Books published by Oxford University Press (S1)

With growing concerns over climate change and air pollution, the need to switch from fossil fuels to clean and renewable sources of energy has become pressing. Here, Nick Jelley describes the main renewables, explains how wind and solar farms can provide the cheapest energy in ma...ny parts of the world, and calls for urgent action.
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Plants are absolutely fundamental to the functioning of life on earth. But how did the earliest plants first emerge from water and conquer the continents? Using the latest research, David Beerling tells their evolutionary story. And, as we face catastrophic loss of biodiversity, ...he highlights the profound effect they have on ecosystems and climate.
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Although long considered to be a barren region on the periphery of ancient Chinese civilization, the southwest massif was once the political heartland of numerous Bronze Age polities. Their distinctive material tradition-intricately cast bronze kettle drums and cowrie shell conta...iners-has given archaeologists and historians a glimpse of the extraordinary wealth, artistry, and power exercised by highland leaders over the course of the first millennium BC. In the first century BC, Han imperial conquest reduced local power and began a process of cultural assimilation. Instead of a clash between center and periphery or barbarism and civilization, this book examines the classic study of imperial rule as a confrontation between different political temporalities. The author provides an archaeological account of the southwest where Bronze Age landscape formations and funerary traditions bring to light a history of competing warrior cultures and kingly genealogies. In particular, the book illustrates how mourners used funerals and cemetery mounds to transmit social biographies and tribal affiliations across successive generations. Han incorporation thus entangled the orders of state time with the generational cycles of local factions, foregrounding the role of time in the production of power relations in imperial frontiers. The book extends approaches to empires to show how prehistoric time frames continue to shape the futures of frontier subjects despite imperial efforts to unify space and histories.
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The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked. 'The Hearing Eye' makes the case for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter.

This seminal book injects the topic of superintelligence into the academic and popular mainstream. What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? In a tour de force of analytic thinking, Bostrom lays a foundation for ...understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life.
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