A Patterned Past

In this comprehensive study of the rhetoric, narrative patterns, and intellectual content of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, David Schaberg reads these two collections of historical anecdotes as traces of a historiographical practice that flourished around the fourth century BCE among the followers of Confucius. He contends that the coherent view of early China found in these texts is an effect of their origins and the habits of reading they impose. Rather than being totally accurate accounts, they represent the efforts of a group of officials and ministers to argue for a moralizing interpretation of the events of early Chinese history and for their own value as skilled interpreters of events and advisers to the rulers of the day.

A satisfactory comprehensive history of the social and economic development of pre-modern China, the largest country in the world in terms of population, and with a documentary record covering three millennia, is still far from possible. The present work is only an attempt to disengage the major themes that seem to be of relevance to our understanding of China today. In particular, this volume studies three questions. Why did the Chinese Empire stay together when the Roman Empire, and every other empire of antiquity of the middle ages, ultimately collapsed? What were the causes of the medieval revolution which made the Chinese economy after about 1100 the most advanced in the world? And why did China after about 1350 fail to maintain her earlier pace of technological advance while still, in many respects, advancing economically? The three sections of the book deal with these problems in turn but the division of a subject matter is to some extent only one of convenience. These topics are so interrelated that, in the last analysis, none of them can be considered in isolation from the others.

A groundbreaking argument about the link between autism and ingenuity. Why can humans alone invent? In The Pattern Seekers, Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a case that autism is as crucial to our creative and cultural history as the mastery of fire. Indeed, Baron-Cohen argues that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for seventy thousand years, from the first tools to the digital revolution. How? Because the same genes that cause autism enable the pattern seeking that is essential to our species's inventiveness. However, these abilities exact a great cost on autistic people, including social and often medical challenges, so Baron-Cohen calls on us to support and celebrate autistic people in both their disabilities and their triumphs. Ultimately, The Pattern Seekers isn't just a new theory of human civilization, but a call to consider anew how society treats those who think differently.

The book will be of importance for archaeologists and of interest to anthropologists.

During his long career as a diplomat, international lawyer, statesman and investment banker, George Ball interrogated Albert Speer at the end of World War II, worked with Jean Monnet to build Europe, supervised the rescue of hostages in the Congo, advised President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis and, as Undersecretary of State in the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, was an early and consistent opponent of America’s involvement in Vietnam. “Clarity, serenity and precision are the marks of this major contribution to an understanding of American foreign policy during the past 40 years. The book deserves to be compared with Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation (but less self-satisfied) and George Kennan’s Memoirs (but less introverted). Although the author is best known to the general public for his opposition to American military involvement in Vietnam, the historian will find his discussion of European issues the most interesting part of the book.” — Gaddis Smith, Foreign Affairs “[A] first-rate memoir of American politics and foreign policy over half a century. It is literate, lively and amusing, and in places it clarifies basic questions about the foreign policy of the United States... The Past Has Another Pattern is a colorful and thought provoking tour of the recent and not-so-recent past, conducted by a skillful guide.” — Daniel Yergin, The New York Times “[O]ne of the great, examined public lives of our time.” — Kirkus “A distinguished lawyer and public servant with experience of Presidents stretching from Roosevelt to Reagan, [George Ball] has written an impressive book of memoirs.” — Douglas Johnson, London Review of Books “A few years ago I read some 70 volumes of biography and autobiography as a Pulitzer Prize juror. George Ball’s memoirs are everything that most of the art is not. While he does not neglect his achievement, he is candid on the things that went wrong. His public life has provided him with a very great deal of very great importance to tell. He writes admirably well. And much of his story is amusing. This year there will, I promise, be no other biography that will be as good.” — John Kenneth Galbraith “George Ball is that rarity — a distinguished public servant who can write; and his memoir is not only indispensable for the historian but absorbing for the general reader.” — Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.