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615 results in Books

Page 1 of 31

Bibliography and Modern Book Production
  • Notes and Sources for Student Librarians, Printers, Booksellers, Stationers, Book-collectors
  • Percy Freer
  • Introduction by Veronica Klipp
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    01 August 2024
  • Covering key developments in bibliography and publishing, from the history of writing and paper manufacture to the origins of typefaces and printing up to the 1940s.

    Bibliography and Modern Book Production is a fascinating historic journey through the fields of print history, librarianship and publishing. It covers key developments from 1494 to 1949 in bibliography and book production from the history of scripts and paper manufacture to the origins of typefaces and printing. Although not a textbook, the book was a guide for library students in the 1950s on the essential literature of librarianship.

    As the first librarian appointed to Wits University in 1929, Percy Freer's near encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject of bibliography enabled him to develop a key resource for relevant library examinations in South Africa and abroad.

    Due to its immense value as a historic record, and to acknowledge Freer's contributions as scholar, librarian and publisher, it is being reissued as part of the Wits University Press Re/Presents series to make it accessible to scholars in book histories, publishing studies and information science.

Kielezo cha Insha
  • Shaaban Robert
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    01 December 2024
  • The definitive Kiswahili guide to essay writing with pertinent examples.

    Kielezo cha Insha is the earliest guide to essay writing in Kiswahili, published by Wits University Press in 1954.

    After Tanzania's independence in 1961 the book was not available for several decades because of the political and economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa.

    The book covers pertinent issues in composition writing, including the purpose and types of composition, preparation, structure, language and style, cohesion, objectivity and punctuation. It includes 60 model essays together with Robert's thoughts and perspectives on the issues he addresses. The topics include some of the issues current at the time, such as 'secret marriages', culture, the environment, language and nationhood, patriotism, women's oppression, health, and the meaning of life and death.

    After being out of print for more than sixty years, Wits University Press has reissued the text as a testament to its enduring historical value. Kielezo cha Insha is an example of Robert's educational and pedagogical writing at its best.

Natural Property Rights
  • Eric R. Claeys
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • Natural Property Rights presents a novel theory of property based on individual, pre-political rights. The book argues that a just system of property protects people's rights to use resources and also orders those rights consistent with natural law and the public welfare. Drawing on influential property theorists such as Grotius, Locke, Blackstone, and early American statesmen and judges, as well as recent work in in normative and analytical philosophy, the book shows how natural rights guide political and legal reasoning about property law. It examines how natural rights justify the most familiar institutions in property, including public property, ownership, the system of estates and future interests, leases, servitudes, mortgages, police regulation, and eminent domain. Thought-provoking and comprehensive, the book challenges leading contemporary justifications for property and shows how property both secures individual freedom and serves the common good.

Rehabilitating Criminal Justice
  • Innovations in Policing, Adjudication, and Sentencing
  • Christopher Slobogin
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • Rehabilitating Criminal Justice offers bold yet sensible proposals for reforming every major component of the US criminal justice system. The first third of the book explains how existing caselaw can be interpreted to end over-policing, better regulate interrogations, and replace the exclusionary rule with direct sanctions on officers and their departments. The second part of the book, on the post-arrest adjudication process, calls for replacing cash bail with validated risk assessments and proposes to reorient our error-prone, hyper-adversarial system by ending convictions via guilty pleas and giving judges more power over questioning of witnesses and the selection of experts. The final chapters show how the harshness of the system can be leavened by refocusing sentencing on prevention rather than retribution and by creating an independent criminal court system. They also explain why these reforms are preferable to the currently popular movement to defund police departments and abolish prisons.

Rotation Sequences and the Theory of Vectors and Coordinates
  • Don Koks
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • This book applies rotation theory to problems involving vectors and coordinates, with an approach that combines easily visualised procedures with smart mathematics. It constructs rotation theory from the ground up, building from basic geometry through to the motion and attitude equations of rockets, and the tensor analysis of relativity. The author replaces complicated pictures of superimposed axes with a simple and intuitive procedure of rotating a model aircraft, to create rotation sequences that are easily turned into mathematics. He combines the best of the 'active' and 'passive' approaches to rotation into a single coherent theory, and discusses many potential traps for newcomers. This volume will be useful to astronomers and engineers sighting planets and satellites, computer scientists creating graphics for movies, and aerospace engineers designing aircraft; also to physicists and mathematicians who study its abstract aspects.

Percy Shelley in Context
  • Edited by Ross Wilson
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • Percy Shelley was a writer in the broadest sense – poet, pamphleteer, philosopher, translator, and correspondent – and one of the most eccentric, fascinating figures of his age. Yet he is emphatically of our age too, continuing to influence contemporary writers, to be referenced in popular culture, and to inspire social and political movements. Bringing together a wide range of contributors from different critical perspectives, this vivid and accessible volume sets Shelley's work in its many contexts – from ancient literature to contemporary poetry, from his travels around Britain and Europe to his global reception, and from his rivalries with his poetic peers to his often-strained relations with his family. Despite his short life, Shelley emerges as a vital literary presence.

The Neuroscience of Language
  • Jonathan E. Peelle
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    10 April 2025
  • The Neuroscience of Language offers a remarkably accessible introduction to language in the mind and brain. Following the chain of communication from speaker to listener, it covers all fundamental concepts from speech production to auditory processing, speech sounds, word meaning, and sentence processing. The key methods of cognitive neuroscience are covered, as well as clinical evidence from neuropsychological patients and multimodal aspects of language including visual speech, gesture, and sign language. Over 80, full color figures are included to help communicate key concepts. The main text focuses on big-picture themes, while detailed studies and related anecdotes are presented in footnotes to provide interested students with many opportunities to dive deeper into specific topics. Throughout, language is placed within the larger context of the brain, illustrating the fascinating connections of language with other fields including cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, and speech and hearing science.

Theory of Image Formation
  • 2nd edition
  • Richard E. Blahut
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • Fully revised and updated, the second edition of this classic text is the definitive guide to the mathematical models underlying imaging from sensed data. Building on fundamental principles derived from the two- and three-dimensional Fourier transform, and other key mathematical concepts, it introduces a broad range of imaging modalities within a unified framework, emphasising universal theoretical concepts over specific physical aspects. This expanded edition presents new coverage of optical-coherence microscopy, electron-beam microscopy, near-field microscopy, and medical imaging modalities including MRI, CAT, ultrasound, and the imaging of viruses, and introduces additional end-of-chapter problems to support reader understanding. Encapsulating the author's fifty years of experience in the field, this is the ideal introduction for senior undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers, and professional engineers across engineering and the physical sciences.

Becoming Nations Again
  • The Journey Towards Tribal Self-Determination
  • Adam Crepelle
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • North America's Indigenous inhabitants operated effective governments long before European arrival. Tribes built cities, developed laws, and participated in transcontinental trade networks. European arrival, however, brought many hardships for Indians. Although tribes were guaranteed the right to self-govern on reservations, the United States imposed severe restraints on tribal autonomy resulting in socioeconomic maladies, such as poverty and crime. Today, federal policies continue to inhibit tribal self-governance. As a result, tribes continue to suffer from these social ills. Becoming Nations Again argues empowering tribal governments is the key to solving tribal problems. It moves to liberate tribes from the antiquated regulations that apply only to tribal lands and allow tribes to exercise jurisdiction over all people on their land. Once this occurs, tribes will be free to implement their own laws and participate in the federalist system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Prohibition of Torture and Ill-Treatment under International Law
  • Stuart Casey-Maslen
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • The first comprehensive analysis of domestic and international law defining and prohibiting torture and other forms of ill-treatment, this groundbreaking work reviews the law on torture in countries around the world. It considers how international law governs the use of force by police against suspects held in custody and during protests, and the practice and outlawing of torture both in peacetime and during armed conflict. The analysis also includes the application of universal jurisdiction, which is used in the attempt to prosecute and punish torture committed anywhere in the world. The application and execution of the death penalty are also discussed in detail.

Ways of Seeing International Organisations
  • New Perspectives for International Institutional Law
  • Edited by Negar Mansouri, Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • For decades, the field of scholarship that studies the law and practice of international organisations -also known as 'international institutional law'- has been marked by an intellectual quietism. Most of the scholarship tends to focus narrowly on providing 'legal' answers to 'legal' questions. For that reason, perspectives rarely engage with the insights of critical traditions of legal thought (for instance, feminist, postcolonial, or political economy-oriented perspectives) or with interdisciplinary contributions produced outside the field. Ways of Seeing International Organisations challenges the narrow gaze of the field by bringing together authors across multiple disciplines to reflect on the need for 'new' perspectives in international institutional law. Highlighting the limits of mainstream approaches, the authors instead interrogate international organisations as pivots in processes of world-making. To achieve this, the volume is organised around four fundamental themes: expertise; structure; performance; and capital. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater
  • A Play
  • Neil Coppen, Mpume Mthombeni
  • Foreword by Kira Erwin
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    01 April 2024
  • Isidlamlilo/ The Fire Eater is an electrifying one-woman play inspired by the true story of a woman who served as a political assassin in the build-up to South Africa's first democratic elections. Zenzile Maseko, the protagonist, is a 60-year-old Zulu grandmother living in a women's hostel in Durban. Falsely declared dead by the Department of Home Affairs, she finds herself cast into a Kafkaesque nightmare that forces her to confront her past.

    Flown in on the wings of the Impundulu (the lightning bird), Zenzile's story weaves a magical and terrifying tapestry. She draws on myth, religious symbolism and traditional beliefs as she shares the realities - at times brutal, at times forgiving - of survival in South Africa. Her story touches on what it means to live through political violence, the transition to democracy, the brutality of inequality, health epidemics like HIV/AIDS, patriarchy, and the apathetic bureaucracy of government departments.

    Ultimately, Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater offers a critical and unflinching look at the eddying cycles of violence and revenge that play out across generations. Yet it is most of all a story about regeneration and redemption that speaks to both the country's haunted past and its present-day complexities.

    Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater will appeal to teachers, high school learners, and tertiary students in theatre, drama and English studies.

Rick Turner's Politics as the Art of the Impossible
  • Edited by Michael Onyebuchi Eze, Lawrence Hamilton, Laurence Piper, Gideon van Riet
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    01 July 2024
  • Rick Turner was a South African academic and activist who rebelled against apartheid at the height of its power and was assassinated in 1978 when he was 32 years old, but his life and work are testimony to the power of philosophical thinking for humans everywhere. Turner chose to live freely in an unfree time and argued for a non-racial, socialist future in a context where this seemed unimaginable.

    This book considers Rick Turner's challenge that political theorising requires thinking in a utopian way. Turner's seminal book The Eye of the Needle: Towards a Participatory Democracy in South Africa laid out potent ideas on a radically different political and economic system. His demand was that we work to escape the limiting ideas of the present, carefully design a just future based on shared human values, and act to make it a reality, both politically and in our daily lives.

    The contributors to this volume engage critically with Turner's work on race relations, his relationship with Steve Biko, his views on religion, education and gender oppression, his model of participatory democracy, and his critique of poverty and economic inequality. It's an important contribution to contemporary thinking and activism.

How to Decarbonize
  • Policy and Social Theory
  • Ross Astoria
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    13 March 2025
  • How to Decarbonize explores opportunities for decarbonization introduced by recent federal legislation, which has prompted state-level climate planning. It is designed for students and professionals whose work brings them into contact with these opportunities, even if climate is not their primary profession, including city managers, bankers, and home builders who are interested in participating in planning for decarbonization. Chapters aim to support the successful uptake of these policies by providing high-level views of these new decarbonization policies using social theory. The book is divided into four sections, each introducing a social theory about the organization of societies and how they change, and then providing examples to demonstrate the intricacies of implementation.

Darkest Before Dawn
  • Writings, Testimonies and Correspondence from the Life of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe
  • Derek Hook, Leswin Laubscher
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    01 October 2024
  • A definitive collection of Robert Sobukwe's political writings, speeches, unpublished court testimonies, and interviews, complete with a biographical narrative by the editors that demonstrates the many challenges Sobukwe faced and his continued political resolve in the post-prison years of his life.

    Darkest Before Dawn captures the story of the years Robert Sobukwe, the founder of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, spent in Kimberley after his release from Robben Island.

    It includes political writings, speeches, unpublished court testimonies and interviews from this period. The biographical narrative by the editors and images from Sobukwe's life demonstrate the many challenges he faced. His continued political resolve to fight for an end to apartheid is captured in the letters he exchanged with friends and admirers, including the celebrated novelist Bessie Head whose letters to Sobukwe are published here for the first time. Sobukwe continued to meet political allies, such as Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, pursue a legal career and play host to international visitors in spite of banning orders. The portrait that emerges is that of a highly ethical man, a figure of dignity and fortitude, and a wise elder whose commitment to the vision of Pan-Africanism remained undeterred, despite being forced to live under near impossible conditions, in his final years.

    To do justice to Sobukwe's intellectual contribution and his unfailing desire to pursue liberation for African people, Darkest Before Dawn includes expansive annotations by the compilers and ends with a reflective essay which highlights the ongoing pertinence of his legacy.

Explaining our Actions
  • A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing
  • Peter Carruthers
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • We often explain our actions and those of others using a commonsense framework of perceptions, beliefs, desires, emotions, decisions, and intentions. In his thoughtful new book, Peter Carruthers scrutinizes this everyday explanation for our actions, while also examining the explanatory framework through the lens of cutting-edge cognitive science. He shows that the 'standard model' of belief–desire psychology (developed, in fact, with scant regard for science) is only partly valid; that there are more types of action and action-explanation than the model allows; and that both ordinary folk and armchair philosophers are importantly mistaken about the types of mental state that the human mind contains. His book will be of great value to all those who rely in their work on assumptions drawn from commonsense psychology, whether in philosophy of mind, epistemology, moral psychology, ethics, or psychology itself. It will also be attractive to anyone with an interest in human motivation.

Wagner Studies
  • Edited by Steven Vande Moortele
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • While the music of Richard Wagner has long served as a touchstone for music-theoretical and analytical models both old and new, music analysts have often been intimidated by the complexity of his works, their multi-layeredness, and their sheer unwieldiness. This volume brings together ten contributions from an international roster of leading Wagner scholars of our time, all of which engage in some way with analytical or theoretical questions posed by Wagner's music. Addressing the operas and music dramas from Die Feen through Parsifal, they combine analytical methods including form-functional theory, Neo-Riemannian theory, Leitmotiv analysis, and history of theory with approaches to dramaturgy, hermeneutics, reception history, and discursive analysis of sexuality and ideology. Collectively, they capture the breadth of analytical studies of Wagner in contemporary scholarship and expand the reach of the field by challenging it to break new interpretative and methodological ground.

Fighting an Invisible Enemy
  • The Story of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases
  • Barry Schoub
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    01 July 2024
  • The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) is a flagship South African public health organisation, and this book, by its first executive director and virologist Dr Barry Schoub, paints a portrait of its development, despite many challenges, towards becoming an internationally renowned partner in the struggle for global health.

    Fighting an Invisible Enemy narrates the development of the internationally renowned National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) in South Africa from its foundations in the early twentieth century as the South African Institute for Medical Research and, later, the National Institute for Virology. It started humbly and faced daunting obstacles: financial restrictions, international isolation during the apartheid era and political interference both during and after apartheid. The institute plays a crucial role in the ongoing global effort to eradicate polio, and its HIV research unit has become a world leader. Its multidisciplinary laboratories and epidemiologists support the constant surveillance of communicable diseases and provide alerts for any signal of an impending outbreak or pandemic. The NICD is a flagship public health organisation in South Africa, and this book, enhanced by images of its projects and facilities, paints a vivid portrait of its accomplishments. It will be of interest to public health specialists and activists, as well as a more general audience.

Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation
  • Giuseppe Pezzini
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Taking his readers into the depths of a majestic and expansive literary world, one to which he brings fresh illumination as if to the darkness of Khazad-dûm, Giuseppe Pezzini combines rigorous scholarship with an engaging style to reveal the full scale of J. R. R. Tolkien's vision of the 'mystery of literary creation'. Through fragments garnered from across a scattered body of writing, and acute readings of primary texts (some well-known, others less familiar or recently published), the author divulges the unparalleled complexity of Tolkien's work while demonstrating its rich exploration of literature's very nature and purpose. Eschewing any overemphasis on context or comparisons, Pezzini offers rather a uniquely sustained, focused engagement with Tolkien and his 'theory' on their own terms. He helps us discover – or rediscover – a fascination for Tolkien's literary accomplishment while correcting long-standing biases against its nature and merits that have persisted fifty years after his death.

Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy
  • Christoph Schuringa
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • It is indisputable that Marx began his intellectual trajectory as a philosopher, but it is often thought that he subsequently turned away from philosophy. In this book, Christoph Schuringa proposes a radically different reading of Marx's intellectual project and demonstrates that from his earliest writings his aim was the 'actualization' of philosophy. Marx, he argues, should be understood not as turning away from philosophy, but as seeking to make philosophy a practical force in the world. By analysing a series of texts from across Marx's output, Schuringa shows that Marx progressively overcame what he called 'self-sufficient philosophy', not in order to leave philosophy behind but to bring it into its own. This involves a major reinterpretation of Marx's relationship to his ancestors Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, and shows that philosophy, as it actualizes itself, far from being merely a body of philosophical doctrine, figures as an instrument of the revolution.

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