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Universities have stood for 900 years in Western culture with most of their institutional structures essentially unchanged. They still serve three basic functions: educating the faculty, teaching students and gathering knowledge. Funding is, and always has been, the main difficulty within universities and most of the problems critics point to can be traced to a lack of it--universities, it seems, are always in crisis. The authors demonstrate that universities are in fact doing well. They generate an immense amount of research and drive the development of new technologies. On the whole, faculty members teach pretty well and students are in fact learning (at least something), and the challenges of inadequate funding are faced with adequate success.

Vladimir Nabokov, one of the 20th century's greatest novelists, is particularly remembered for his masterpiece Lolita. The present work examines the enduring themes of Lolita and places the novel in its biographical, social, cultural and historical contexts. Of particular interest are questions of love in all of its manifestations, the central problem of time in the book, and memory as it is explored in fictional memoir or, in this case, the central protagonist's'confession.'

Though baseball would eventually come to embody the American spirit, in the nineteenth century onlookers regarded the game with some ambivalence. To capture the hearts of the public, baseball needed teams worth watching--and no team was a better ambassador for baseball in the 19th century than the New York Giants. The pre-John McGraw Giants were occasionally very good and frequently very fashionable, but they had not yet become the trademark team of the National League that they would become in the early 20th century. The Giants were, however, one of the league's premier teams simply because they played in the country's premier city. New York and its Giants epitomized the rise of industrialized America and the need for organized spectator diversions. Together, the city and the team helped propel baseball into its position as the national pastime.