The stage adaptation of Philip Pullman's trilogy: Northern lights, The subtle knife, and The amber spyglass. Adapted under the series title, His dark materials.

Exciting and provocative... Overall, this courageous, well-written book provides us with a ground-breaking survey. It brings out a story of the Hundred Years War that has long needed to be told, and will deservedly form an essential addition to reading on the subject. HISTORY TODAY This alternative account of peasant life during crisis is a welcome addition to the historiography of late-medieval France... a useful corrective to most standard interpretations of warfare and peasantry. SPECULUM This study of the soldier-peasant relationship in the context of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) aims to bring out the realities of the situation. It seeks an understanding of different attitudes: how aristocratic soldiers reconciled the ideals of chivalry with exploitation of non-combatants, and how French peasants reacted to the soldiery, drawing on the late-medieval literature of chivalry and political commentary in England and (especially) in France. Employing additional documentary material, including the largely unpublished records of the French royal chancery, the book also describes the ways in which individual peasants and village communities were exploited by soldiers, and how, in order to survive, they adjusted to and reacted against their treatment.

A photographic celebration of the history, versatility, and beauty of ribbon, looking at how it can be used in home decor, describing techniques for tying bows and working with ribbon, and including tips on buying, storing, and caring for ribbon.

This very readable overview of the rise and transformations of medical genetics and of the eugenic impulses that have been inspired by the emerging understanding of the genetic basis of many diseases and disabilities is based on a popular nonmajors course, "Social Implications of Genetics," that Gillham gave for many years at Duke University. The book is suitable for use as a text in similar overview courses about genes and social issues or genes and disease. It gives a good overview of the developments and status of this field for a wide range of biomedical researchers, physicians, and students, especially those interested in the prospects for the new, genetics-based personalized medicine.

A dramatization of the time that Van Gogh spent in Brixton in the 1870s--a period before he became a painter and one that changed him completely. Vincent develops a rapport with a widow twice his age, which blossoms into a full-blown love affair, only to be cruelly curtailed by the arrival of his fiercely puritan young sister. From the author of Cressida, Mrs. Klein, and the recent adaptation of Wedekind's Lulu.

Through the flash points of its glorious history, Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright, two of today's most distinguished men of the theatre, celebrate the British and American stage as it has evolved over the course of the twentieth century. From "Pygmalion's first Eliza Doolittle (Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who enchanted playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1914) and her equally piquant successors, to Uta Hagen in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; from Gertrude Lawrence and Noel Coward in his "Private Lives (their performance as dazzling as the play itself), to Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen--this stylish, astute, richly pictorial volume brings us the actors, directors, and playwrights who have shaped one hundred years of the theatre and the performances that live on in our minds . Lotte Lenya in "The Threepenny Opera, Laurence Olivier in the British production of Eugene O'Neill's viscerally American "Long Day's Journey into Night, Sidney Poitier in "A Raisin in the Sun, Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth, Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman, Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead . . . Here is the essential mixture of Shakespearean heritage, Irish magic, American vitality, and Russian pathos that converged on the stage in an efflorescence of dramatic innovation. Eyre and Wright's survey of this brilliant period is allusive, intelligent, and intimate, rich in anecdote and infused with a deep love and understanding of the theatre.

Few scientists have made lasting contributions to as many fields as Francis Galton. He was an important African explorer, travel writer, and geographer. He was the meteorologist who discovered the anticyclone, a pioneer in using fingerprints to identify individuals, the inventor of regression and correlation analysis in statistics, and the founder of the eugenics movement. Now, Nicholas Gillham paints an engaging portrait of this Victorian polymath. The book traces Galton's ancestry (he was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin and the cousin of Charles Darwin), upbringing, training as a medical apprentice, and experience as a Cambridge undergraduate. It recounts in colorful detail Galton's adventures as leader of his own expedition in Namibia. Darwin was always a strong influence on his cousin and a turning point in Galton's life was the publication of the Origin of Species. Thereafter, Galton devoted most of his life to human heredity, using then novel methods such as pedigree analysis and twin studies to argue that talent and character were inherited and that humans could be selectively bred to enhance these qualities. To this end, he founded the eugenics movement which rapidly gained momentum early in the last century. After Galton's death, however, eugenics took a more sinister path, as in the United States, where by 1913 sixteen states had involuntary sterilization laws, and in Germany, where the goal of racial purity was pushed to its horrific limit in the "final solution." Galton himself, Gillham writes, would have been appalled by the extremes to which eugenics was carried. Here then is a vibrant biography of a remarkable scientist as well as a superb portrait of science in the Victorian era.