Product Description

The history of animals and humans as seen through barbed wire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1116170 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
"Stunningly thought-provoking and beautifully grim in bearing witness to a larger meaning of technology, this book makes a supple use of traditional sources to discuss place and containment, with utterly novel generalizations about human economic activities and the appropriation of space." (Paul F. Starrs, author of Let the Cowboy Ride )

From the Publisher
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 trim. 10 maps, 2 figures

About the Author
REVIEL NETZ is Associate Professor at Stanford University, teaching history and the philosophy of science. His books include The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: A Study in Cognitive History (1999) and the forthcoming Archimedes: Translation and Commentary.

Customer Reviews

Big ideas and a gripping read
This is a tour-de-force piece of scholarship from an author who normally writes fascinating, but quite difficult, texts about ancient mathematics. Barbed Wire takes the invention, development, and use of barbed wire in agriculture, on the battlefield, and in prison camps as a case study to talk about the ways in which modernity can, in a sense, be defined through the ways in which it changed how movement is allowed and prevented, and how the economic/ecological processes of everyday life are organized. This book presents big, often terrifying, ideas in a way which is accessible and pleasurable to read. It poses serious questions which we cannot ignore about modern politics and the ways in which we live in relation to each other as humans and as animals on the planet.