Although Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing—or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the “best book ever written about nature,” and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael’s sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851. A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville’s novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow’s nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851—at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab’s and Ishmael’s worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville’s narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism. Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab’s Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep—from whale hunters to climate refugees.

Now in its second edition, Text Analysis with R provides a practical introduction to computational text analysis using the open source programming language R. R is an extremely popular programming language, used throughout the sciences; due to its accessibility, R is now used increasingly in other research areas. In this volume, readers immediately begin working with text, and each chapter examines a new technique or process, allowing readers to obtain a broad exposure to core R procedures and a fundamental understanding of the possibilities of computational text analysis at both the micro and the macro scale. Each chapter builds on its predecessor as readers move from small scale “microanalysis” of single texts to large scale “macroanalysis” of text corpora, and each concludes with a set of practice exercises that reinforce and expand upon the chapter lessons. The book’s focus is on making the technical palatable and making the technical useful and immediately gratifying. Text Analysis with R is written with students and scholars of literature in mind but will be applicable to other humanists and social scientists wishing to extend their methodological toolkit to include quantitative and computational approaches to the study of text. Computation provides access to information in text that readers simply cannot gather using traditional qualitative methods of close reading and human synthesis. This new edition features two new chapters: one that introduces dplyr and tidyr in the context of parsing and analyzing dramatic texts to extract speaker and receiver data, and one on sentiment analysis using the syuzhet package. It is also filled with updated material in every chapter to integrate new developments in the field, current practices in R style, and the use of more efficient algorithms.

In the midst of our busy activity, people often feel fragmented. We experience conflicting demands from our work, our personal relationships, our families, and our spiritual practice. In this book, the author, a practicing psychotherapist, explores the challenges and joys of making our life into a coherent whole. Psychotherapy addresses a sense of fragmentation in an effort to help us be uniquely ourselves. Zen Buddhist practice insists we find ourselves on every moment of our lives; it speaks to the basic connectedness of all things. This book attempts to integrate the two. Each chapter examines some aspect of sewing together the practice of Zen with the realization of psychotherapy, and its implications for daily life. Though there is a logical progression to the chapters, each chapter can be read on its own if the reader is interested in how a particular text might inform their psychotherapy or life circumstances. Through the stories of his clients' and his own difficulties and discoveries, the author invites each reader to actualize the fundamental point: to realize the joy and compassion that comes when we touch the basic ground of life, and put it into play in our everyday activity.

Martin Noth's study of the Chronicler's History may not be so widely known as his celebrated Deuteronomistic History (published by JSOT Press in English translation in 1981). However, as Williamson argues in his introduction, written specially to accompany this translation, it was a most significant contribution to the study of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, and a translation of it has been long overdue. In view of the recent revival of interest in this body of literature, it is important that English-speaking readers should have first-hand access to one of the seminal studies in this field.

Hailed by national leaders as politically diverse as former Vice President Al Gore and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Generations has been heralded by reviewers as a brilliant, if somewhat unsettling, reassessment of where America is heading. William Strauss and Neil Howe posit the history of America as a succession of generational biographies, beginning in 1584 and encompassing every-one through the children of today. Their bold theory is that each generation belongs to one of four types, and that these types repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern. The vision of Generations allows us to plot a recurring cycle in American history -- a cycle of spiritual awakenings and secular crises -- from the founding colonists through the present day and well into this millenium. Generations is at once a refreshing historical narrative and a thrilling intuitive leap that reorders not only our history books but also our expectations for the twenty-first century.