A recurrent theme that characterizes the work of Dennis Oppenheim (Electric City, Washington, 1938), one of the most unusual and adventurous of contemporary American artists, is the encounter between art and nature. His first work using land, in Oakland, was produced in 1967. From the beginning of the Seventies, his work began to take a wide variety of forms, from performance art to installations, from video to the production, at the end of the decade, of the machine pieces, three-dimensional structures animated by mechanical devices. In 1986, the work of the artist took another turn: his works, enormous imaginary objects, mutant and distorted, are all pervaded by a new violent and playful irony. This book presents Oppenheim's sculptural upside-down church Device to root out evil. Produced for Venice, this glass and aluminum sculpture, 12 metres high, 6 metres long, and 4 metres deep, balances only on the tip of the bell-tower.

If it is not surprising how many mediums Bernar Venet has worked in, from sculpture to painting to photography to sound to furniture, it is surprising how many he has used in performance. From the first moments of "Performance dans les détritus" in 1961 through sound compositions corresponding to and implicating his visual work, to a ballet for which he wrote the music, created the choreography and designed both the set and costumes, Venet has been omnivorous, recording mathematical poems on vinyl, the engines of the Concorde on CD and finally the sounds of the creation of his own sculpture. In 2004, Venet had three simultaneous solo shows in New York City, two at the Robert Miller and Jim Kempner galleries and a third along the Park Avenue Mall, where his large-scale Indeterminate Line pieces were installed. In 2005 he was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, France's highest decoration.

The recent exhibitions dedicated to Botticelli around the world show, more than ever, the significant and continued debate about the artist. Botticelli Past and Present engages with this debate. The book comprises four thematic parts, spanning four centuries of Botticelli’s artistic fame and reception from the fifteenth century. Each part comprises a number of essays and includes a short introduction which positions them within the wider scholarly literature on Botticelli. The parts are organised chronologically beginning with discussion of the artist and his working practice in his own time, moving onto the progressive rediscovery of his work from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, through to his enduring impact on contemporary art and design. Expertly written by researchers and eminent art historians and richly illustrated throughout, the broad range of essays in this book make a valuable contribution to Botticelli studies.

Neal Stephenson follows his highly-praised historical novels, Quicksilver and The Confusion, with the extraordinary third and final volume of the Baroque Cycle. The year is 1714. Daniel Waterhouse has returned to England, where he joins forces with his friend Isaac Newton to hunt down a shadowy group attempting to blow up Natural Philosophers with 'Infernal Devices' - time bombs. As Daniel and Newton conspire, an increasingly vicious struggle is waged for England's Crown: who will take control when the ailing queen dies? Tories and Whigs clash as one faction jockeys to replace Queen Anne with 'The Pretender' James Stuart, and the other promotes the Hanoverian dynasty of Princess Caroline. Meanwhile, a long-simmering dispute between Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz comes to a head, with potentially cataclysmic consequences. Wildly inventive, brilliantly conceived, The System of the World is the final volume in Neal Stephenson's hugely ambitious and compelling saga. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters in a time of genius, discovery and change, the Baroque Cycle is a magnificent and unique achievement.

"The Frances L. Hofer Bequest of drawings came to Harvard in 1978. Numbering over 1500 pieces, it has enriched both The Houghton Library, which received the drawings for book illustration, and the Fogg Art Museum. Philip Hofer, who formed the collection, has been closely associated with both institutions throughout his long Harvard career ... In 1979 the Fogg Art Museum exhibited a selection of the master drawings it received from this bequest. Now, two years after Mrs Hofer's death, the Houghton Library is exhibiting for the first time a selection of fifty of the drawings for book illustration."--P. 7.

PC-Aided Numerical Heat Transfer and Convective Flow is intended as a graduate course textbook for Mechanical and Chemical Engineering students as well as a reference book for practitioners interested in analytical and numerical treatments in the subject. The book is written so that the reader can use the enclosed diskette, with the aid of a personal computer, to systematically learn both analytical and numerical approaches associated with fluid flow and heat transfer without resorting to complex mathematical treatments. This is the first book that not only describes solution methodologies but also provides complete programs ranging from SOLODE to SAINTS for integration of Navier-Stokes equation. The book covers boundary layer flows to fully elliptic flows, laminar flows to turbulent flows, and free convection to forced convection. The student will learn about convection in porous media, a new field of rapid growth in contemporary heat transfer research. A basic knowledge of fluid mechanics and heat transfer is assumed. It is also assumed that the student knows the basics of Fortran and has access to a personal computer.The material can be presented in a one-semester course or with selective coverage in a seminar.