Raffaello Cortina Editore

The next pandemic? Probably a flu.

If germs manage to get the upper hand over medicines, there is a very real risk that all the progress made in medicine will be annihilated.

Ever since the beginning of the space age, Mars has been the main target of our explorations of the solar system. It has also been the scene of many spectacular and dramatic failures.This book takes the reader on a journey through the history of the missions to Mars, and explains why, although it is the planet that is the most similar and closest to ours, the challenges that its unique characteristics constitute for our spaceships are so tough that they have defeated half of the tens of missions that have tackled the Red Planet.The author, who has participated actively in all the European missions to Mars and has also been involved in many of the NASA missions to the Red Planet, writes of these explorations and of the planet from his personal experience. The conclusion of the book looks to the future, to the missions to Mars that are programmed for the coming years and the dream of sending the first human beings to the Red Planet, maybe even by the end of the first half of this century.

A voyage in the future to understand past mistakes and avoid repeating them

The illness that has been diagnosed is scientific innumeracy, the cure prescribed: 120 “pills of mathematics”

Friendship is a basic sentiment that concerns everyone.  It links us with others but doesn’t exclude solitude, of which indeed it is the central part. It is both a miraculous source of joy and a fragile balance that has to be protected, cared for, nurtured. It is an ancestral sentiment composed of infinite nuances, susceptible to change depending on elements such as the time of life, gender, characters, as well as external, familial, social and historic conditions.Last but not least, friendship is of significant interest in psychiatry, particularly in this post-pandemic phase, and plays an important role in therapy.The words of great thinkers, poets, and authors from Friedrich Nietzsche to Emily Dickinson accompany Eugenio Borgna in this all-embracing reflection on the sentiment of friendship, to better capture its meaning and value.

While politicians and the media in the West were concentrating almost exclusively on Covid-19, elsewhere people continued to suffer for other dramatical reasons. Wars, torture, repressive regimes are just a few of the evils that beset the peripheral areas of the world of the well-off. In these areas, the health emergency of the last few years has certainly not been a priority.  Prior to the Syrian civil war, Mohammed Bakr was a judge in Homs, now he sells old shoes in the province of Idlib. Rohallah is a Pashtun Taliban who roams the Panshir valley with his Kalashnikov “to cut the throats of those ungrateful Tajiks”; in the meantime, Afghanistan has been plunged back into the past: anyone who has the means to leave, flees the country, no-one wears western clothes anymore, the women are segregated, buried in their burqas once again. These are just a few of the people that Pietro Del Re, journalist and correspondent of the Italian national daily la Repubblica for more than twenty years, met during the pandemic. He travelled to those corners of the Earth that bear the brunt of human tragedies, to give a voice and space to those who have been forgotten, the world’s losers that no-one, or almost no-one, cares about.    

Stromboli, Taormina, Selinunte, Siracusa: travelling in Sicily with nymphs and cyclops

The world’s greatest expert on trauma and mourning    In this book, Roger Solomon draws on his wealth of experience and clinical sensitivity to explain how to work with mourning and the pain of loss. The author describes the impact that the loss of a loved one can have on innumerable functions, both intrapsychic and interpersonal, on the tasks that the mourner has to face in processing the sense of loss and the plethora of factors that can complicate mourning. After providing a brief panorama of EMDR, the author accompanies the therapist through the process step by step, integrating theoretical explanations with numerous accounts of clinical cases, using theoretical frameworks – including the theory of attachment and that of continuing bonds – that are efficacious for clinical work and a complete understanding of the cases presented. The author completes the volume with a detailed explanation of how to use EMDR therapy to facilitate the mourning process: each of the eight phases is examined in depth, in relation to working through grieving and the pain of loss.  

Travel tales, nostalgic memories flavoured with a dash of irony and 60 recipes from the world’s great cities Looking for a tasty snack? Which of these would tickle your gastric juices, one of San Francisco’s famous tuna melts or a French assiette de fromages? And if you are feeling gloomy, which would you choose to brighten up your day, a bagna caoda from the Italian Piedmont region or a Berlin currywurst?A professor of Russian literature describes his travel experiences, especially to street markets and the best eating places.  A gastro-cultural tour of a number of cities – Turin, London, New York, Berlin, San Francisco, Paris, Istanbul – that have changed over the course of the years. Metropolitan glimpses of eccentric personalities, anecdotes of everyday life, nostalgic memories flavoured with a dash of irony and seasoned with recipes of dishes and beverages enjoyed over five decades.Which was more poignant, the whiff of cinnamon in a San Francisco fog or the smell of coal dust hanging in the air above a Berlin still divided by the Wall? After a day in Paris, should you raise a glass of classic Kir or Kir Royal? Those who lean to the left might prefer to order a communard, those who tend more to the right will ask for a cardinal. Whichever you choose, Cheers! .

The life, passion and resurrection of Jesus as recounted by a great scholar This “biography” of Jesus is constructed on the watershed between faith and historical fact. The opening pages provide a setting that isolates the historical-cultural and geopolitical coordinates of the four Gospels, after which the reader is accompanied in a journey through their pages that offer a composite of portraits taken from different perspectives rather than an academic reconstruction of a character and his story. Gianfranco Ravasi develops this profile of Jesus adhering to certain fundamental features, starting from his public life in the village of Nazareth, his speeches that frequently flowed into parabolic narratives, his hands that moved in surprising gestures, catalogued as “miracles”. Then the supreme sacrifice, his death by capital execution condoned by Rome. But just when the curtain falls on Jesus’s earthly existence, a new phase of his life opens, a discriminant without precedence, defined as “resurrection”.  Understanding this requires another descriptive channel, mainly consigned to a transcendental consciousness, known as the “Paschal Mystery”.  

Great discoveries that happened by chance. Serendipity and its heroes, from Christopher Columbus to Sherlock Holmes. How many times have you searched for something and come across something entirely different? A partner, a friend, a job, an object. It happens to scientists all the time: they design an experiment and the results reveal something totally unexpected, that often turns out to be quite important. This fascinating phenomenon is known as serendipity, coined from the Persian fable of the three princes of Serendip, sent out by their father to explore the world.In the history of science, this is how the greatest discoveries have been made. But here you won’t find the usual list of anecdotes about the discovery of penicillin, X-rays and microwave ovens. The most surprising serendipity stories reveal profound aspects of the logic of scientific discovery. These discoveries cannot be ascribed to fortune alone: serendipity springs from a mixture of astuteness and curiosity, of sagacity and accidents seized upon and transformed into knowledge in the blink of an eye. Above all, serendipity shows us things we didn’t know that we didn’t know. Following the success of The Natural History of Imperfection and Finitude, Telmo Pievani reveals the thrilling story of an idea. From Zadig to Sherlock Holmes, the numerous heroes of serendipity show us that Nature, out there, is always much greater than we ever imagine.