Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
Neruda was a kind of King Midas. Everything he touched turned to poetry, says Gabriel García Márquez, who also considers the Chilean Nobel laureate "the greatest poet of the twentieth century, in any language." [The Fragrance of Guava, 1983]. 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. The Canto speaks of the destiny of Latin American peoples and the life of the poet himself. Without question, this is one of the most important and powerful long poems written in the modern period.
Ernest J. Finney
Words of My Roaring
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Set in a small town south of San Francisco during World War II, Words of My Roaring is a compelling picture of the confusions, the dislocations, and the brutality of war as they affect the home front. The novel recreates a neighborhood in San Bruno and connects it to San Francisco and the larger stage of the war. Tanforan racetrack, first an assembly camp for Japanese Americans awaiting internment, becomes a naval training base for Pacific-bound recruits. The elementary school becomes a USO, and air-raid drills and blackouts are routine as California prepares for an expected Japanese invasion. We see these events through the eyes of a novice teacher, an abandoned boy, two young girls whose mother works in the shipyards and whose father enlists in the Army, and a sailor scarred by his months in the war zone. Words of My Roaring is a richly textured, emotionally charged novel about the unlikely sources of human redemption.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies
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Begun in 1912 at the castle of Duino near Trieste, these ten Elegies were finally completed, after a decade of sporadic and protracted creation, at the Château Muzot in the Swiss Valais. Rilke considered them his greatest achievement, and, as MacIntyre suggests, they are "among the great and unforgettable poetry of the world."
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.
Benjamin R. Barber
Strong Democracy
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Since its appearance twenty years ago, Benjamin R. Barber's Strong Democracy has been one of the primary standards against which political science thinking and writing is measured. Defined as the participation of all of the people in at least some aspects of self-government at least some of the time, Strong Democracy offers liberal society a new way of thinking about and of practicing democracy. Contrary to the commonly held view that an excess of democracy can undo liberal institutions, Barber argues that an excess of liberalism has undermined our democratic institutions and brought about the set of crises we still find ourselves struggling against: cynicism about voting, alienation, privatization, and the growing paralysis of public institutions. In a new preface Barber looks at the past twenty years and restates his argument, which seems, sadly, more pressing than ever.
James E. Packer
The Forum of Trajan in Rome
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This abridged edition of the magisterial three-volume The Forum of Trajan in Rome makes this definitive study of the acknowledged showplace of imperial Rome available to a wide audience. Published without the scholarly apparatus of the original edition, the paperback version nonetheless presents a complete history of the Forum, its construction, use in antiquity, destruction, and later fortunes. James E. Packer's comprehensive examination also summarizes the archaeological investigations on the site and reviews the nine major restoration studies of the Basilica Ulpia undertaken by scholars of the last 176 years, focusing on the architecture of the Forum. Beautifully and extensively illustrated with both color drawings and black-and-white photographs, this book will be the authoritative guide to the site.
The Forum of Trajan has suffered a harsh fate. During the earthquakes of a.d. 810 and 847, its buildings collapsed. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the site was quarried for its marble, travertine, and peperino. Packer's book is the first to present information from the systematic excavations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the buildings still interred, unpublished documents and drawings, representations on coins, and those chance finds reported in the past provide much new information. For the fully excavated East Colonnade and Hemicycle, the West Library, and the Basilica Ulpia, accurate restorations are now feasible. By determining the precise ancient appearance of the excavated buildings, these reconstructions establish, as much as possible, the essential architectural texts for all further study of the site.
An afterword discusses changes made to the reconstructions of the Forum's buildings offered in the original text and figures. The result of work on two computer models of the restored architecture of the site (1997, 1999, 2000), these revised reconstructions appear in thirteen new color figures. The other 158 in-text illustrations document the visible ruins, the excavations, and the earlier reconstructions.
Sherry B. Ortner
The Fate of Culture
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Clifford Geertz is one of the foremost figures in the reconfiguration of the boundary between the social sciences and the humanities in the second half of the twentieth century. Expanding the power and complexity of the anthropological concept of culture, his work is both foundational to, and in critical counterpoint with, that vast interdisciplinary spectrum of scholarship known today as "cultural studies." This book brings together seven leading scholars from four disciplines to take a fresh look at Geertz's work, and to consider the continuing implications of his work in the contemporary context.
Framed by an important introduction by anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner, the articles cover such topics as seventeenth-century English ghosts, Jewish merchants in early capitalism, Egyptian women in the age of television, and the role of Sherpas in Himalayan mountaineering, as well as such methodological issues as the place of emotional empathy and "complicity" in ethnographic fieldwork, and the mutual illumination of culture and history.
Linda Dahl
Morning Glory
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Mary Lou Williams—pianist, arranger, composer, and probably the most influential woman in the history of jazz—receives the attention she has long deserved in this definitive biography.
Sophie Lévy
A Transatlantic Avant-Garde
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This landmark book is the first to capture the diversity of American artistic production of the interwar period in Paris. Assembling works from American and European collections to illustrate the presence of American artists at the heart of numerous avant-garde movements, including Purism, geometric abstraction, and surrealism, A Transatlantic Avant-Garde chronicles an uncertain time of transition when many American artists resisted the nationalist trends of Stieglitz and his circle and flooded the French capital seeking artistic exchange.
Abundantly illustrated, this book includes over 200 color reproductions of artwork by both American artists and those European artists with whom they came in contact, including Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Albert Eugene Gallatin, Jean Hélion, and Fernand Léger, as well as those from the surrealist circles, such as Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. It also includes portraits of the illustrious characters by Berenice Abbott, Lee Miller, and Edward Steichen.
This book reflects the transatlantic dialogue of the era by bringing together groundbreaking research in eight essays by both American and French authors. It is further enriched by a detailed chronology, bibliography, and illustrated insets that trace the incessant travel, encounters and ensuing friendships, exhibitions and publications of the American avant-garde.
A Transatlantic Avant-Garde: American Artists in Paris, 1918-1939 accompanies a major traveling exhibition organized by the Musée d'Art Américain Giverny.
David Harvey
Spaces of Hope
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As the twentieth century drew to a close, the rich were getting richer; power was concentrating within huge corporations; vast tracts of the earth were being laid waste; three quarters of the earth's population had no control over its destiny and no claim to basic rights. There was nothing new in this. What was new was the virtual absence of any political will to do anything about it. Spaces of Hope takes issue with this.
David Harvey brings an exciting perspective to two of the principal themes of contemporary social discourse: globalization and the body. Exploring the uneven geographical development of late-twentieth-century capitalism, and placing the working body in relation to this new geography, he finds in Marx's writings a wealth of relevant analysis and theoretical insight. In order to make much-needed changes, Harvey maintains, we need to become the architects of a different living and working environment and to learn to bridge the micro-scale of the body and the personal and the macro-scale of global political economy.
Utopian movements have for centuries tried to construct a just society. Harvey looks at their history to ask why they failed and what the ideas behind them might still have to offer. His devastating description of the existing urban environment (Baltimore is his case study) fuels his argument that we can and must use the force of utopian imagining against all who say "there is no alternative." He outlines a new kind of utopian thought, which he calls dialectical utopianism, and refocuses our attention on possible designs for a more equitable world of work and living with nature. If any political ideology or plan is to work, he argues, it must take account of our human qualities. Finally, Harvey dares to sketch a very personal utopian vision in an appendix, one that leaves no doubt about his own geography of hope.
Eileen Chang
The Rouge of the North
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The Rouge of the North is the story of Yindi, a beautiful young bride who marries the blind, bedridden son of a rich and noble family. Captive to household ritual, to the strategies and contempt of her sisters-in-law, and to the exacting dictates of her husband's mother, Yindi is pressed beneath the weight of an existence that offers no hope of change. Dramatic events in the outside world fail to make their way into this insular society. Chang's brilliant portrayal of the slow suffocation of passion, moral strength, and physical vitality—together with her masterful evocation of the sights, smells, and sounds of daily existence—make The Rouge of the North a remarkable chronicle of a vanished way of life.
Gene Brucker
Florence
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Over the centuries many thousands of visitors have journeyed to Florence to admire the city's great beauty and to marvel at its unique history. In this century Gene Brucker has been one of the city's most knowledgeable admirers. With the historian's ability to uncover the past, he skillfully relates the story of Florence's Golden Age and the conjoined forces that transformed the city on the Arno into one of the most glorious civilizations the world has known. Brucker's story of the premier city of the Italian Renaissance tells of great families and common people, wars and economic dislocations, natural catastrophes and religious turmoil, and extraordinary artistic and literary achievement.
The creative growth of the city of Dante, Giotto, Brunelleschi, and Michelangelo was made possible through Florence's role as an economic center, the zeal of its small manufacturing industries, and the enterprise of the merchants who spread Florentine influence well beyond the city's walls and territories. The pages of Florence are enlivened with the voices of historical protagonists, and their words richly convey the tenor of the times. Brucker's accessible writing is complimented by a wealth of paintings and drawings, 200 of them in full color. Also included are a chronology of important historical events, a listing of noted Florentine families, and a genealogy of the famed Medici family. Historians and students will find much of value here; so too will anyone who is in love with—or who plans to fall in love with—the shining city of Florence.
John Richardson
The Annals of London
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One of the world's greatest cities, the vast metropolis of twentieth-century London began in ad 43 when Aulius Plautius led the second invasion from Richborough to defeat the local army on the banks of the Thames. The victors then created a Roman settlement and established themselves on the river. They developed the city with a southern defense work (Southwark), and the settlement prospered as the preeminent trading base linking Britain to Europe and the Near East. The city's expansion through the invasions of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings serves as a background for the first of the almanac entries, 1065, which sees the consecration of Edward the Confessor's Abbey at Westminster, shortly before the king's own burial in his new church.
The first appearance and gradual evolution of roads, buildings, and landmarks is set in the context of the ebb and flow of history through the capital's streets and rivers: from the local (the 1665 outbreak of plague, where the healthy were incarcerated with the sick to avoid further infection, and the spread of the great fire that decimated much of the city the following year) to the politically significant (the execution of the king in 1649 outside Inigo Jones's banqueting house, whose building in 1619 is also described).
The sweep of this book is vast and its detail magnificent. Disasters, innovations, and everyday events relating to politics, society, pageantry, the arts, religion, and industry are revealed to display the wide spectrum of London life. Year by year, from 1065 to the present day, events that have shaped the London we know are brought vividly to life by John Richardson's informative text, which is supported by an extraordinary and eclectic collection of historical illustrations.
Phyllis M. Faber
Californias Wild Gardens
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California's Wild Gardens showcases the splendid abundance of California's native plants in their natural settings—from foggy rain forests and rolling grasslands to high alpine meadows and parched deserts. The book offers a close-up look at more than one hundred special sites in the state, highlighting their distinctive ecology, the rare and unique plants found in them, and some of their more familiar botanical treasures. With its spectacular color photographs and lively writing by some of California's best biologists and ecologists, California's Wild Gardens is the perfect introduction to the state's remarkable botanical diversity. Like the best travel guides, it will inspire its readers to further explore California's natural heritage. In addition to illuminating California's botanical bounty, this book discusses threats facing the state's flora and describes protection efforts now under way.
Kevin Starr
Rooted in Barbarous Soil
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Perhaps never in the time-honored American tradition of frontiering did "civilization" appear to sink so low as in gold rush California. A mercurial economy swung from boom to bust, and back again, rendering everyone's fortunes ephemeral. Competition, jealousy, and racism fueled individual and mass violence. Yet, in the very midst of this turbulence, social and cultural forms emerged, gained strength, spread, and took hold. Rooted in Barbarous Soil,Volume 3 in the four-volume California History Sesquicentennial Series, is the only book of its kind to examine gold rush society and culture, to present modern interpretations, and to gather up-to-date bibliographies of its topics.
Chapters by leading scholars in their respective fields explore a range of topics including migration and settlement; ethnic diversity, assimilation, cooperation, and conflict; the dispossession of Indians and the Californios; the founding of schools and universities; urban life; women in early California; the sexual frontier; and the development of religion, art, literature, and popular culture. Many rarely seen illustrations supplement the text.
John Donne
John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels
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The glory of John Donne's prose at its best is very different from that of his verse, but is equal to it; and there can be no question that his best prose is in his sermons. His sense of form and arrangement, his psychological insight, his differences of mood and emphasis, and his religious fervor will make this selection of ten sermons particularly interesting to the attentive reader familiar with Donne's poetry.
David Rudenstine
The Day the Presses Stopped
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This bold account provides an original perspective on one of the most significant legal struggles in American history: the Nixon administration's efforts to prohibit the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing the 7,000-page, top-secret Pentagon Papers, which traced U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In his gripping account of this highly charged case, Rudenstine examines new evidence, raises difficult questions, and challenges conventional views of a historic moment.
Stephen Walsh
Stravinsky
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Widely regarded as the greatest composer of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky was central to the development of modernism in art, yet no dependable biography of him exists. Previous studies have drawn too heavily from his own unreliable memoirs and conversations, and until now no biographer has possessed both the musical knowledge to evaluate his art and the linguistic proficiency needed to explore the documentary background of his life--a life whose span extended from tsarist Russia to Switzerland, France, and ultimately the United States.
In this revealing volume, the first of two, Stephen Walsh follows Stravinsky from his birth in 1882 to 1934. He traces the composer's early Russian years, laying bare the complicated relationships within his family and showing how he first displayed his extraordinary talents. Stravinsky's brilliantly creative involvement with the Ballets Russes is illuminated by a sharp sense of the internal artistic politics that animated the group. Portraying Stravinsky's circumstances as an emigré in France trying to make his living as a conductor and pianist as well as a composer, Walsh reveals the true roots of his notorious obsession with money. He also describes the nature of his long affair with Vera Sudeykina.
While always respecting Stravinsky's own insistence that life and art be kept distinct, Stravinsky makes clear precisely how the development of his music was connected to his life and to the intellectual environment in which he found himself. But at the same time it demonstrates the composer's remarkably pragmatic psychology, which led him to consider the welfare of his art to be of paramount importance, before which everything else had to give way. Walsh, long established as an expert on Stravinsky's music, has drawn upon a vast array of material, much of it unpublished or unavailable in English, to bring the man himself, in all his color and genius, to glowing life.
Elizabeth Hallam
The British Inheritance
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Britain's 1000-year prominence on the international stage endures. Posterity owes the English language (spoken now by more than half the world's population) a tradition of democratic freedom, governmental and legal systems which have been adapted in many countries, and world figures in science, literature, and the arts. The "British Inheritance" is shared not just by the peoples of the UK but also by those of many lands--the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and India--which were once its colonies and are now its allies and partners.
Britain's rich historical heritage is evident in the great archive and manuscript collections found in such institutions as the Public Record Office, British Library, National Library of Scotland, Scottish Record Office, and National Library of Wales. From King Arthur, Alfred the Great, and William the Conqueror to the end of the Empire, swinging England of the 1960s, and the multicultural Britain of the '90s, this volume displays, in chronological order, key documents which illuminate defining moments in British history. The documents are accompanied by lively commentaries by experts and curators, placing the material in context and explaining its significance. Alongside such major treasures as the Domesday Book and Magna Carta are many less-well-known but nonetheless fascinating items such as Oscar Wilde's calling card and the last letter of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Superbly illustrated in color throughout, with a brief introduction, this authoritative and accessible book will appeal to anyone with an interest in history, politics, and culture.
Katsuichi Honda
Harukor
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In this engaging tale, Honda Katsuichi reconstructs the life of an Ainu woman living on the northern island of Japan over five hundred years ago. Harukor's story, created from surviving oral accounts of Ainu life and culture as well as extensive scholarly research, is set in the centuries before the mainland Japanese nearly destroyed the way of life depicted here.
In the first person, the fictional Harukor tells us of her childhood, her adolescence, and her motherhood, drawing on tales and songs performed by her grandmother and other bards. She describes festivals, weddings, childbirth and midwifery, traditional healing methods, battles, and funerals in detail. Her story is followed by the adventures of her oldest son, Pasekur, which end by foreshadowing an early Ainu rebellion against Japanese encroachment.
Amply illustrated and prefaced by an extensive introduction to Ainu history, the natural surroundings, and the sources used to construct Harukor and her world, this volume is a unique portrait of Ainu gods and humans, of matters sacred and mundane, and of the distinctive Ainu respect for nature's bounty.
William H. Brewer
Up and Down California in 1860–1864
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In 1860 William Brewer, a young Yale-educated teacher of the natural sciences and a recent widower, eagerly accepted an offer from Josiah Whitney to assist in the first geological survey of the state of California. Brewer was not a geologist, but his training in agriculture and botany made him an invaluable member of the team. He traveled more than fourteen thousand miles in the four years he spent in California and spent much of his leisure time writing lively, detailed letters to his brother back East.
These warmly affectionate letters, presented here in their entirety, describe the new state in all its spectacular beauty and paint a vivid picture of California in the mid-nineteenth century. This fourth edition includes a new foreword by William Bright (1500 California Place Names) and a set of maps tracing Brewer's route.
Susan Eckstein
Power and Popular Protest
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Eclectic and insightful, these essays—by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists—represent a range of subjects on the cause and consequence of protest movements in Latin America, from an examination of the varying faces but common origins of rural guerilla movements, to a discussion of multiclass protests, to an essay on las madres de plaza de mayo. This volume is an indispensable text for anyone concerned with reducing inequities and injustices around the world, so that oppressed people need not be defiant before their concerns are addressed. A new preface and epilogue discuss recent social movements.
David J. Garrow
Liberty and Sexuality
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Liberty and Sexuality is a definitive account of the legal and political struggles that created the right to privacy and won constitutional protection for a woman's right to choose abortion.
Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established that right, grew out of not only efforts to legalize abortion but also out of earlier battles against statutes that criminalized birth control. When the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, voided such a prohibition as an outrageous intrusion upon marital privacy, it opened a previously unimagined constitutional door: the opportunity to argue that a woman's access to a safe, legal abortion was also a fundamental constitutional right.
Garrow's essential history details both the unheralded contributions of the young lawyers who filed America's first abortion rights cases and also the inside-the-Supreme Court deliberations that produced Roe v. Wade.
In this updated and expanded paperback edition, Garrow also traces the post-Roe evolution of abortion rights battles and the wider struggle for sexual privacy up through the 25th anniversary of Roe in early 1998.
Bud Schultz
The Price of Dissent
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Bud and Ruth Schultz's vivid oral history presents the extraordinary testimony of people who experienced government repression and persecution firsthand. Drawn from three of the most significant social movements of our time--the labor, Black freedom, and antiwar movements--these engrossing interviews bring to life the experiences of Americans who acted upon their beliefs despite the price they paid for their dissent. In doing so, they--and the movements they were part of--helped shape the political and social landscape of the United States from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century.
The majority of the voices in this book belong to everyday people--workers, priests, teachers, students--but more well-known figures such as Congressman John Lewis, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Abbie Hoffman, and Daniel Ellsberg are also included. There are firsthand accounts by leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, active early in the century; Southern Tenant Farmers Union of the 1930s; Women's Strike for Peace, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of the 1950s and 1960s; and the Hormel meatpackers' Local P-9 in the 1980s. Lively introductions by the authors contextualize these personal statements.
Those who tell their stories in The Price of Dissent, and others like them, faced surveillance and disruption from police agencies, such as the FBI; brutalization by local police; local ordinances and court injunctions limiting protest; inquisitions into beliefs and associations by congressional committees; prosecution under laws that curbed dissent; denaturalization and deportation; and purges under government loyalty programs. Agree with them or not, by dissenting when it was unpopular or dangerous to do so, they insisted on exercising the precious American right of free expression and preserved it for a new century's dissenters.
Roger Nichols
The Harlequin Years
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Few decades in the life of any European city have been as rich in musical personalities and achievements as the 1920s in Paris. It was, as Stravinsky said, the hub of the musical world, popular for travelers because it was cheap. Composers working in or near the city included Ravel, Fauré, Satie, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev as well as the up-and-coming members of Les Six, most notably Poulenc, Milhaud, and Auric. Among their collaborators were the painters Picasso, Braque, Dufy, and Juan Gris, while Jean Cocteau kept a watchful eye on new trends. Horowitz, Robert Casadesus, and Vlado Perlemuter all made their Paris debuts in this decade, as did the young violin prodigies Ginette Neveu and Yehudi Menuhin. Women musicians were coming into their own: the composers Germaine Tailleferre and Lili Boulanger, salon hostesses like the Princesse de Polignac and Mae Clemenceau. The Harlequin Years charts a nimble course through this remarkable era, noting currents as well as personalities, telling stories as well as pondering the occasional philosophical problem.
Through the whole book runs the double thread spun by Jean Cocteau in his little volume Le coq et l'harlequin: the warp of the traditional French cock being pulled by the weft of the foreign, multicolored harlequinade. Roger Nichols's spirited narrative shows that this was also an uncertain time, as the war had cast doubt on old assumptions. Did wisdom necessarily come with age? Were hierarchies necessary? Irreverence was in, the circus was aesthetically at least as valuable as the finest symphony orchestra. Against all this some composers, like Fauré and Roussel, continued with traditional forms, though each brought to them his own highly personal language and syntax.
Anne Hollander
Feeding the Eye
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Since the advent of cinema, visual art has tended to be perceived as if it were in motion. Artists now create less often in fresco or carved stone and more on film and tape, on the dance stage, or in the ever changing, ever moving medium of clothes. In this remarkable collection, Anne Hollander ranges over art of the twentieth and other centuries with unusual depth of historical insight to explore these rich, diverse visual treasures and the underlying themes that connect them.
Richard J. Powell
Rhapsodies in Black
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Harlem has captivated the imagination of writers, artists, intellectuals, and politicians around the world since the early decades of this century. Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance examines the cultural reawakening of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s as a key moment in twentieth-century art history, one that transcended regional and racial boundaries. Published to coincide with the exhibition that opens in England and travels to the United States, this catalog reflects the Harlem Renaissance's impressive range of art forms—literature, music, dance, theater, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and graphic design. The participants included not only artists based in New York, but also those from other parts of the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe.
Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey present selected works that focus on six themes: Representing "The New Negro;" Another Modernism; Blues, Jazz, and the Performative Paradigm; The Cult of the Primitive; Africa: Inheritance and Seizure; and Jacob Lawrence's Toussaint L'Ouverture series. The visual arts from 1919 to 1938 included in the book suggest the extraordinary vibrancy of the time when Harlem was a metaphor for modernity. In spite of the importance of the Harlem Renaissance to early twentieth-century American culture and to the artistic climate of "Jazz Age" Paris and Weimar Berlin, few art exhibitions have been devoted exclusively to the subject. Rhapsodies in Black will be welcomed for its unique presentation of this creative time.
Roland Barthes
The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
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In this appealing and luminous collection of essays, Roland Barthes examines the mundane and exposes hidden texts, causing the reader to look afresh at the famous landmark and symbol of Paris, and also at the Tour de France, the visit to Paris of Billy Graham, the flooding of the Seine—and other shared events and aspects of everyday experience.
Steven Watson
Prepare for Saints
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Perhaps the oddest and most influential collaboration in the history of American modernism was hatched in 1926, when a young Virgil Thomson knocked on Gertrude Stein's door in Paris. Eight years later, their opera Four Saints in Three Acts became a sensation--the longest-running opera in Broadway history to date and the most widely reported cultural event of its time. Prepare for Saints is Steven Watson's brilliant and absorbing account of how that revolutionary opera was born.
David Hancocks
A Different Nature
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Humanity has had an enduring desire for close contact with exotic animals—from the Egyptian kings who kept thousands of animals, including monkeys, wild cats, hyenas, giraffes, and oryx, to the enormously popular zoological parks of today. This book, the most extensive history of zoos yet published, is a fascinating look at the origins, evolution, and—most importantly—the future of zoos.
David Hancocks, an architect and zoo director for thirty years, is passionately opposed to the poor standards that have prevailed and still exist in many zoos. He reviews the history of zoos in light of their failures and successes and points the way toward a more humane approach, one that will benefit both the animals and the humans who visit them. This book, replete with illustrations and full of moving stories about wild animals in captivity, shows that we have only just begun to realize zoos' enormous potential for good.
Hancocks singles out and discusses the better zoos, exploring such places as the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, the Bronx Zoo with its dedication to worldwide conservation programs, Emmen Zoo in Holland with its astonishingly diverse education programs, Wildscreen in England, and Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo, where the concept of "landscape immersion"—exhibits that surround people and animals in carefully replicated natural habitats—was pioneered.
Calling for us to reinvent zoos, Hancocks advocates the creation of a new type of institution: one that reveals the interconnections among all living things and celebrates their beauty, inspires us to develop greater compassion for wild animals great and small, and elicits our support for preserving their wild habitats.
Alan Lomax
Mister Jelly Roll
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When it appeared in 1950, this biography of Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton became an instant classic of jazz literature. Now back in print and updated with a new afterword by Lawrence Gushee, Mister Jelly Roll will enchant a new generation of readers with the fascinating story of one of the world's most influential composers of jazz. Jelly Roll's voice spins out his life in something close to song, each sentence rich with the sound and atmosphere of the period in which Morton, and jazz, exploded on the American and international scene. This edition includes scores of Jelly Roll's own arrangements, a discography and an updated bibliography, a chronology of his compositions, a new genealogical tree of Jelly Roll's forebears, and Alan Lomax's preface from the hard-to-find 1993 edition of this classic work. Lawrence Gushee's afterword provides new factual information and reasserts the importance of this work of African American biography to the study of jazz and American culture.
Anselm Jappe
Guy Debord
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This is the first serious intellectual biography of Guy Debord, prime mover of the Situationist International (1957-1972) and author of The Society of the Spectacle, perhaps the seminal book of May 1968 in France. Anselm Jappe rejects recent attempts to set Debord up as a "postmodern" icon, arguing that he was a social theorist in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition—not a precursor of Jean Baudrillard but an heir of the young Georg Lukács of History and Class Consciousness (1923). Neither hagiographical nor sectarian, Guy Debord places its subject squarely in his historical context: the politicizing Letterist and Situationist "anti-artists" who, in the European aftermath of World War II, sought to criticize and transcend the Surrealist legacy. The book offers a lively, critical, and unusually reliable account of Debord's "last avant-garde" on its way from radical bohemianism to revolutionary theory. Jappe also discusses Debord's films, which are largely inaccessible at present. This English language edition of the book has been revised by the author and features an updated critical bibliography of Debord and the Situationists.
Frederic Wakeman Jr.
The Great Enterprise, Volume 2
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In classical Chinese, The Great Enterprise means winning The Mandate of heaven to rule over China, the Central Kingdom.
This second volume of a two-volume work on The Great Enterprise of the Manchus is the first scholarly narrative in any language relating their conquest of China during the seventeenth century.
(This book was originally published as a boxed two-volume set. It is now available as separate volumes with plain hardcover. The page numbering continues from the first volume to the second.)
Gerald Nachman
Raised on Radio
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In the late 1920s radio exploded almost overnight into being America's dominant entertainment, just as television would do twenty-five years later. Gerald Nachman, himself a product of the radio years, takes us back to the heyday of radio, bringing to life the great performers and shows, as well as the not-so-great and not-great-at-all. Nachman analyzes the many genres that radio exploited or invented, from the soap opera to the sitcom to the quiz show, zooming in to study closely key performers like Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Fred Allen. Raised onRadio is a generous, instructive, and sinfully readable salute to an extraordinary American phenomenon.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics
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TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, UPDATED AND EXPANDED
When Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics was published twenty years ago, it became an instant classic—a beautifully written study tracing the social disintegration of "Ballybran," a small village on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. In this richly detailed and sympathetic book, Nancy Scheper-Hughes explores the symptoms of the community's decline: emigration, malaise, unwanted celibacy, damaging patterns of childrearing, fear of intimacy, suicide, and schizophrenia. Following a recent return to "Ballybran," Scheper-Hughes reflects in a new preface and epilogue on the well-being of the community and on her attempts to reconcile her responsibility to honest ethnography with respect for the people who shared their homes and their secrets with her.
Marybeth Hamilton
When I'm Bad, I'm Better
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In a world of trendsetting film icons, few are more familiar than Mae West. Yet for all her public controversy, West is also a mystery. Marybeth Hamilton combines elements of biography, cultural analysis, and social history to unmask West and reveal her commercial savvy, willpower, and truly shocking theatrical transgressions.
Stephane Mallarme
Selected Poems of Mallarme, Bilingual edition
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The leading poet of French symbolism, Stéphane Mallarmé has exercised an enormous influence both on French and on English and American avant-garde writers. In this volume C. F. MacIntyre has translated forty-three of his poems, including the "Ouverture" and "Scène" from Hérodiade, which was to have been a drama in verse, and the well-known L'Après-midi d'un faune, for which Debussy composed his orchestral prelude. The French text faces the English translations, which are both true to the original and poetic.
Indeed, as MacIntyre suggests, Debussy is probably "one of the best guides into the mysterious realm of Mallarmé." The poet was more concerned with the music of words, their sounds and vague associations, than with their conventional meanings; one of the elements in his credo was that suggestion and evocation are of greater significance than statement. His syntax is fractious, his meaning frequently enigmatic; but the reader will find MacIntyre's notes helpful in savoring the translations and the original French verses.
Alexander Saxton
Bright Web in the Darkness
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Set in the San Francisco Bay area during World War II, Bright Web in the Darkness is a novel that illuminates the role of women workers during the war and the efforts of African Americans to achieve regular standing as union members. The central characters are two young women—one black, one white—who meet in a welding class and become friends as they work to qualify for the well-paid jobs opening to women as male workers are drafted. Sensitively and presciently written, this novel addresses social issues that still demand our attention.
John Gage
Color and Culture
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Color is fundamental to life and art yet so diverse that it has seldom been studied in a comprehensive way. This ground-breaking analysis of color in Western culture from the ancient Greeks to the late twentieth century is a John Gage triumph. With originality and erudition, he describes the first theories of color articulated by philosophers from Democritus to Aristotle and the subsequent attempts by the Romans and their Renaissance disciples to organize color systematically or endow it with symbolic power. The place of color in religion, Newton's analysis of the spectrum, Goethe's color theory, and the theories and practices that have attempted to unite color and music are among the intriguing topics this award-winning book illuminates.
With a large classified bibliography, discursive footnotes, and an exhaustive index, Color and Culture is an invaluable resource for artists, historians of art and culture, psychologists, linguists, and anyone fascinated by this most inescapable and evocative element of our perceptions.
Rita Carter
Mapping the Mind
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Today a brain scan reveals our thoughts, moods, and memories as clearly as an X-ray reveals our bones. We can actually observe a person's brain registering a joke or experiencing a painful memory. Drawing on the latest imaging technology and the expertise of distinguished scientists, Rita Carter explores the geography of the human brain. Her writing is clear, accessible, witty, and the book's 150 illustrations—most in color—present an illustrated guide to that wondrous, coconut-sized, wrinkled gray mass we carry inside our heads.
Mapping the Mind charts the way human behavior and culture have been molded by the landscape of the brain. Carter shows how our personalities reflect the biological mechanisms underlying thought and emotion and how behavioral eccentricities may be traced to abnormalities in an individual brain. Obsessions and compulsions seem to be caused by a stuck neural switch in a region that monitors the environment for danger. Addictions stem from dysfunction in the brain's reward system. Even the sense of religious experience has been linked to activity in a certain brain region. The differences between men and women's brains, the question of a "gay brain," and conditions such as dyslexia, autism, and mania are also explored.
Looking inside the brain, writes Carter, we see that actions follow from our perceptions, which are due to brain activity dictated by a neuronal structure formed from the interplay between our genes and the environment. Without sidestepping the question of free will, Carter suggests that future generations will use our increasing knowledge of the brain to "enhance those mental qualities that give sweetness and meaning to our lives, and to eradicate those that are destructive."
Jay Gummerman
Chez Chance
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A freak accident has left young Frank Eastman a paraplegic—a "wild card" who needs to "pair up with someone or something or he won't pass back into existence." Los Angeles, the scene of his accident, is where he imagines this existence to be. He settles into a rundown motel near Disneyland, his neighbors a wild assortment of eccentrics who, though more able-bodied than Frank, have learned the effectiveness of willful inability. What Frank learns from them, in magnificently odd and mesmerizing conversations, will leave him as transformed emotionally as he has been physically with a narrative at once ironic, hilarious, and poignant.
Luis Buñuel
An Unspeakable Betrayal
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Although Luis Buñuel, one of the great filmmakers of the century, was notoriously reluctant to discuss his own work in public, he wrote--and wrote well--on many subjects over the years. This collection proceeds chronologically, from poetry and short stories written in Buñuel's youth in Spain to an essay written in 1980, not long before his death. Newly translated into English, the writings offer startling insights into the filmmaker's life and thought.
The earliest pieces came well before Buñuel joined the Surrealist movement in Paris and created the landmark film Un chien andalou with Salvador Dalí. Yet these and the early Surrealist writings reveal the inventiveness of the mind that would later create such masterpieces of cinema as L'Age d'or, Los olvidados, Viridiana, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and That Obscure Object of Desire.
Later writings, which include screenplays and reflections on his own and others' films, illuminate many aspects of Buñuel's career, as well as the ways of thinking and perceiving that underlie his unique cinematic style. The final essay by this extraordinary artist sums up his view of the world--still vibrant and full of contradictions--at the end of his life.
Charles Moore
The Place of Houses
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With a new epilogue
Richly illustrated with houses large and small, old and new, with photographs, plans, and cutaway drawings, this is a book for people who want a house but who may not know what they really need, or what they have a right to expect.
The authors establish the basis for good building by examining houses in the small Massachusetts town of Edgartown; in Santa Barbara, California, where a commitment was made to re-create an imaginary Spanish past; and in Sea Ranch, on the northern California coast, where the authors attempt to create a community. These examples demonstrate how individual houses can express the care, energies, and dreams of the people who live in them, and can contribute to a larger sense of place.
S. D. Goitein
A Mediterranean Society, Volume V
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$34.95
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This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the world. Professor Goitein devoted the last thirty years of his long and productive life to their study, deciphering the language of the documents and organizing what he called a "marvelous treasure trove of manuscripts" into a coherent, fascinating picture of the society that created them.
It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century.
Volume V, subtitled The Individual, draws a portrait of the individual—a social person who mingled within the community; addressed the challenges of poverty, illness, aging, and death; possessed friends, enemies, and lovers; prayed and responded within a religious community; learned, created, thought and taught.
Monica Bohm-Duchen
The Private Life of a Masterpiece
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The world's most well known works of art are both instantly familiar and profoundly mysterious. What has made these images so popular, and how did they come into existence? The Private Life of a Masterpiece answers these questions by delving into the secrets of iconic works of art dating from 1501 to 1950. Piecing together a trail of clues, it examines each work from conception through completion to afterlife, detailing how the commission came about, the preparation undertaken by the artist, the way the work was executed, how the finished work was received, and its influence on other artists. We learn, for example, that Leonardo devised a new form of perspective when painting the Mona Lisa, and that four centuries later Picasso was detained for stealing the portrait from the Louvre; that Goya painted The Third of May 1808 as a criticism of the monarchy but nonetheless offered it to the king as a gift; that Van Gogh's Sunflowers owes much to improvements in the postal system; that Munch's The Scream was influenced by the Incas; and that Jackson Pollock's paintings were promoted by the CIA. Along the way, we also learn about each artist's life, including the struggles with family, lovers, patrons, and critics.
The works featured in this book met with a variety of reactions when first unveiled, and the author details them all, from admiration and respect to horror and contempt. Now readers can judge for themselves.
Beautifully illustrated and lucidly written, The Private Life of a Masterpiece offers an innovative and compelling introduction to the extraordinary stories contained in the history of art. It will enthrall all those who wish to know more about this fascinating subject.
Rosemary Stevens
American Medicine and the Public Interest
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The reissue of Rosemary Stevens's groundbreaking book on the growth of medical specialties offers a new opportunity to consider the state of the American health care system. Updated with an extensive new introduction and a new bibliography, Stevens's book chronicles the development of the medical profession and shows how increasing emphasis on specialization has influenced medical education and public policy. She details specialization's effects on health care costs and on health care providers, and her concerns are especially timely: the implications of technology and the resulting ethical dilemmas, the issues of insurance, many people's limited access to care. As a long-time observer of American medicine, Stevens makes a valuable contribution to the current debate on how best to provide—and pay for—a high level of medical care in this country.
Guy Garcia
Skin Deep
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The narrator of Skin Deep is David Loya, a second generation Chicano from the East L.A. barrio. With a degree from Harvard Law School he is a rising star in a major New York law firm. He returns to L.A. in response to an urgent request from a Harvard friend to find a missing illegal Mexican named Josefina Juarez. David's search for Juarez takes him deep into the barrio where the mystery of her fate upends his world and forces him to confront long-buried questions about family, love, friendship, and his own identity. Skin Deep is a novel about coming of age in the new America, a place in which races and cultures have not so much melded as collided and in which no identity is secure. Garcia chronicles this new urban landscape with acuity and informed sympathy.
Sappho
Sappho
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These hundred poems and fragments constitute virtually all of Sappho that survives and effectively bring to life the woman whom the Greeks consider to be their greatest lyric poet. Mary Barnard's translations are lean, incisive, direct--the best ever published. She has rendered the beloved poet's verses, long the bane of translators, more authentically than anyone else in English.
Teresa P. R. Caldeira
City of Walls
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Teresa Caldeira's pioneering study of fear, crime, and segregation in São Paulo poses essential questions about citizenship and urban change in contemporary democratic societies. Focusing on São Paulo, and using comparative data on Los Angeles, she identifies new patterns of segregation developing in these cities and suggests that these patterns are appearing in many metropolises.
Steven Platzman
Cézanne
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Cézanne revolutionized the way we see and transcribe the essence of the material world. His position is pivotal: his style is part of the canon of early modernism and his iconic images, his still lifes, and landscapes are associated with a unique analytical approach that changed the face of modern art. But how did Cézanne see and portray himself? His self-portraits are a surprisingly neglected area of study and there has been no extended and in-depth analysis of how Cézanne's signature style was used to fashion his self-image. Steven Platzman's accessible and richly illustrated book fills this gap by examining the stylistic development of Cézanne's self-portraits in an effort to understand how the artist saw himself and others, and how he positioned himself in the art world and French society. Platzman's detailed analysis of the paintings offers new explanations and assessments of significant aspects of Cézanne's career and oeuvre. Abundant and exquisitely reproduced illustrations, including crucial details, make Cézanne: The Self-Portraits an essential resource for anyone interested in this French master.
Platzman demonstrates that the expectation of a self- portrait from a master artist goes beyond color and structural analysis. He questions whether a Cézanne self-portrait reveals something of the artist's emotions, or whether it obscures the feelings of the man whose celebrated and groundbreaking style altered the course of the history of art. The author also thoroughly and clearly fleshes out the historical and artistic contexts of mid-nineteenth century France and investigates Cézanne's complex relationship with the avant-garde in the 1860s and early 1870s. He provides a new explanation for Cézanne's flirtation with impressionism and his subsequent adoption of a more personal, idiosyncratic style. He also takes a new and radically different view of Cézanne's so-called "narrative self-portraits," exploring for the first time his relationship with the icon of the femme fatale. Through these close visual analyses, readers will come to a greater understanding of the concerns, ambitions, and relationships that shaped Cézanne's oeuvre.
Otto Friedrich
City of Nets
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This dazzling story of Hollywood during the decade of its greatest success is a social and cultural history of the movie capital's golden age. Its cast includes actors, writers, musicians and composers, producers and directors, racketeers and labor leaders, journalists and politicians in the turbulent decade from World War II to Korea.
John F. Oates
Myth and Reality in the Rain Forest
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John Oates tackles one of the most serious challenges facing the world's conservation leaders today: How can the needs of wildlands and wildlife be reconciled with the needs of people? Current conservation theory holds that wildlife can best be protected through the promotion of human economic development. Oates disagrees. Drawing on his extensive experience as a primate ecologist who has worked on rainforest conservation projects in Africa and India, he argues that the linking of conservation to economic development has had disastrous consequences for many wildlife populations, especially in West Africa. He maintains that in those parts of the world where people are very poor, human well-being is more likely to be promoted by large-scale political, social, and economic reforms than by community development schemes associated with conservation projects.
Samuel Heilman
Defenders of the Faith
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In this first in-depth portrait of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel today, Samuel Heilman introduces a community that to many may seem to be the very embodiment of the Jewish past. To outsiders who stumble upon these neighborhoods and find bearded men in caftans, children with earlocks, and women in long dresses, black kerchiefs and stockings, it may appear that these people still hold fast to every tradition while turning their backs to the contemporary world. But rather than being a relic from the past, ultra-Orthodox Jews, or haredim, are very much part of the contemporary landscape and are playing an increasingly prominent role in the Jewish world and in Israeli politics. Defenders of the Faith takes us inside the world of this contemporary fundamentalist community, its lifestyle and mores, including education, religious practices and beliefs, sexual ethics, and marriage. Heilman explores the reasons why this group is more militant and extreme than its pre-Holocaust brethren, and provides insight into the worldview of this small but influential sector of modern Jewry.
Maurizio Bettini
The Portrait of the Lover
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There are a surprising number of stories from antiquity about people who fall in love with statues or paintings, and about lovers who use such visual representations as substitutes for an absent beloved. In a charmingly conversational, witty meditation on this literary theme, Maurizio Bettini moves into a wide-ranging consideration of the relationship between self and image, the nature of love in the ancient world, the role of representation in culture, and more. Drawing on historical events and cultural practices as well as literary works, The Portrait of the Lover is a lucid excursion into the anthropology of the image.
The majority of the stories and poems Bettini examines come from Greek and Roman classical antiquity, but he reaches as far as Petrarch, Da Ponte, and Poe. The stories themselves—ranging from the impassioned to the bizarre, and from the sublime to the hilarious—serve as touchstones for Bettini's evocative explorations of the role of representation in literature and in culture. Although he begins with a consideration of lovers' portraits, Bettini soon broadens his concerns to include the role of shadows, dreams, commemorative statues, statues brought to life, and vengeful statues—in short, an entire range of images that take on a life of their own.
The chapters shift skillfully from one theme to another, touching on the nature of desire, loss, memory, and death. Bettini brings to the discussion of these tales not only a broad learning about cultures but also a delighted sense of wonder and admiration for the evocative power and endless variety of the stories themselves.
Mark D. Spalding
World Atlas of Coral Reefs
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Coral reefs are one of the most biologically diverse habitats in the world, host to an extraordinary variety of marine plants and animals. They are also one of the world's most fragile and endangered ecosystems. The growth of mass tourism, combined with the boom in popularity of scuba diving, has brought these spectacular ecosystems to public attention across the planet.
Coral reefs provide essential fish habitat, support endangered and threatened species, and harbor protected marine mammals and turtles. They are a significant source of food, provide income and employment through tourism and marine recreation, and offer countless other benefits to humans, including supplying compounds for pharmaceuticals. Yet coral reefs around the world are rapidly being degraded by a number of human activities, such as overfishing, coastal development, and the introduction of sewage, fertilizer, and sediment.
World Atlas of Coral Reefs provides the first detailed and definitive account of the current state of our planet's coral reefs. With its wealth of authoritative and up-to-date information, the finest maps available, and detailed descriptive texts and images by leading experts, this full-color volume will be a critical resource for anyone interested in these vital environments.
World Atlas of Coral Reefs contains eighty-four full-page newly researched and drawn color maps, together with more than two hundred color photos illustrating reefs, reef animals, and images taken from space by NASA astronauts during the 2000 and 2001 space shuttle flights. The authors provide a wealth of information on the geography, biodiversity, and human uses of coral reefs, as well as details about the threats to their existence.
Prepared at the UNEP–World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, England--the United Nations office responsible for providing authoritative information on the condition of global biodiversity--the Atlas will be a critical tool for scientists, students, policymakers, and planners at local, national, and international levels alike.
Publication of the World Atlas of Coral Reefs is supported by international institutions including the United Nations Environment Programme; The Marine Aquarium Council, The International Coral Reef Initiative; ICLARM--The World Fish Center; the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, and the Aventis Foundation.
Yitzhak Rabin
The Rabin Memoirs, Expanded Edition with Recent Speeches, New Photographs, and an Afterword
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The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November of 1995—one year after he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Yasir Arafat—sent shock waves around the world. Known as both a man of war and of peace, the Jerusalem-born Israeli prime minister played a key role in developing the Jewish state and was instrumental in establishing peace in the Middle East. Yitzhak Rabin's memoirs, first published in 1979 but long out of print, are now available in this expanded edition. They provide a candid appraisal of significant events in Israeli history, and passages censored when the memoirs were first published have been restored. The addition of an afterword by Rabin's political advisor, Yoram Peri, and his most important speeches given after 1979 round out Rabin's life and show the evolution of his beliefs.
Rabin writes of his years in the Haganah (the independent Jewish military) and gives a controversial account of the War of Independence. He details the tactical moves that made him a hero in the Six Day War and recalls his years as ambassador to the United States. He tells of his difficult decision to authorize the 1976 rescue of hijacked hostages from the Entebbe airport. Rabin describes the conflicts that eventually led to his party's defeat after thirty years in power, and he concludes with a shrewd assessment of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty and of prospects for peace with Israel's other neighbors, including the Palestinians.
Yitzhak Rabin's memoirs are important not only for the insider's view they offer about Israel and the Middle East, but also for providing a very human portrait of a heroic world leader.
From the book:"Most of you watched that ceremony on the White House lawn with mixed emotions, many of you grinding your teeth. I knew that the hand outstretched to me . . . was the same hand that held the knife, that held the gun, the hand that gave the order to shoot, to kill. Of all the hands in the world, it was not the hand that I wanted or dreamed of touching. . . . On that world stage, I stood as the representative . . . of a state that is willing to give peace a chance. As I have said, one does not make peace with one's friends. One makes peace with one's enemy."—Jerusalem, December 1993
Andrew McClellan
Inventing the Louvre
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Founded in the final years of the Enlightenment, the Louvre—with the greatest collection of Old Master paintings and antique sculpture assembled under one roof—became the model for all state art museums subsequently established. Andrew McClellan chronicles the formation of this great museum from its origins in the French royal picture collections to its apotheosis during the Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. More than a narrative history, McClellan's account explores the ideological underpinnings, pedagogic aims, and aesthetic criteria of the Louvre. Drawing on new archival materials, McClellan also illuminates the art world of eighteenth-century Paris.
Thomas Carlyle
Historical Essays
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$95.00
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Thomas Carlyle, renowned nineteenth-century essayist and social critic, came to be thought of as a secular prophet by many of his readers and as the "undoubted head of English letters" by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Historical Essays brings together Carlyle's essays on history and historical subjects in a fully annotated modern edition for the first time. These essays, which were originally collected in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, span Carlyle's career from 1830 to 1875 and represent a major facet of his writings. This edition uses all the extant authoritative versions of the essays to create an accurate critical text and includes a mine of lucidly presented information to enhance readers' understanding of Carlyle's densely allusive prose.
The collection includes essays on the French Revolution, Cromwell, Frederick the Great, and medieval Scandinavia. It also includes such essential pieces as "On History," "On History Again," "Count Cagliostro," and "The Diamond Necklace." Together the essays show Carlyle positioning himself in relation to the new Romantic historiography but not yet ready to adopt the strictures of modern scientific history. They also exhibit his talent for analyzing the historical significance of seemingly minor events. He describes a plot to steal a diamond necklace in which Marie Antoinette became implicated, a visit of Whig sympathizers to the National Assembly during the French Revolution, and the kidnapping of two fifteenth-century German princes, one of whose descendents was Carlyle’s contemporary Prince Albert.
This volume, the third of the eight-volume Strouse Edition of Carlyle’s works, includes a historical introduction and illustrations along with complete textual apparatus.
Peter R. Dallman
Plant Life in the World's Mediterranean Climates
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This book provides a wonderful overview of the landscapes, vegetation types, and plants of the five regions of the world that have a Mediterranean climate. This climate of mild, rainy winters and dry, warm summers is found in California, Central Chile, the Cape Region of South Africa, the southwestern part of Australia and the Mediterranean Basin. The regions are widely separated and the flora of each is distinctive, having for the most part developed independently. Nevertheless, the plants share remarkably similar characteristics which allow them to thrive in these unusual conditions.
Peter Dallman's non-technical prose is complemented by numerous maps, tables, and figures, and the book is richly illustrated with photographs of landscapes, plants, and flowers. With its detailed information on some of the world's most resilient plant life, this book will serve as an excellent reference for everyone interested in growing drought-resistant plants and as a naturalist's guide to these beautiful and unusual bioregions.
For the growing number of travelers whose vacations focus on learning about and appreciating natural history, Dallman also includes a chapter on planning trips to the five Mediterranean regions.
S. D. Goitein
A Mediterranean Society, Volume III
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$32.95
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This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the world. Professor Goitein devoted the last thirty years of his long and productive life to their study, deciphering the language of the documents and organizing what he called a "marvelous treasure trove of manuscripts" into a coherent, fascinating picture of the society that created them.
It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century.
Volume III, subtitled The Family, reveals the Mediterranean family—the extended family, marriage (rituals, economics, social and cultural safeguards), the Mediterranean household, widowhood, divorce, remarriage, and the world of women.
Deborah Rudacille
The Scalpel and the Butterfly
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In this sweeping history of animal research and the animal protection movement, Deborah Rudacille examines the ethical question of whether enhancement of human life justifies the use of animals for research. She shows how the question and the answers provided by both scientists and anti-vivisectionists over the past 150 years have shaped contemporary society. Rudacille anchors her narrative in events from the lives of key players in the history of the war between science and animal protection, describing the work of activists who work outside the law as well as those working to change the system from within.
Gregor Benton
New Fourth Army
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In his prizewinning Mountain Fires: The Red Army's Three-Year War in South China, 1934-1938, Gregor Benton traced the fate of the Communist rear guard that stayed behind when the Red Army set off on the Long March. After three bloody years, the survivors regrouped as the New Fourth Army, which later helped to drive the Nationalists from the mainland. In this sequel to Mountain Fires, Benton describes the first three years of this army, and its triangular war with the Nationalists and the Japanese.
Like the Three-Year War from which it stemmed, the New Fourth Army was for many years neglected by historians, mainly because of the absence from it of Mao Zedong, around whom the story of the Chinese Revolution was largely written until his death in 1976. With the downgrading of the Mao cult and the return of some power to the regions (where New Fourth Army veterans held power) in the 1980s, new sources on the New Fourth Army became available. This study, which combines a thematic and a narrative approach, makes exhaustive use of these and other sources to explain the original features of this youthful army, which was no outgrowth or faithful copy of Mao's senior and better-known Eighth Route Army but a body with its own origins and history, and which fought its war in a quite different political, military, and social setting.
Sonia Saldívar-Hull
Feminism on the Border
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In this bold contribution to contemporary feminist theory, Sonia Saldívar-Hull argues for a feminism that transcends national borders and ethnic identities. Grounding her work in an analysis of the novels and short stories of three Chicana writers--Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Helena María Viramontes--Saldívar-Hull examines a range of Chicana feminist writing from several disciplines, which she collects under the term "feminism on the border." By comparing and defining literary and national borders, she presents the voices of these and other Chicana writers in order to show their connection to feminist literature and to women of color in the United States. This book provides one of the most comprehensive accounts of Chicana feminist writing available.
Saldívar-Hull draws on contemporary literary and post-colonial theory, as well as her own autobiography, or testimonio, to help her define "feminism on the border." Successfully uniting theory with lived social experience, she delineates many of the internal processes that must be acknowledged in order to access larger transnational and geopolitical literary movements. This book thus joins a body of scholarship within feminist theory, working at the intersection of identity politics and political praxis. Saldívar-Hull's close readings of Chicana literary texts are informed by a comparative and cross-cultural perspective that enables her to forge links to a geopolitical feminist literary movement that unites ethnic identity to global solidarity.
Antony Griffiths
Prints and Printmaking
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A print is a pictorial image that has been produced by a process that enables it to be multiplied, and many of the best-known works by some of the world's greatest artists are prints. Yet little is understood about this popular art form. Now Antony Griffiths provides an excellent introduction for anyone who wishes to acquire a basic understanding of prints and printmaking. In succinct and lucid language, he explains the different printmaking techniques and shows both details and whole prints to demonstrate the effects that can be achieved. Woodcuts, engraving, etching, mezzotint, and lithography are among the many processes explained, illustrated, and placed within a historical context.
This fully revised and updated edition of the highly praised 1980 British publication is available for the first time in the United States. With its complete glossary, index, and helpful illustrations, Griffiths's book is the essential foundation for an intelligent appreciation of the printmaker's art.
Thomas Schatz
Boom and Bust
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Boom and Bust traces the movie industry through the momentous decade of the 1940s. It discusses changes in the structure of the studio system—including the shift to independent production—and the dominant stars, genres, and production trends through the period.
Roger Daniels
The Politics of Prejudice
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This classic study offers a history of anti-Japanese prejudice in California, extending from the late nineteenth century to 1924, when an immigration act excluded Japanese from entering the United States. The Politics of Prejudice details the political climate that helped to set the stage for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and reveals the racism present among middle-class American progressives, labor leaders, and other presumably liberal groups.
James Campbell
This Is the Beat Generation
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Beginning in New York in 1944, James Campbell finds the leading members of what was to become the Beat Generation in the shadows of madness and criminality. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs had each seen the insides of a mental hospital and a prison by the age of thirty. A few months after they met, another member of their circle committed a murder that involved Kerouac and Burroughs as material witnesses.
This book charts the transformation of these experiences into literature, and a literary movement that spread across the globe. From "The First Cut-Up"--the murder in New York in 1944--we end up in Paris in 1960 with William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel, experimenting with the technique that made him notorious, what Campbell calls "The Final Cut-Up."
In between, we move to San Francisco, where Ginsberg gave the first public reading of Howl. We discover Burroughs in Mexico City and Tangiers; the French background to the Beats; the Buddhist influence on Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others; the "Muses" Herbert Huncke and Neal Cassady; the tortuous history of On the Road; and the black ancestry of the white hipster.
Leonard Gardner
Fat City
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Originally published in 1969, Fat City is an American classic whose stature has increased over the years. Made into an acclaimed film by John Huston, the book is set in and around Stockton, California.
Simon Karlinsky
Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya
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Simon Karlinsky has substantially expanded and revised the first edition of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson's correspondence to include fifty-nine letters discovered subsequent to the book's original publication in 1979. Since then, five volumes of Edmund Wilson's diaries have been published, as well as a volume of Nabokov's correspondence with other people and Brian Boyd's definitive two-volume biography of Nabokov. The additional letters and a considerable body of new annotations clarify the correspondence, tracing in greater detail the two decades of close friendship between the writers.
Darra Goldstein
The Georgian Feast
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According to Georgian legend, God took a supper break while creating the world. He became so involved with his meal that he inadvertently tripped over the high peaks of the Caucasus, spilling his food onto the land below. The land blessed by Heaven's table scraps was Georgia.
Nestled in the Caucasus mountain range between the Black and Caspian seas, the Republic of Georgia is as beautiful as it is bountiful. The unique geography of the land, which includes both alpine and subtropical zones, has created an enviable culinary tradition. In The Georgian Feast, Darra Goldstein explores the rich and robust culture of Georgia and offers a variety of tempting recipes.
The book opens with a fifty-page description of the culture and food of Georgia. Next are over one hundred recipes, often accompanied by notes on the history of the dish. Holiday menus, a glossary of Georgian culinary terms, and an annotated bibliography round out the volume.
Robert L. Carringer
The Making of Citizen Kane, Revised edition
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Citizen Kane, widely considered the greatest film ever made, continues to fascinate critics and historians as well as filmgoers. While credit for its genius has traditionally been attributed solely to its director, Orson Welles, Carringer's pioneering study documents the shared creative achievements of Welles and his principal collaborators. The Making of Citizen Kane, copiously illustrated with rare photographs and production documents, also provides an in-depth view of the operations of the Hollywood studio system. This new edition includes a revised preface and overview of criticism, an updated chronology of the film's reception history, a reconsideration of the locus of responsibility of Welles's ill-fated The Magnificent Ambersons, and new photographs.
Seton Lloyd
Ancient Turkey
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Seton Lloyd's lively account of Turkey's early history is for the ever-increasing number of people visiting the ancient sites of this fabled land. Written by an archaeologist who has spent much of his life in the Near East, the book is not a conventional "guide" to the antiquities of Anatolia, nor is it a textbook. It is instead Lloyd's attempt to share his profound interest in an antique land, its inhabitants, and the surviving monuments that link the present to the past.
Lloyd traces the many different cultures that have been a part of Turkey from prehistoric times to the Christian era. He recounts the exploits of the Hittite kings, the confrontation of Croesus and the Persian king Cyrus, the conquests of Alexander the Great, and Mithridates' epic resistance against Rome. Archaeological landmarks discussed include the discovery of the Alaca Hüyük tombs, the attempts to establish the location of Troy, and the opening of the Tomb of Midas. Lloyd shows how each successive culture has left its mark on an astonishing variety of sites, from the shrines of Çatal Hüyük to the temples of Ephesus and the churches founded by St. Paul.
Tracy I. Storer
California Grizzly
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The California Bear Flag and the University of California football team the Golden Bears emblemize the great animal that has been extinct in California since the 1920s but once numbered perhaps as many as ten thousand in the state. Forty years after its original publication, University of California Press proudly reissues California Grizzly, still the most comprehensive book on the bear's history in California. The lessons of the book resonate today as the issues of protection of wildlife habitat versus unfettered development of land for human use are debated with increasing urgency.
Judith Nies
Nine Women
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In an expanded edition of her history of American women activists, Judith Nies has added biographical essays on feminist Bella Abzug and civil rights visionary Fannie Lou Hamer and a new chapter on women environmental activists. Included are portraits of Sarah Moore Grimké, who rejected her life as a Southern aristocrat and slaveholder to promote women's rights and the abolition of slavery; Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who led more than three hundred slaves to freedom on the Underground Railway; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the first woman to run for Congress, who advocated for women's rights to own property, to vote, and to divorce; Mother Jones, "the Joan of Arc of the coalfields," one of the most inspiring voices of the American labor movement; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who worked for the reform of two of America's most cherished institutions, the home and motherhood; Anna Louise Strong, an intrepid journalist who covered revolutions in Russia and China; and Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, who fed and sheltered the hungry and homeless in New York's Bowery for more than forty years.
Richard Fletcher
The Barbarian Conversion
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In a work of splendid scholarship that reflects both a firm mastery of difficult sources and a keen intuition, one of Britain's foremost medievalists tells the story of the Christianization of Europe. It is a very large story, for conversion encompassed much more than religious belief. With it came enormous cultural change: Latin literacy and books, Roman notions of law and property, and the concept of town life, as well as new tastes in food, drink, and dress. Whether from faith or by force, from self-interest or by revelation, conversion had an immense impact that is with us even today. It is Richard Fletcher's achievement in this superb work that he makes that impact both felt and understood.
Ninian Smart
Dimensions of the Sacred
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A world-renowned religion scholar explores the world's major religions and comparable secular systems of thought in this unusually wide-ranging and accessible work. Ninian Smart considers Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, as well as Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, nationalism, and Native American, African, and other systems of belief. His goal is to advance our understanding of how we as human beings interact thoughtfully with the cosmos and express the exigencies of our own nature and existence.
Smart demonstrates that diverse systems of belief reflect several recurring themes: the tendency to worship, the contemplative life, story-telling, a view of history, ethical instruction, guidelines on bodily practices, rituals, and visual icons. He examines each of these themes in relation to specific belief systems. He points out that religions and comparable worldviews should be studied at least as much through their practices as through their beliefs.
The result of twenty-five years of research, this comprehensive book is nothing less than an analysis of the entire pattern of human spiritual life, viewed through what Smart calls "the grammar of symbols, the modes and forms in which religion manifests itself."
Richard H. Rovere
Senator Joe McCarthy
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The story of Senator Joseph McCarthy's rise to unprecedented power and the decline of his influence is a dramatic one. Richard Rovere documents the process by which a clever, power hungry individual came to mislead and manipulate members of Congress and the American public and to damage countless lives. A new foreword for this edition by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. places the book in historical context and relates it to current issues in American public life.
Arthur C. Danto
Philosophizing Art
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Arthur Danto's work has always affirmed a deep relationship between philosophy and art. These essays explore this relationship through a number of concrete cases in which either artists are driven by philosophical agendas or their art is seen as solving philosophical problems in visual terms. The essays cover a varied terrain, with subjects including Giotto's use of olfactory data in The Raising of Lazarus; chairs in art and chairs as art; Mel Bochner's Wittgenstein drawings; the work of Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, and Robert Irwin; Louis Kahn as "Archai-Tekt"; and visual truth in film. Also featured are a meditation on the battle of Gettysburg; and a celebration of the Japanese artist Shiko Munakata, an essay that is partly autobiographical.
Arthur C. Danto is one of the most original and multitalented philosophers writing today, a thinker whose interests traverse the boundaries of traditional understandings of philosophy. Best known for his contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, Danto is also esteemed for his work in the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophical psychology, and action theory. These two volumes, each with an introduction by the author, contain essays spanning more than twenty-five years that have been selected to highlight the inseparability of philosophy and art in Danto's work. Together they present the thinking of Arthur C. Danto at his very best.
Esther Benbassa
Sephardi Jewry
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Until the publication of this remarkably comprehensive history of the Sephardi diaspora, only limited attention had been given to the distinctive Judeo-Spanish cultural entity that flourished in the Balkans and Asia Minor for more than four centuries. Yet the great majority of Sephardi Jews, after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and subsequently from Portugal, found their way to this region, drawn by the political stability and relatively tolerant rule of the Ottoman Empire, as well as by promising socioeconomic conditions. Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue show how Sephardi society and culture developed in the Levant, sharing language, religion, customs, and communal life as they did nowhere else, both during prosperous times and during the declining fortunes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The impact of westernization, the end of Ottoman power, and the rise of fragmenting nation-states transformed this vital community in the modern era. And, like many other Jewish communities, the unique Judeo-Spanish culture was dispersed and destroyed by the Holocaust and the migrations of the twentieth century. Sephardi Jewry presents its vivid history in a readable, well-documented narrative.
Harold Biswell
Prescribed Burning in California Wildlands Vegetation Management
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Harold Biswell's decades of research and field experience were a major factor in developing policies of controlled or prescribed burning, which mimics or reintroduces the natural fire cycle. This comprehensive study introduces the principles and practices of prescribed burning, which apply far beyond California, within a historical and ecological perspective. Available for the first time in paperback, with a new foreword by James Agee, this book places Biswell's study—and his legacy—in the context of recent developments in the field.
Erich S. Gruen
Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy
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This book is an examination of the impact of Greek learning, literature, and religion on central aspects of Roman life in the middle Republic. Acclaimed historian Erich S. Gruen discusses the introduction of and resistance to new cults, the relationship between Roman political figures and literary artists schooled in Greek, and the reaction to Hellenic philosophy and rhetoric by the Roman elite. This book contributes new and important information on the place of Greek culture in Roman public life.
Preston Sturges
Four More Screenplays by Preston Sturges
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Includes The Palm Beach Story, Triumph over Pain/The Great Moment, The Miracle at Morgan's Creek, and Unfaithfully Yours.
Humorous, sophisticated, and superbly crafted, the cinema of Preston Sturges maintains an enduring presence in the small canon of films that enjoy critical acclaim, scholarly attention, and popular admiration. Following the enthusiastic reception of Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges, the University of California Press returns with Four More.
This volume contains three scripts widely regarded as among the filmmaker's best: The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Unfaithfully Yours. Based on the actual shooting scripts rather than the final screen versions, these screenplays contain scenes that were not filmed or that disappeared on the cutting room floor.
In the fourth script, Triumph over Pain/The Great Moment, Sturges dramatizes the career of W.T.G. Morton, the doctor who first demonstrated the use of ether and thus revolutionized surgery. Arguably the most important biographical film project of the 1940s, this film was recut and rearranged by Paramount before it was released. By reprinting Sturges's original script and explaining its transformation, Brian Henderson has, in effect, discovered a new work by Sturges.
In the introductions that precede each screenplay, Henderson examines every important aspect of the screenplay's composition. He analyzes Sturges's process of constant revision, discusses variant drafts and fragments of drafts, and describes the writer/director's relations with Paramount executives, the Church, the Hayes Office, and Darryl Zanuck.
Alone or as a companion to the earlier volume, this work will be welcomed by scholars, film buffs, screenplay writers, and admirers of Preston Sturges.
Leonard J. Leff
Hitchcock and Selznick
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Hitchcock and Selznick is the story of one of the oddest partnerships in Hollywood history, the union of a reticent, overweight Englishman with a flair for striking detail and a penchant for the perverse, and a dynamic movie mogul with a keen eye for successful entertainment on the grand scale. It began in 1938, when producer David O. Selznick agreed to bring director Alfred Hitchcock from England, where he was already gaining widespread acclaim for his "little thrillers," and the collaboration resulted in the making of such masterpieces as Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious.
Hitchcock was soft-spoken and meticulous; Selznick was confrontational and chronically disorganized. They were, moreover, two geniuses with wholly different approaches to filmmaking. The sparks that flew between them over the next eight years ignited into some of Hitchcock's most memorable achievements, but they made collaboration impossible in the end. Drawing on unpublished documents, early drafts of script treatments, and humorous production anecdotes—and including a wealth of previously unseen photographs—Leonard Leff has written a book for specialist and layman alike, a fascinating behind-the-scenes portrait not only of two great Hollywood figures but of the film industry itself.
Betty Rojtman
Black Fire on White Fire
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Using the tools of contemporary semiotic theory to analyze classical rabbinic hermeneutics and medieval mystical exegesis, Betty Rojtman unveils a striking modernity in these early forms of textual interpretation. The metaphor from rabbinic literature that describes the writing of the Torah—black fire on white fire—becomes, in Rojtman's analysis, a figure for the differential structures that can be found throughout rabbinic discourse. Moving through the successive levels of traditional commentary, from early Midrash to modern Kabbalah, Rojtman examines the tension between the fluidity and nuance of the biblical text and the fixed commitment to ideological and theological content. To examine this strain between open text and sacred language, Rojtman scrutinizes the demonstrative, "this," as a word whose significance changes with every change in context. Her analysis suggests a double-layered meaning for "this," which refers to the existential world in its multiplicity but also to transcendence and the eternal presence of God.
Oliver Moore
Chinese
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Any account of reading the Chinese past is enriched by the fact that Chinese writing is both ancient and current. No other writing system of antiquity enjoys this benefit. Since the emergence of the earliest discernible process of writing, in northern China around 1200 b.c., the Chinese system has been used by millions of speakers, and today more people speak a Chinese language than any other. In his accessible, straightforward book, Oliver Moore demystifies one of the world's oldest writing systems, introducing the basic principles of the language, the formation of written characters, and the ways these characters have developed. Drawing on evidence from numerous artifacts in the British Museum and elsewhere, he describes, chronologically, several of the major scripts used to write on each material, from the earliest oracle bones to calligraphic works of art.
Moore defines the Chinese language both as a member of an East Asian language family and as a broad term covering quite distinct variations in speech within the borders of modern China. He discusses how the Chinese writing system works today, demonstrating how it exerts its influence far beyond the traditional borders of China. The last chapter illustrates instances of Chinese characters borrowed to write non-Chinese languages.
Dean MacCannell
The Tourist
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Long regarded as a classic, The Tourist is an examination of the phenomenon of tourism through a social theory lens that encompasses discussions of authenticity, high and low culture, and the construction of social reality. It brings the concerns of social science to an analysis of travel and sightseeing in the postindustrial age, during which the middle class acquired leisure time for international travel. This edition includes a new foreword by Lucy R. Lippard and a new afterword by the author.
David Mitchinson
Celebrating Moore
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This book is a celebration of The Henry Moore Foundation's collection—the most important and comprehensive single group of Moore's drawings, graphics, and sculpture.
More than 300 of Moore's acclaimed works are reproduced in full color, and extensive captions are provided by distinguished sculptors, art critics, and art historians, many of whom knew and worked with Moore. Their fresh insights and personal anecdotes provide a detailed and compelling analysis of Moore's artistry.
David Mitchinson's introductory essay traces the formation of The Henry Moore Foundation's collection, a fascinating story that has never been told before. He explains Moore's somewhat haphazard way of working, the confused ownership between the Foundation and its trading company, the strengths and weaknesses of the Collection itself, and the evolution of the Foundation's property at Perry Green in Hertfordshire. With a foreword by Sir Alan Bowness, Celebrating Moore will be a welcome addition to the study and appreciation of Henry Moore for years to come.
From the Foreword:"Henry Moore talked well and liked talking about sculpture, but he rarely gave any verbal explanation of his own works. That was for others to do: He was the man who had made the piece and put it out in the world. This is the form that the catalogue takes—twenty-five sculptors, art historians, critics, curators, and film makers write about sculptures and drawings that particularly interest them."
John Jacobs
A Rage for Justice
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This political biography of Phillip Burton (1926-1983) is the riveting story of one of the most brilliant, driven, and productive legislators of his—or indeed any—era of American politics. A ruthless and unabashed progressive, Burton terrified his opponents, ran over his friends, forged improbable coalitions, and from 1964 to 1983 became one of the most influential Representatives in the House. He also acquired more raw power than almost any left-liberal politician ever had.
Moving from grassroots campaigns to epic battles in the California state capital, and finally to the very pinnacle of power on Capitol Hill, John Jacobs's inside account of Burton's life shows how politics really works. He demonstrates the exercise of power in the hands of a superb strategist and shows an unheralded master going about his life's work during the glory years of postwar American liberalism.
Burton was an unforgettable, uncontrollable figure whose relentless day-and-night politicking distilled the raw essence of American politics. Jacobs brings to life Burton's seething, perpetual sense of outrage, gargantuan appetites, and dedication to the disenfranchized. Animated by a sometimes frightening drive for power—his only modern counterpart is Lyndon Johnson—Burton played a pivotal role in California and U.S. politics, championing welfare and civil rights, landmark labor legislation, environmentalism and congressional reform. His achievements included the groundbreaking black lung bill for miners and their families; Supplemental Social Security for the aged, blind, and disabled; and helping to secure America's extensive national park system.
Burton's failures were equally dramatic: in 1976, at the height of his power, he lost, by one vote, the chance to become House Majority Leader. Had he won this critical political fight, he no doubt would have become Speaker of the House.
Jacobs's account is based on Burton's personal papers and hundreds of interviews with people at every stage of his life, including four Democratic Speakers of the House. The result is a book that brilliantly demonstrates how one person can make a difference in public life.
Frank O'Hara
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
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Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.
John M. G. Barclay
Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora
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Most studies of Jews in the period from Alexander to Trajan have concentrated almost exclusively on Jerusalem and Judea. In this book, John Barclay assembles and analyzes evidence about the Jewish communities in Egypt, Syria, Cyrenaica, Rome, and Asia. Barclay's ambitious goal is to describe, as precisely as the evidence allows, the varying levels of assimilation and antagonism between Jews and the non-Jewish communities in these areas for this 440-year period. With a concluding review of Jewish identity in the Diaspora as a whole, this book provides our first comprehensive and multi-faceted survey of Diaspora communities and Diaspora literature.
Stephanie Barron
Reading California
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This companion volume to the exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity,1900-2000 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art offers in-depth, illustrated essays on the making of California culture in the twentieth century. Written by a stellar cast of art historians and scholars in the humanities, the essays look closely at the forces that shaped fine art and material culture in California. The contributors weave their subjects around themes that are central to the milestone exhibition: the California landscape—both the natural and built environments—and the state's cultural and political relationships with Latin America and Asia.
These provocative essays cover topics such as counterculture architecture, Watts Towers, border culture, identity and gender issues, the role of schools in California art, auto tourism, Hollywood, music, Beat culture, politics, literature, photography, and much more. Accessibly written and intellectually engaging, these essays sharpen our understanding of California in the twentieth century and bring together many diverse, yet interrelated, aspects of its art and culture.
Jane Holtz Kay
Asphalt Nation
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Asphalt Nation is a powerful examination of how the automobile has ravaged America's cities and landscape over the past 100 years together with a compelling strategy for reversing our automobile dependency. Jane Holtz Kay provides a history of the rapid spread of the automobile and documents the huge subsidies commanded by the highway lobby, to the detriment of once-efficient forms of mass transportation. Demonstrating that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions to the problem, she shows that radical change is entirely possible. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.
Alice Shepherd
Proto-Wintun
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This volume represents a reconstruction of Proto-Wintun, the parent language of a group of California Indian languages. It includes a grammatical sketch of Proto-Wintun, cognate sets with reconstructions and an index to the reconstructions. The book fulfills a need for in-depth reconstructions of proto-languages for California Indian language families, both for theoretical purposes and deeper comparison with other proto- or pre-languages.
Tino Balio
Grand Design
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The advent of color, big musicals, the studio system, and the beginning of institutionalized censorship made the thirties the defining decade for Hollywood. The year 1939, celebrated as "Hollywood's greatest year," saw the release of such memorable films as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Stagecoach. It was a time when the studios exercised nearly absolute control over their product as well as over such stars as Bette Davis, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart. In this fifth volume of the award-winning series History of the American Cinema, Tino Balio examines every aspect of the filmmaking and film exhibition system as it matured during the Depression era.
Robert Paul Wolff
In Defense of Anarchism
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"A deep and provocative discussion of some of the most fundamental issues in political philosophy, written crisply, with candor, in a style that I find very winning. It is a most useful book, and a very good one."—Carl Cohen, author of Communism, Fascism, and Democracy
"A provocative and engrossing introduction to current questions of political legitimacy, consent, deliberative democracy, the basis of majority rule, workers collectives, etc., that have been taken up by contemporary political theorists."—Georgia Warnke, author of Justice and Interpretation
Mary Louise Flint
Natural Enemies Handbook
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This book is the best-ever practical guide to the identification and biology of beneficial organisms that control pests. Growers, pest control advisers, landscape professionals, home gardeners, pest management teachers and students, and anyone fascinated by natural enemies and their prey will want this book to find, identify, and use natural enemies to control pests in almost any agricultural crop, garden, or landscape.
The Natural Enemies Handbook is superbly illustrated with 180 high-quality color photographs and 140 expertly rendered drawings, showing hundreds of predators, parasites, and pathogens that attack pest insects, mites, nematodes, plant pathogens, and weeds. The handy Quick Guide allows readers to locate natural enemies that they are likely to find on almost any crop or in the garden and landscape. They can then go to the main text for clear, detailed information.
Natural enemies are organisms that kill, decrease the reproductive potential, or otherwise reduce the numbers of other organisms. Biological control is the practical use of natural enemies to manage pests. Living natural enemies are the agents of biological control. Virtually every pest has natural enemies that reduce its populations under certain circumstances. The book features chapters on biological control of plant pathogens, nematodes, and weeds as well as individual chapters on parasites, predators, and pathogens of arthropods.
References, suppliers, and a comprehensive index make this an indispensable source book. The up-to-date review of applied biological control literature will appeal to scholars.
Marina Warner
Monuments and Maidens
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Marina Warner explores the tradition of personifying liberty, justice, wisdom, charity, and other ideals and desiderata in the female form, and examines the tension between women's historic and symbolic roles. Drawing on the evidence of public art, especially sculpture, and painting, poetry, and classical mythology, she ranges over the allegorical presence of the woman in the Western tradition with a sharply observant eye and a piquant and engaging style.
Herbert W. Meyer
The Oligocene Bridge Creek Flora of the John Day Formation, Oregon
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This comprehensive systematic revision of the Bridge Creek flora is based on large collections of megafossil specimens from the John Day and Crooked River basins. The flora was found to be more diverse than previously recognized, with at least 125 species. At least 11 genera are extinct, but the majority are extant members of deciduous forests. The flora was derived from a variety of sources and represents a classic example of the broadleaved deciduous forests that became widespread at mid-latitudes following the Eocene-Oligocene climatic cooling.
Susan Schaller
A Man Without Words
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For more than a quarter of a century, Ildefonso, a Mexican Indian, lived in total isolation, set apart from the rest of the world. He wasn't a political prisoner or a social recluse, he was simply born deaf and had never been taught even the most basic language. Susan Schaller, then a twenty-four-year-old graduate student, encountered him in a class for the deaf where she had been sent as an interpreter and where he sat isolated, since he knew no sign language. She found him obviously intelligent and sharply observant but unable to communicate, and she felt compelled to bring him to a comprehension of words.
A Man without Words vividly conveys the challenge, the frustrations, and the exhilaration of opening the mind of a congenitally deaf person to the concept of language.
Richard Longstreth
On the Edge of the World
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Richard Longstreth provides a detailed picture of the early careers of four architects—Bernard Maybeck, Willis Polk, Ernest Coxhead, and A.C. Schweinfurth—who had a decisive impact on the course of design in the San Francisco Bay Area and who stand as significant contributors to American architecture.
Gerard L'E Turner
Scientific Instruments, 15001900
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The impulse to collect is an almost universal one, satisfying the hunting and acquisitive instincts, the love of beauty, and intellectual curiosity. The wealthy have collected rare and beautiful things from the earliest days of civilization, but the collection, or "cabinet," containing natural curiosities dates from the sixteenth century, and it was this type of collection in which scientific instruments found a home. In the twentieth century, we have come to accept a vast range of technical, often complex, equipment for everyday use. Science has become the very substance of our life style. But the appeal of historic scientific instruments remains, and from them much can be learned of the practice and development of science over four centuries.
This book traces the historical origins and development of instruments as they spread across the globe, explaining their manufacture, use, and adaptations. This must-have book for the active collector gives practical advice on dealing with instruments and checking their authenticity. It features a comprehensive international list of major museums and instrument collections. Over 100 superb illustrations show the instruments to their full advantage.
