Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one's eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheim's reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.
Paul Monaco
The Sixties
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Amid the turbulence of political assassinations, the civil rights struggle, and antiwar protests, American society was experiencing growing affluence and profound cultural change during the 1960s. The film industry gradually redirected its energies, resulting in a distinctive break from traditional business and stylistic practice and emergence of a new "cinema of sensation." Feature films became faster-paced and more graphic, the antihero took his place alongside the classic Hollywood hero, and "downer" films like Midnight Cowboy proved as popular as those with upbeat fare. Paul Monaco gives a sweeping view of this exhilarating decade, ranging from the visceral sensation of Bonnie and Clyde, to the comic-book satire of Dr. Strangelove, to the youthful alienation of The Graduate.
Marc Treib
An Everyday Modernism
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William Wilson Wurster (1895-1973) has been widely recognized as the foremost proponent of a distinctive Bay Area architectural style. But his ideas extended far beyond California: In private practice and as head of architecture schools at the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wurster shaped an entire generation of architects and city planners.
An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster documents Wurster's fifty-year career and his important place in contemporary American architectural thought. Along with his wife, city planner Catherine Bauer, and landscape architect Thomas Church, Wurster was intimately involved in the rise of modern city planning and landscape design in the United States. In keeping with the social and economic conditions of the late 1930s, Wurster encouraged the development of small houses that offered the livability of those of greater scale, and he influenced the building of affordable mass-produced housing. His designs embodied principles of simplicity and economy, yet incorporated complex human needs. Wurster's legacy is especially relevant today, as uncertain economic conditions and social dislocations affect housing for Americans at every level.
Over fifty of Wurster's projects are featured here, with photographs, drawings, and plans, along with numerous projects by his contemporaries. Essays by distinguished architectural historians and critics—several of whom knew or worked with Wurster—provide insights into his personal as well as professional life. Abundantly illustrated, this first large-scale examination of William Wurster's architectural enterprise offers a full appreciation of the man and his work.
Herwig Wolfram
The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples
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The names of early Germanic warrior tribes and leaders resound in songs and legends; the real story of the part they played in reshaping the ancient world is no less gripping. Herwig Wolfram's panoramic history spans the great migrations of the Germanic peoples and the rise and fall of their kingdoms between the third and eighth centuries, as they invaded, settled in, and ultimately transformed the Roman Empire.
As Germanic military kings and their fighting bands created kingdoms, and won political and military recognition from imperial governments through alternating confrontation and accommodation, the "tribes" lost their shared culture and social structure, and became sharply differentiated. They acquired their own regions and their own histories, which blended with the history of the empire. In Wolfram's words, "the Germanic peoples neither destroyed the Roman world nor restored it; instead, they made a home for themselves within it."
This story is far from the "decline and fall" interpretation that held sway until recent decades. Wolfram's narrative, based on his sweeping grasp of documentary and archaeological evidence, brings new clarity to a poorly understood period of Western history.
Thomas Carlyle
Past and Present
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Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish essayist, historian, cultural critic, and leading man of English letters during the Victorian era, published Past and Present, one of his most influential works, in 1843. Written as a response to the economic crisis of the 1840s—closure of factories, loss of jobs, the growth of slums in industrial centers, the starving poor—Past and Present aimed to lead readers toward a "conversion experience" in order to stimulate social reform. In this work, Carlyle provides a trenchant articulation of the political, social, religious, and economic climate of the mid-nineteenth century and a prophetic vision of the future.
This volume, the fourth of the eight-volume Strouse Edition, includes an informative historical introduction and illustrations, along with complete notes and scholarly apparatus, and is the definitive modern scholarly edition.
Michel Foucault
This Is Not a Pipe
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What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction.
Anne Salmond
Aphrodites Island
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Aphrodite's Island is a bold new account of the European discovery of Tahiti, the Pacific island of mythic status that has figured so powerfully in European imaginings about sexuality, the exotic, and the nobility or bestiality of “savages.” In this groundbreaking book, Anne Salmond takes readers to the center of the shared history to furnish rich insights into Tahitian perceptions of the visitors while illuminating the full extent of European fascination with Tahiti. As she discerns the impact and meaning of the European effect on the islands, she demonstrates how, during the early contact period, the mythologies of Europe and Tahiti intersected and became entwined. Drawing on Tahitian oral histories, European manuscripts and artworks, collections of Tahitian artifacts, and illustrated with contemporary sketches, paintings, and engravings from the voyages, Aphrodite's Island provides a vivid account of the Europeans' Tahitian adventures. At the same time, the book's compelling insights into Tahitian life significantly change the way we view the history of this small island during a period when it became a crossroads for Europe.
S. D. Goitein
A Mediterranean Society, An Abridgment in One Volume
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S. D. Goitein's magisterial five-volume work on Jewish communities in the medieval Mediterranean world offers an unparalleled view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. Living under Muslim rule, the Jews became increasingly urbanized and played a significant part in an expanding world economy. As major actors in the flourishing intellectual life of the period, they forged much of what constitutes traditional Judaism today and served as a conduit of Islamic learning to the Christian West.
Goitein's masterpiece is now abridged and reworked by Jacob Lassner in a single volume that captures the essential narratives and contexts of the original. To understand the value of this distillation, we need to picture the remarkable, all-but-impenetrable cache of unique letters and documents found by accident in a geniza, or repository of sacred writings, in Old Cairo. These materials, unlike historical chronicles and literary texts of the time, represent the living experiences of people in a wide variety of settings throughout the entire Mediterranean and stretching as far east as the Indian subcontinent.
Goitein explored and interpreted these texts as no other scholar had. Lassner, in turn, makes Goitein's findings available to a wide audience and then moves on to raise a host of new and tantalizing questions about the Jews of the Geniza and the relationship of their community to the hegemonic Muslim society.
David Rains Wallace
The Klamath Knot
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Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, the Commonwealth Club Silver Medal for Literature 1984, and named one of the twentieth century's best nonfiction books by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Klamath Knot, originally published by Sierra Club Books in 1983, is a personal vision of wilderness in the Klamath Mountains of northwest California and southwest Oregon, seen through the lens of "evolutionary mythology." David Rains Wallace uses his explorations of the diverse ecosystems in this region to ponder the role of evolution and myth in our culture. The author's new epilogue makes a case for the creation of a new park to safeguard this exceptionally rich storehouse of relict species and evolutionary stories, which has largely been bypassed by conservationists since John Muir.
Harald Thorsrud
Ancient Scepticism
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Scepticism, a philosophical tradition that casts doubt on our ability to gain knowledge of the world and suggests suspending judgment in the face of uncertainty, has been influential since its beginnings in ancient Greece. Harald Thorsrud provides an engaging, rigorous introduction to the central themes, arguments, and general concerns of ancient Scepticism, from its beginnings with Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360 B.C. -ca. 270 B.C.) to the writings of Sextus Empiricus in the second century A.D. Thorsrud explores the differences among Sceptics and examines in particular the separation of the Scepticism of Pyrrho from its later form—Academic Scepticism—the result of its ideas being introduced into Plato's Academy in the third century B.C. Steering an even course through the many differences of scholarly opinion surrounding Scepticism, the book also provides a balanced appraisal of the philosophy's enduring significance by showing why it remains so interesting and how ancient interpretations differ from modern ones.
Copub: Acumen Publishing Limited
Guillaume Apollinaire
Calligrammes
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A fully annotated, bilingual edition, Calligrammes is a key work not only in Apollinaire's own development but in the evolution of modern French poetry. Apollinaire--Roman by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), Parisian by choice--died at thirty-eight in 1918. Nevertheless, he became one of the leading figures in twentieth-century poetry, a transitional figure whose work at once echoes the Symbolists and anticipates the work of the Surrealists.
Pratapaditya Pal
Himalayas
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This sweeping survey of the artistic achievements of Himalayan culture is the first major exhibition to include objects from all the major religions of the region. Created to accompany the landmark art exhibition that will include almost two hundred of the finest works of art created between the sixth and nineteenth centuries in India, Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan, this book explores the particular beauty that evolved from the spiritual traditions unique to the Himalayas. Lavishly illustrated with many rarely seen images, Himalayas conveys the spiritual aspirations of those who defied the physical hardships of an arduous mountain terrain to express their soaring creative spirit.
Currently held in private and public collections in North America and Europe, seventy percent of this art has never been published or publicly exhibited. The works include temple sculptures of stone and wood; works in terracotta; cast bronzes with inlaid gemstones, gilding, and paint; colorful paintings—from reverential portraits to depictions of awe-inspiring deities—on cloth, palm leaf, paper, and wood; and ritual objects in various media. Pratapaditya Pal provides a fascinating description of the cultural milieu in which these works of art were created.
Copublished with the Art Institute of Chicago
Patricia Albers
Shadows, Fire, Snow
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Ten years of research and the discovery of long-forgotten letters and photos enabled Patricia Albers to bring new recognition to this talented, intelligent, and independent photographer whose life embodied the cultural and political values of many artists of the post-World War I generation.
Edmund P. Green
World Atlas of Seagrasses
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Seagrasses, a group of about sixty species of underwater marine flowering plants, grow in the shallow marine and estuary environments of all the world's continents except Antarctica. The primary food of animals such as manatees, dugongs, green sea turtles, and critical habitat for thousands of other animal and plant species, seagrasses are also considered one of the most important shallow-marine ecosystems for humans since they play an important role in fishery production. Though they are highly valuable ecologically and economically, many seagrass habitats around the world have been completely destroyed or are now in rapid decline. The World Atlas of Seagrasses is the first authoritative and comprehensive global synthesis of the distribution and status of this critical marine habitat—which, along with mangroves and coral reefs, has been singled out for particular attention by the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity.
Illustrated throughout with color maps, photographs, tables, and more, and written by a large team of international collaborators, this unique volume covers seagrass ecology, scientific studies to date, current status, changing distributions, threatened areas, and conservation and management efforts for twenty-four regions of the world. As human populations expand and continue to live disproportionately in coastal areas, bringing new threats to seagrass habitat, a comprehensive overview of coastal resources and critical habitats is more important than ever. The World Atlas of Seagrasses will stimulate new research, conservation, and management efforts, and will help better focus priorities at the international level for these vitally important coastal ecosystems.
Paul Rose
Oceans
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The oceans are the single most important feature of our planet. They shape our climate, our culture, and our future. Yet their depths have remained a mysterious and unchartered expanse. This book, which accompanies a major BBC television series, draws on the most exciting stories from the fields of subaquatic archaeology, geology, marine biology, and anthropology to reveal an astonishing landscape of forgotten shipwrecks, submerged volcanoes, and hidden caves. For Oceans, explorer Paul Rose and his team of expert divers filmed fluorescence in Red Sea corals for the very first time and explored the undisturbed waters of the Black Hole off the Bahamas. They witnessed rarely seen behavior in sperm whales in the Sea of Cortez and discovered a potentially unknown species below the arctic ice pack. Undertaking thrilling and often dangerous dives, Rose and his team reveal the importance of the oceans to human existence—and at the same time trace the possible consequences of climate change on their delicate balance. Beautifully illustrated with more than 160 color photographs, Oceans unravels the mysteries of the deep and provides illuminating insights into this vast undersea domain.
"It is my sincere hope that this work will make more urgent the chorus of voices crying out to save the oceans."—From the foreword, by Philippe Cousteau
Copub: BBC
Henry Moore
Henry Moore
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Henry Moore's writings constitute a vivid and comprehensive record of his life and work, of the influences that shaped his vision, and of his reactions to the work of other artists, periods, and cultures. Spanning some seventy years, Moore's writings and conversations are much more than documentary records of his life and times: they have considerable literary merit in their own right.
This fascinating collection of Moore's written and spoken words is the most comprehensive yet compiled, and contains much previously unpublished material. It includes over 150 illustrations: photographs of the sculptures, drawings and prints discussed in the text, illustrations of works by other artists, and photographs of the sculptor and his environment at various stages of his life.
Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations completes and complements the catalogues of his sculpture, drawings, and prints. It will be indispensable for scholars and engrossing reading for Moore enthusiasts worldwide.
William Desmond
Cynics
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Far from being pessimistic or nihilistic, as modern uses of the term "cynic" suggest, the ancient Cynics were astonishingly optimistic regarding human nature. They believed that if one simplified one's life—giving up all unnecessary possessions, desires, and ideas—and lived in the moment as much as possible, one could regain one's natural goodness and happiness. It was a life exemplified most famously by the eccentric Diogenes, nicknamed "the Dog," and his followers, called dog-philosophers, kunikoi, or Cynics. Rebellious, self-willed, and ornery but also witty and imaginative, these dog-philosophers are some of the most colorful personalities from antiquity. This engaging introduction to Cynicism considers both the fragmentary ancient evidence on the Cynics and the historical interpretations that have shaped the philosophy over the course of eight centuries—from Diogenes himself to Nietzsche and beyond. Approaching Cynicism from a variety of thematic perspectives as well—their critique of convention, praise of natural simplicity, advocacy of self-sufficiency, defiance of Fortune, and freedom—William Desmond offers a fascinating survey of a school of thought that has had a tremendous influence throughout history and is of continuing interest today.
Copub: Acumen Publishing Limited
James Campbell
Exiled in Paris
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Exiled in Paris provides a compelling look at the personalities who fueled the literary and philosophical dramas of postwar Paris: James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, Boris Vian, Maurice Girodias, and many others. James Campbell provides a fresh look at Samuel Beckett's early career; reveals the facts behind the publication of the scandalous best-seller The Story of O; and tells the poignant story of Richard Wright's years in exile. He captures the sense of deliverance that Wright, so accustomed to daily humiliations in his own country, experienced during his sojourn on the Left Bank, where, for the first time in his life, he was treated as a great man of letters. Here, too, are all the circumstances surrounding Wright's mysterious death, which many close to him regarded as suspicious.
Hugh Kenner
Geodesic Math and How to Use It
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It was 1976—twenty-five years after R. Buckminster Fuller introduced geodesic domes when literary critic Hugh Kenner published this fully-illustrated practical manual for their construction. Now, some twenty-five years later, Geodesic Math and How to Use It again presents a systematic method of design and provides a step-by-step method for producing mathematical specifications for orthodox geodesic domes, as well as for a variety of elliptical, super-elliptical, and other nonspherical contours.
Out of print since 1990, Geodesic Math and How To Use It is California's most requested backlist title. This edition is fully illustrated with complete original appendices.
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 10
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Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions—until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet.
The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic events in English history. Pepys witnessed the London Fire, the Great Plague, the Restoration of Charles II, and the Dutch Wars. He was a patron of the arts, having himself composed many delightful songs and participated in the artistic life of London. His flair for gossip and detail reveals a portrait of the times that rivals the most swashbuckling and romantic historical novels. In none of the earlier versions was there a reliable, full text, with commentary and notation with any claim to completeness. This edition, first published in 1970, is the first in which the entire diary is printed with systematic comment. This is the only complete edition available; it is as close to Pepys’s original as possible.
Erik Millstone
The Atlas of Food
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What we eat, where we eat, and how we eat: these questions are explored in this remarkable book, first published in 2002. Now in its second edition, The Atlas of Food provides an up-to-date and visually appealing way of understanding the important issues relating to global food and agriculture. In mapping out broad areas of investigation—contamination of food and water, overnutrition, micronutrient deficiency, processing, farming, and trade—it offers a concise overview of today's food and farming concerns. Buttressed by engaging prose and vivid graphics, Erik Millstone and Tim Lang convincingly argue that human progress depends on resolving global inequality and creating a more sustainable food production system.
Copub: Myriad Editions
Norman Myers
The New Atlas of Planet Management
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The New Atlas of Planet Management was regarded as the most groundbreaking survey of the state of our planet when it was first published in 1984. After over twenty years in print, it has become the bible of the environmental movement and the definitive guide to a planet in critical transition. Regularly featured among the top ten books on the environment, the Atlas has been read by millions of people and translated into more than a dozen languages. This enlarged edition brings the classic reference up-to-date. Thoroughly revised with the latest figures and analysis, fresh full-color and easy-to-read graphics, an expanded format, and a wealth of current environmental and political topics that have arisen during the previous two decades, The New Atlas of Planet Management will equip a further generation of readers with information to face the challenges of the new millennium.
THIS REVISED EDITION CONTAINS:
*Updated chapters on land, oceans, elements, evolution, humankind, civilization, and management
*New sections on consumption, globalization, environmental security, refugees, international terrorism, the rise of information technology, china, and more
*Powerful new illustrations that convey a wealth of information Copub: Gaia Books
John Lahr
Coward the Playwright
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In five dexterously argued chapters, John Lahr investigates all the major plays and many of Noël Coward's lesser-known pieces. Hay Fever, Private Lives, and Design for Living, for instance, make a fascinating group of "Comedies of Bad Manners." Blithe Spirit and Relative Values raise the "Ghost in the Fun Machine." And Lahr explores the "politics of charm" oozing through The Vortex, Easy Virtue, and Present Laughter. Further chapters consider the patriotic plays like Cavalcade and This Happy Breed and examples of Coward's later work, such as Waiting in the Wings and A Song at Twilight.
In all Coward's stage work, Lahr detects a coherent philosophy in which charm is both the subject of Coward's comedies and the trap that makes his very public life a perpetual performance.
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 5
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$31.95
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Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions—until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet.
The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic events in English history. Pepys witnessed the London Fire, the Great Plague, the Restoration of Charles II, and the Dutch Wars. He was a patron of the arts, having himself composed many delightful songs and participated in the artistic life of London. His flair for gossip and detail reveals a portrait of the times that rivals the most swashbuckling and romantic historical novels. In none of the earlier versions was there a reliable, full text, with commentary and notation with any claim to completeness. This edition, first published in 1970, is the first in which the entire diary is printed with systematic comment. This is the only complete edition available; it is as close to Pepys’s original as possible.
Mark M. Smith
Sensing the Past
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Do we rely on different senses now than the ones we relied on in the past? How have our senses affected history? How have the senses themselves changed? What role have the senses played in the ways we discriminate? Exploring illuminating examples from antiquity to the twenty-first century, this lively, concise introduction to the essential, emerging field of sensory history presents a new way of looking at the past that takes the everyday, the average, and the banal as seriously as it takes the history of elites, the intellect, and the exceptional. Considering each of the five senses, Mark M. Smith explores diverse subjects: visual culture in Victorian Britain and South America, sound in nineteenth-century Australia and France, gender politics and touch in early modern Europe and in native America, "race" and olfaction in the United States and scent in ancient Christianity, and the role of taste in shaping national identity in modern China and early America.
Madeleine Grynsztejn
Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco
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This sweeping overview of Ellsworth Kelly's fifty-year career is the first to bring together the twenty-two pieces the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired from Kelly's personal collection in May 1999. The volume also includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and reliefs from the Museum's previous holdings and private collections throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. The primary text by Madeleine Grynsztejn explores the evolution of Kelly's artwork, his longstanding interest in the phenomenology of vision, and his experimentation with compositions generated by the laws of chance. Additional essays by Julian Myers examine key issues and groupings of works, from Kelly's early figural paintings through the shaped panels and relief paintings for which the artist is best known. Produced to accompany the exhibition of the same name, Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco is an elegant presentation of the most significant collection of the artist's work. It secures Kelly's place as one of the most original of American artists.
Kelly's paintings and sculptures are recognized as vital to the evolution of postwar Modernism. One of the chief proponents of hard-edge abstraction during the 1950s, he is also celebrated for his large-scale monochrome canvases. In 1956, Kelly gained critical recognition when the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchased his work and the Betty Parsons gallery presented his first solo exhibition in the U.S. From the 1970s to the present, the scale of Kelly's work increased as he joined canvases of different sizes and shapes into asymmetrical formats and created totems in bronze, wood, and steel. From 1996 to 1998 the artist's work traveled to museums in Los Angeles, London, and Munich. Today Kelly's works are represented in museums and private collections worldwide, and he has received several prestigious awards and honorary degrees.
Matthew Frye Jacobson
Special Sorrows
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"A scholarly study of the real roots of what Jacobson calls 'America's largely assimilated but ultimately "unmeltable" ethics.' It's a startling point of view for readers who are accustomed to the self-congratulatory myth of America as a beacon of liberty to which the 'huddled masses' of the world look with longing."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
Jean Bingen
Hellenistic Egypt
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Hellenistic Egypt brings together for the first time the writings of the preeminent historian, papyrologist, and epigraphist Jean Bingen. These essays, first published by Bingen from 1970 to 1999, make a distinctive contribution to the historiography of Hellenistic Egypt, a period in ancient Egypt extending from its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. until its annexation as a province of the Roman Empire by Octavian (later Augustus) in 30 B.C., after his defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Ruled by Ptolemaic kings during this period, Hellenistic Egypt was a sophisticated, rich, and fertile country. Its history is intimately bound up with the history of the Mediterranean as a whole, yet parts of that history remain relatively obscure and open to debate. New evidence, particularly from papyri, emerges frequently and shifts our understanding and interpretation of this significant time. For the last six decades Jean Bingen has been a leading editor and interpreter of such evidence. In particular his work on the Ptolemaic monarchy and economy, which illustrates how the Greeks and Egyptians interacted, has transformed the field and influenced all subsequent work. Historian and classicist Roger Bagnall has selected and introduced Bingen’s most important essays on this topic.
Copub: Edinburgh University Press
W. G. Beasley
The Japanese Experience
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The Japanese Experience is an authoritative history of Japan from the sixth century to the present day. Only a writer of W.G. Beasley's stature could render Japan's complicated past so concisely and elegantly. This is the history of a society and a culture with a distinct sense of itself, one of the few nations never conquered by a foreign power in historic times (until the twentieth century) and the home of the longest-reigning imperial dynasty that still survives. The Japanese have always occupied part or all of the same territory, its borders defined by the sea. They have spoken and written a common language, (once it had taken firm shape in about the tenth century) and their population has been largely homogeneous, little touched by immigration except in very early periods. Yet Japanese society and culture have changed more through time than these statements seem to imply. Developments within Japan have been greatly influenced by ideas and institutions, art and literature, imported from elsewhere. In this work Beasley, a leading authority on Japan and the author of a number of acclaimed works on Japanese history, examines the changing society and culture of Japan and considers what, apart from the land and the people, is specifically Japanese about the history of Japan.
The arrival of Buddhism in the sixth century brought a substantially Chinese-style society to Japan, not only in religion but in political institutions, writing system, and the lifestyle of the ruling class. By the eleventh century the Chinese element was waning and the country was entering a long and essentially "Japanese" feudal period—with two rulers, an emperor and a Shogun—which was to last until the nineteenth century. Under the Togukawa shogunate (1600-1868), Chinese culture enjoyed something of a renaissance, though popular culture owed more to Japanese urban taste and urban wealth.
In 1868 the Meiji Restoration brought to power rulers dedicated to the pursuit of national wealth and strength, and Japan became a world power. Although a bid for empire ended in disaster, the years after 1945 saw an economic miracle that brought spectacular wealth to Japan and the Japanese people, as well as the westernization of much of Japanese life.
Samuel C. Heilman
When a Jew Dies
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Samuel Heilman's eloquent account of the traditional customs that are put into practice when a Jewish person dies provides both an informative anthropological perspective on Jewish rites of mourning and a moving chronicle of the loss of his own father. This unique narrative crosses and recrosses the boundary between the academic and the religious, the personal and the general, reflecting Heilman's changing roles as social scientist, bereaved son, and observant Jew. Not only describing but explaining the cultural meaning behind Jewish practices and traditions, this extraordinary book shows what is particular and what is universal about Jewish experiences of death, bereavement, mourning, and their aftermath.
Heilman describes the many phases of death: the moment between life and death, the transitional period when the dead have not yet been laid to rest, the preparation of the body (tahara), the Jewish funeral, the early seven-day period of mourning (shivah), the nearly twelve months during which the kaddish is recited, and the annual commemorations of bereavement. The richly informative ethnography that surrounds Heilman's personal account deepens our understanding of the customs and traditions that inform the Jewish cultural response to death.
When a Jew Dies concludes by revealing the rhythm that lies beneath the Jewish experience with death. It finds that however much death has thrown life into disequilibrium, the Jewish response is to follow a precisely timed series of steps during which the dead are sent on their way and the living are reintegrated into the group and into life. Filled with absorbing detail and insightful interpretations that draw from social science as well as Jewish sources, this book offers new insight into one of the most profound and often difficult situations that almost everyone must face.
Cover illustration by Max Ferguson
Stephen Prince
A New Pot of Gold
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Facing an economic crisis in the 1980s, the Hollywood industry moved boldly to control the ancillary markets of videotape, video disk, pay-cable and pay-per-view, and the major studios found themselves targeted for acquisition by global media and communications companies. This volume examines the decade's transformation that took Hollywood from the production of theatrical film to media software.
Some of the films discussed in this volume include:
PlatoonDo the Right ThingBlue VelvetDinerE.T.BatmanBody Heat
Francis Maes
A History of Russian Music
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Francis Maes's comprehensive and imaginative book introduces the general public to the scholarly debate that has revolutionized Russian music history over the past two decades. Based on the most recent critical literature, A History of Russian Music summarizes the new view of Russian music and provides a solid overview of the relationships between artistic movements and political ideas.
The revision of Russian music history may count as one of the most significant achievements of recent musicology. The Western view used to be largely based on the ideas of Vladimir Stasov, a friend and confidant of leading nineteenth-century Russian composers who was more a propagandist than a historian. With the deconstruction of Stasov's interpretation, stereotyped views have been replaced by a fuller understanding of the conditions and the context in which composers such as Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Stravinsky created their oeuvres. Even the more recent history of Soviet music, in particular the achievement of Dmitry Shostakovich, is being assessed on new documentary grounds.
A more complex conception of Russian music develops as Maes explores the cultural and historical milieu from which great works have emerged. Questioning and re-examining traditional views, the author considers the personal development of composers, the relationship of art to social and political ideals in Russia, and the ideologies behind musical research.
B. P. Reardon
Collected Ancient Greek Novels
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Prose fiction, although not always associated with classical antiquity, did in fact flourish in the early Roman Empire, not only in realistic Latin novels but also and indeed principally in the Greek ideal romance of love and adventure to which they are related. Popular in the Renaissance, these stories have been less familiar in later centuries. Translations of the Greek stories were not readily available in English before B.P. Reardon’s excellent volume.
Nine complete stories are included here as well as ten others, encompassing the whole range of classical themes: ideal romance, travel adventure, historical fiction, and comic parody. A new foreword by J.R. Morgan examines the enormous impact this groundbreaking collection has had on our understanding of classical thought and our concept of the novel.
John T.
Persons and Masks of the Law
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Legal thought in this country has always focused on the rules rather than on the persons affected by the rules. Persons and Masks of the Law restores the balance by taking a person-centered view of the law. The author shows how even great jurists have chosen the "masks of the law" over persons, his surprising examples being Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, Benjamin Cardozo, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--four of the greatest lawyers of the United States.
Noonan discusses how the concept of property, applied to a person, is a perfect mask since no trace of human identity remains. An auction of slaves in Virginia, the takeover of a banana plantation in Costa Rica, and an accident on the Long Island railroad are the famous cases involving these four legal giants. The stories of the litigations at three different periods of our history provide and new and powerful analyses of American law. This book, breaking through the formalism in which jurisprudence is enshrined, offers a new vision of law and represents a call for reform in the education and even behavior of lawyers.
David Goodman
Fault Lines
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South Africa has experienced one of the world's most dramatic political transformations. David Goodman, a journalist and activist who has witnessed South Africa's struggles since the darkest days of apartheid, chronicles the historic transition from apartheid to democracy. This compelling story is told through the lives of four pairs of South Africans who have experienced apartheid from opposite sides of the racial and political divide. Taken together, these profiles provide the first in-depth look at the social dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa.
Part social history and part personal drama, Fault Lines is an account of what happens to real people when their country is reinvented around them. The struggle to reconcile past evils is captured in the stories of a former police assassin and his intended victim. The rise and fall of South African racism is portrayed through the lives of the late Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd—the notorious "architect of apartheid"—and his grandson, now a member of the ruling African National Congress. The battle to break out of poverty is detailed in the story of two black women: one an impoverished domestic worker and new city councilor, the other a Mercedes-driving member of South Africa's new black elite. The struggle for the land is told through the eyes of two neighbors: a black farmer who was evicted from his lands in the 1980s and has returned to start over, and a conservative white farmer who participated in the eviction and now does business with the man whose life he nearly destroyed. These powerful stories are accompanied by the photography of award-winning South African documentary photographer Paul Weinberg.
Rita Carter
Exploring Consciousness
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Rita Carter ponders the nature, origins, and purpose of consciousness in this fascinating inquiry into the toughest problem facing modern science and philosophy. Building on the foundation of her bestselling book Mapping the Mind, she considers whether consciousness is merely an illusion, a by-product of our brain's workings, some as yet inexplicable feature or property of the material universe or—as the latest physics may suggest—the very fundament of reality. Little, she discovers, is as it first seems.
Carter draws from a solid body of knowledge—empirical findings and theoretical hypotheses--about consciousness, much of it derived from recent discoveries about the brain. Her lively, accessible narrative ranges widely over new ways of thinking about the subject and what direction new research is taking. Leading scholars from a range of perspectives provide topical essays that complement Carter's account. The book also discusses how traditional approaches—philosophical, scientific, and experiential—might be brought together to create a more complete understanding of consciousness.
This excellent collection contains 13 essays from Gadamer's Kleine Schriften, dealing with hermeneutical reflection, phenomenology, existential philosophy, and philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer applies hermeneutical analysis to Heidegger and Husserl's phenomenology, an approach that proves critical and instructive.
Luciano Canfora
Julius Caesar
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In this splendid profile, Luciano Canfora offers a radically new interpretation of one of the most controversial figures in history. Julius Caesar played a leading role in the culture and politics of a world empire, dwarfing his contemporaries in ambition, achievement, and appetite. For that, he has occupied a central place in the political imagination ever since. Yet Caesar, struck down by his own lieutenants because he could not be comprehended nor contained, remains an enigma. The result of a comprehensive study of the ancient sources, Julius Caesar: The Life and Times of the People's Dictator paints an astonishingly detailed portrait of this complex man and the times in which he lived. Based on his many years of research, Canfora focuses on what we actually know about Caesar, the man of politics and war, in a stylish, engaging narrative chronologically structured around the events in Caesar's life. The result is a rich, revelatory, full biographical portrait of the dictator whose mission of Romanization lies at the very heart of modern Europe.
Copub: Edinburgh University Press
barry bluestone
Growing Prosperity
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In this elegantly argued book, political economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison examine America's great surge of economic expansion in its historical context to demonstrate the causes for the vibrancy of our economy.
A Century Foundation Book
Sia Morhardt
California Desert Flowers
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This easy-to-use guide to the most visible families of California desert flowers includes family and genus keys, color photographs of nearly 300 species, and a wealth of diagrams. Created as a primer on identification to family and genus, California Desert Flowers takes readers to a new level of understanding and appreciation of wildflower relationships and their habitats and adaptations.
Kirstin Dow
The Atlas of Climate Change
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Today's headlines and recent events reflect the gravity of climate change. Heat waves, droughts, and floods are bringing death to vulnerable populations, destroying livelihoods, and driving people from their homes.
Rigorous in its science and insightful in its message, this atlas examines the causes of climate change and considers its possible impact on subsistence, water resources, ecosystems, biodiversity, health, coastal megacities, and cultural treasures. It reviews historical contributions to greenhouse gas levels, progress in meeting international commitments, and local efforts to meet the challenge of climate change.
With more than 50 full-color maps and graphics, this is an essential resource for policy makers, environmentalists, students, and everyone concerned with this pressing subject.
The Atlas covers a wide range of topics, including:
* Warning signs
* Future scenarios
* Vulnerable populations
* Health
* Renewable energy
* Emissions reduction
* Personal and public action
Copub: Myriad Editions
Philip Ball
Life's Matrix
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One of the four elements of classical antiquity, water is central to the environment of our planet. In Life's Matrix, Philip Ball writes of water's origins, history, and unique physical character. As a geological agent, water shapes mountains, canyons, and coastlines, and when unleashed in hurricanes and floods its destructive power is awesome. Ball's provocative exploration of water on other planets highlights the possibilities of life beyond Earth. Life's Matrix also examines the grim realities of depletion of natural resources and its effects on the availability of water in the twenty-first century.
Charles Affron
Lillian Gish
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At the time of her death in 1993, Lillian Gish was universally recognized as a film legend. In this revealing and absorbing narrative, Charles Affron uses newly released documents to uncover a life that was cast in the shadow of self-generated myth. Filling the gaps left by Gish's selective memoirs and authorized biographies, he shows how the actress carefully shaped her public identity while keeping much of her life private.
A New York Times Notable Book
Donald L. Horowitz
The Deadly Ethnic Riot
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Donald L. Horowitz's comprehensive consideration of the structure and dynamics of ethnic violence is the first full-scale, comparative study of what the author terms the deadly ethnic riot—an intense, sudden, lethal attack by civilian members of one ethnic group on civilian members of another ethnic group. Serious, frequent, and destabilizing, these events result in large numbers of casualties. Horowitz examines approximately 150 such riots in about fifty countries, mainly in Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union, as well as fifty control cases. With its deep and thorough scholarship, incisive analysis, and profound insights, The Deadly Ethnic Riot will become the definitive work on its subject.
Furious and sadistic, the riot is nevertheless directed against a precisely specified class of targets and conducted with considerable circumspection. Horowitz scrutinizes target choices, participants and organization, the timing and supporting conditions for the violence, the nature of the events that precede the riot, the prevalence of atrocities during the violence, the location and diffusion of riots, and the aims and effects of riot behavior. He finds that the deadly ethnic riot is a highly patterned but emotional event that tends to occur during times of political uncertainty. He also discusses the crucial role of rumor in triggering riots, the surprisingly limited role of deliberate organization, and the striking lack of remorse exhibited by participants.
Horowitz writes clearly and eloquently without compromising the complexity of his subject. With impressive analytical skill, he takes up the important challenge of explaining phenomena that are at once passionate and calculative.
John Gregory Dunne
Delano
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In September 1965, Filipino and Mexican American farm workers went on strike against grape growers in and around Delano, California. More than a labor dispute, the strike became a movement for social justice that helped redefine Latino and American politics. The strike also catapulted its leader, Cesar Chavez, into prominence as one of the most celebrated American political figures of the twentieth century. More than forty years after its original publication, Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike, based on compelling first-hand reportage and interviews, retains both its freshness and its urgency in illuminating a moment of unusually significant social ferment.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Selected Poems of Rilke, Bilingual Edition
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These poems, selected from Das Buch der Bilder and the two parts of Neue Gedichte, show Rilke's deep concern with sculpture and painting. Written in his less mystical period (1900-1908), the poems exhibit Rilke's particular artistic and poetic power.
Rainer Maria Rilke was one of Germany's most important poets. His influences include the paintings of the Worpswedders and the French Impressionists, the sculpture of Rodin (to whom he was both friend and secretary), and the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and other symbolists. His poetry is innovative, enigmatic, and entertainingly idiosyncratic. C.F. MacIntyre's translations are both true to the original and poetic in their own right, and in each book he includes an introduction and notes. German text faces the English translation.
James Harpur
Sacred Tracks
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Ever since the Magi trekked from the East to witness the birth of Jesus, pilgrims have undertaken long and often dangerous journeys to seek out holy Christian places. Sacred Tracks tells the two-thousand-year-old story of Christian pilgrimage and the saints and pilgrims, shrines and cathedrals, relics and practices of a tradition that is still flourishing today.
Drawing on contemporary accounts and a wealth of illustration, Sacred Tracks captures the atmosphere of pilgrimage through the ages. Divided into three sections—"Early Paths," "Medieval Roads," and "Modern Ways"—the book describes every aspect of pilgrimage past and present, from the practicalities of setting out to the difficult conditions of travel, to the great sites, such as Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, and Canterbury. The book looks at the pilgrims themselves, from St. Brendan, who is said to have cast himself adrift, letting God guide his search for a paradisal holy island, to the penitents, cure seekers, and adventurers who in the Middle Ages set out for the unknown in their millions.
In recent times pilgrimage has recaptured the popular imagination. For the increasing numbers who each year follow in the footsteps of their medieval forbears, Sacred Tracks describes the popular places of contemporary pilgrimage, such as Lourdes, Fatima, Walsingham, and Knock. Seven new and revived pilgrimages are described in detail, while a gazetteer provides information about a further seven in Europe, Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Entertaining, colorful, and informative, this book is both a fascinating history of Christian pilgrimage and the perfect traveling companion for the pilgrim of today.
Edna R. Russmann
Eternal Egypt
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This sumptuously illustrated book is a wonderful introduction to the enormous and varied legacy of ancient Egypt. Created to accompany one of the greatest loan exhibitions ever to have been mounted from the collections of the British Museum, Eternal Egypt illustrates the development and achievements of ancient Egyptian art over a period of more than 3,000 years. Almost all of the artifacts have been drawn from the Museum's permanent exhibitions; many are among the finest examples of their kind to have survived from antiquity. Handsomely produced, this book reveals these objects—including sculpture, relief, papyri, hieroglyphic writing, jewelry, painting, cosmetic objects, and items of funerary equipment—as a means of extraordinary artistic expression rather than simply as historical documents. The book and the exhibit, which will travel to eight U.S. cities over the course of three years, provide a remarkable opportunity to explore the creative genius of one of the world's most extraordinary civilizations.
Eternal Egypt features the unique and innovative aspects of art from each period, as well as characteristic styles, forms, and genres. Edna Russmann, one of the world's leading authorities on ancient Egyptian art and curator of the exhibition, offers a wide-ranging and authoritative introductory essay that covers archaism, portraiture, and stylistic innovation in Egyptian art. The text also relates the history of the British Museum collection of Egyptian antiquities, showing how these exquisite art works came together. Each piece in the exhibition is given a separate explanatory entry in the book. With its superb color photographs and accessible yet informative text, Eternal Egypt marks a substantial step forward in scholarly understanding of its subject, embodying the results of the very latest research and containing many new and original insights and observations. It will be a must read for anyone with a passion for ancient Egypt.
Published in association with the American Federation of Arts by arrangement with the British Museum Press
Don Gifford
Ulysses Annotated
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Don Gifford's annotations to Joyce's great modern classic comprise a specialized encyclopedia that will inform any reading of Ulysses. The suggestive potential of minor details was enormously fascinating to Joyce, and the precision of his use of detail is a most important aspect of his literary method. The annotations in this volume illuminate details which are not in the public realm for most of us.
The annotations gloss place names, define slang terms, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, trace literary allusions and references to other cultures. Annotations are keyed not only to the reading text of the critical edition of Ulysses, but to the standard 1961 Random House edition, and the current Modern Library and Vintage texts.
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 8
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Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions—until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet.
The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic events in English history. Pepys witnessed the London Fire, the Great Plague, the Restoration of Charles II, and the Dutch Wars. He was a patron of the arts, having himself composed many delightful songs and participated in the artistic life of London. His flair for gossip and detail reveals a portrait of the times that rivals the most swashbuckling and romantic historical novels. In none of the earlier versions was there a reliable, full text, with commentary and notation with any claim to completeness. This edition, first published in 1970, is the first in which the entire diary is printed with systematic comment. This is the only complete edition available; it is as close to Pepys’s original as possible.
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Genes, Peoples, and Languages
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Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was among the first to ask whether the genes of modern populations contain a historical record of the human species. Cavalli-Sforza and others have answered this question—anticipated by Darwin—with a decisive yes. Genes, Peoples, and Languages comprises five lectures that serve as a summation of the author's work over several decades, the goal of which has been nothing less than tracking the past hundred thousand years of human evolution.
Cavalli-Sforza raises questions that have serious political, social, and scientific import: When and where did we evolve? How have human societies spread across the continents? How have cultural innovations affected the growth and spread of populations? What is the connection between genes and languages? Always provocative and often astonishing, Cavalli-Sforza explains why there is no genetic basis for racial classification.
Fred Abrahams
A Village Destroyed, May 14, 1999
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On a warm spring morning in 1999, in the midst of NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia, Serbian security and paramilitary forces descended on the small village of Cuska, near the western Kosovo city of Pec. Soldiers with painted faces and masks rounded up the population and forced them to assemble in the center of the village. The women, children, and elderly were separated from any men who had not managed to flee. The villagers were threatened and robbed of their money, jewelry, and identification papers. Twenty-nine men were divided into three groups and taken into three separate houses, where they were sprayed repeatedly with automatic weapons. Each house was then set on fire and left to burn. This gripping investigative account of the massacre establishes the truth of what happened in Cuska, deepens our understanding of war crimes, and sheds light on the world of paramilitaries who carry out mass killings of civilians in the name of the state.
The events in Cuska are emblematic of the destruction of hundreds of other villages throughout Kosovo. But in this case there was a difference: in each of the three groups of men there was one survivor who managed to crawl from each of the burning houses. They, and many others present that day, told their stories to Human Rights Watch, a research and advocacy organization that monitors abuses in more than seventy countries around the world. Fred Abrahams scanned into his laptop photographs of Serbian security forces apparently left behind when they withdrew from Kosovo, and showed them to victims, who identified the perpetrators.
With an essay by Eric Stover and a collection of arresting photographs by Gilles Peress of the exile and return of Kosovar Albanians to their homes and villages, this book presents a riveting, multifaceted story of unmatched depth and complexity. A final section of "self–portraits" taken by Serbian troops and paramilitaries holds the key to understanding how Serb forces were able to overrun so much territory in so little time.
George Russell
Piers Plowman
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This definitive and long-awaited edition of the C Version of Piers Plowman now joins the California editions of the A and B Versions to complete the set of Piers Plowman texts prepared under the general editorship of George Kane. Piers Plowman is the single most important Middle English poem, with the exception of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The forty-eight extant manuscripts of the poem are classified in three main versions: A, the earliest, written about 1362; B, a longer revision, written about 1378; and C, the most finished and public form, written about 1394. The basis of this edition is the text in Huntingon Library MS 143, corrected and restored from the evidence of all known manuscripts of the C tradition to that of the first fair copy of the poet's revision materials. The correction and restoration are described in an extensive introduction, and there is a full apparatus of variant readings. Two appendices cover excluded lines and passages and the Ilchester Prologue.
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 3
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$31.95
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Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions—until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet.
The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic events in English history. Pepys witnessed the London Fire, the Great Plague, the Restoration of Charles II, and the Dutch Wars. He was a patron of the arts, having himself composed many delightful songs and participated in the artistic life of London. His flair for gossip and detail reveals a portrait of the times that rivals the most swashbuckling and romantic historical novels. In none of the earlier versions was there a reliable, full text, with commentary and notation with any claim to completeness. This edition, first published in 1970, is the first in which the entire diary is printed with systematic comment. This is the only complete edition available; it is as close to Pepys’s original as possible.
Sylvia Yount
Cecilia Beaux
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At the turn of the twentieth century, the celebrated American artist William Merritt Chase named Cecilia Beaux “not only the greatest living woman painter, but the best that has ever lived.” While Beaux—unlike her contemporaries John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt—has not fared well in modernist-driven art history, her work has become the subject of renewed interest on the part of art historians, collectors, and general viewers on both sides of the Atlantic, and her forty-year career represents a compelling and under-examined chapter in the history of American art. Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter is the most comprehensive appraisal of Beaux’s talent in more than three decades. This handsomely illustrated book presents a range of the artist’s strongest work and offers a fresh understanding of her career by examining critical questions of gender, class, and the importance of place. It features substantive essays which examine Beaux’s participation in the international portrait market of the 1890s, explore the artist’s professional identity and changing fortunes through a close reading of key images, investigate Beaux’s sensitivity to the framing and display of her work. An illustrated chronology of Beaux’s life and work, compiled by Alison Bechtel Wexler, completes the study.
Copub: High Museum
Antonia Fraser
The Middle Ages
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This volume opens with the Norman conquest, William I's bold incursion in 1066 that propelled a new dynasty to the throne of England, and covers three centuries of drama, intrigue, loyalty, betrayal, courage, cowardice, and crime.
About the series A Royal History of England:
From the beginning of monarchical power in Norman times to the present queen, the British royal family has experienced many scandals, triumphs, and changes in public image, but few of their reigns can be described as uneventful. With contributions by specialist authors and contemporary illustrations of royal heraldry and coats of arms, Antonia Fraser has edited a definitive and entertaining history of one of the most powerful monarchies in the world.
Richard Manning
Food’s Frontier
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Food's Frontier provides a survey of pioneering agricultural research projects underway in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, India, China, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru by a writer both well-grounded technically and sensitive to social and cultural issues. The book starts from the premise that the "Green Revolution" which averted mass starvation a generation ago is not a long-term solution to global food needs and has created its own very serious problems. Based on increasing yields by extensive use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and monoculture--agribusiness-style production of single crops--this approach has poisoned both land and farm workers, encouraged new strains of pests that are resistant to ever-increasing amounts of pesticides, and killed the fertility of land by growing single crops rather than rotating crops that can replenish nutrients in the soil. Solutions to these problems are coming from a reexamination of ancient methods of agriculture that have allowed small-scale productivity over many generations. Research in the developing world, based on alternative methods and philosophies, indigenous knowledge, and native crops, joined with cutting edge technology, offer hope for a more lasting solution to the world's increasing food needs.
Jerome Rothenberg
Symposium of the Whole
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Symposium of the Whole traces a discourse on poetry and culture that has profoundly influenced the art of our time, with precedents going back two centuries and more. Beginning with a reassertion of the complexity of poetry among peoples long labeled “primitive” and “savage,” many recent poets have sought to base a new poetics over the fullest range of human cultures. The attempt to define an ethnopoetics has been significantly connected with the most experimental and future-directed side of Romantic and modern poetry, both in the Western world and, increasingly, outside it. As a visionary poetics and as a politics, this complex redefinition of cultural and intellectual values has involved a rarely acknowledged collaboration between poets and scholars, who together have challenged the narrow view of literature that has excluded so many traditions.
In this gathering, the Rothenbergs follow the idea of an ethnopoetics from predecessors such as Vico, Blake, Thoreau, and Tzara to more recent essays and manifestos by poets and social thinkers such as Olson, Eliade, Snyder, Turner, and Baraka. The themes range widely, from the divergence of oral and written cultures to the shaman as proto-poet and the reemergence of suppressed and rejected forms and images: the goddess, the trickster, and the “human universe.” The book’s three ethnographic sections demonstrate how various poetries are structured and composed, how they reflect meaning and worldview, and how they are performed in cultures where all art may be thought of as art-in-motion.
Among the poetries discussed are the language of magic; West African drum language and poetry; the Huichol Indian language of reversals; chance operations in African divination poetry; picture-writings and action-writings from Australia and Africa; and American Indian sacred-clown dramas and traditional trickster narratives. The cumulative effect is a new reading of the poetic past and present—in the editors’ words, “a changed paradigm of what poetry was or now could come to be.”
Michael Graf
Plants of the Tahoe Basin
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This is the first comprehensive illustrated guide to the trees, ferns, and flowering plants of the Tahoe Basin. Covering more than 600 species, many of them rare, and with over 300 color photographs, here is the most complete and up-to-date wildflower guide available for this floristically rich region.
Michael Graf discusses native higher vascular plants: flowering plants, ferns and their allies, and conifers. He covers the Tahoe region from Desolation Wilderness in the west to the Carson Range in the east and includes Donner Lake and Pass, Sagehen Meadows, Castle Peak, Pole Creek, Shirley Canyon, Granite Chief, and Alpine Meadows in the north; and Hope Valley and Carson and Luther Passes in the south. Each of these areas represents extensions of Tahoe Basin plant communities, and the entire region offers spectacular wildflower viewing.
The book is arranged taxonomically, thereby helping readers to develop a basic understanding of plant families, genera, and species. Each species account includes size, bloom period, and preferred habitat, and a full description follows, including clues for identification, notes on where to view the plant, use by humans, and additional ecological information. An introductory section discusses the evolutionary principles of plant taxonomy and the geologic and climatic history of the Tahoe Basin, its vegetative ecology, and its environmental history from the time of the Washoe Indians to the present.
An appendix provides a family key, a glossary, and drawings of plant anatomy. Throughout the book, taxonomic information is based on the 1993 edition of the Jepson Manual. With its clear descriptions, beautiful photographs, and information on everything from pollination to conservation, this book should be in the backpack of anyone who loves wildflowers, from amateur to professional field biologist.
Edward Norman
The Roman Catholic Church
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The history of the Roman Catholic Church is a gateway to understanding two thousand years of Western—and at times world—civilization. Edward Norman's lavishly illustrated, incisive account, sure to become a classic, tells the story of the multifarious ways in which the Church has shaped the lives and beliefs of Christians and non-Christians alike.
It is partly a story of remarkable people, from the greatest theologian of the early Church, St. Augustine, to one of the greatest figures of the modern age, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. It is also a story rich in symbols, not least the awe-inspiring basilica built over the tomb of St. Peter in Rome, the most recognizable church in the world. But the focus of the book is a historical account of epic proportions. Here we discover how Rome became the heart of the Roman Catholic religion and played a role in transforming Western Europe into Christendom. We gain a view of the Crusades undistorted by today's agendas, explore the Counter-Reformation as the fruit of the venerable Catholic reforming tradition, and witness the beginning of a new 500-year history, in which missionaries took their message to Latin America and the East. And, in this boldly uplifting account, we come to see how the Church, reflecting the vision of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, today embodies Christ's own injunction to "teach all nations."
Copub: Thames & Hudson
Peter Brown
Augustine of Hippo
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This classic biography was first published thirty years ago and has since established itself as the standard account of Saint Augustine's life and teaching. The remarkable discovery recently of a considerable number of letters and sermons by Augustine has thrown fresh light on the first and last decades of his experience as a bishop. These circumstantial texts have led Peter Brown to reconsider some of his judgments on Augustine, both as the author of the Confessions and as the elderly bishop preaching and writing in the last years of Roman rule in north Africa. Brown's reflections on the significance of these exciting new documents are contained in two chapters of a substantial Epilogue to his biography (the text of which is unaltered). He also reviews the changes in scholarship about Augustine since the 1960s. A personal as well as a scholarly fascination infuse the book-length epilogue and notes that Brown has added to his acclaimed portrait of the bishop of Hippo.
John R. MacArthur
The Selling of Free Trade
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The Selling of "Free Trade" shows how Washington works to accomplish political or economic goals, even when confronted with widespread popular opposition. John R. MacArthur chronicles the brutal and expensive campaign in 1993 that led to passage of the poorly understood, highly controversial law creating the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Theodora Kroeber
Ishi in Two Worlds, 50th Anniversary Edition
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OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD
The life story of Ishi, the Yahi Indian, lone survivor of a doomed tribe, is unique in the annals of North American anthropology. For more than forty years, Theodora Kroeber's biography has been sharing this tragic and absorbing drama with readers all over the world.
Ishi stumbled into the twentieth century on the morning of August 29, 1911, when, desperate with hunger and with terror of the white murderers of his family, he was found in the corral of a slaughter house near Oroville, California. Finally identified as an Indian by an anthropologist, Ishi was brought to San Francisco by Professor T. T. Waterman and lived there the rest of his life under the care and protection of Alfred Kroeber and the staff of the University of California's Museum of Anthropology.
Alessia Fassone
Egypt
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This beautifully designed pocket reference—more a compact encyclopedia than a dictionary—presents ancient Egypt in stunningly-produced photographs and concise textual descriptions of Egyptian art, culture, and government. Not merely a travel guide, this handy and easy-to-use guide provides an overall view of the civilization as a whole, including a fascinating section on the history of Egyptology, the invasions and excavations, and a section on where the artifacts can be seen today. This is a must-have addition to the library of anyone interested in ancient Egypt, and a necessary companion for the traveler.
Paul Verlaine
Selected Poems of Paul Verlaine, Bilingual edition
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The influential French poet, Symbolist leader, and Decadent Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) was recognized as a groundbreaking writer even in his own lifetime—his stylistic innovations brought a new musicality to French poetry and paved the way for free verse and other twentieth-century techniques and experiments. This selection of poems, with the French text en face, provides a comprehensive selection of Verlaine’s verse together with a lucid introduction illuminating his life and works.
Pablo Neruda
Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda
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The atom, a tuna, laziness, love—the everyday elements and essences of human experience glow in the translucent language of Neruda's odes. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote three books of odes during his lifetime. Odas elementales was published in 1954, followed in subsequent years by Nuevas odas elementales and Tercer libro de las odas. Margaret Sayers Peden's selection of odes from all three volumes, printed with the Spanish originals on facing pages, is by far the most extensive yet to appear in English. She vividly conveys the poet's vision of the realities of day-to-day life in her trans-lations, while her brief introduction describes the genesis of the poems.
John Conroy
Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People
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Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People is a riveting book that exposes the potential in each of us for acting unspeakably. John Conroy sits down with torturers from several nations and comes to understand their motivations. His compelling narrative has the tension of a novel. He takes us into a Chicago police station, two villages in the West Bank, and a secret British interrogation center in Northern Ireland, and in the process we are exposed to the experience of the victim, the rationalizations of the torturer, and the seeming indifference of the bystander. The torture occurs in democracies that ostensibly value justice, due process, and human rights, and yet the perpetrators and their superiors escape without punishment, revealing much about the dynamics of torture.
Pablo Neruda
Canto General
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The Canto General, thought by many of Neruda’s most prominent critics to be the poet’s masterpiece, is the stunning epic of an entire continent and its people.
Stephen Walsh
Stravinsky
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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.
Jan Tschichold
The New Typography
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Since its initial publication in Berlin in 1928, Jan Tschichold's The New Typography has been recognized as the definitive treatise on book and graphic design in the machine age. First published in English in 1995, with an excellent introduction by Robin Kinross, this new edition includes a foreword by Rich Hendel, who considers current thinking about Tschichold's life and work.
John Lahr
Prick Up Your Ears
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John Lahr—New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer of his father Bert Lahr (Notes on a Cowardly Lion)—reconstructs both the life and death of Joe Orton in another extraordinary biography that was chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in 1978.
"I have high hopes of dying in my prime," Joe Orton confided to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for fifteen years. Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stagestruck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the Butler Saw.Prick Up Your Ears is a watershed biography; it paved the way for Orton's revival and ensured his rightful place in the English repertoire.
Paul Cartledge
Spartan Reflections
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The complex and distinctive Spartan tradition has been a prominent theme in western thinking from antiquity to today. Sparta is also one of a handful of ancient Greek cities with enough existing evidence for historians to create a realistic social portrait. Over the past quarter-century Paul Cartledge has established himself as the leading international authority on ancient Sparta. Spartan Reflections is a superb collection of his essays—two are published here for the first time, and the rest, often difficult to locate, have been revised and updated for publication in book form. Giving us a real sense of what Sparta was like as a culture, these essays constitute a fascinating introduction to and overview of ancient Spartan history and its reception. This collection, unique in breadth and scope, will be an essential source for anyone interested in this idiosyncratic society.
Cartledge brings us up to date on what is known about the most important and intriguing aspects of Sparta: its military development, questions of gender and sexuality, and the difficult problem of artistic and literary aspects of Sparta. We learn about the institutions that distinguished Sparta from other city-states, including its religion, education process, degree of literacy, secret service, unusual system of servitude, and institutionalized pederasty. Throughout, Cartledge also makes important comparisons with Athens, helping us grasp what is really striking about Sparta.
Cartledge's writing is clear and engaging as he draws from myriad sources both ancient and modern, as well as from political and cultural theory. These essays, together with their magisterial bibliography, demonstrate his remarkable scholarly and intellectual range. Spartan Reflections will be an important source on the most significant issues in Sparta scholarship today as well as a fascinating look at this culture for general readers.
A Selection of the History Book Club
A. A. Long
Stoic Studies
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"Long's discussions enjoy consistently thorough contextualization; psychology cannot be understood without natural philosophy, nor dialectic without ethics, and Long's case studies show both that and how that is the case, in persuasive detail and with enviable clarity. The pieces fall into three subject areas: intellectual and cultural inheritance, ethics, and psychology."—Catherine Atherton, New College, Oxford
"A. A. Long's Stoic Studies does far more than bring together a set of important papers on Stoicism. Read together, the papers in this collection paint two pictures. One is of the author and his broad-minded pursuit of an intellectual 'fascination,' a pursuit carried out with historical and literary rigour as well as considerable philosophical ingenuity. The other is of the Stoic school itself, emerging from a passion for Socratic arguments... It is a long and remarkably rich philosophical history, and Tony Long has done a very great deal to help others feel its fascination."—Brad Inwood, University of Toronto
"Long writes in a lucid, engaging way, even when treating difficult subjects or referring to complex scholarly and philosophical debates. He has a special gift for combining, in thirty pages or so, an illuminating survey of a topic with at least one sustained analysis of a key text or theory. As a result, this collection has a coherence and internal development that makes it comparable with a good monograph."—Christopher Gill, University of Exeter
Dr. Charles Krebs Dr.
The Ecological World View
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This new textbook fills an important niche by offering a lively overview of the principles of ecology for a broad audience including college level science and biology students as well as readers interested in the fundamentals of ecological science. Filled with many vivid examples of topic issues and current events, The Ecological World View develops a basic understanding of how the natural world works and of how humans interact with the planet's natural ecosystems. It briefly and lucidly covers the history of ecology and describes the general approaches of the scientific method, then takes a wide-ranging look at basic principles of population dynamics and applies them to everyday practical problems. Each chapter is devoted to an important environmental story that has been covered in the media in order to illustrate how the science works in real situations.
Reyner Banham
Los Angeles
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Reyner Banham examined the built environment of Los Angeles in a way no architectural historian before him had done, looking with fresh eyes at its manifestations of popular taste and industrial ingenuity, as well as its more traditional modes of residential and commercial building. His construct of "four ecologies" examined the ways Angelenos relate to the beach, the freeways, the flatlands, and the foothills. Banham delighted in this mobile city and identified it as an exemplar of the posturban future. In a spectacular new foreword, architect and scholar Joe Day explores how the structure of Los Angeles, the concept of "ecology," and the relevance of Banham's ideas have changed over the past thirty-five years.
Matthew Spender
From a High Place
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An immigrant from a small Armenian village in eastern Turkey, Arshile Gorky (c. 1900-1948) made his way to the U.S. to become a painter in 1920. Having grown up haunted by memories of his alternately idyllic and terrifying childhood—his family fled the Turks' genocide of Armenians in 1915—he changed his name and created a new identity for himself in America. As an artist, Gorky bridged the generation of the surrealists and that of the abstract expressionists and was a very influential figure among the latter. His work was an inspiration to Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, among others. Matthew Spender illuminates this world as he tells the story of Gorky's life and career.
Barbara Rose
Monochromes
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The first comprehensive study of the modern history of monochrome art, Monochromes traces the development of single-color artwork—painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installations—up to the present. With almost 160 full-color reproductions, this stunning book examines fundamental aesthetic issues raised by the monochrome in a historical context. The authors ask whether the monochrome is the last and most radical phase of abstract painting or instead a point of departure for installations and environments. Among the many artists featured in this book are Alexander Rodchenko, Georgia O'Keeffe, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Robert Irwin, and Isamu Noguchi. The book includes writings on the monochrome by twenty-six artists, from Kasimir Malevich to Warhol, and from Carl Andre, Reinhardt, and Donald Judd to Ben Nicholson, Robert Ryman, and Anish Kapoor. In an engaging essay, Barbara Rose deftly surveys the divergent complex issues raised by the monochrome.
Additional Essays by Gladys Fabre, Christopher K. Ho, and Vincenzo Trione. Edited by Valerie Varas and Paula Rispa
Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus, Bilingual Edition
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Written with astonishing rapidity in two weeks of February 1922, when Rilke was finally completing the Duino Elegies that had occupied him intermittently for a decade, Sonnets to Orpheus is a series of fifty-five brilliant and affirmative songs. It is in a sense a spontaneous creative dividend generated by a larger work. Because the sonnets were written only four years before Rilke's death, they belong properly to his final and philosophic period, and offer a sharp and striking contrast to the less mystical Das Buch der Bilder and Neue Gedichte.
Rainer Maria Rilke was one of Germany's most important poets. His influences include the paintings of the Worpswedders and the French Impressionists, the sculpture of Rodin (to whom he was both friend and secretary), and the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and other symbolists. His poetry is innovative, enigmatic, and entertainingly idiosyncratic. C.F. MacIntyre's translations are both true to the original and poetic in their own right, and in each book he includes an introduction and notes. German text faces the English translation.
Leora Auslander
Cultural Revolutions
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In Cultural Revolutions, Leora Auslander takes a highly original approach to the significance of the political changes wrought by the English Civil War (1642-1651), the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), and the French Revolution (1789-1799). This broadly conceived yet succinct essay advances a new argument: that these three revolutions were not bourgeois in character but were revolutions of culture that led to a transformation of the ways societies could be politicized. Auslander argues that these revolutions conferred new importance upon the symbols of state and upon the cultural components of our everyday lives—the clothes that cover our bodies, the food we eat, and the songs and plays to which we turn for distraction and insight.
Copub: Berg Publishers
Millicent Dillon
You Are Not I
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The famously enigmatic writer-composer Paul Bowles is the subject of Millicent Dillon's unforgettable new book. Her portrait of the chameleonlike artist is much more than an account of Bowles's life, however. It is also a meditation on biography that questions the biographer's role, the subject's credibility, and the very nature of "truth" in the telling of a life.
Millicent Dillon first met Paul Bowles in Tangier in 1977, when she was writing a biography of his wife, the author Jane Bowles, who died in 1973. Dillon returned to Morocco in 1992 to work with Bowles on a book about his own life. In Bowles's book-lined apartment often crowded with visitors, Dillon observes the magnetism the aging artist exerts on anyone who comes into his circle. Bowles talks of his difficult childhood and of his grief over Jane's long illness, of exile, dreams, and madness. He is charming and evasive with Dillon, generous and devious. As the book unfolds, Dillon's own reflections and concerns surface alongside details of Bowles's daily life, his physical condition, his interactions with others. Her portrait of the artist is seen simultaneously with her construction of that portrait, and in a kind of literary legerdemain we are able to observe Dillon on the biographical canvas along with Bowles and his deceased wife.
Author of the international bestseller The Sheltering Sky and numerous other works, as well as an acclaimed composer, Paul Bowles has had an immensely rich creative life. Millicent Dillon seems to have been destined to write this unconventional biography of the artist, and the result is wonderful, disturbing, and strangely compelling, like Paul Bowles himself.
Virgil
The Aeneid of Virgil, 35th Anniversary Edition
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This deluxe edition of Virgil's epic poems, recounting the wanderings of Aeneas and his companions after the fall of Troy, contains an introduction by Allen Mandelbaum and fourteen powerful renderings created by Barry Moser to illustrate this volume.
Richard Fletcher
Moorish Spain
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Beginning in the year 711 and continuing for nearly a thousand years, the Islamic presence survived in Spain, at times flourishing, and at other times dwindling into warring fiefdoms. But the culture and science thereby brought to Spain, including long-buried knowledge from Greece, largely forgotten during Europe’s Dark Ages, was to have an enduring impact on the country as it emerged into the modern era. In this gracefully written history, Richard Fletcher reveals the Moorish culture in all its fascinating disparity and gives us history at its best: here is vivid storytelling by a renowned scholar.
R. W. Connell
The Men and the Boys
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Questions about men and boys have aroused remarkable media attention and public interest in recent years. But what have we learned about masculinity, and where is our thinking on the subject headed? In this important book, R. W. Connell continues his pioneering work by taking the next step in understanding the dynamics of contemporary masculinity: incorporating the international dimension. The first sustained discussion of masculinity and globalization, The Men and the Boys links cutting-edge theory with fascinating case studies to point us toward change—in scholarship and public policy as well as in the lives of individual men.
This powerful book looks at a range of intriguing and controversial subjects, including the question of sex between men, men's bodies and health, education, the prevention of violence, and much more. It includes the voices of many men, both straight and gay, in a series of vivid life histories that include a compelling account of "iron man" Steve Donoghue and many others who describe coming to terms with their sexuality, their childhoods, and their experiences at school and work. As he reveals the price men and boys across cultures pay for patriarchy, Connell makes a persuasive case for men to change their conduct in order to create a more cooperative and peaceful world.
Marina Warner
Joan of Arc
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Joan has a unique role in Western imagination--she is one of the few true female heroes. Marina Warner uses her superb historical and literary skills to move beyond conventional biography and to capture the essence of Joan of Arc, both as she lived in her own time and as she has "grown" in the human imagination over the five centuries since her death. She has examined the court documents from Joan of Arc's 1431 Inquisition trial for heresy and woven the facts together with an analysis of the histories, biographies, plays, and paintings and sculptures that have appeared over time to honor this heroine and symbol of France's nationhood. Warner shows how the few facts that are known about the woman Joan have been shaped to suit the aims of those who have chosen her as their hero. The book places Joan in the context of the mythology of the female hero and takes note of her historical antecedents, both pagan and Christian and the role she has played up to the present as the embodiment of an ideal, whether as Amazon, saint, child of nature, or personification of virtue.
Laura Shapiro
Perfection Salad
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Toasted marshmallows stuffed with raisins? Green-and-white luncheons? Chemistry in the kitchen? This entertaining and erudite social history, now in its fourth paperback edition, tells the remarkable story of America's transformation from a nation of honest appetites into an obedient market for instant mashed potatoes. In Perfection Salad, Laura Shapiro investigates a band of passionate but ladylike reformers at the turn of the twentieth century—including Fannie Farmer of the Boston Cooking School—who were determined to modernize the American diet through a "scientific" approach to cooking. Shapiro's fascinating tale shows why we think the way we do about food today.
Francis P. Farquhar
History of the Sierra Nevada, Revised and Updated
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From the time it was sighted by Spanish explorers in the eighteenth century through the creation of the John Muir trail, the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam, and the founding of the Sierra Club, the great snowy range of California has provided fulfillment to generations of trappers, immigrants, engineers, naturalists, and tourists. Now a mountaineering classic, this pioneering book was the first to synthesize into a single, riveting narrative all of the varied aspects of human endeavor related to the history of the Sierra Nevada. Thoroughly illustrated with photographs, drawings, and maps, the book continues to be indispensable for any lover of the high country.
Joseph Kerman
Opera as Drama
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Passionate, witty, and brilliant, Opera as Drama has been lauded as one of the most controversial, thought-provoking, and entertaining works of operatic criticism ever written. First published in 1956 and revised in 1988, Opera as Drama continues to be indispensable reading for all students and lovers of opera.
J. G. Landels
Engineering in the Ancient World, Revised Edition
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In his classic book, J. G. Landels describes the technological advances of the Greeks and Romans with erudition and enthusiasm. He provides an important introduction to engineering, writing about power and energy sources, water engineering, cranes, and transportation devises. From aqueducts to catapults, he attempts to envision machines as they may have worked in the ancient world. He then traces the path of knowledge taken by early thinkers—including Plato, Pliny, and Archimedes—in developing early theories of engineering and physics.
Judith Kafka Maxwell
Anna Richards Brewster, American Impressionist
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Anna Richards Brewster, American Impressionist is the first in-depth study of an artist whose name is not well-known today but who was one of the most successful women artists of her time. This beautifully illustrated book, catalog to the exhibition of the same name, provides a fascinating look at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century art world as experienced by a woman artist. Anna Richards Brewster (1870-1952) began painting at age ten, studied with William Merritt Chase and John LaFarge, and trained at Académie Julian in Paris. She was a prolific painter of landscapes, portraits, and illustrations who showed her work regularly until the 1930s. In this volume, curator Judith Kafka Maxwell revives Brewster's work while exploring the contradictions common to women like her—those whose professional ambitions were neither supported nor encouraged by institutions or patrons. An introduction by Wanda M. Corn situates the artist in her social and cultural milieu, and essays by art historian Leigh Culver and American historian Kirsten Swinth explore the works themselves, the artist's education, and the post-Civil War rise of women artists. The result is a rich history of an artist and her time that makes vivid the obstacles faced by female artists in the early twentieth century.
Andrew Graham-Dixon
Renaissance
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The Renaissance was one of the great periods of creative and intellectual achievement. This "age of genius," from its origins in the thirteenth century to its zenith in sixteenth-century Rome, produced some of the most fascinating and dynamic artists of all time--Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci. In his adventurous new book, lavishly illustrated with 125 color illustrations, acclaimed art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon takes a fresh look at this most exciting period in art history, challenging many of the myths and misconceptions surrounding the Renaissance.
The Italian scholars who first dreamed of a Renaissance wished to revive the spirit of classical antiquity after the darkness--as they saw it--of the medieval and Byzantine periods. Graham-Dixon argues, however, that the Renaissance represented a culmination rather than a complete rejection of those earlier influences. Starting in the Middle Ages with the impact of the Franciscan movement on painting in Italy, Graham-Dixon's reappraisal of the Renaissance takes us through the key moments of its development, focusing on the major artists and architects of the time: the Early Renaissance in Florence--Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, and Brunelleschi; the Northern Renaissance--Dürer, Cranach, and Brueghel; Venice--Titian, Palladio, and Tintoretto; and the High Renaissance in Rome--Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael.
Renaissance also outlines the historical context of this time of great social as well as artistic change. It reveals the social climate in which these artists worked: the power struggles between the Renaissance rulers of the Italian city-states, the French invasions of Italy, the invention of printing, and the Protestant Reformation. Along with his vivid, highly original, and often extremely entertaining descriptions of the works themselves, Graham-Dixon not only reassesses but also brings to life one of the most glorious periods in history.
Ada Gabucci
Rome
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This pocket-size reference draws on the vast treasures of this ancient civilization to illustrate the remarkable achievements of one of the great empires of the West, from the traditional date of Rome’s founding—754 BCE—until the fall of the Western Empire in 476 CE, the year in which the last emperor, the boy Romulus Augustus, was deposed by the Goths and the imperial insignia was sent to Constantinople. Rome opens with a section on the major personages, such as Romulus and Remus, Pompey, and Constantine; each concise biography is complemented by full-color reproductions of portraits, ivories, coins, and monuments. A section on power and public life includes the grain dole, the army, the city’s archives, and its imperial triumphs. A chapter on religion considers the major gods and cults, “Oriental” rites, and Christianity. The chapter devoted to daily life includes makeup, gambling, and portraiture, and is followed by a section on funerals and the dead. A section on the layout of the city is a must-read for any tourist to Rome. The book includes a map of the ancient city, a chronology, accounts of the major museums, an index, and a bibliography.
Janet McDonald
Project Girl
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Selected by The Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year, Project Girl is the powerful account of a young woman's struggle to realize her dreams while remaining true to who she was before attending Ivy League schools and receiving impressive diplomas. It tells of the spectacular failures and unlikely comebacks of a ghetto kid whose academic talent opens doors onto a world of private schools, rich classmates, and plum jobs but who back home confronts a neighborhood of growing poverty, drug abuse, and crime. Project Girl is McDonald's story of her divided life and terrible battle to reconcile opposing worlds.
Michael Allaby
The Encyclopedia of Earth
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This sumptuously illustrated, beautifully written encyclopedia, the best book available on the topic, presents the most up-to-date information about planet Earth in a style and format that will appeal to an extremely wide range of readers. With thousands of photographs, illustrations, diagrams, and maps and a text written by a team of international experts, it presents an impressive overview of our globe—beginning with the history of the universe and ending with today's conservation issues. A truly spectacular reference, The Encyclopedia of Earth offers new visual interpretations of many ideas, concepts, and facts, painting a fascinating picture of Earth today and across the ages.
The encyclopedia is divided into six sections that are designed for either browsing or in-depth study. Birth gives an overview of Earth's 4.6-billion-year history, including the evolution of life. Fire explains the inner workings of our dynamic planet, its structure, and the tectonic forces that have molded its landscape. Land surveys rocks, minerals, and habitats. Air covers weather, including extreme weather events such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Water tours the oceans, rivers, and lakes of the world. The final section, Humans, provides a compelling portrait of our relationship with Earth, and of how the natural world has shaped social and political developments.
Copub: Weldon Owen Publishing The Encyclopedia of Earth features:
* Some of the world's finest landscape photography and hundreds of detailed illustrations and diagrams, cross sections, cutaways, maps, and charts
* Coverage of topics including volcanology, paleontology, geology, natural history, cosmology, and more
* Simple, easy-to-understand explanations of complex phenomena
* The most recent scientific information and conservation data
* "Fact files" providing information at readers' fingertips
* "Heritage Watch" boxes focusing on key conservation issues and World Heritage sites
Colbert E. Cushing
River and Stream Ecosystems of the World
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Rivers and streams around the world that once flowed wild and unchecked are rapidly disappearing into dams or being channelized between concrete banks. This valuable sourcebook, now available to a wide audience in a paperback edition, is an important comparative documentation of what is being lost: naturally flowing river and stream ecosystems. No other single volume brings together so much critical information on rivers and streams worldwide. Each chapter is packed with a wealth of raw data on waterways including the prominent rivers of North America, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Oceania. The volume evaluates the usefulness of the River Continuum Concept and ecosystem-level measurements for evaluating the structure and function of rivers and streams. The new introductory chapter examines the relevance of other useful concepts including Nutrient Spiraling, Patch Dynamics, the Flood Pulse Concept, the Network Dynamics Hypothesis, and the Hyporheic Corridor Concept.
Daniel Rothenberg
With These Hands
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With These Hands documents the farm labor system through the presentation of a collection of voices—workers who labor in the fields, growers who manage the multi-billion dollar agricultural industry, contractors who link workers with growers, coyotes who smuggle people across the border, union organizers, lobbyists, physicians, workers' families in Mexico, farmworker children and others. The diversity of stories presents the world of migrant farmworkers as a complex social and economic system, a network of intertwined lives, showing how all Americans are bound to the struggles and contributions of our nation's farm laborers.
Angela McDonald
Write Your Own Egyptian Hieroglyphs
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The Egyptian hieroglyphic script is one of the most beautiful, fascinating, and expressive writing systems ever invented. In Ancient Egypt, only an elite few could read and write hieroglyphs, but now you too can recognize and write a selection of names, titles, descriptions, sayings, greetings—even insults! For the ancient Egyptians, nothing could exist without a name—names held the spark of life. In this colorful illustrated guide, Angela McDonald explains how the Egyptians composed names for the elements of their world and along the way opens a fascinating window on their ancient culture—their gods, enemies, animals, and more. With practical guides and a lively, informative text, she shows how to create many charming and useful phrases in hieroglyphs for yourself, your friends, your pets—even your house. There are step-by-step tips on how to draw some of the trickier signs and a collection of genuine Egyptian phrases—greetings, laments, and insults—for use in your own compositions. In the words of one Egyptian papyrus, "By day write with your fingers, recite by night. Befriend the scroll and the palette—it's more fulfilling than wine!"
Copub: British Museum Press
Jeff Kelley
Childsplay
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Allan Kaprow has been described as an avant-garde revolutionary, a radical sociologist, a Zen(ish) monk, a progressive educator, and an anti-art theorist. But, above all, as this book reminds us, he has been an influential artist. Known for his "Happenings," Kaprow created vanguard performances in the early 1960s in which he collaged various art forms (painting, music, dance), disguised as ordinary things (newspaper, noise, body movement), into quasi-theatrical events. In the decades since, his works have remained open to the changing character of contemporary experience, always seeking the thresholds at which art and life converge. Because this art places such emphasis on direct experience, some people today think Kaprow's works were primarily transitory and immaterial. Childsplay corrects that misconception by providing a vivid description of Kaprow's Happenings and other art activities, clarifying their materiality, duration, and setting, as well as the ways in which people participated in them. Jeff Kelley brings the artist, his era, and his work to life by showing that Kaprow's artworks were physically present, socially engaged, and intellectually resonant in the moment of their enactment.
Dorothee E. Kocks
Dream a Little
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In this innovative and exciting synthesis of historical analysis, literary criticism, and personal essay, Dorothee E. Kocks explores the links between place and political ideals in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the iconography of the American West. Dream a Little explores the American tradition of using the land to reveal and elaborate our dreams for social justice.
Writing with a novelist's sensitivity toward language, Kocks explores the idea that Americans have historically looked to the land for answers to society's problems. To illustrate this point, she shows that the frontier state with its homestead program was actually the predecessor of the modern welfare state. Instead of money, the federal government gave away land. Kocks shows how we have "forgotten" the politics and history behind this giveaway and unravels the significance of this forgetting for our national consciousness.
In the second half of the book, Kocks journeys into three symbolic landscapes: the West, the family farm, and the small community. She looks at these landscapes through the eyes of writers Mari Sandoz and Josephine Johnson, and civil rights activist Ella Baker. Interweaving her own life experiences in this analysis, she traces the relationship between geography and democracy, and of the hopes we attach to the West.
George McKay
The Encyclopedia of Animals
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The Encyclopedia of Animals is a lavishly illustrated, authoritative, and comprehensive exploration of the rich and intriguing world of animals. Written by an international team of specialists, spectacularly adorned with a gallery of more than 2,000 color illustrations, and supplemented with distribution maps, detailed and beautifully rendered diagrams, and some of the world's finest wildlife photographs, this volume will become the standard by which all others are measured. Each page is expertly laid out to enhance either browsing or in-depth study. Readers will find detailed coverage of all sorts of animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, and invertebrates.
The Encyclopedia includes an introductory overview of animal evolution, biology, behavior, classification, habitats, and current conservation issues. An extensive encyclopedic survey of the animals follows, with special attention given to endangered and vulnerable species. All information is completely up-to-date, with the most recent scientific and conservation data.
Elegant graphics put a broad selection of information at readers' fingertips, including classification information, scientific and common names, distribution maps for all animal groups, conservation panels that focus on threatened species, accurate and detailed anatomical drawings, and illustrations of multiple species. Each section is color coded for easy identification of animal groups. Feature pages explore topics of particular interest and provide insights into animal behavior. With its expansive scope, richly detailed information, and inviting design, this will be the ideal reference for a broad range of uses.
* Completely up-to-date, with the most recent scientific information and conservation data
* A gallery of more than 2,000 illustrations
* Authoritative text contributed by a team of international specialists
* Lavish color photographs from leading wildlife photographers
* Distribution maps for all animal groups
* Detailed explanatory scientific diagrams
* Feature pages exploring topics of particular interest and providing insights into animal behavior
James Halliday
Wine Atlas of Australia
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Written by one of the most respected wine critics in the world, this book is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to the wine-growing regions of Australia. With his usual wit and erudition, James Halliday introduces the reader to each area with an informative overview of its distinguishing features and history, as well as the wine styles and individual wines for which that region is known. He includes contact details for many of the regions' wineries, along with profiles of the wineries' styles and signature labels. Superbly produced with more than 90 color maps and hundreds of illuminating color photos throughout, this user-friendly atlas provides everyone from the devoted connoisseur to the armchair enthusiast with a thorough understanding of why Australia is rapidly becoming one of the world's top wine regions.
Australian wines are known not only for their quality but also for their unequalled, rainbowlike spectrum of styles. With a career that spans over forty years, the author is a consummate authority on every aspect of the wine industry, from the planting and pruning of vines through the creation and marketing of the finished product. His passion for his subject is evident and his insights brilliantly demonstrate how variety, climate, terroir, and technology have combined to produce superb wines that are just beginning to make their mark on the world.
Copub: Hardie Grant Books
