Biography & Autobiography

Name: Not Yo' Butterfly
Brand: Nobuko Miyamoto
Price: 29.95 USD
Availability: InStock

60 products

Sort

The Next American Revolution

Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy

Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley

Lawrence Clark Powell

Paperback

$39.95

Luigi Russolo, Futurist

Luciano Chessa

Paperback

$36.95

The Music of Bela Bartok

America's Social Arsonist

Gabriel Thompson

Paperback

$24.95

John Wilkins 1614-1672

Barbara J. Shapiro

Paperback

$49.95

Radiant Science, Dark Politics

Fritz Baltzer Translated from the German by Dorothea Rudnick

Biography of Yu-Wen Hu

Translated and Annotated by Albert E. Dien

Some Unpublished Letters of Lord Chesterfield

Lord Chesterfield Introduction by Sidney L. Gulick

Paperback

$39.95

Thomas Jefferson as Political Leader

Dumas Malone

Paperback

$39.95

Viscount Maua and the Empire of Brazil

Anyda Marchant

Paperback

$49.95

Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can)

Peter Matthiessen

Paperback

$24.95

Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer

Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara, with an introduction by George Lipsitz and Josh Kun

William Shinji Tsuchida

Paperback

$39.95

Roger of Salisbury, Viceroy of England

The Life and Adventures of George Nidever, 1802 - 1883

Edited by William Henry Ellison

Paperback

$39.95

Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan

Owen Lattimore and the Loss of China

Robert P. Newman

Paperback

$65.00

The Autobiography of an Unknown South African

Michele Barbi's Life of Dante

Translated and Edited by Paul G. Ruggiers

Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

Bela Bartok and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest

Catherine Parsons Smith

Beethoven and the Construction of Genius

Tia DeNora

Paperback

$31.95

The Listening Composer

George Perle

Paperback

$31.95

The Beethoven Quartet Companion

Robert Winter and Robert Martin, editors

Paperback

$31.95

Music, Politics, and the Academy

Pieter C. van den Toorn

Paperback

$33.95

Between Romanticism and Modernism

Carl Dahlhaus

Paperback

$26.95

Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation

Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance

Music and Sexuality in Britten

Grace Lee Boggs

The Next American Revolution

$20.95

The Strategist's Best Books About Asian American Identity, New York Magazine

The pioneering Asian American labor organizer and writer’s vision for intersectional and anti-racist activism.

In this powerful, deeply humanistic book, Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis—political, economical, and environmental—and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities. A vibrant, inspirational force, Boggs has participated in all of the twentieth century’s major social movements—for civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, and more. She draws from seven decades of activist experience, and a rigorous commitment to critical thinking, to redefine “revolution” for our times.

From her home in Detroit, she reveals how hope and creativity are overcoming despair and decay within the most devastated urban communities. Her book is a manifesto for creating alternative modes of work, politics, and human interaction that will collectively constitute the next American Revolution—which is unraveling before our eyes.

Nobuko Miyamoto

Not Yo' Butterfly

$29.95

A mold-breaking memoir of Asian American identity, political activism, community, and purpose.

Not Yo’ Butterfly is the intimate and unflinching life story of Nobuko Miyamoto—artist, activist, and mother. Beginning with the harrowing early years of her life as a Japanese American child navigating a fearful west coast during World War II, Miyamoto leads readers into the landscapes that defined the experiences of twentieth-century America and also foregrounds the struggles of people of color who reclaimed their histories, identities, and power through activism and art.

Miyamoto vividly describes her early life in the racialized atmosphere of Hollywood musicals and then her turn toward activism as an Asian American troubadour with the release of A Grain of Sand—considered to be the first Asian American folk album. Her narrative intersects with the stories of Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, influential in both Asian and Black liberation movements. She tells how her experience of motherhood with an Afro-Asian son, as well as a marriage that intertwined Black and Japanese families and communities, placed her at the nexus of the 1992 Rodney King riots—and how she used art to create interracial solidarity and conciliation.

Through it all, Miyamoto has embraced her identity as an Asian American woman to create an antiracist body of work and a blueprint for empathy and praxis through community art. Her sometimes barbed, often provocative, and always steadfast story is now told.

Yiman Wang

To Be an Actress

$34.95

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles, yet with her US citizenship scrutinized due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong—a defiant misfit—innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career. In this critical study of Wong's cross-media and transnational career, Yiman Wang marshals extraordinary archival research and a multifocal approach to illuminate a lifelong labor of performance. Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, To Be an Actress adopts a feminist decolonial perspective to speculatively meet her as an interlocutor while inviting a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.

Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley

Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy

$34.95

The king of radio comedy from the Great Depression through the early 1950s, Jack Benny was one of the most influential entertainers in twentieth-century America. A master of comic timing and an innovative producer, Benny, with his radio writers, developed a weekly situation comedy to meet radio’s endless need for new material, at the same time integrating advertising into the show’s humor. Through the character of the vain, cheap everyman, Benny created a fall guy, whose frustrated struggles with his employees addressed midcentury America’s concerns with race, gender, commercialism, and sexual identity. Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley contextualizes her analysis of Jack Benny and his entourage with thoughtful insight into the intersections of competing entertainment industries and provides plenty of evidence that transmedia stardom, branded entertainment, and virality are not new phenomena but current iterations of key aspects in American commercial cultural history.

Daniel Heartz

Mozart's Operas

$34.95

Renowned Mozart scholar Daniel Heartz brings his deep knowledge of social history, theater, and art to a study of the last and great decade of Mozart's operas. Mozart specialists will recognize some of Heartz's best-known essays here; but six pieces are new for the collection, and others have been revised and updated with little-known documents on the librettist's, composer's, and stage director's craft. All lovers of opera will value the elegance and wit of Professor Heartz's writing, enhanced by thirty-seven illustrations, many from his private collection.

The volume includes Heartz's classic essay on Idomeneo (1781), the work that continued to inspire and sustain Mozart through his next, and final, six operas. Thomas Bauman brings his special expertise to a discussion of Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782). The ten central chapters are devoted to the three great operas composed to librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte—Le nozze di Figaro (l786), Don Giovanni (l787), and Così fan tutte (l790). The reader is treated to fresh insights on da Ponte's role as Mozart's astute and stage-wise collaborator, on the singers whose gifts helped shape each opera, and on the musical connections among the three works. Parallels are drawn with some of the greatest creative artists in other fields, such as Molière, Watteau, and Fragonard. The world of the dance, one of Heartz's specialties, lends an illuminating perspective as well.

Finally, the essays discuss the deep spirituality of Mozart's last two operas, Die Zauberflöte and La Clemenza di Tito (both l79l). They also address the pertinence of opera outside Vienna at the end of the century, the fortunes and aspirations of Freemasonry in Austria, and the relation of Mozart's overtures to the dramaturgy of the operas.

Luciano Chessa

Luigi Russolo, Futurist

$36.95

Luigi Russolo (1885–1947)—painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movement—was a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics. As creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music. In the first English language study of Russolo, Luciano Chessa emphasizes the futurist’s interest in the occult, showing it to be a leitmotif for his life and a foundation for his art of noises. Chessa shows that Russolo’s aesthetics of noise, and the machines he called the intonarumori, were intended to boost practitioners into higher states of spiritual consciousness. His analysis reveals a multifaceted man in whom the drive to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with an embrace of the irrational, and a critique of materialism and positivism.

Marsha Gordon

Becoming the Ex-Wife

$26.95

"Makes an excellent case for Parrott as an unjustly forgotten historical figure."—The New Yorker
"Remind[s] us of the brazenly talented women sidelined by convention."—New York Times
The riveting biography of Ursula Parrott—best-selling author, Hollywood screenwriter, and voice for the modern woman.

Credited with popularizing the label "ex-wife" in 1929, Ursula Parrott wrote provocatively about divorcées, career women, single mothers, work-life balance, and a host of new challenges facing modern women. Her best sellers, Hollywood film deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law made her a household name. Part biography, part cultural history, Becoming the Ex-Wife establishes Parrott's rightful place in twentieth-century American culture, uncovering her neglected work and keen insights into American women's lives during a period of immense social change.

Although she was frequently dismissed as a "woman's writer," reading Parrott's writing today makes it clear that she was a trenchant philosopher of modernity—her work was prescient, anticipating issues not widely raised until decades after her decline into obscurity. With elegant wit and a deft command of the archive, Marsha Gordon tells a timely story about the life of a woman on the front lines of a culture war that is still raging today.

Gabriel Thompson

America's Social Arsonist

$24.95

"A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire."—Fred Ross

Raised by conservative parents who hoped he would “stay with his own kind,” Fred Ross instead became one of the most influential community organizers in American history. His activism began alongside Dust Bowl migrants, where he managed the same labor camp that inspired John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. During World War II, Ross worked for the release of interned Japanese Americans, and after the war, he dedicated his life to building the political power of Latinos across California. Labor organizing in this country was forever changed when Ross knocked on the door of a young Cesar Chavez and encouraged him to become an organizer.

Until now there has been no biography of Fred Ross, a man who believed a good organizer was supposed to fade into the crowd as others stepped forward. In America’s Social Arsonist, Gabriel Thompson provides a full picture of this complicated and driven man, recovering a forgotten chapter of American history and providing vital lessons for organizers today.

John T. Blackmore

Ernst Mach

$49.95

Ernst Mach: His Work, Life, and Influence aims to bring attention to the important yet often overlooked figure of Ernst Mach, a physicist, philosopher, and psychologist whose contributions span multiple disciplines. The book seeks to provide new biographical information to help the educated public better understand Mach, emphasizing his significant influence on modern physics and philosophy of science. Not merely a physicist, Mach's work also impacted psychology and physiology, and his philosophical ideas, particularly his attempt to base modern physics on a presentationalist epistemology, remain a subject of both admiration and controversy. The book highlights how Mach's ideas, though often opposed by later scientists, laid the groundwork for key developments in science and philosophy, making him a figure deserving of recognition alongside figures like Max Planck and Albert Einstein.

The book also addresses the reasons why Mach’s legacy has remained somewhat obscure, despite his profound impact. A combination of Mach’s own reluctance for a biography and the philosophical battles surrounding his views, especially his critique of Newtonian physics, has led to his ideas being misunderstood or neglected. His intellectual life was marked by intense controversies with figures like Max Planck, Ludwig Boltzmann, and even Albert Einstein, which contributed to his personal and professional struggles. Despite his later life being marked by personal tragedy and physical decline, Mach continued to defend his ideas with remarkable tenacity. His scientific contributions, such as his work on shock waves, are still widely acknowledged today, with terms like Mach number becoming part of the scientific lexicon. However, the book argues that it is time for Mach’s full philosophical and scientific influence to be more widely recognized and understood, shedding light on his controversial yet crucial role in shaping 20th-century thought.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

Translated and Annotated by Albert E. Dien

Biography of Yu-Wen Hu

$39.95

Albert E. Dien’s Biography of Yü-Wen Hu offers a comprehensive translation and analysis of a pivotal historical figure in northern China’s sixth century. Through a detailed rendering of the Chou shu biography, this work explores the complex interplay between Confucian ideals and the governance of the Northern Chou dynasty, a state ruled by leaders of non-Chinese origin. Dien’s annotations illuminate how the historian of the Chou shu adeptly portrays the Yü-Wen rulers as fully sinified, reflecting the successful integration of Confucian moral and political norms into their administration. This biography not only captures the turbulent dynamics of the era but also reveals the broader sociocultural transition from tribal leadership to a Confucian state.

Scholars and students of Chinese history will find this volume invaluable for its rigorous attention to historical detail and sociopolitical context. Yü-Wen Hu’s rise to power as regent and his deft handling of internal court conflicts are presented as a lens to examine broader themes of authority, loyalty, and cultural transformation. Dien’s work underscores the Northern Chou’s ambitious emulation of the ancient Chou dynasty, offering a nuanced perspective on how Confucian principles shaped political legitimacy and statecraft in early medieval China. Ideal for sinologists and comparative historians, this translation bridges historical narrative and cultural analysis, making it an essential resource for understanding this transformative period in Chinese history.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.

Peter Matthiessen

Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can)

$24.95

In the summer of 1968 Peter Matthiessen met Cesar Chavez for the first time. They were the same age: forty-one. Matthiessen lived in New York City, while Chavez lived in the Central Valley farm town of Delano, where the grape strike was unfolding. This book is Matthiessen’s panoramic yet finely detailed account of the three years he spent working and traveling with Chavez, including to Sal Si Puedes, the San Jose barrio where Chavez began his organizing. Matthiessen provides a candid look into the many sides of this enigmatic and charismatic leader who lived by the laws of nonviolence.

Sal Si Puedes is less reportage than living history. In its pages a whole era comes alive: the Chicano, Black Power, and antiwar movements; the browning of the labor movement; Chavez’s fasts; the nationwide boycott of California grapes. When Chavez died in 1993, tens of thousands gathered at his funeral. It was a clear sign of how beloved he was and how important his life had been.

A new foreword by Marc Grossman considers the significance of Chavez’s legacy for our time. As well as serving as an indispensable guide to the 1960s, this book rejuvenates the extraordinary vitality of Chavez’s life and spirit, giving his message a renewed and much-needed urgency.

Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara, with an introduction by George Lipsitz and Josh Kun

Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer

$29.95

A pioneer of Chicano rock, Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara performed with Frank Zappa, Johnny Otis, Bo Diddley, Tina Turner, and Celia Cruz, though he is best known as the front man of the 1970s experimental rock band Ruben And The Jets. Here he recounts how his youthful experiences in the barrio La Veinte of Santa Monica in the 1940s prepared him for early success in music and how his triumphs and seductive brushes with stardom were met with tragedy and crushing disappointments. Brutally honest and open, Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer is an often hilarious and self-critical look inside the struggle of becoming an artist and a man. Recognizing racial identity as composite, contested, and complex, Guevara—an American artist of Mexican descent—embraces a Chicano identity of his own design, calling himself a Chicano “culture sculptor” who has worked to transform the aspirations, alienations, and indignities of the Mexican American people into an aesthetic experience that could point the way to liberation.

Peter Richardson

Savage Journey

$24.95

A superbly crafted study of Hunter S. Thompson’s literary formation, achievement, and continuing relevance.

Savage Journey is a "supremely crafted" study of Hunter S. Thompson's literary formation and achievement. Focusing on Thompson's influences, development, and unique model of authorship, Savage Journey argues that his literary formation was largely a San Francisco story. During the 1960s, Thompson rode with the Hell's Angels, explored the San Francisco counterculture, and met talented editors who shared his dissatisfaction with mainstream journalism. Peter Richardson traces Thompson's transition during this time from New Journalist to cofounder of Gonzo journalism. He also endorses Thompson's later claim that he was one of the best writers using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon. Although Thompson's political commentary was often hyperbolic, Richardson shows that much of it was also prophetic.

Fifty years after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more than a decade after his death, Thompson's celebrity continues to obscure his literary achievement. This book refocuses our understanding of that achievement by mapping Thompson's influences, probing the development of his signature style, and tracing the reception of his major works. It concludes that Thompson was not only a gifted journalist, satirist, and media critic, but also the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.

James Campbell

Talking at the Gates

$19.95

An intimate portrait of Baldwin's mythic life.

James Baldwin was one of the most incisive and influential American writers of the twentieth century. Active in the civil rights movement and open about his homosexuality, Baldwin was celebrated for eloquent analyses of social unrest in his essays and for daring portrayals of sexuality and interracial relationships in his fiction. By the time of his death in 1987, both his fiction and nonfiction works had achieved the status of modern classics.

James Campbell knew James Baldwin for the last ten years of Baldwin's life. For Talking at the Gates, Campbell interviewed many of Baldwin's friends and professional associates and examined several hundred pages of correspondence. Campbell was the first biographer to obtain access to the large file that the FBI and other agencies had compiled on the writer. Examining Baldwin's turbulent relationships with Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, Marlon Brando, Martin Luther King Jr., and others, this candid and original account portrays the life and work of a writer who held to the principle that "the unexamined life is not worth living."

This new edition features a fresh introduction addressing recent developments in Baldwin’s reputation and his return to a position he occupied in the early 1960s, when Life magazine called him "the monarch of the current literary jungle." It also contains a previously unpublished interview with Norman Mailer about Baldwin, which Campbell conducted in 1987.

Hyman Weintraub

Andrew Furuseth

$39.95

Emancipator of the Seamen explores the life and impact of Andrew Furuseth, a Norwegian-born seaman who became a defining figure in the American labor movement through his dedication to the Sailors' Union of the Pacific (SUP). Arriving in San Francisco in 1880, Furuseth committed his life to improving the lives of sailors and ensuring their rights. The SUP, under his leadership, became a steadfast institution in labor history, embodying the challenges and triumphs of organized labor in America. This biography not only captures Furuseth’s contributions but also sheds light on the broader labor movement dynamics—rivalries within unions, the shaping of business unionism, the influence of labor in California and national politics, and the push for protective legislation.

Authored by Dr. Hyman Weintraub, this work brings together firsthand knowledge of the labor movement with the analytical depth of historical scholarship. Weintraub’s background as both a historian and someone with personal connections to labor provides a nuanced perspective on Furuseth’s legacy and the SUP’s enduring influence. Published by the Institute of Industrial Relations, this biography continues the Institute’s research into American labor history, following works like Dr. Grace Heilman Stimson’s Rise of the Labor Movement in Los Angeles. Emancipator of the Seamen offers readers a detailed account of Furuseth’s life and achievements while contributing to a deeper understanding of labor’s role in shaping American society.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1959.

Sally N. Vanghn

Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan

$49.95

This title delves into the intertwined lives of St. Anselm, the renowned theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury, and Robert of Meulan, an influential Anglo-Norman nobleman and advisor to the English crown. These two figures, representing the sacred and the secular, engaged in a lifelong adversarial relationship that spanned both Normandy and England during a pivotal period of political and ecclesiastical change. Anselm, a former abbot of Bec, came into conflict with the English monarchy over the autonomy of the church, while Robert championed the rights of the state as an advisor to multiple kings. Their disputes, particularly over the Investiture Controversy, defined a critical era in the development of English political and religious policy, revealing the tension between regnum (the realm) and sacerdotium (the church).

Despite their frequent clashes, Anselm and Robert ultimately worked toward a vision of stability for the Anglo-Norman realm. While Anselm’s legacy endures in the form of his theological contributions and sanctity, Robert’s accomplishments are less widely remembered outside of specialized historical circles. This study aims to provide a fuller picture of both men, focusing on the political, philosophical, and personal forces that shaped their lives and legacies. Through meticulous analysis of historical sources and a synthesis of previously published research, the book illuminates how the contrasting visions of Anselm and Robert for a “right order” in the Christian kingdom ultimately converged, forming a compromise that influenced the balance of church and state for generations to come.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Theodora Kroeber

Alfred Kroeber

$49.95

The Handbook of the Indians of California, written by Alfred Kroeber between 1916 and 1917, is the defining work by which he is widely recognized. Known beyond academic circles, the Handbook remains a primary reference for many on California's Indigenous cultures. Kroeber embraced this association with his work, considering it the “first fruits” of his career and a testament to his early fieldwork. His later explorations into broader theoretical concepts were deeply rooted in these experiences with the living cultures of Native Americans, which began on his early field trips to Wyoming and Oklahoma, and ultimately California, where he made his lifelong home.

Kroeber's westward journey marked a turning point, setting him apart from his East Coast roots. Arriving in California in 1900, he immersed himself in fieldwork, traversing the state to study Native American communities in rural areas. Known as the serious young anthropologist with his black beard and pockets full of tools and treats, he quickly became a respected figure among the Indigenous tribes he worked with, particularly the Yurok of northern California’s Klamath River and the Mohave of the Colorado River. His interest lay in California's landscapes—the rivers, bays, and coastline—which paralleled the natural surroundings of the Indigenous cultures he studied, reflecting his deep connection to the Pacific and its waterways.

Despite the powerful draw of the West, Kroeber’s formative years were shaped in New York, amidst the waterways surrounding Manhattan. He grew up in a close-knit family, with friendships that spanned his life despite geographic separation. This early foundation influenced his work and perspective, anchoring him in both his professional discipline and personal relationships. His early life on the East Coast contrasts with his later dedication to California’s Indigenous cultures, highlighting the unique, dual influence of these landscapes on his approach to anthropology and his lifelong commitment to understanding and documenting the rich cultural heritage of Native American communities.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

Naboth Mokgatle

The Autobiography of an Unknown South African

$49.95

The Autobiography of an Unknown South African by Naboth Mokgatle offers a detailed and rich narrative of the author’s life and his tribal roots, providing a vivid glimpse into the customs, traditions, and history of the Bafokeng people of South Africa. Mokgatle begins with his family history, recounting the circumstances of his birth in 1911 in Phokeng, a tribal village in the Rustenburg district of the Transvaal Province. He describes the complex dynamics of his family, shaped by both African traditions and the influence of Christianity, which often created tension in their practices. The narrative reveals the traditional African values of marriage, gender roles, and the discipline instilled in children, highlighting how his father’s strict yet caring nature governed their upbringing. Through anecdotes about his siblings and the unique family circumstances, Mokgatle intertwines personal stories with broader cultural themes, demonstrating how tribal laws and Christian beliefs shaped his family’s life and the society they inhabited.

The book also delves into the historical and cultural legacy of Mokgatle’s Bafokeng tribe, tracing their migration from Lesotho to Botswana and eventually to the Transvaal. The tribe’s identity, symbolized by the crocodile, is intricately tied to their customs, including circumcision, marriage traditions, and communal living. Mokgatle recounts how the tribe split into three sections due to a dispute over chieftainship, leading to the formation of independent clans that still maintained cultural ties and a shared identity. Through vivid descriptions of agricultural practices, food preparation, and the artistry of pottery, Mokgatle portrays a self-sufficient community deeply connected to the land and its resources. He also reflects on the impact of European influence and Christianity on the tribe, which introduced both modern conveniences and challenges to traditional ways of life. This autobiography stands as both a personal memoir and a cultural archive, capturing the complexities of transitioning from traditional African society to a modern, colonized world.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Roland De Wolk

American Disruptor

$26.95

The rags-to-riches story of Silicon Valley's original disruptor.

American Disruptor is the untold story of Leland Stanford – from his birth in a backwoods bar to the founding of the world-class university that became and remains the nucleus of Silicon Valley. The life of this robber baron, politician, and historic influencer is the astonishing tale of how one supremely ambitious man became this country's original "disruptor" – reshaping industry and engineering one of the greatest raids on the public treasury for America’s transcontinental railroad, all while living more opulently than maharajas, kings, and emperors.

It is also the saga of how Stanford, once a serial failure, overcame all obstacles to become one of America’s most powerful and wealthiest men, using his high elective office to enrich himself before losing the one thing that mattered most to him—his only child and son. Scandal and intrigue would follow Stanford through his life, and even after his death, when his widow was murdered in a Honolulu hotel—a crime quickly covered up by the almost stillborn university she had saved. Richly detailed and deeply researched, American Disruptor restores Leland Stanford’s rightful place as a revolutionary force and architect of modern America.

Jan Caeyers

Beethoven, A Life

$29.95

The authoritative Beethoven biography, endorsed by and produced in close collaboration with the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, is timed for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth.

With unprecedented access to the archives at the Beethoven House in Bonn, renowned Beethoven conductor and scholar Jan Caeyers expertly weaves together a deeply human and complex image of Beethoven—his troubled youth, his unpredictable mood swings, his desires, relationships, and conflicts with family and friends, the mysteries surrounding his affair with the “immortal beloved,” and the dramatic tale of his deafness. Caeyers also offers new insights into Beethoven’s music and its gradual transformation from the work of a skilled craftsman into that of a consummate artist.

Demonstrating an impressive command of the vast scholarship on this iconic composer, Caeyers brings Beethoven’s world alive with elegant prose, memorable musical descriptions, and vivid depictions of Bonn and Vienna—the cities where Beethoven produced and performed his works. Caeyers explores how Beethoven’s career was impacted by the historical and philosophical shifts taking place in the music world, and conversely, how his own trajectory changed the course of the music industry. Equal parts absorbing cultural history and lively biography, Beethoven, A Life paints a complex portrait of the musical genius who redefined the musical style of his day and went on to become one of the great pillars of Western art music.

Nirad C. Chaudhuri

Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

$55.00

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C. Chaudhuri is a profound and introspective account of a man's journey through early 20th-century India. The narrative weaves the personal with the historical, using the author’s life as a lens to explore the broader struggles of Indian civilization confronting British imperialism and modernity. Chaudhuri’s intention is to present not merely a memoir but a historical testimony, highlighting the intersection of individual experience with societal evolution. His unique perspective, shaped by an exceptional and unconventional path, offers a vantage point akin to an aerial view—detached yet deeply connected to the land below. Written with unflinching honesty, the book delves into themes of identity, colonialism, and the trajectory of Indian society, emphasizing the tension between the dominant national currents and the often-overlooked exceptions that resist them.

Addressing an English-speaking audience, Chaudhuri aims to provide insight into the forces that shaped India’s trajectory under British rule and beyond. While his experiences are atypical, he argues that their value lies in their ability to illuminate the broader environment through a distinct, independent lens. Chaudhuri candidly critiques both the dominant narratives of his time and the leaders who guide nations into either growth or decline. Through his reflections, he not only grapples with the complexities of India’s societal fabric but also examines the role of exceptional individuals who challenge or reinforce prevailing trends. This book stands as a bold declaration of faith in understanding history, culture, and personal identity amidst the relentless tide of change.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

Joseph Horowitz

Wagner Nights

$49.95

As never before or since, Richard Wagner's name dominated American music-making at the close of the nineteenth century. Europe, too, was obsessed with Wagner, but—as Joseph Horowitz shows in this first history of Wagnerism in the United States—the American obsession was unique.

The central figure in Wagner Nights is conductor Anton Seidl (1850-1898), a priestly and enigmatic personage in New York musical life. Seidl's own admirers included the women of the Brooklyn-based Seidl Society, who wore the letter "S" on their dresses. In the summers, Seidl conducted fourteen times a week at Brighton Beach, filling the three-thousand-seat music pavilion to capacity. The fact that most Wagnerites were women was a distinguishing feature of American Wagnerism and constituted a vital aspect of the fin-de-siècle ferment that anticipated the New American Woman.

Drawing on the work of such cultural historians as T. Jackson Lears and Lawrence Levine, Horowitz's lively history reveals an "Americanized" Wagner never documented before. An entertaining and startling read, a treasury of operatic lore, Wagner Nights offers an unprecedented revisionist history of American culture a century ago.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Edward T. Cone

The Composer's Voice

$39.95

Music, we are often told, is a language. But if music is a language, then who is speaking? The Composer's Voice tries to answer this obvious but infrequently raised question. In so doing, it puts forward a dramatistic theory of musical expression, based on the view that every composition is a symbolic utterance involving a fundamental act of impersonation. The voice we hear is not that of the composer himself, but of a persona--a musical projection of his consciousness that experiences and communicates the events of the composition.

Developing his argument by reference to numerous examples ina wide variety of styles, Mr. Cone moves from song and opera through program music to absolute instrumental music. In particular, he discusses the implications of his theory for performance. According to the dramatistic view, not only every singer but every instrumentalist as well becomes a kind of actor, assuming a role that functions both autonomously and as a component of the total musical persona. In his analysis of the problems inherent in this dual nature of the performer's job, Mr. Cone offers guidance that will prove of practical value to every performing musician.

He has much to say to the listener as well. He recommends an imaginative participation in the component roles of musical work, leading to a sense of identification with the persona itself, as the path to complete musical understanding. And this approach is shown to be relevant to a number of specialized kids of listening as well--those applicable to analysis, historical scholarship, and criticism. The dance, too, is shown to depend on similar concepts.

Although The Composer's Voice involves an investigation of how music functions as a form of communication, it is not primarily concerned with determine, or interpreting, the "content" of the message. A final chapter, however, puts forward a tentative explanation of musical "meaning" based on an interpretation of the art as a coalescence of symbolic utterance and symbolic gesture. While not essential to the main lines of the argument, it suggests interesting possibilities for further development of the dramatistic theory.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

David Cairns

Berlioz

$31.95

This biography of composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) describes with unprecedented intimacy, affection, and respect the life of one of France's greatest artists. After long being regarded as an oddity and an eccentric figure, Berlioz is now being accepted into the ranks of the great composers. Based on a wealth of previously unpublished sources, and on a profound understanding of the humanity of his subject, David Cairns's book provides a full account of this extraordinary and powerfully attractive man.

Berlioz, Volume I, previously published only in Britain, is now available to American readers in a revised edition, together with the eagerly awaited, new Volume II. These two volumes together comprise a monumental biographical achievement, sure to stand as the definitive Berlioz biography.

In researching Berlioz's life, Cairns has had access to unpublished family papers, and in Volume I he is able to portray all the people close to Berlioz in his boyhood, and to evoke a detailed picture of their lives in and around La Côte St.-André in the foothills of the French Alps. No artist's achievement connects more directly with early experience than that of Berlioz, whose passionate sensibility began to absorb the material of his art long before he had heard any musical ensemble other than the local town band. Volume I also traces the student years in Paris and Italy and discusses Berlioz's three great love affairs, shedding remarkable light on his later character and development. Volume I ends on the afternoon of December 9, 1832, the day of the concert that launched the composer's career.

Stephen Walsh

Stravinsky

$29.95

Stephen Walsh's magisterial, engagingly written two-volume Stravinsky is the most detailed and extensive work available on the life of the man widely regarded as the greatest composer of the twentieth century. This second volume takes up the composer's story in 1934, in a Europe growing ever more chaotic in the lead-up to World War II. Walsh follows Stravinsky's emigration to the United States, where he courted Hollywood, associated with writers and artists including Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, and George Balanchine, began a career as a conductor and recording artist, and composed a string of masterpieces that changed the course of twentieth-century music. Stravinsky: The Second Exile takes full account of Russian-language sources, including much correspondence, made available since the composer's death and since the fall of the Soviet Union, and is the first work to thoroughly assess the authenticity of many of the writings published under Stravinsky's name.

Stephen Walsh

Stravinsky

$29.95

Widely regarded as the greatest composer of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky was central to the development of modernism in art, yet no dependable biography of him exists. Previous studies have drawn too heavily from his own unreliable memoirs and conversations, and until now no biographer has possessed both the musical knowledge to evaluate his art and the linguistic proficiency needed to explore the documentary background of his life--a life whose span extended from tsarist Russia to Switzerland, France, and ultimately the United States.

In this revealing volume, the first of two, Stephen Walsh follows Stravinsky from his birth in 1882 to 1934. He traces the composer's early Russian years, laying bare the complicated relationships within his family and showing how he first displayed his extraordinary talents. Stravinsky's brilliantly creative involvement with the Ballets Russes is illuminated by a sharp sense of the internal artistic politics that animated the group. Portraying Stravinsky's circumstances as an emigré in France trying to make his living as a conductor and pianist as well as a composer, Walsh reveals the true roots of his notorious obsession with money. He also describes the nature of his long affair with Vera Sudeykina.

While always respecting Stravinsky's own insistence that life and art be kept distinct, Stravinsky makes clear precisely how the development of his music was connected to his life and to the intellectual environment in which he found himself. But at the same time it demonstrates the composer's remarkably pragmatic psychology, which led him to consider the welfare of his art to be of paramount importance, before which everything else had to give way. Walsh, long established as an expert on Stravinsky's music, has drawn upon a vast array of material, much of it unpublished or unavailable in English, to bring the man himself, in all his color and genius, to glowing life.

Judit Frigyesi

Bela Bartok and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest

$34.95

Bartók's music is greatly prized by concertgoers, yet we know little about the intellectual milieu that gave rise to his artistry. Bartók is often seen as a lonely genius emerging from a gray background of an "underdeveloped country." Now Judit Frigyesi offers a broader perspective on Bartók's art by grounding it in the social and cultural life of turn-of-the-century Hungary and the intense creativity of its modernist movement. Bartók spent most of his life in Budapest, an exceptional man living in a remarkable milieu. Frigyesi argues that Hungarian modernism in general and Bartók's aesthetic in particular should be understood in terms of a collective search for wholeness in life and art and for a definition of identity in a rapidly changing world. Is it still possible, Bartók's generation of artists asked, to create coherent art in a world that is no longer whole? Bartók and others were preoccupied with this question and developed their aesthetics in response to it. In a discussion of Bartók and of Endre Ady, the most influential Hungarian poet of the time, Frigyesi demonstrates how different branches of art and different personalities responded to the same set of problems, creating oeuvres that appear as reflections of one another. She also examines Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, exploring philosophical and poetic ideas of Hungarian modernism and linking Bartók's stylistic innovations to these concepts.

Catherine Parsons Smith

William Grant Still

$33.95

During the 1930s and 1940s William Grant Still (1895-1978) was known as the "Dean of Afro-American Composers." He worked as an arranger for early radio, on Broadway, and in Hollywood; major symphony orchestras performed his concert works; and an opera, written in collaboration with Langston Hughes, was produced by the New York City Opera. Despite these successes the composer's name gradually faded into obscurity. This book brings William Grant Still out of the archives and examines his place in America's musical heritage. It also provides a revealing window into our recent cultural past.

Until now Still's profound musical creativity and cultural awareness have been obscured by the controversies that dogged much of his personal and professional life. New topics explored by Catherine Parsons Smith and her contributors include the genesis of the Afro American Symphony, Still's best-known work; his troubled years in film and opera; and his outspoken anticommunism.

Christoph Wolff

Mozart's Requiem

$34.95

Mozart's unfinished Requiem has long been shrouded in mystery. Mozart undertook the commission for an Austrian nobleman, little knowing that he was to write a requiem for himself. Inevitably, the secrecy surrounding the anonymous commission, the circumstances of Mozart's death, the unfinished state of the work, and its completion under the direction of Mozart's widow, Constanze, have precipitated two centuries of romantic speculation and scholarly controversy.

Christoph Wolff provides a critical introduction to the Requiem in its many facets. Part I of his study focuses on the tangled genesis and completion of the work and its fascinating early reception history until Constanze's death. Wolff summarizes the current state of research on the subject, provides new perspectives on Mozart's conception of the whole work, and surveys his contributions to the movements composed posthumously by his assistant, Süssmayr. Part II provides a musical analysis of Mozart's composition, including contextual, structural, and interpretive aspects. Part III consists of an annotated collection of the principal literary documents (1791-1839) that illuminate the fascinating early history of the Requiem.

The book concludes with a complete edition of the work that is at the center of Wolff's study, the authentic score of the Requiem—Mozart's fragment—supplemented by crucial excerpts from Süssmayr's 1792 Requiem completion.

Tia DeNora

Beethoven and the Construction of Genius

$31.95

In this provocative account Tia DeNora reconceptualizes the notion of genius by placing the life and career of Ludwig van Beethoven in its social context. She explores the changing musical world of late eighteenth-century Vienna and follows the activities of the small circle of aristocratic patrons who paved the way for the composer's success.

DeNora reconstructs the development of Beethoven's reputation as she recreates Vienna's robust musical scene through contemporary accounts, letters, magazines, and myths—a colorful picture of changing times. She explores the ways Beethoven was seen by his contemporaries and the image crafted by his supporters. Comparing Beethoven to contemporary rivals now largely forgotten, DeNora reveals a figure musically innovative and complex, as well as a keen self-promoter who adroitly managed his own celebrity.

DeNora contends that the recognition Beethoven received was as much a social achievement as it was the result of his personal gifts. In contemplating the political and social implications of culture, DeNora casts many aspects of Beethoven's biography in a new and different light, enriching our understanding of his success as a performer and composer.

George Perle

The Listening Composer

$31.95

George Perle takes us into the composer's workshop as he reevaluates what we call "twentieth-century music"—a term used to refer to new or modern or contemporary music that represents a radical break from the tonal tradition, or "common practice," of the preceding three centuries. He proposes that this music, in the course of breaking with the tonal tradition, presents coherent and definable elements of a new tradition. In spite of the disparity in their styles, idioms, and compositional methods, he argues, what unites Scriabin, Stravinsky, Bartók, and the Viennese circle (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) is more important than what separates them.

If we are to understand the connections among these mainstream composers, we also have to understand their connections with the past. Through an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of a single piece by Varèse, Density 21.5 for unaccompanied flute, Perle shows how these composers refer not only to their contemporaries but also to Wagner, Debussy, and Beethoven.

Perle isolates the years 1909-10 as the moment of revolutionary transformation in the foundational premises of our musical language. He asks: What are the implications of this revolution, not only for the composer, but also for the listener? What are the consequences for the theory and teaching of music today? In his highly original answers, Perle relates the role of intuition in the listening experience to its role in the compositional process.

Perle asserts that the post-Schoenbergian serialists have preoccupied themselves with secondary and superficial aspects of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method that have led it to a dead end but he also exposes the speciousness of current alternatives such as chance music, minimalism, and the so-called return to tonality. He offers a new and more comprehensive definition of "twelve-tone music" and firmly rejects the notion that accessibility to the new music is reserved for a special class of elite listeners.

Robert Winter and Robert Martin, editors

The Beethoven Quartet Companion

$31.95

While the Beethoven string quartets are to chamber music what the plays of Shakespeare are to drama, even seasoned concertgoers will welcome guidance with these personal and sometimes enigmatic works.

This collection offers Beethoven lovers both detailed notes on the listening experience of each quartet and a stimulating range of more general perspectives: Who has the quartets' audience been? How were the quartets performed before the era of sound recordings? What is the relationship between "classical" and "romantic" in the quartets? How was their reception affected by social and economic history? What sorts of interpretive decisions are made by performers today?

The Companion brings together a matchless group of Beethoven experts. Joseph Kerman is perhaps the world's most renowned Beethoven scholar. Robert Winter, an authority on sketches for the late quartets, has created interactive programs regarded as milestones in multimedia publishing. Maynard Solomon has written an acclaimed biography of Beethoven. Leon Botstein is the conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra as well as a distinguished social historian and college president. Robert Martin writes from his experience as cellist of the Sequoia Quartet. And the book is anchored by the program notes of Michael Steinberg, who has served as Artistic Advisor of the San Francisco Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra.

Pieter C. van den Toorn

Music, Politics, and the Academy

$33.95

Advocates of "new musicology" claim that technical methods of music analysis are conservative, elitist, positivist, and emotionally arid. Pieter C. van den Toorn challenges those claims, asking why cultural, sociopolitical, or gender-studies approaches to music should be deemed more democratic or expressive of music's content or impact. Why should music analysis be thought incapable of serving larger aesthetic ends?

Van den Toorn confronts Susan McClary, Leo Treitler, and Joseph Kerman in particular, arguing that hands-on music analysis can penetrate the complexity of music and speak to our experience of it. He criticizes new musicologists for retreating from issues of musical immediacy by focusing on cultural issues. In later chapters van den Toorn defends Schenkerian methods and demonstrates the usefulness of technical analysis in the appreciation of Beethoven, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky.

Karl Geiringer

Haydn

$34.95

This definitive study of the life and works of Joseph Haydn represents half a century of research. As a curator of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, Dr. Geiringer was in charge of one of the world's leading Hayden collections. His scholarly investigations took him to various monasteries, to libraries in Eisenstadt, Prague, Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington, D.C., and, as a guest of the Hungarian government, to the previously almost inaccessible archives of the Princes of Esterhazy in Budapest.

In the past decade, Haydn studies have progressed enormously. A thematic catalog is now available, and a substantial part of Haydn's vast creative output is accessible in critically revised editions. The new edition of Hayden: A Creatie Life in Music has been substantially rewritten to incorporate the results of recent research and to remove the tarnish that had assimilated on the picture of Haydn in the earlier years.

Philip Brett

Music and Sexuality in Britten

$34.95

Philip Brett’s groundbreaking writing on Benjamin Britten altered the course of music scholarship in the later twentieth century. This volume is the first to gather in one collection Brett’s searching and provocative work on the great British composer. Some of the early essays opened the door to gay studies in music, while the discussions that Brett initiated reinvigorated the study of Britten’s work and inspired a generation of scholars to imagine “the new musicology.” Addressing urgent questions of how an artist’s sexual, cultural, and personal identity feeds into specific musical texts, Brett examines most of Britten’s operas as well as his role in the British cultural establishment of the mid-twentieth century. With some of the essays appearing here for the first time, this volume develops a complex understanding of Britten’s musical achievement and highlights the many ways that Brett expanded the borders of his field.

Richard F. Kuisel

Ernest Mercier

$39.95

Ernest Mercier (1878-1955) was a key figure in the rise of the technical-managerial class in early 20th-century France. A businessman and technocrat, he sought to overhaul the French political and economic system through his work in modernizing the electric power industry and promoting the creation of a native petroleum industry. As head of France's largest utilities syndicate, Mercier was influential within the business and political elite, forming connections with figures like Marshals Foch and Pétain and Presidents Poincaré and Lebrun. His technocratic movement, Redressement Français (1925-1935), aimed at replacing the political establishment with a results-oriented, expert-driven system. Mercier's career, deeply intertwined with the rise of the managerial class, offers insight into the broader goals of technocrats to modernize France’s economy and society while also seeking a shift in traditional political and social values.

Mercier's story also illustrates the tensions between modernization and the political climate of the era. Despite his drive for economic transformation, his elitist tendencies and authoritarian associations, including his involvement in the Croix de Feu, demonstrate the complexities of his character. As a technocrat, Mercier aimed to make France more efficient and productive, but his belief in authoritarian methods clashed with democratic ideals. His biography is not only a study of the man himself but also of the broader technocratic movement that sought to reshape France. While his efforts to modernize the French system largely failed during his lifetime, they laid the groundwork for the technocratic influence that would grow stronger in the postwar era.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.