Through its missionary, pedagogical, and scientific accomplishments, the Society of Jesus-known as the Jesuits-became one of the first institutions with a truly "global" reach, in practice and intention. The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits offers a critical assessment of the Order, helping to chart new directions for research at a time when there is renewed interest in Jesuit studies. In particular, the Handbook examines their resilient dynamism and innovative spirit, grounded in Catholic theology and Christian spirituality, but also profoundly rooted in society and cultural institutions. It also explores Jesuit contributions to education, the arts, politics, and theology, among others. The volume is organized in seven major sections, totaling forty articles, on the Order's foundation and administration, the theological underpinnings of its activities, the Jesuit involvement with secular culture, missiology, the Order's contributions to the arts and sciences, the suppression the Order endured in the 18th century, and finally, the restoration. The volume also looks at the way the Jesuit Order is changing, including becoming more non-European and ethnically diverse, with its members increasingly interested in engaging society in addition to traditional pastoral duties.

Through its missionary, pedagogical, and scientific accomplishments, the Society of Jesus-known as the Jesuits-became one of the first institutions with a truly "global" reach, in practice and intention. The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits offers a critical assessment of the Order, helping to chart new directions for research at a time when there is renewed interest in Jesuit studies. In particular, the Handbook examines their resilient dynamism and innovative spirit, grounded in Catholic theology and Christian spirituality, but also profoundly rooted in society and cultural institutions. It also explores Jesuit contributions to education, the arts, politics, and theology, among others. The volume is organized in seven major sections, totaling forty articles, on the Order's foundation and administration, the theological underpinnings of its activities, the Jesuit involvement with secular culture, missiology, the Order's contributions to the arts and sciences, the suppression the Order endured in the 18th century, and finally, the restoration. The volume also looks at the way the Jesuit Order is changing, including becoming more non-European and ethnically diverse, with its members increasingly interested in engaging society in addition to traditional pastoral duties.

The legendary explorers, heroic figures such as Columbus, Marco Polo, Magellan, and Cook, all were lucky and determined enough to discover something which changed our view of the world, revealing previously unknown continents and cultures. Prepared to go beyond what others saw as reasonable limits, they shared a fortitude which carried them through the severest hardships, whether cold, heat, illness, hunger, or starvation. Their failures are often as illuminating as their successes, revealing what it was that drove them to go beyond the possible in search of the unknown. InThe Oxford Book of Explorers, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, hailed by theSunday Timesof London as "the greatest explorer of the last twenty years," offers the first comprehensive collection of these stalwart adventurers, spanning the ages to capture the emotions and motives of those who took part in the daunting effort to find new worlds. We go to Africa with Doctor Livingston and Mr. Stanley, with Mungo Park and Sir Richard Burton; to Asia with Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, and Vitus Bering; to the Pacific with Magellan, Cook, and Bougainville; and to North and South America with Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro, Henry Hudson, Sir Francis Drake, Charles Darwin, Theodore Roosevelt, and many others. We read passages from Livington's last journals, where he recounts "the mere animal pleasure of travelling in a wild unexplored country." Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt, trekking through South America, describes an attempt to capture electric eels by stampeding wild horses into a pool. We sled with Robert Peary close to the North Pole, through air "as keen and bitter as frozen steel." We join Meriwether Clark as he discovers the Great Falls of the Missouri, comes upon a herd of over a thousand buffalo, and is suddenly in a footrace for his life, chased by a large brown bear. And we climb with Sir Edmund Hillary as he and Sherpa Norgay Tenzing reach the summit of the highest place on earth. The ultimate travel book,The Oxford Book of Explorationcaptures the words of those who changed the world through their search for new lands, new peoples, and new adventures. Brimming with the drama of world exploration, it is the perfect book for the armchair traveler.

When Paul Dombey asks `what's money?' in Charles Dickens's novel, his father is hard put to find an answer. The Oxford Book of Money sets out to explore the question with the help of writers, poets, artists, philosophers, economists, financiers and politicians, and to determine not only whatit is, but more importantly, what it can do.More than just `gold, and silver, and copper', more, even, than banknotes (or cowrie shells or cocoa beans), money represents power and status, the lack of it misery and ignominy. True to the decimal system, the ten sections that make up this anthology look at the rich and the poor and thecountless ways in which money can be made and lost. From ancient Greece to modern America trade, speculation, inheritance, debt, and ruin have been the themes of literature and the sources of philosophical and psychological conjecture on money, happiness, and evil. And the hardest question of allreveals a centuries-old ambivalence: how much is it worth? Some things are beyond value, but we all work for hire.Money is a subject that few writers have ignored: Dante, Milton, Nietzche, Baudelaire, Beckett, Propertius, Whitman, Wolfe and Eco - there is an inexhaustible wealth of material that is here tapped to the full. Kevin Jackson has compiled a gem of an anthology on the richest topic of themall.

An intriguing collection of more than 70 Latin American essays, some never before translated into English, gives us the whole spectrum of concerns that have animated some of the greatest writers of our time--from Andres Bello, Pablo Neruda, and Alfonso Reyes to Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Rosario Ferre--an assembly confident, ingenious, aware.

Historical fiction is as popular today as it was at its birth in the nineteenth century. The imaginative recreation of a period beyond living memory has a power to evoke the past better than any history textbook. The stories in this collection travel in time from pre-history and the ancient Greeks to Regency bucks and Edwardian suffragettes, by way of medieval Europe, the English Civil War and the French Revolution. Emperors and kings, poets and soldiers walk these pages, in tales of intrigue, adventure, mystery and romance. As well as the giants of the genre - Stanley Weyman, Rafael Sabatini, and Georgette Heyer among them - this anthology also includes tales by Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner and Marjorie Bowen, and by writers from the golden age of the Victorian magazine. In their choices the editors demonstrate the vitality of a form that cuts across the boundaries of popular and literary fiction to appeal to anyone who enjoys a cracking good read.