The Vanishing Statue

Nancy, Bess, and George must find a stolen statue in this twentieth book of the Nancy Drew Diaries, a fresh approach to the classic mystery series. Nancy is beyond excited when she receives an invitation to an elite celebration of the arts hosted by the Duchess Strickland, a woman once renowned for her collection who hasn’t been seen in years. With Bess and George at her side, Nancy’s certain it will be an evening she’ll never forget. Then just days before the party, a priceless sculpture is stolen! Still, the Duchess vows the party will go on as planned—and Nancy is determined to use the opportunity to sniff out the thief. But on the big night, as creatives, collectors, and connoisseurs—all with their own motives—converge, it quickly becomes clear that crime, like art, is all about the illusion, and a stolen statue may be the least of Nancy’s troubles.

Nancy, Bess, and George must find a stolen statue in this twentieth book of the Nancy Drew Diaries, a fresh approach to the classic mystery series. Nancy is beyond excited when she receives an invitation to an elite celebration of the arts hosted by the Duchess Strickland, a woman once renowned for her collection who hasn’t been seen in years. With Bess and George at her side, Nancy’s certain it will be an evening she’ll never forget. Then just days before the party, a priceless sculpture is stolen! Still, the Duchess vows the party will go on as planned—and Nancy is determined to use the opportunity to sniff out the thief. But on the big night, as creatives, collectors, and connoisseurs—all with their own motives—converge, it quickly becomes clear that crime, like art, is all about the illusion, and a stolen statue may be the least of Nancy’s troubles.

David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding are amongst the most widely-studies texts on philosophy. Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction presents in a clear, concise and accessible manner the key themes of these texts. Georges Dicker clarifies Hume's views on meaning, knowledge, causality, and sense perception step by step and provides us with a sharp picture of how philosophical thinking has been influenced by Hume. Accessible to anyone coming to Hume for the first time, Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics is an indispensible guide to Hume's philosophical thinking.

Georges Dicker here provides a commentary on John Locke's masterwork, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding-the foundational work of classical Empiricism. Dicker's commentary is an accessible guide for students who are reading Locke for the first time; a useful research tool for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students; and a contribution to Locke scholarship for professional scholars. It is designed to be read alongside the Essay, but does not presuppose familiarity with it. Dicker expounds and critically discusses the main theses and arguments of each of the Essay's four books, on the innatism that Locke opposes, the origin and classification of ideas, language and meaning, and knowledge, respectively. He analyses Locke's influential explorations of related topics, including primary and secondary qualities, substance, identity, personal identity, free will, nominal and real essences, perception, and external-world skepticism, among others. Written in an analytical style that strives for clarity, the book offers careful textual analyses as well as step-by-step reconstructions of Locke's arguments, and it references and engages with relevant work of other major philosophers and Locke commentators.

Spanning centuries and the vastness of the Roman Empire, The Last Statues of Antiquity is the first comprehensive survey of Roman honorific statues in the public realm in Late Antiquity. Drawn from a major research project and corresponding online database that collates all the available evidence for the statue habit across the Empire from the late third century AD onwards, the volume examines where, how, and why statues were used, and why these important features of urban life began to decline in number before eventually disappearing around AD 600. Adopting a detailed comparative approach, the collection explores variation between different regions--including North Africa, Asia Minor, and the Near East--as well as individual cities, such as Aphrodisias, Athens, Constantinople, and Rome. A number of thematic chapters also consider the different kinds of honorand, from provincial governors and senators, to women and cultural heroes. Richly illustrated, the volume is the definitive resource for studying the phenomenon of late-antique statues. The collection also incorporates extensive references to the project's database, which is freely accessible online.

Essays discuss realism, futurism, Dada, the grammar of poetry, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Yeats, Turgenev, Pasternak, Blake, and semiotic theory.

The Vanishing Map takes the reader on a real and imagined journey across some of the world's major cities to explore what of their past history will survive in our memory.

French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the conflict between the ideals of individualism and community defines American culture. In this groundbreaking new work, anthropologist Charles Nuckolls discovers that every culture consists of such paradoxes, thus making culture a problem that cannot be solved. He does, however, find much creative tension in these unresolvable opposites. Nuckolls presents three fascinating case studies that demonstrate how values often are expressed in the organization of social roles. First he treats the Micronesian Ifaluks’ opposition between cooperation and self-gratification by examining the nature versus nurture debate. Nuckolls then shifts to the values of community and individual adventure by looking at the conflicts in the identities of public figures in Oklahoma. Finally, he investigates the cultural significance in the diagnostic system and practices of psychiatry in the United States. Nuckolls asserts that psychiatry treats genders differently, assigning dependence to women and independence to men and, in some cases, diagnoses the extreme forms of these values as disorders. Nuckolls elaborates on the theory of culture that he introduced in his previous book, The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire, which proposed that the desire to resolve conflicts is central to cultural knowledge. In Culture: A Problem that Cannot Be Solved, Nuckolls restores the neglected social science concept of values, which addresses both knowledge and motivation. As a result, he brings together cognition and psychoanalysis, as well as sociology and psychology, in his study of cultural processes.