'Astonishing ... enjoy its riches slowly, and savour every generous, erudite and undogmatic page' Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times'We English men have wits,' wrote the clergyman Ralph Lever in 1573, and, 'we have also framed unto ourselves a language.'Witcraft is a fresh and brilliant history of how philosophy became established in English. It presents a new form of philosophical storytelling and challenges what Jonathan Rée calls the 'condesc...

'The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking' Heidegger'We should never allow our fears of the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny'Martin Heidegger was one of the most controversial philosophers of the 20th century, and still causes widespread division. Born in Germany, he was concerned with what makes beings intelligible as beings, and best known for his contributi...

The wartime adventures of the legendary SOE agent Harry Rée, told in his own wordsA school teacher at the start of the war, Harry Rée renounced his former pacifism with the fall of France in 1940. He was deployed into a secret branch of the British army and parachuted into central France in April 1943.Harry showed a particular talent for winning the confidence of local resisters, and guided them in a series of dramatic sabotage operations, before getting in...

A groundbreaking study of deafness, by a philosopher who combines the scientific erudition of Oliver Sacks with the historical flair of Simon Schama.There is nothing more personal than the human voice, traditionally considered the expression of the innermost self. But what of those who have no voice of their own and cannot hear the voices of others?In this tour de force of historical narrative, Jonathan Rée tells the astonishing story of the deaf, from the sixteenth century t...

A historical study of how increased access to ice—decades before refrigeration—transformed American life.During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans depended upon ice to stay cool and to keep their perishable foods fresh. Jonathan Rees tells the fascinating story of how people got ice before mechanical refrigeration came to the household. Drawing on newspapers, trade journals, and household advice books, Before the Refrigerator expla...

In 'Becoming a Philosopher' Jonathan Rée describes the extraordinary lives of some of most influential thinkers of the past four hundred years and the radical and sometimes bizarre ideas that emerged from them. In so doing he challenges the notion of philosophy as a set of fixed ideas to be arranged and catalogued like botanical specimens. Rather, the philosophical life is revealed, as Kierkegaard has described, as one of relentless struggle, a never-ending 'dance in the service of thought...

What do we really know about the food we eat? A firestorm of recent food-fraud cases – from the honey-laundering scandal in the USA, to the forty-year-old frozen ‘zombie’ meat smuggled into China, to horsemeat passed off as beef in the UK – suggests fraudulent and intentional acts of food adulteration are on the rise.Jonathan Rees examines the complex causes and surprising effects of adulteration and fraud across the global food chain. Covering comestibles of all kinds from around t...

How we keep food cold while the house stays warm.Only when the power goes off and food spoils do we truly appreciate how much we rely on refrigerators and freezers. In Refrigeration Nation, Jonathan Rees explores the innovative methods and gadgets that Americans have invented to keep perishable food cold—from cutting river and lake ice and shipping it to consumers for use in their iceboxes to the development of electrically powered equipment that ushered i...

A fascinating examination of the controversial work of Harvey Wiley, the founder of the pure food movement and an early crusader against the use of additives and preservatives in food.Though trained as a medical doctor, chemist Harvey Wiley spent most of his professional life advocating for "pure food"—food free of both adulterants and preservatives. A strong proponent of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, still the basis of food safety legislation in the United S...

This book provides a descriptive, episodic yet analytical synthesis of industrialization in America. It integrates analysis of the profound economic and social changes taking place during the period between 1877 and the start of the Great Depression. The text is supported by 30 case studies to illustrate the underlying principles of industrialization that cumulatively convey a comprehensive understanding of the era.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.It may be responsible for a greater improvement in human diet and longevity than any other technology of the last two thousand years-but have you ever thought seriously about your refrigerator? That box humming in the background displays more than you might expect, even who you are and the society in which you live. Jonathan Rees examines the past, present, and future of the ho...

The successful FRCS Trauma and Orthopaedics Viva returns for a second edition, now including over 95 viva topics. Completely updated to include current clinical management guidelines, and exam hot topics, the book is brought to you again from the team behind the highly successful Oxford revision course. Based on the principle that viva candidates improve their technique by observing and learning from others, the editor team have created a best-practice formula for dealing with the...