Award winning books
Smrtí smrt překonat. Relikvie a jejich moc ve středověku
Jana Černocká, Ivan Foletti, Adrien Palladino, Katarína Šimová
What could be more disgusting and distant to contemporary man than the worship of decomposed human remains? And yet it is a cult that binds continents together and is literally written into the DNA of our civilisation. How is this possible? And does a story seemingly so distant still have something to say to us today?
This book explores death, the cult of dead “celebrities” and people’s relationship to them in the Middle Ages and on the threshold of modernity. It is not, however, an oppressive, gloomy or frightening book. On the contrary, Death in the Middle Ages glows with gold, silver and precious stones in the form of reliquaries, objects venerated across the centuries that still fascinate with their breathtaking quality.
- 2024 The Miroslav Ivanov Prize in the Political Science, Philosophy, and Religion category, awarded by the Non-Fiction Authors' Club.
Paměti. Kdo sloužíš vlasti, odměny nečekej
Karel Engliš
Karel Engliš started writing his memoirs in 1925, when he was 45 years old, and he worked on them intermittently until the end of his life in 1961. This resulted in the creation of several comprehensive thematic collections. It is therefore not a classic biography. However, this is what makes the book unique and special. It allows us to witness how Engliš dealt with different subjects over the years, and what he considered necessary to comment on, to record. The book provides the reader with an opportunity to recognize Engliš’s keen observational talent and extraordinary memory. Despite a gap of decades, Karel Engliš can describe events and personalities in such detail, as if he experienced or saw them just yesterday.
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2023 The Miroslav Ivanov Prize for Memoirs and biography, awarded by the Non-Fiction Authors' Club.
Míla Doleželová
Markéta Bártová, Aleš Filip (ed.), Jana Horváthová, Tomáš Mazáč, Alena Mizerová (ed.)
The book brings a new, revealing perspective to the work of the extraordinary painter Míla Doleželová (1922–1993). She lived and worked in Prague and mainly in the Czech-Moravian Highlands, under Javořice Mountain, in Jihlávec, Klatovec and Telč. For art lovers, she left an extremely comprehensive and monumental work consisting of frescoes and countless oil paintings, drawings and prints.
The monograph was published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the painter’s birth, accompanied by almost three hundred reproductions of paintings, photographs and documents, a pictorial calendar of her life and work, and several appendices.
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2022 The Vysočina Region Award for the Most Beautiful Book of Vysočina. Presented annually at the Autumn Book Fair in Havlíčkův Brod, the award recognizes books that are contextually or thematically connected to the Vysočina Region.
Velká logika. Věda o myšlenkovém řádu
Karel Engliš
Karel Engliš wrote his masterpiece, Velká logika. Věda o myšlenkovém řádu ("The Great Logic: The Science of the Order of Thought"), during World War II while hiding from the Nazis in the Vysočina region, in the village of Velké Tresné. Spanning over 2,500 pages, he divided the manuscript into two main volumes: the General Part and the Special Part, subtitled Logical Discourses. His goal was to provide a comprehensive exposition of the theory of knowledge.
This crowning achievement of Karel Engliš (1880–1961) is being published for the very first time. In 1947, the regime banned the completed manuscript from publication; the prepared typesetting was destroyed, and the typescript had to be hidden by family and friends to prevent its seizure. Focused on philosophy and the general theory of scientific knowledge, this work by the preeminent interwar Czechoslovak economist, educator, politician, and philosopher remained inaccessible for over seventy years.
By publishing this facsimile of the original manuscript, Masaryk University makes this significant work available to the research community while honoring the memory of Karel Engliš, who played a pivotal role in founding the university and served as its first rector.
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2022 Josef Hlávka Special Award for Scientific Literature, honoring the publication of this work.
Buy the book Free e-book The Work of Karel Engliš book series
Co nás učí nádory. Paralely v chování buněk a lidí
Jana Šmardová
Mnohobuněčný organismus představuje společenství buněk, které se vyvíjejí a vykonávají svou funkci ve vymezeném čase a prostoru pro maximální užitek celého systému, jehož jsou součástí. Nádory vznikají z buněk, které porušují základní pravidla soužití a spolupráce. Bylo popsáno jedenáct typických vlastností, kterými se nádory liší od zdravých tkání a která dokládají význam dodržování těchto pravidel. Jsou tyto vlastnosti a pravidla odrazem obecnějších principů, které jsou základem správného fungování komplexních živých systémů? Lze se z nich poučit nebo inspirovat i k dobrému fungování lidské společnosti?
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2022 Medal for an Extraordinary Creative Achievement awarded to author Jana Šmardová by Tomáš Kašparovský, Dean of the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University.
Statistical Data Analysis in the Social Sciences (Using SPSS)
Ladislav Rabušic, Petr Soukup a Petr Mareš
The authors explain how to perform statistical analysis using the SPSS program. At the same time, they present in a simple way the principles of statistics, important methodological aspects of data analysis and guide students through the options of SPSS of how to carry out the necessary calculations and outputs, both numerical and graphical. Apart from the theoretical insight, the textbook features practical advice, data files and tools for practical data analysis as well as exercises to practise the analysis. No similar textbook of data analysis in the social sciences has been published in the Czech Republic so far, it will thus be of benefit for both students and researchers in social sciences. 2nd revised edition.
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2020 The Jaroslav Jirsa Award for the best textbook of the year
Charles University recognises high-quality textbooks as distinctive creative scientific and educational texts. Each year, it supports authors by granting the „Jaroslav Jirsa Award“ for the best textbook of the year.
Living Onlife: Lessons from the Information Sciences
Michal Černý
In the fifth volume we reflect on the hybrid nature of the social and work environment in which most of us normally live. The boundaries between online and offline are blurring, both worlds merge into one. How will the ongoing technological revolution affect our education, professional success or value orientation? According to information science, the core of the answer lies in the way we obtain, evaluate and use information.
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2019/2020 The best books for children and adolescents
The committee for children’s books of the Association of Czech Booksellers and Publishers and the Czech section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) created a project in which they recommend new Czech books for children and adolescents on a yearly basis. The catalogue serves as guidance for booksellers, libraries, and schools, but also for parents and the wider public. In most European countries such national catalogues are published, and it significantly helps all who work with books and with children. -
2020 Listed in the Lidové noviny "Book of the Year" poll
Limits to Darwinism
Jiří Vácha
Darwinism claims to be a complete theory of biological life, including human life. It has a significant effect on the self-concept of contemporary humans and their worldview. In his unique book, Professor Emeritus of Masaryk University, physician and philosopher Jiří Vácha summarizes the current scientific critique of Darwinism, and also expands the whole problem by the notion of "consciousness" as the most specific feature of live beings. In addition to the evolving physical aspect of organisms, their experiential aspect has evolved too, and Darwinism does not take that sufficiently into account. Modern natural science, following in the footsteps of Descartes' mechanism, has a priori closed the door to this fundamental problem and has had to make way for philosophy and its interpretation. Despite its broad scientific scope, the book is surprisingly readable, the author explains complex things in clear and simple language.
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2020 Listed in the Lidové noviny "Book of the Year 2020" poll
Věrní a rozumní. Kapitoly o ekologické zpozdilosti
Hana Librová and her students: The Faithful and the Reasonable. Chapters on Ecological Backwardness
This book follows the successful titles “The Colourful and the Green: Chapters on Voluntary Simplicity” and “The Half-Hearted and the Hesitant: Chapters on Ecological Luxury.” The author poses the question of why, at a time of continuing devastation of nature, people’s interest in nature conservation has been decreasing. Are the media to blame or is our numbness toward ecological problems rooted in our mental makeup that tends to supress unpleasant realities? The author also wants to find out why some people have remained faithful to nature. To get to the answers, she applies sociological, philosophical, psychological, and theological perspectives. An unexpected question that may surprise some readers then becomes: Actually, why should we protect nature when it can take care of itself? It is not weak; it is strong and cruel.
Librová’s students Vojtěch Pelikán, Lucie Galčanová, and Lukáš Kala interview the children of “the Colourful,” too: have they inherited their parents’ modest lifestyle?
Those interested in the book have a unique opportunity to choose from two designs: publication with color linocuts by Miloš Sláma or with paintings by Bohdan Lacina.
- Czech Sociological Association Award for outstanding publication
Plastická a rekonstrukční chirurgie
Ladislav Bařinka: Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
This epic book celebrates the successes of professor Bařinka’s sixtyyear long career in plastic and reconstructive surgery. On almost 900 pages, it presents the long years of experience of the Brno plasticsurgery school in which the author has played a substantive role. The main asset of the publication is a huge number of meticulously compiled patients’ case histories which virtually encompass the whole discipline. The book is divided into eleven chapters organised according to individual areas of interest of the field. In selected topics (such as the auricle reconstruction or lower extremities lymphedema), the book strives for significant deepening of the readers’ knowledge. It is the most extensive monograph in the field of plastic surgery ever published in the Czech Republic.
- 2016: Josef Hlávka Award for scientific literature in medical sciences
Čínský deník
Lumír Jisl: The China diary
In late 1957, Czech archaeologist and art historian Lumír Jisl set off for a business trip to Mongolia and China. He was keeping a detailed personal diary throughout his six-month journey where he openly and critically captured the atmosphere of Chinese everyday life. Above all, he vividly portrayed diverse Buddhist and other temples, rock and cave sacral complexes, and other significant monuments of Chinese history. He supplemented his records with colour and black and white photographs. The manuscript of the diary was preserved along with the negatives in the family archive and could not be published until now.
Apart from the diary itself, the book contains rich visual accompaniment, several memories of Jisl’s contemporaries, and specialised religionist and sinologist studies. A detailed index, cartographic attachment, and extensive footnotes are naturally not missing.
- 2016: shortlisted for the Most beautiful Czech books award
Understanding Policy Attitudes: Effects of Affective Source Cues on Political Reasoning
Lenka Hrbková: Understanding Policy Attitudes: Effects of Affective Source Cues on Political Reasoning
How do citizens form their political attitudes? How do political actors influence people’s political views in their everyday lives? Do people’s feelings towards political parties and politicians influence public opinion? The book presents a series of laboratory experiments focused on the formation processes of citizens’ attitudes to political issues in the context of their emotional attachments to political actors. It investigates how basic cues, in form of affective reactions of experimental subjects towards political parties and party leaders, influence attitudes on issues articulated by these parties and leaders. The research puts emphasis on negativity and negative feelings of citizens towards political actors and shows that this type of negative attachment influences the way people think about political issues. Since the experimental method is a newcomer in the field of Czech political science, the volume’s ambition is also to introduce experiments as a relevant and useful tool for extending knowledge of substantial political processes and phenomena.
- 2016: Rector's Award for outstanding dissertation thesis
Drahé kameny starověkých civilizací
Ivan Mrázek: Gemstones of ancient civilizations
Gemstones are masterpieces of nature, and their mysterious sparkle has fascinated man from time immemorial. The representative publication conveys the history of precious stones, as well as history as such. Gemstones on its 382 pages, in 332 photographs and 50 illustrations reveal to us the life and problems of ancient civilizations. The compelling text and extensive visual material draw readers directly into the long gone times which they discover step by step thanks to the systematic documentation of archaeological finds – artefacts made of precious stones.
The book is unique in its scope; it presents a summary of the existing knowledge about the subject. It will be of use to experts on various ancient civilizations and those interested in mineralogy and archaeology, but it will also certainly impress any lover of beauty, history and precious stones.
- 2014: Josef Hlávka Award for scientific literature
- 2013: shortlisted for the Magnesia litera Award for scientific literature
- 2013: The most beautiful book of the Autumn Book Fair in Havlíčkův Brod
Hudebně-literární slovník
Vladimír Spousta: Music-literary dictionary
The grandiose encyclopaedic trilogy is based on the interconnection of musical, verbal, and also visual arts. It contains over two thousand entries with the personalities of composers, in whose work has music at least once met with literature – from mere documentable inspiration to setting a literary work into music. The dictionary is the result of impressive, decades-long author's work.
- 2014: The Dictionary of the year Award (2nd place)
Latinitas medica
Elena Marečková-Štolcová a kolektiv: Latinitas medica. A lexicon of (not only) medical sentences, quotations and phrases
Latinitas medica is a voluminous compendium presenting nearly 7,000 sentences, quotations, phrases, and technical terms formulated throughout centuries in Latin language. Primarily, the spheres of human health and medicine have been focused on but other natural sciences (e. g. pharmacy) and the adherent spheres of philosophy as well as religion, psychology, ethics, pedagogy, sociology and law have been integrated. The items, both the texts written by well-known authorities and anonymous pieces of folk wisdom, appear in their original (Latin) version as accompanied by their brand-new Czech translation and occasional commentaries and references. Thanks to the alphabetic order and the two comprehensive keyword catalogues (Latin and Czech) the inner structure of the comprehensive volume discussed appears lucid and the book itself proofs user-friendly.
- 2012 Jury Award in the Dictionary of the year contest (2nd place)
Vinný kámen
Marek Fencl: Cream of tartar
Marek Fencl, born in Hodonín in 1967, graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University and works in Brno as a doctor. He published his verses in the literary review Weles and in several collections of poems. His first individual collection contains 45 poems written in a free verse, full of pictures of landscape and life in Moravian Slovakia. The land there is cultivated from ancient times, among other things by the demanding cultivation of grapevine, is in itself such a vineyard of the Lord with the symbolism that belongs to it. It gives people bread not only for food, but also food for the spirit.
- 2010 Shortlisted for the Magnesia litera Award for the revelation of the year
Komunistické právo v Československu
Michal Bobek, Pavel Molek a Vojtěch Šimíček (eds.): Communist Law in Czechoslovakia. Chapters from the History of Injustice
“Communist Law in Czechoslovakia” is a unique project born out of intellectual discomfort of the editors of this collective volume. The discomfort was caused by what was perceived as a lack of as good as any critical analysis of what communist law was and how it still considerably shapes the law in contemporary Czech Republic and Slovakia. The collective volume has the ambition of launching the long needed debate on this subject.
- 2009 The European Academy for Democracy Award for the most valuable book in political studies
Oborové didaktiky: vývoj - stav - perspektivy
Iva Stuchlíková, Tomáš Janík a kol.: Field Didactics: Development – State of the art – Perspectives
Field didactics are scientific disciplines that focus on the domain-specific dimension of teaching and learning in and outside the school environment. They deal with a range of issues, from defining and justifying the aims of teaching and learning in the specific field/subject to legitimation and didactic transformation of content and to methodical structuring of learning processes. A general issue in the Czech educational system is the fact that field didactics have not been systematically developed with adequate demand for a long period of time. Despite this, they have grown into relatively independent scientific disciplines (as evident in this book). The publication aims to give an overview of the development and state of the art of field didactics in the Czech Republic and discuss the prospects for their future.
- 2015 Rector of the University of South Bohemia's Award for popularizing/overview book
- 2016 Czech Association for pedagogical research Award for outstanding research book
Poème électronique. 1958. Le Corbusier – E. Varèse – I. Xenakis
Martin Flašar: Poème électronique. 1958. Le Corbusier – E. Varèse – I. Xenakis
“Poème électronique” was one of the first comprehensive multimedia works, which consistently used the handling of audio material in architectural space. This work was prepared by a trio of artists Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse and Iannis Xenakis for the presentation of the Philips company at the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958. Poème électronique is used in this book as a comprehensive term for a set of artistic acts associated with the Philips pavillion. A particular emphasis is placed on the personality of the solitaire and pioneer of electroacoustic music, Edgard Varèse. The present publication attempts to trace the lines of the development of the three main protagonists intersecting an interpretive framework designed by the aesthetics of contemporary art groups and movements.
- 2012 shortlisted for the F. X. Šalda Award