Kirjahaku

An entertaining, often surprising cultural examination of Earth’s moon, through history, science, and literature, from ancient times to the present Werewolves and Wernher von Braun, Stonehenge and the sex lives of sea corals, aboriginal myths, and an Anglican bishop: In his new book, Moon, Bernd Brunner weaves variegated information into an enchanting glimpse of Earth’s closest celestial neighbor, whose mere presence inspires us to wonder what might be “out there.”Going beyond the discoveries of contemporary science, Brunner presents an unusual cultural assessment of our complex relationship with Earth’s lifeless, rocky satellite. As well as offering an engaging perspective on such age-old questions as “What would Earth be like without the moon?” Brunner surveys the moon’s mythical and religious significance and provokes existential soul-searching through a lunar lens, inquiring, “Forty years ago, the first man put his footprint on the moon. Will we continue to use it as the screen onto which we cast our hopes and fears?”Drawing on materials from different cultures and epochs, Brunner walks readers down a moonlit path illuminated by more than seventy-five vintage photographs and illustrations. From scientific discussions of the moon’s origins and its “chronobiological” effects on the mating and feeding habits of animals to an illuminating interpretation of Bishop Francis Godwin’s 1638 novel The Man in the Moone, Brunner’s ingenious and interdisciplinary explorations recast a familiar object in an entirely original and unforgettable light and will change the way we view the nighttime sky.

People have perennially projected their fantasies onto the North as a frozen no-man’s-land full of marauding Vikings or as the unspoiled landscape of a purer, more elemental form of life. Bernd Brunner recovers the encounters of adventurers with its dramatic vistas, fierce weather, exotic treasures and indigenous peoples—and with the literary sagas that seemed to offer an alternate (“whiter” and “superior”) cultural origin story to those of decadent Greece or Rome, and the moralistic “Semitic” Bible. The Left has idealised Scandinavian social democracy. The Right borrows from a long history of crackpot theories of Northern origins. Nordic phenotypes characterised eugenics, which in turn influenced America’s limits on immigration. The North, Brunner argues, was as much invented as discovered. A valuable contribution to intellectual history, full of vivid documentation, Extreme North is an enlightening journey through a place that is real, but also, in fascinating and very disturbing ways, imaginary.

Scholars and laymen alike have long projected their fantasies onto the great expanse of the global North, whether it be as a frozen no-man’s-land, an icy realm of marauding Vikings or an unspoiled cradle of prehistoric human life. Bernd Brunner reconstructs the encounters of adventurers, colonists and indigenous communities that led to the creation of a northern “cabinet of wonders” and imbued Scandinavia, Iceland and the Arctic with a perennial mystique. Like the mythological sagas that inspired everyone from Wagner to Tolkien, Extreme North explores both the dramatic vistas of the Scandinavian fjords and the murky depths of a Western psyche obsessed with Nordic whiteness. In concise but thoroughly researched chapters, Brunner highlights the cultural and political fictions at play from the first “discoveries” of northern landscapes and stories, to the eugenicist elevation of the “Nordic” phenotype (which in turn influenced America’s limits on immigration), to the idealisation of Scandinavian social democracy as a post-racial utopia. Brunner traces how crackpot Nazi philosophies that tied the “Aryan race” to the upper latitudes have influenced modern pseudoscientific fantasies of racial and cultural superiority the world over. The North, Brunner argues, was as much invented as discovered. Full of glittering details embedded in vivid storytelling, Extreme North is a fascinating romp through both actual encounters and popular imaginings, and a disturbing reminder of the power of fantasy to shape the world we live in.

A captivating cultural and scientific history of orchards, for readers of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire and Mark Kurlansky’s Salt. Throughout history, orchards have nourished both body and soul: they are sites for worship and rest, inspiration for artists and writers, and places for people to gather. In Taming Fruit, award-winning writer Bernd Brunner interweaves evocative illustrations with masterful prose to show that the story of orchards is a story of how we have shaped nature to our desires for millennia. As Brunner tells it, the first orchards may have been oases dotted with date trees, where desert nomads stopped to rest. In the Amazon, Indigenous people maintained mosaic gardens centuries before colonization. Modern fruit cultivation developed over thousands of years in the East and the West. As populations expanded, fruit trees sprang from the lush gardens of the wealthy and monasteries to fields and roadsides, changing landscapes as they fed the hungry. But orchards don’t just produce fruit; they also inspire great artists. Taming Fruit shares paintings, photographs, and illustrations alongside Brunner's enchanting descriptions and research, offering a multifaceted-—and long-awaited—portrait of the orchard.