Marilyn Monroe and the Camera

The most beautiful photo book on Marilyn ever published! All iconic images from Avedon to Weegee. Marilyn Monroe posed for nearly every major photographer of her day. This pictorial chronicle features pictures by Richard Avendon, Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Elliott Erwitt, Philippe Halsman, Weegee, and thirty other artists: her early days as a model for ads and pinup calendars, film stills that follow her career from a minor actress to a major star, famous master portraits and shots by paparazzi who trailed her every move.

Marilyn emerges in all her moods - young and carefree, sexy and serious, glamorous and girl-next-door. In a fascinating and revealing interview with French writer Georges Belmont Marilyn sets the record straight about her early life, her ambitions, fears, and dreams. Jane Russell, a friend of Marilyn's and her co-star in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, wrote an affectionate foreword.

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Democracy and Moral Conflict

Why democracy? Most often this question is met with an appeal to some decidedly moral value, such as equality, liberty, dignity or even peace. But in contemporary democratic societies, there is deep disagreement and conflict about the precise nature and relative worth of these values. And when democracy votes, some of those who lose will see the prevailing outcome as not merely disappointing, but morally intolerable. How should citizens react when confronted with a democratic result that they regard as intolerable? Should they revolt, or instead pursue democratic means of social change? In this book, Robert Talisse argues that each of us has reasons to uphold democracy - even when it makes serious moral errors - and that these reasons are rooted in our most fundamental epistemic commitments. His original and compelling study will be of interest to a wide range of readers in political philosophy and political theory. 

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Cosmopolis: The HiddenAgenda of Modernity

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our present and future world.

"By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."—Richard M. Rorty, University of Virginia

"[Toulmin] has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all. . . . His aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium."—Quentin Skinner, New York Review of Books.

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The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965

Phayer makes an important addition to the literature of Holocaust studies: he provides evidence that Pope Pius XII (who reigned over the Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958) knew in early 1942 what was happening to Europe's Jews (and to non-Jews in Croatia and Poland)Ayet he remained silent. The pope, he argues, was a Germanophile who had been schooled as a diplomat: treaties (particularly one he'd drafted between Germany and Rome in 1933) and the Communist threat were his main priorities. Protection of Vatican City from Allied or Axis bombs was another. Phayer contends that, had the pope resisted the Nazis and informed his flockAeither overtly or through existing secret channelsAabout what was happening, there would have been many more Catholic rescuers and fewer collaborators than there were. Phayer also details the Church's postwar policies; it played its part in helping Nazis escape justice, he contends, rather than support efforts to force Germany to pay reparations to survivors. Phayer, however, doesn't only describe the years of Pius XII; he contrasts him with Pope Pius XI and Pope John XXIII (who respectively preceded and followed him), and in doing so he makes a forceful point about the difference strong leadership can make. Both Pius XI and John XXIII used their positions of infallibility to openly and publicly encourage cordiality and acceptance of Jews, culminating in the Church's 1965 declaration that the Jews were not responsible for crucifying Jesus. Pius XII, says Phayer, was in contrast a weak leader and a cowardly oneAand the author argues that, given the conditions under which he served, his lack of courage proved devastating.

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Introduction to The Philosophy of 'Religion

FOR some years I have been teaching the philosophy of religion to students interested in the foundations of religious belief but with no preparation in philosophy. Coming from courses in literature and in the physical and social sciences, these students brought with them many questions involving values, the nature of truth, the compatibility of religious faith with the findings of science, and the nature of man and his destiny. As discussion proceeded it became increasingly clear that I could not assume that they had even an elementary knowledge of the physical world as a whole, let alone any appreciation of the basic problems involved in the interpretation of scientific discoveries. They tended to take for granted that what had been taught in biology, psychology, and sociology was all that was to be known about man's nature—the more since they had little knowledge of their own religious tradition at its best. Moreover, they were relatively unaware of the problems involved in interpreting "facts," having had little practice in considering man's world as a whole. Yet these students were particularly anxious to know whether one could find any basis for religious belief in a world whose energies might any day blow up in their faces.

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