“An eminent Polish physician reflects on his lifetime practice of medicine . . . A profound celebration of the human spirit.” —Kirkus Reviews There is a grand tradition of physicians who are also great writers and philosophers. When his first book, Catharsis, was published in English, critics from Seamus Heaney to Czeslaw Milosz stood to applaud. Now Andrzej Szczeklik has followed with an ever deeper and more accomplished book. It has become unfortunately rare for a scientist or doctor to find his grounding in a broad understanding of literature and the humanities. But in Kore, the author insists that only with a curiosity thoroughly at home in both worlds can one expect to discover what we should mean about sickness and about the soul. No tedious academic, Szczeklik writes with the grace of a poet and the ease of a fine storyteller. Anecdotes drawn from a personal immersion in art, music, and literature are woven with reports on experimental medicine and daily clinical experience. From DNA and the re–creation of the Spanish Flu virus, to contemporary research in genetics, cancer, neurology, and the AIDS virus, from Symptoms and Shadows, to Dying and Death, to Enchantment of Love, every chapter of this book is alive and engaging. The result is a life–affirming work of science, philosophy, art, and spirituality. “No medical experience necessary: readers need only approach with a love of the human body and an understanding of how it relates to emotion and story . . . Readers may find it difficult to keep up, but few are likely to forget this book.” —Publishers Weekly

Films like Shoplifters and After the Storm have made Kore-eda Hirokazu one of the most acclaimed auteurs working today. Critics often see Kore-eda as a director steeped in the Japanese tradition defined by Yasujirō Ozu. Marc Yamada, however, views Kore-eda’s work in relation to the same socioeconomic concerns explored by other contemporary international filmmakers. Yamada reveals that a type of excess, not the minimalism associated with traditional aesthetics, defines Kore-eda’s trademark humanism. This excess manifests in small moments when a desire for human connection exceeds the logic of the institutions and policies formed by the neoliberal values that have shaped modern-day Japan. As Yamada shows, Kore-eda captures the shared spaces formed by bodies that move, perform, and assemble in ways that express the humanistic impulse at the core of the filmmaker’s expanding worldwide appeal.

About 24,000 figurines and fragments have been found on Acrocorinth, and this study greatly increases our understanding of the way in which this artform developed over the centuries.

The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema draws readers into the first 13 feature films and 5 of the documentaries of award-winning Japanese film director Kore-eda Hirokazu. With his recent top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters, Kore-eda is arguably Japan’s greatest living director with an international viewership. He approaches difficult subjects (child abandonment, suicide, marginality) with a realistic and compassionate eye.The lyrical tone of the writing of Japanese film scholar Linda C. Ehrlich perfectly complements the understated, yet powerful, tone of the films. From An Elemental Cinema, readers will gain a special understanding of Kore-eda’s films through a novel connection to the natural elements as reflected in Japanese traditional aesthetics.An Elemental Cinema presents Kore-eda’s oeuvre as a connected whole with overarching thematic concerns, despite frequent generic experimentation. It also offers an example of how the poetics of cinema can be practiced in writing, as well as on the screen, and helps readers understand the films of this contemporary director as works of art that relate to their own lives.

This volume presents the terracotta miscellaneous finds from the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Acrocorinth. The finds comprise 21 classes, including protomes and masks, altars, plaques, models of various personal and household items, and loomweights and other textile tools (the latter initially studied by Gloria S. Merker and brought to publication by Nancy Bookidis). In addition to providing a catalogue of the finds arranged according to their subjects, the authors compare these finds with similar objects found elsewhere in Greece and refer to literary, epigraphical, and visual sources to understand their possible uses and meanings and the character of religious activity that may have triggered their dedication in the sanctuary. This volume will greatly facilitate comparative studies of ancient Greek miscellaneous finds and will be an important reference for historians of Greek art as well as of Greek religion.

Excavations conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth, 1961-1975, produced more than 170 inscribed objects of stone, bronze, bone, lead weights, pottery (graffiti and dipinti), clay pinakes, magical lead tablets, and in a mosaic. In this new Corinth volume, Ron Stroud presents all of these inscriptions, and he relates them to an overall interpretation of the activities, secular and religious, attested in this shrine during its long period of use from the 7th century B.C. until the end of the 4th century A.D. Where possible, Stroud also draws out their implications for and contribution to the history of ancient Corinth, the worship of the goddesses Demeter and Kore, and the practice of magic-especially in the Roman period. This is the final publication of the inscribed objects from the sanctuary, excluding loomweights and stamped amphora handles, which will be included in a later publication.