Kessinger Publishing's rare reprints

The MAA is delighted to be the publisher of the sixth edition of this book, updated with a new section 15.9 on the author's useful concept of inversive distance. Throughout most of this book, non-Euclidean geometries in spaces of two or three dimensions are treated as specializations of real projective geometry in terms of a simple set of axioms concerning points, lines, planes, incidence, order and continuity, with no mention of the measurement of distances or angles. This synthetic development is followed by the introduction of homogeneous coordinates, beginning with Von Staudt's idea of regarding points as entities that can be added or multiplied. Transformations that preserve incidence are called colineations. They lead in a natural way to elliptic isometries or "congruent transformations". Following a recommendation by Bertrand Russell, continuity is described in terms of order. Elliptic and hyperbolic geometries are derived from real projective geometry by specializing an elliptic or hyperbolic polarity which transforms points into lines (in two dimensions) or planes (in three dimensions) and vice versa. This treatment can be enjoyed by anyone who is familiar with algebra up to the elements of group theory. - Publisher.

"Bronislaw Malinowski's pathbreaking Argonauts of the Western Pacific is at once a detailed account of exchange in the Melanesian islands and a manifesto of a modernist anthropology. Malinowski argued that the goal of which the ethnographer should never lose sight is 'to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.' Through vivid evocations of Kula life, including the building and launching of canoes, fishing expeditions and the role of myth and magic amongst the Kula people, Malinowski brilliantly describes an inter-island system of exchange - from gifts from father to son to swapping fish for yams - around which an entire community revolves. A classic of anthropology that did much to establish the primacy of painstaking fieldwork over the earlier anecdotal reports of travel writers, journalists and missionaries, it is a compelling insight into a world now largely lost from view. With a new foreword by Adam Kuper"--

American journalist John 'Jack' Reed writes, on the scene, describing the Mexican Revolution of 1914. He gives an excellent realistic account of the Mexican Indians & peons that have suffered under a brutal dictatorship. He writes about the time he spent in Northern Mexico with Pancho Villa & the war in the desert. It was hard for him as a Gringo as most Americans had only gone to Mexico to plunder the environment. Read "The White Rose' by Bruno Traven & his other 'jungle' series books about the exploitation of Indian Mexican's. Many would say that Jack Reed took over from Jack London in his war reporting, since Jack had just died in 1914. Jack Reed's other famous book "Ten Days That Shook The World" is about the Red October (Boleshvik) Russian Revolution--the movie "Reds" by Warren Beaty is Jack Reed's story.