At a time in our post-9/11 world when fundamentalist forces appear to dominate Islam, a vibrant and consequential discourse has emerged from many prominent writers seeking to change the direction of Muslim thought. This timely volume, representing a broad cross-section of this reformist trend in countries ranging from Malaysia to Algeria and Morocco, brings together the writings of thirteen of the most renowned and influential Muslim thinkers alive today. Individually and collectively, they argue for reforms in Islamic theology and jurisprudence and for reinterpretations of popular notions of Islam that are consistent with and supportive of the tenets of modern life. Their essays include broad overviews of Islam, its core principles, and the complex relationship between Islam, democracy, and civil rights; three works by Muslim feminist intellectuals; and more. The volume also places the life, career, and arguments of each thinker in national and historical context.
Copub: I.B. Tauris
Emma Tarlo
Unsettling Memories
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This richly detailed ethnographic work tells the story of a period of deep civil unrest in India . In 1975 Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency which gave her the power to silence opposition through arrests and censorship and to introduce a new program of reform which included the draconian campaigns of slum clearance and family planning. In the capital city of Delhi access to basic civic amenities became dependent on the production of a sterilization certificate. For many of the city's poorest inhabitants whose homes had been demolished, the choice was between sterilization or homelessness.
Unsettling Memories provides a gripping analysis of how state oppression was orchestrated and experienced in Delhi during the Emergency. Using personal narratives and previously unstudied archival material, it traces the process by which policies were subverted at the local level through a combination of violence, trickery and market forces. It fills a significant gap in the recent political history of India, shedding light on a period many would rather forget. Its documentation and analysis of the relationship between state archives and lived experience is methodologically innovative, charting new ground for anthropologists and political scientists concerned with the role of the state in everyday life.
Ramachandra Guha
How Much Should a Person Consume?
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Based on research conducted over two decades, this accessible and deeply felt book provides a provocative comparative history of environmentalism in two large ecologically and culturally diverse democracies—India and the United States. Ramachandra Guha takes as his point of departure the dominant environmental philosophies in these two countries—identified as "agrarianism" in India and "wilderness thinking" in the U.S. Proposing an inclusive "social ecology" framework that goes beyond these partisan ideologies, Guha arrives at a richer understanding of controversies over large dams, state forests, wildlife reserves, and more. He offers trenchant critiques of privileged and isolationist proponents of conservation, persuasively arguing for biospheres that care as much for humans as for other species. He also provides profiles of three remarkable environmental thinkers and activists—Lewis Mumford, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, and Madhav Gadgil. Finally, the author asks the fundamental environmental question—how much should a person or country consume?—and explores a range of answers.
Copub: Permanent Black
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 9
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Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions—until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet.
The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic events in English history. Pepys witnessed the London Fire, the Great Plague, the Restoration of Charles II, and the Dutch Wars. He was a patron of the arts, having himself composed many delightful songs and participated in the artistic life of London. His flair for gossip and detail reveals a portrait of the times that rivals the most swashbuckling and romantic historical novels. In none of the earlier versions was there a reliable, full text, with commentary and notation with any claim to completeness. This edition, first published in 1970, is the first in which the entire diary is printed with systematic comment. This is the only complete edition available; it is as close to Pepys’s original as possible.
Charles Higham
The Civilization of Angkor
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In the late sixteenth century a mythical encounter was reported during an elephant hunt in the dense north of the Tonle Sap, or Great Lake of central Cambodia. King Satha of Cambodia and his retainers were beating a path through the undergrowth when they were halted by stone giants and a massive wall. The King, the fable reported, ordered six thousand men to clear away the forest overgrowth around the wall, thereby exposing the city of Angkor--"lost" for over a century.
Subsequent reports from Portuguese missionaries described its five gateways, with bridges flanked by stone figures leading across a moat. There were idols covered in gold, inscriptions, fountains, canals, and a "temple with five towers, called Angor." For four centuries, this huge complex has inspired awe among visitors from all over the world, but only now are its origins and history becoming clear.
This book begins with the development of the prehistoric communities of the area and draws on the author's recent excavations to portray the rich and expansive chiefdoms that existed at the dawn of civilization. It covers the origins of early states, up to the establishment, zenith, and decline of this extraordinary civilization, whose most impressive achievement was the construction of the gilded temple mausoleum of Angkor Wat in the twelfth century, allegedly by 70,000 people.
Drawing on the latest research on prehistoric archaeology, epigraphy, and art history, Charles Higham has written a clear and concise history of this remarkable civilization.
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 4
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Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions—until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet.
The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic events in English history. Pepys witnessed the London Fire, the Great Plague, the Restoration of Charles II, and the Dutch Wars. He was a patron of the arts, having himself composed many delightful songs and participated in the artistic life of London. His flair for gossip and detail reveals a portrait of the times that rivals the most swashbuckling and romantic historical novels. In none of the earlier versions was there a reliable, full text, with commentary and notation with any claim to completeness. This edition, first published in 1970, is the first in which the entire diary is printed with systematic comment. This is the only complete edition available; it is as close to Pepys’s original as possible.
Lovell Langstroth
A Living Bay
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Monterey Bay, on the central California coast, is unique in its spectacular underwater immensity. Here species found far to the north and south overlap in their respective ranges, offering a floral and faunal diversity without parallel in the North Pacific. With more than 200 magnificent color photographs and an informed, accessible text, this book provides a dazzling picture of the rich underwater world of Monterey Bay.
A Living Bay describes the complex biological interactions among many of the marine plants and animals of Monterey Bay, including its seaweeds, seagrasses, invertebrates, marine mammals, fish, and birds. We learn how these organisms reproduce, prey, and defend themselves. The introduction presents basic biological concepts, while successive chapters tour the various habitats of the bay. From its beaches to the bottom of its submarine canyon—even deeper than the Grand Canyon in Arizona—the tiniest details come to life in the stunning photographs and explanatory text.
Samella Lewis
African American Art and Artists
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Samella Lewis has brought African American Art and Artists fully up to date in this revised and expanded edition. The book now looks at the works and lives of artists from the eighteenth century to the present, including new work in traditional media as well as in installation art, mixed media, and digital/computer art. Mary Jane Hewitt, an author, curator, and longtime friend of Samella Lewis's, has written an introduction to the new edition. Generously and handsomely illustrated, the book continues to reveal the rich legacy of work by African American artists, whose art is now included in the permanent collections of national and international museums as well as in major private collections.
Tony Rodd
Trees
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Beautifully illustrated and designed, this gorgeous reference book explores the world of trees from every perspective—from the world's great forests to the lifespan of a single leaf. Arresting color photographs of a wide variety of trees and close-ups of many of their remarkable features provide an enormous amount of information in a highly accessible format. The volume illustrates how trees grow and function, looks at their astounding diversity and adaptations, documents the key role they play in ecosystems, and explores the multitude of uses to which we put trees—from timber and pharmaceuticals to shade and shelter. A highly absorbing read cover to cover or dipped into at random, Trees: A Visual Guide delves into many specific topics: the details of flowers, bark, and roots; profiles of favorite trees; how animals and insects interact with trees; trees in urban landscapes; the role trees play in our changing climate; deforestation and reforestation; and much more. With clear diagrams, illustrations, and intriguing sidebars on many featured topics, this unique volume is a complete visual guide to the magnificence of the arboreal world.
Kate Crehan
Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology
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In the last twenty years Antonio Gramsci has become a major presence in British and American anthropology, especially for anthropologists working on issues of culture and power. This book explores Gramsci's understanding of culture and the links between culture and power. Kate Crehan makes extensive use of Gramsci's own writings, including his preprison journalism and prison letters as well as the prison notebooks. Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology also provides an account of the intellectual and political contexts within which he was writing. Crehan examines the challenge that Gramsci's approach poses to common anthropological assumptions about the nature of "culture" as well as the potential usefulness of Gramsci's writings for contemporary anthropologists.
William Blake
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake
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Since its first publication in 1965, this collection has been widely hailed as the best available text of William Blake's poetry and prose. It is now expanded to include a new foreword by Harold Bloom, his definitive statement on Blake's greatness.
Stephanie Barron
Made in California
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This opulent and expansive volume, published in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's monumental exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity,1900-2000, charts the dynamic relationship between the arts and popular conceptions of California. Displaying a dazzling array of fine art and material culture, Made in California challenges us to reexamine the ways in which the state has been portrayed and imagined. Unusually inclusive, visually intriguing, and beautifully produced, this volume is a delight throughout—both in image and in text—and will appeal to anyone who has lived in, visited, or imagined California.
Drawn from the exhibition, which gathers more than 1,200 artworks and pieces of ephemera from many public and private collections, Made in California is an image-driven look at the past century, featuring more than 400 works in a range of media, from painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, and photographs to furniture, fashion, and film. The book also includes more than 150 cultural artifacts such as tourist brochures, posters, labor union tracts, personal letters, and government reports that convey the richness and complexity of twentieth-century California. Arranged provocatively by theme, these objects take us on a visual tour of a state that was promoted as a bountiful paradise early in the century; as a glamour capital by Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s; as a suburban utopia in the late '40s and '50s; as a haven for counterculture in the '60s and '70s, and as a multicultural frontier in the '80s and '90s. The book's exploration of how these themes were reflected and contested in California's visual culture deepens our understanding of the state's artistic traditions as well as its fascinating history.
The volume is divided into five twenty-year sections, each including a narrative essay discussing the history of that era and highlighting topics particularly relevant to its visual culture. Two overarching themes emerge that have been crucial for how we imagine and understand California: first, the landscape, including both the natural and built environment, and second, the multifaceted relationships California has had with Latin America and Asia.
Geographer Michael Dear has contributed a sweeping overview of the social history of California that examines the vibrant and sometimes turbulent conditions out of which the culture emerged. Essayist Richard Rodriguez closes the volume with a uniquely personal meditation on the Golden State.
Charles Clover
The End of the Line
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Ninety percent of the large fish in the world's oceans have disappeared in the past half century, causing the collapse of fisheries along with numerous fish species. In this hard-hitting, provocative exposé, Charles Clover reveals the dark underbelly and hidden costs of putting food on the table at home and in restaurants. From the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo to a seafood restaurant on the North Sea and a trawler off the coast of Spain, Clover pursues the sobering truth about the plight of fish. Along with the ecological impact wrought by industrial fishing, he reports on the implications for our diet, particularly our need for omega-3 fatty acids. This intelligent, readable, and balanced account serves as a timely warning to the general public as well as to scientists, regulators, legislators--and all fishing enthusiasts.
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 7
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$31.95
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Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions—until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet.
The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic events in English history. Pepys witnessed the London Fire, the Great Plague, the Restoration of Charles II, and the Dutch Wars. He was a patron of the arts, having himself composed many delightful songs and participated in the artistic life of London. His flair for gossip and detail reveals a portrait of the times that rivals the most swashbuckling and romantic historical novels. In none of the earlier versions was there a reliable, full text, with commentary and notation with any claim to completeness. This edition, first published in 1970, is the first in which the entire diary is printed with systematic comment. This is the only complete edition available; it is as close to Pepys’s original as possible.
C. F. MacIntyre
French Symbolist Poetry, 50th Anniversary Edition, Bilingual Edition
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Whether viewed as an influence or in and for themselves, the Symbolists are a tantalizing group. Paralleling similar movements in art and music, their intensely personal poetry leans more heavily on oblique suggestions and evocation than on overt statement. It sets its perceptions, intuitive and nonrational, squarely against intellectual and scientific thinking—and this with a music that is flexible, intrepid, and subtle, sometimes even dissonant and jazzy. But the poetry itself is the movement's best definition.
Here with bilingual text en face, an introduction, and illuminating notes, are some forty carefully selected poems of that movement. They range from the remote beginnings in Nerval and Baudelaire, through the humor and irony of Corbière and Laforgue, to the technical brilliance of Valéry, who died as recently as 1945. For those who wish an overall view of the movement, this is a generous sampling.
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 2
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Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions—until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet.
The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic events in English history. Pepys witnessed the London Fire, the Great Plague, the Restoration of Charles II, and the Dutch Wars. He was a patron of the arts, having himself composed many delightful songs and participated in the artistic life of London. His flair for gossip and detail reveals a portrait of the times that rivals the most swashbuckling and romantic historical novels. In none of the earlier versions was there a reliable, full text, with commentary and notation with any claim to completeness. This edition, first published in 1970, is the first in which the entire diary is printed with systematic comment. This is the only complete edition available; it is as close to Pepys’s original as possible.
Patrick K. Ford
The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales
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The four stories which make up the Mabinogi along with three additional tales from the same tradition form this collection and comprise the core of the ancient Welsh mythological cycle. Included are only those stories that have remained unadulterated by the influence of the French Arthurian romances, providing a rare, authentic selection of the finest works in medieval Celtic literature. In this first thoroughly revised edition and translation since Lady Charlotte Guest's famous Mabinogion in 1849, Patrick Ford has presented a scholarly document in readable, modern English, a literary achievement of the highest order.
Herman Melville
Moby Dick or, The Whale
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This trade edition of Moby-Dick is a reduced version of the Arion Press Moby-Dick, which was published in 1979 in a limited edition of 250 copies and has been hailed as a modern masterpiece of bookmaking. It was hand set under the supervision of one of America's finest book designers and printers. The initial letters that begin each chapter were designed especially for this book and christened "Leviathan." The illustrations, of places, creatures, objects or tools, and processes connected with nineteenth-century whaling, are original boxwood engravings by Massachusetts artist Barry Moser. The text of Moby-Dick used in this edition is based on that used in the critical edition of Melville's works published by the Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library.
This reduced version is smaller in size than the Arion edition and the California deluxe edition, but it includes all of the original pages and illustrations. It is printed in black only throughout, and it is not slipcased.
Enrico Ascalone
Mesopotamia
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This beautifully illustrated guide to the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia, the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is the perfect companion for travelers and armchair travelers alike. It provides a concise survey of three ancient cultures that have often been misunderstood, both because of Biblical and neoclassical traditions, and because of twentieth- and twenty-first-century events. Lavishly illustrated in full color on every page, the book is arranged topically to cover the broad areas of life, such as people, politics, religion, the world of the dead, and important places and monuments. The text emphasizes the archaeological and literary evidence pertaining to Mesopotamia during the period before the arrival of Alexander the Great, beginning with the written sources, including the list of Sumerian kings and the epic of Gilgamesh, and continuing with the major personages, such as the Akkadian monarchy from Sargon through Nabonedo. The book also brings together the principal Mesopotamian works of art that have been dispersed in museums worldwide - notably the materials from the Baghdad Museum that were damaged or lost in the present war. Packed with information, images, maps, diagrams, and reconstructions, Mesopotamia is the perfect companion to an important ancient civilization.
Copub: Mondadori Electa
Stefania Ratto
Greece
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This gorgeously illustrated, compact volume considers the entire civilization of ancient Greece, including Magna Graecia's colonial expansion. In color photographs and text, the book offers views of virtually all aspects of ancient Greek life, from the material needs of the people to their artistic culture, from political and administrative organization to the religious cults, and from urban structures to architectural typologies. Archaeologist Stefania Ratto has infused the commentary with accurate, well-informed, and up-to-date scholarship while keeping it lively and accessible, and the clarity of the book's design makes Greece an attractive and inviting introduction to the classical period. A fantastic guide for both the traveler and the general reader, Greece is a welcome addition to any library.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Zettel, 40th Anniversary Edition
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Zettel, an en face bilingual edition, collects fragments from Wittgenstein's work between 1929 and 1948 on issues of the mind, mathematics, and language.
Rita Gonzalez
Phantom Sightings
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Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement is the first comprehensive consideration of Chicano art in almost two decades and the largest exhibition of cutting-edge Chicano art ever presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Traditionally described as work created by Americans of Mexican descent, Chicano art first emerged during the vibrant Chicano rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This catalog and exhibition explore the experimental tendencies within today's Chicano art, which is oriented less toward painting and polemical assertion and more toward conceptual art, performance, film, photography, and media-based art, as well as "stealthy" artistic interventions in urban spaces. Three essays by Rita Gonzalez, Howard N. Fox, and Chon A. Noriega explore the topic in depth. With more than two hundred color illustrations, twenty-five individual artist portfolios, and a wryly subversive chronology of significant moments in Chicano cultural history, Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement charts new territory and provides a conceptual sampling of Chicano art today.
Derek Hayes
Historical Atlas of the United States
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Using more than five hundred historical maps from collections around the world, this stunning book is the first to tell the story of America's past from a unique geographical perspective. Covering more than half a millennium in U.S. history—from conception to colonization to Hurricane Katrina—this atlas documents the discoveries and explorations, the intrigue and negotiations, the technology and the will that led the United States to become what it is today. Richly detailed, visually breathtaking maps are accompanied by extended captions that elucidate the stories and personalities behind their creation.
Coasts and mountains, rivers and lakes, and peaks and plains are described by explorers encountering them for the first time. These maps can convey explorers' ideas of what lay over the mountains ahead, their notions about what was discovered, and their explanations of the land's potential for sponsors back home. The maps can also show a promoter's attempt to sell his project to settlers or a general's assessment of a coming battle. They chart the wars that created and molded the country: the French and Indian War and the War for Independence; the Mexican and Civil Wars; the numerous Indian wars; as well as more localized battles of conquest and survival. Readers can follow the progression of map creation and design as more knowledge was gained about the American continent.
Distilling an enormous amount of information into one handsome volume, the Historical Atlas of the United States highlights the evolution of geographical knowledge at the same time that it presents a fascinating chronicle of the expansion and development of a nation.
Copub: Douglas & McIntyre
Peter Winn
Americas
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Stunning in its sweep, Americas is the most authoritative history available of contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean. From Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, and from Cuba to Trinidad and Tobago, Americas examines the historical, demographic, political, social, cultural, religious, and economic trends in the region. For this new edition Peter Winn has provided a new preface and made revisions throughout to include the most up-to-date information on changes and developments in Latin America since the last revised edition of 1999.
Paul Freedman
Food
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This richly illustrated book is the first to apply the discoveries of the new generation of food historians to the pleasures of dining and the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilizations, past and present. Editor Paul Freedman has gathered essays by French, German, Belgian, American, and British historians to present a comprehensive, chronological history of taste from prehistory to the present day. The authors explore the early repertoire of sweet tastes; the distinctive contributions made by classical antiquity and China; the subtle, sophisticated, and varied group of food customs created by the Islamic civilizations of Iberia, the Arabian desert, Persia, and Byzantium; the magnificent cuisine of the Middle Ages, influenced by Rome and adapted from Islamic Spain, Africa, and the Middle East; the decisive break with highly spiced food traditions after the Renaissance and the new focus on primary ingredients and products from the New World; French cuisine's rise to dominance in Europe and America; the evolution of modern restaurant dining, modern agriculture, and technological developments; and today's tastes, which employ few rules and exhibit a glorious eclecticism. The result is the enthralling story not only of what sustains us but also of what makes us feel alive.
Copub: Thames & Hudson
Fernando de Rojas
The Celestina
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The Celestina is considered by scholars to be the first European novel. Written in fifteenth-century Spain, this masterpiece is remarkable for its originality, depth, handling of dialogue, and drawing of character. The novel's focus is the character of Celestina, who dominates the scene. An old bawd brimming with salty wisdom derived from a vigorous and sinful life, she is one of the great creations of all literature and holds a secure place beside her two compatriots, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. This Spanish classic, the greatest of the forebears of Cervantes, was originally published anonymously, in 1499; later editions bear the name of Fernando de Rojas as author.
Ian Watt
The Rise of the Novel, Updated Edition
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The Rise of the Novel is Ian Watt's classic description of the interworkings of social conditions, changing attitudes, and literary practices during the period when the novel emerged as the dominant literary form of the individualist era.
In a new foreword, W. B. Carnochan accounts for the increasing interest in the English novel, including the contributions that Ian Watt's study made to literary studies: his introduction of sociology and philosophy to traditional criticism.
Greg Malouf
Artichoke to Za’atar
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This richly illustrated book offers a comprehensive collection of 170 recipes, organized alphabetically according to ingredients widely used in Middle Eastern cooking. Written by award-winning chef Greg Malouf and his writing partner, Lucy Malouf, Artichoke to Za'atar covers everything from the basics—almonds, lemons, and yogurt—to less widely known components such as pomegranates, rose water, and sumac. A brief description and history of each ingredient is provided, along with invaluable tips on how to select, prepare, and cook it. Originally published in 1999 as Arabesque, this book has earned international acclaim as the ultimate guide to modern Middle Eastern cuisine by a chef who is considered a master of the genre. Artichoke to Za'atar is a volume to read, use, and treasure—a must for anyone interested in creative cooking and culinary history. Now available in North America for the first time.
Martin Luther
The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume VI
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Dedicated to documenting the life of America's best-known advocate for peace and justice, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. breaks the chronology of its series to present King's never-before-published sermon file. In 1997 Mrs. Coretta Scott King granted the King Papers Project permission to examine papers kept in boxes in the basement of the Kings' home. The most significant finding was a battered cardboard box that held more than two hundred folders containing documents King used to prepare his celebrated sermons. This private collection that King kept in his study sheds considerable light on the theology and preaching preparation of one of the most noted orators of the modern era.
These illuminating papers reveal that King's concern about poverty, human rights, and social justice was clearly present in his earliest handwritten sermons, which conveyed a message of faith, hope, and love for the dispossessed. His enduring message can be charted through his years as a seminary student, as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, and, ultimately, as an internationally renowned proponent of human rights who saw himself mainly as a preacher and "advocate of the social gospel." Ten of the original and unedited sermons King submitted for publication in the 1963 book Strength to Love and audio versions of King's most famous sermons are the culmination of this groundbreaking work.
Anne Salmond
BLIGH
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In Bligh, the story of the most notorious of all Pacific explorers is told through a new lens as a key episode in the history of the world, rather than simply of the West. Award-winning anthropologist Anne Salmond recounts with a fresh perspective the triumphs and disasters of William Bligh’s life in a riveting narrative that for the first time portrays the Pacific islanders as players. Beginning in 1777, when Bligh, at twenty-two, first arrived in Tahiti with Captain Cook, Salmond charts Bligh’s three Pacific voyages—and tells how they transformed lives on the islands as well as on board the ships and back in Europe. She sheds new insight into the mutiny aboard the Bounty—and on Bligh’s remarkable 3,000-mile journey across the Pacific in a small boat—through revelations from the raw, unguarded letters between him and his wife Betsy. This beautifully told story reveals Bligh for the first time, as an important ethnographer adding to the paradoxical legacy of this famed seaman, and it captures more definitively than ever the excitement, drama, and terror of these events.
Ibrahim Warde
The Price of Fear
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When the State Department claims to have struck a blow at the heart of the international terrorist finance network, even the most hardened of commentators takes the statement at face value. But as Ibrahim Warde argues in this myth-shattering book, the post-9/11 series of financial crackdowns initiated by the U.S. government has had virtually no impact on terrorism. This is because, as he demonstrates, these actions are based on a fundamental misconception of how terrorism works. Warde shows how operations such as the 9/11 attacks were actually financed, and he brilliantly juxtaposes the reality of shoestring budgets and envelopes of cash against the prevailing fantasy of a buzzing transnational network of seamless electronic transfers.
Copub: I.B.Tauris Books
Jamie Goode
The Science of Wine
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This essential and groundbreaking reference gives a comprehensive overview of one of the most fascinating, important, and controversial trends in the world of wine: the scientific and technological innovations that are now influencing how grapes are grown and how wine is made. Jamie Goode, a widely respected authority on wine science, details the key scientific developments relating to viticulture and enology, explains the practical application of science to techniques that are used around the world, and explores how these issues are affecting the quality, flavor, and perception of wine. The only complete resource available on the subject, The Science of Wine: From Vine to Glass engagingly discusses a wide range of topics including terroir, biodynamics, the production of “natural” or manipulation-free wines, the potential effect of climate change on grape growing, the health benefits of wine, and much more.
* Covers some of the most hotly debated issues including genetically modified grape vines, sulphur dioxide, the future of cork, and wine flavor chemistry
* More than 100 illustrations and photographs make even the most complex topics clear, straightforward, and easy to understand
* Engagingly written for a wide audience of students, winemakers, wine professionals, and general readers interested in the science of wine
Gordon S. Barrass
The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China
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Calligraphy is a defining feature of Chinese culture, both a means of communication and a revered form of art. It has changed more dramatically during the half century since Mao Zedong established the People's Republic in 1949 than over the preceding fifteen hundred years. At first the traditional art of calligraphy was transformed into an instrument of political power and protest, wielded on an unprecedented scale. Over the past three decades it has emerged as a more visually exciting modern genre, one that offers fascinating insights into the people of modern China.
For The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, Gordon S. Barrass interviewed many prominent calligraphers. He focuses on twenty-five individuals who have been key figures in this process and who exemplify its main trends, from the grand tradition to the avant-garde. Lavishly illustrated, this sumptuous book charts the development of these calligraphers and makes their distinctive voices accessible to Western readers for the first time.
Narendra Jadhav
Untouchables
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Every sixth human being in the world today is an Indian, and every sixth Indian is an untouchable. For thousands of years the untouchables, or Dalits, the people at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, have been treated as subhuman. In this remarkable book, at last giving voice to India’s voiceless, Narendra Jadhav tells the awe-inspiring story of his family’s struggle for equality and justice in India. Based on his father’s diaries and family stories, Jadhav has written the triumphant story of his parents—their great love, unwavering courage, and eventual victory in the struggle to free themselves and their children from the caste system. He vividly brings his parents’ world to light and unflinchingly documents the lives of untouchables—the hunger, the cruel humiliations, the perpetual fear, and the brutal abuse. Untouchables is an eye-opening work that gives readers insight into the lives of India’s 165 million Dalits, whose struggle for equality continues even today.
Carlo Collodi
The Adventures of Pinocchio (Le Avventure Di Pinocchio)
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Perella's translation and introductory essay capture the wit, irony, ambiguity, and social satire of the original nineteenth-century text, finally reclaiming Pinocchio for adult readers. It also represents the first time the whole story has appeared in English. This bilingual edition includes over 130 drawings by the original illustrator, Enrico Mazzanti.
Rudolf Arnheim
The Dynamics of Architectural Form, 30th Anniversary Edition
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Rudolf Arnheim has been known, since the publication of his groundbreaking Art and Visual Perception in 1974, as an authority on the psychologicalinterpretation of the visual arts. Two anniversary volumes celebrate the landmark anniversaries of his works in 2009. In The Power of the Center, Arnheim uses a wealth of examples to consider the actors that determine the overall organization of visual form in works of painting, sculpture, and architecture. The Dynamics of Architectural Form explores the unexpected perceptual consequences of architecture with Arnheim's customary clarity and precision.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein, 40th Anniversary Edition
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In 1938 Wittgenstein delivered a short course of lectures on aesthetics to a small group of students at Cambridge. The present volume has been compiled from notes taken down at the time by three of the students: Rush Rhees, Yorick Smythies, and James Taylor. They have been supplemented by notes of conversations on Freud (to whom reference was made in the course on aesthetics) between Wittgenstein and Rush Rhees, and by notes of some lectures on religious belief. As very little is known of Wittgenstein's views on these subjects from his published works, these notes should be of considerable interest to students of contemporary philosophy. Further, their fresh and informal style should recommend Wittgenstein to those who find his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations a little formidable.
Janet Bishop
Robert Bechtle
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Tracing Robert Bechtle's career from his earliest paintings of the 1960s to the present day, this is the definitive book on one of the founders and foremost practitioners of American Photorealism. Created in close collaboration with the artist, Robert Bechtle will accompany the distinguished painter's first retrospective exhibition. Lavish plates feature reproductions of approximately ninety of Bechtle's most significant artworks, from large-scale oil paintings to intimate watercolors and drawings. These magnificent illustrations portray the range of the San Francisco-based painter's iconic imagery of California—the rows of palm trees, stucco houses, and the ubiquitous automobiles that spurred suburban expansion—as well as his lesser-known but equally compelling family scenes and stark interiors. Bechtle's preference for wide, empty spaces; his flat, sun-bleached palette; and his detached mode of recording random details impart a singular sense of alienation to his subjects. His deadpan paintings capture the essence of the postwar American experience, in which California often serves as the testing ground for the realization of national dreams.
Philip L. Fradkin
Wallace Stegner and the American West
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Renowned environmental historian Philip L. Fradkin reveals the Wallace Stegner behind the literary legacy—a generous teacher, conservationist, and man whose early landscapes shaped his life and character. Fradkin chronicles Stegner's formative years, from the raw, desolate plains of Saskatchewan and the canyonlands of Utah to California's Silicon Valley. A lifelong teacher and environmentalist, Stegner inspired countless writers and defended the wilderness against human desecration. In this biography of man, place, and century, Fradkin traces Stegner's life across its many landscapes, and shows us how this child of the fading frontier became the voice, protector, and enduring icon of the West.
Joyce Tyldesley
Egypt
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Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth century sparked a global fascination with ancient Egyptian culture that remains undiminished to this day. This book, written by leading author and archaeologist Joyce Tyldesley, tells the full story of the discoveries of treasures that had lain completely hidden and undisturbed for nearly two thousand years. Tyldesley follows in the footsteps of real-life Indiana Joneses in their quest for the splendid monuments, tombs, and artifacts that have unlocked many of the secrets of this mesmerizing civilization. Crafting a riveting chronicle of historical intrigue and intrepid personalities, the author relates the beginnings of Egyptology, leading the reader from the nail-biting race to crack the code of ancient hieroglyphics to the heart-stopping moment when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamen’s burial chamber.
Egypt introduces the collectors, explorers, and archaeologists who have come to dominate the story of the rediscovery of ancient Egypt. Among these is Giovanni Belzoni, a circus strongman and diehard adventurer who uncovered many of the works of the greatest pharaoh of them all, Rameses II. Tyldesley describes the larger-than-life personalities and spectacular finds of characters such as Jean-François Champollion, Amelia Edwards, and Flinders Petrie. She delves into Howard Carter's dramatic discovery of the golden treasures lying deep in the burial chamber of the boy king Tutankhamen. Illustrated with full-color photographs, Egypt captures the excitement of these gripping adventures stories while highlighting the magnificence of the artifacts that were their object.
Copub: BBC Books
Peter Schrag
Paradise Lost
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For much of the past century California was the envy of the continent, not just for what nature had made but for what civil society had created: speedy freeways, well-supported schools, the world's best public university system, public works that made the desert bloom. Not any more. California's public works and social services are crumbling, and public education has plunged from the top to near-bottom in nationwide measures. How could the American dream go so wrong so fast? Originally published in 1998, Peter Schrag's view of California seems as applicable as ever. In his new preface to the 2004 edition, Schrag updates the California scene and considers the fallout from such political earthquakes as the 2003 recall election.
Robert Flynn Johnson
The Face in the Lens
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Anonymous photography has a magic all its own. The intriguing images assembled here by collector and curator Robert Flynn Johnson are all mysterious, but their appeal is various. By turns poignant, humorous, erotic, and disturbing, their subject is the human condition. In ten stunning chapters every aspect of human experience—both public and private—is explored. Richly reproduced and with subtle tonalities marking their age, over 220 photographs showcase the work of photographers whose identities have been lost in time. The images are never anything less than mesmerizing and include previously unseen portraits of such stars as Cary Grant, Richard Burton, and Marlene Dietrich. Introduced by Alexander McCall Smith, this follow-up to Johnson's widely acclaimed Anonymous touches on birth, marriage, death, disease, hope, glory, and despair and a plethora of additional emotions, events, and human states, and will capture the imagination of any reader.
Copub: Thames and Hudson
Rudolf Arnheim
The Genesis of a Painting
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Rudolf Arnheim explores the creative process through the sketches executed by Picasso for his mural Guernica. The drawings and paintings shown herein, as well as the photographs of the stages of the final painting, represent the complete visual record of the creative stages of a major work of art.
William Saletan
Bearing Right
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In his gripping, behind-the-scenes account, journalist William Saletan reveals exactly how, thirty years after Roe v. Wade, "pro-choice" conservatives have won the abortion war. Having successfully turned abortion into a privacy issue, conservatives now prevail on issues ranging from abortion's legality and parental notification to Medicaid, rape, and cloning; consequently, reproductive autonomy is now becoming inaccessible to the young and the poor. This eye-opening exposé tells how abortion rights activists—people who desired social change, women's equality, and broader access to health care—have had their message co-opted in a culture of privacy and limited government. Bearing Right is also a story about the essentially conservative character of the United States today.
Saletan tells how, beginning in Arkansas in 1986 during the administration of Governor Bill Clinton, the National Abortion Rights Action League repackaged the abortion issue to give it broader appeal to conservatives. Pro-choice conservatives adopted this new rhetoric and made the abortion issue their own. Saletan takes us through the key events in the ensuing story—the fight over the nomination of Judge Robert Bork, the election of Governor Doug Wilder in Virginia, the convergence of the Bush and Clinton positions on abortion in 1992, and much more—right up to the present day.
This book is a crucial lesson in how politicians and interest groups can change the way we vote, not by telling us facts or lies, but by reshaping the way we think—in part through mass marketing. Today, the abortion rights movement must ask itself what it has won and what it is fighting for. This book is sure to play a role in answering that question.
Liza Dalby
Geisha
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In this classic best seller, Liza Dalby, the first non-Japanese ever to have trained as a geisha, offers an insider's look at the exclusive world of female companions to the Japanese male elite. A new preface examines how geisha have been profoundly affected by the changes of the past quarter century yet—especially in Kyoto—have managed to take advantage of modern developments to maintain their social position with flair.
Hugh Johnson
A Life Uncorked
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Hugh Johnson, the preeminent wine writer of our time, now brings to his fans around the world his first major new book in a decade: this stylish, intimate, and delightfully opinionated autobiographical tour through the world of wine. A Life Uncorked weaves Johnson’s wide-ranging ruminations, memories, and observations on his remarkable life together with information on every aspect of wine—from its technical production to its cultural significance. In luminous, utterly engaging prose, he taps into his enormous experience to consider topics such as tasting, cellaring, choosing, understanding, comparing, and buying wine, as well as wine’s more ephemeral and personal pleasures, lures, and mysteries.
At the heart of A Life Uncorked is the idea that wine is more than a drink; its characteristics link it directly to memory, to locations around the world where grapes are grown and wine is made, and to the dining rooms, restaurants, bars, and gardens where we consume it. Johnson takes us to all of these places and many more in this delightful and revelatory memoir. Peppered with anecdotes throughout, A Life Uncorked simultaneously educates and entertains with its absorbing perspective on the complex and fascinating world of wine from one of its most well-known and well-liked aficionados.
Rudolf Arnheim
Visual Thinking
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For thirty-five years Visual Thinking has been the gold standard for art educators, psychologists, and general readers alike. In this seminal work, Arnheim, author of The Dynamics of Architectural Form, Film as Art, Toward a Psychology of Art, and Art and Visual Perception, asserts that all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature, and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading. An indis-pensable tool for students and for those interested in the arts.
Mark di Suvero
Mark di Suvero
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This beautifully illustrated book—the definitive volume on American sculptor Mark di Suvero—features more than two hundred images of his most important works, interspersed with short texts by the artist and by other writers who have inspired his art-making practice, plus a contribution by François Barré. Humanist in approach and populist in sensibility, di Suvero's sculpture is accessible, inviting, and inclusive. Praised in particular for his monumental assemblages incorporating steel and wood, di Suvero emerged as a superstar in the 1960s. He was the first living artist to show his sculpture at the Tuileries Gardens, Paris, and the first honored with three major exhibitions at Storm King Art Center. His distinctive, bold pieces can be found in museums and public collections all over the world, and he continues to be the subject of numerous exhibitions both in the United States and in Europe. Mark di Suvero: Dreambook is a celebration of his artistic oeuvre and of his long, distinguished career.
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Peter Whitfield
Cities of the World
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Condensing centuries of history into one volume, Cities of the World traces the historic form and special character of the world's greatest cities through a breathtaking collection of maps and panoramic views. Peter Whitfield focuses on more than sixty cities—from Athens to Brasilia, Washington to Moscow, San Francisco to Saigon, and Venice to Lhasa. He presents an extremely wide range of maps, historic prints, and photographs from many periods that show how the architectural form and the social life of our cities have been shaped—not only by their geographical setting, but also by religion, royal power, commerce, social ideals, and occasionally artistic vision. These images illustrate the historic heart of the cities: the ancient harbors, the hilltop fortresses, the encircling walls, and the houses, churches, and palaces that have been added over the centuries. For the armchair traveler or anyone passionate about the history of human civilization, this beautiful, unique book captures the richness of the urban fabric and reflects the collective memory of each metropolis.
Cities of the World demonstrates how the city was linked to the birth and progress of civilization itself, how it has acted as a focus for ideas and technologies, arts and sciences, and even religious devotion. It shows the ways that some cities grew slowly into haphazard, unplanned beauties, while others were shaped by the will of masterful individuals. Whitfield chose the cities featured here not only because they are richly and beautifully illustrated, but also because they demonstrate a notion of spirit—an outward and inward uniqueness.
Many of these historic maps have a pictorial quality that vanished long ago from the functional town-plan. Depicting the classical city-state, the medieval fortress, the baroque capital, and the industrial metropolis, the sumptuous illustrations in this book chronicle how simple outlines found on Babylonian clay tablets evolved into the stylized pictures of medieval times and spectacular bird's-eye panoramic views, finally culminating in the highly functional mass-produced maps of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wonderfully evocative of the places they depict and the artistic tastes of their time, these maps shed new light on civilization itself, with all of its contradictions, shortcomings, energy, and aspirations.
Copub: British Library
California Coastal Commission
California Coastal Access Guide
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The California coast, from the majestic redwoods and rocky shores in the north to the palm trees and wide, sandy beaches in the south, is an area of unsurpassed beauty and diversity. This revised and expanded sixth edition of the California Coastal Access Guide is an essential handbook for both new and seasoned visitors exploring California's majestic 1,100-mile shoreline. With up-to-date maps and information, it is a valuable guide for all beachgoers—hikers, campers, swimmers, divers, wheelchair users, joggers, and boaters—detailing where to go, how to get there, and what facilities and environment to expect.
The Guide contains:
o information on more than 890 public access coastal areas
o Clear descriptions of campgrounds, trails, recreation areas, transportation, and parking
o Addresses, phone numbers, websites, transit information, and hours of use
o Information on wheelchair-accessible facilities
o Easy-to-read charts listing facilities and topographical features
o 125 updated maps providing directions and driving distances
o 15 full-color county maps
o More than 300 illustrations
o Also contained in this handbook is extensive information on environmental issues, updated to account for changing ecological conditions and conservation strategies. Feature articles cover a broad range of topics, including natural history, marine and coastal wildlife, environmental issues, and sports and recreation.
Over thirty years ago California voters approved an initiative that led to the creation of the California Coastal Commission. Later, the California Coastal Act of 1976 established the Commission as a permanent state agency with a mission to protect, maintain, and enhance the quality of the coastal environment. One of the Commission's principal goals is to maintain public access and public recreational opportunities along the coast in a way consistent with environmental preservation. The California Coastal Access Guide, which was created with these objectives in mind, will prove indispensable to anyone with a desire to explore the magnificent diversity of California's beaches.
Theresa Urbainczyk
Slave Revolts in Antiquity
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Although much has been written on Greek and Roman slavery in antiquity, the same cannot be said for slave resistance in this period. Slave revolts have typically been dismissed as historically insignificant or exceptional events resulting from peculiar historical circumstances. In the first in-depth work on this topic to be published in two decades, Theresa Urbainczyk challenges much current thinking by looking beyond the canonical sources to reveal a longer and far more significant history of slave resistance. Her engaging, up-to-date account considers the circumstances of these revolts, looks at slave leaders and how they are recorded in history, explores the aims of slaves, examines attitudes toward freedom and slavery, and more. Dissecting both ancient and modern sources, she finds that the writers who recorded and rerecorded these slave rebellions and wars had every reason to repress large-scale resistance or to reconfigure it as something other than what it was. Slave Revolts in Antiquity also addresses one of the most important issues of our own time: the meaning of freedom itself.
Copub: Acumen Publishing Limited
Peter K. Austin
One Thousand Languages
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There are more than six thousand languages used around the world today, although linguists now estimate that by the year 2050 as many as half of those will be extinct. This beautifully designed, engagingly written reference takes us on a panoramic tour of the globe to explore this unique and endangered human gift. Generously illustrated throughout with color photographs, informative sidebars, and clear maps and graphics, One Thousand Languages illuminates the sources, characteristics, and interrelationships of the world's spoken tongues. It looks in detail at the eleven global languages, then delves into the major languages of each world region in turn. Each entry gives a history of the growth and development of the language, details the number of speakers, and traces its geographical spread. The volume also provides information on many extinct languages. A detailed map section tracks the migrations of the major languages, and the book also tells how to count to ten in more than 250 ways.
Copub: Ivy Press Limited
Stuart Chape
The Worlds Protected Areas
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Extensively illustrated with maps, color photographs, and graphics, this state-of-the-art reference offers a comprehensive and authoritative status report on the world's 100,000 parks, nature reserves, and other land and marine areas currently designated as protected areas. Now covering over 12 percent of the Earth's land surface, protected areas are the great strongholds of biodiversity and landscape conservation. They also provide a wide range of valuable ecosystem services: protecting food and water supplies; regulating weather patterns; protecting watersheds and coastlines from erosion; maintaining places of historical or cultural significance for recreation, solace or spiritual wellbeing; generating income and employment from tourism, and more. This timely volume offers a benchmark overview of where these protected areas exist worldwide, what they have and have not accomplished, what threats they face, and how they can be better managed to achieve the goals of conserving biodiversity and other natural resources.
Copub: UNEP-WCMC
James Warren
Presocratics
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The earliest phase of philosophy in Europe saw the beginnings of cosmology and rational theology, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethical and political theory. It also saw the development of a wide range of radical and challenging ideas, from Thales' claim that magnets have souls and Parmenides' account of one unchanging existence to the development of an atomist theory of the physical world. This general account of the Presocratics introduces the major Greek philosophical thinkers from the sixth to the middle of the fifth century B.C. It explores how we might reconstruct their views and understand the motivation and context for their work, and it highlights the ongoing philosophical interest of their often surprising claims. Separate chapters are devoted to each of the major Presocratic thinkers, including Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Leucippus, and Democritus. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this book is an ideal introduction for the student and general reader.
Copub: Acumen Publishing Limited
Gilles Kepel
Muslim Extremism in Egypt
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Gilles Kepel takes us into the world of the students, professionals, workers, and unemployed who are caught up in the Islamic movements of Egypt. Events that have riveted world attention—the first World Trade Center bombing, assassinations in Beirut, the attempt on the life of the Pope, the assassination of Sadat, and, in a new preface, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—are illuminated by this penetrating study.
Don Lattin
Distilled Spirits
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Distilled Spirits blends a religion reporter’s memoir with the compelling stories of three men—Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Bill Wilson—who transformed the landscape of Western religion and spirituality in the twentieth century. Huxley, celebrated author of Brave New World, ignited a generation that chased utopian dreams and sought enlightenment through psychedelic drugs. Heard, an Anglo-Irish mystic, journeyed to California with Huxley in the 1930s to lay the foundations for the New Age and human potential movements. Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, joined forces with Huxley and Heard in the 1940s and 1950s, when Wilson began a series of little-known experiments to see if LSD could be used to help diehard drunks.
Their life stories are gracefully brought together by veteran journalist Don Lattin. Lattin recounts his own rocky personal journey from 1960s and 1970s counter-culture, through the fast-living, cocaine-fueled 1980s and 1990s, to his long struggle to get sober. By weaving an intimate account of his own recovery with the lives of the book’s three central characters, Lattin shows us the redemptive power of story telling, the strength of fellowship, and the power of living more compassionately, one day at a time.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Grammar
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In 1933 Ludwig Wittgenstein revised a manuscript he had compiled from his 1930-1932 notebooks, but the work as a whole was not published until 1969, as Philosophische Grammatik. This first English translation clearly reveals the central place Philosophical Grammar occupies in Wittgenstein's thought and provides a link from his earlier philosophy to his later views.
Genny Smith
Sierra East
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The Eastern Sierra is a dramatic, unusual, mountain-and-desert region in eastern California and western Nevada that includes two famous resorts, Lake Tahoe and Mammoth Lakes. It is a world apart from the lands west of the Sierra Nevada, and the contributors to this lavishly illustrated natural history provide a marvelous introduction to the wonderland that makes up the Eastern Sierra.
As the eastern slope of the 400-mile-long Sierra Nevada merges with the western edge of the Great Basin, desert valleys of long summers and snow-spangled mountains of long winters lie side by side. The region's unique features include altitudes ranging from 2,800 feet at Redrock Canyon to 14,494 feet at the top of Mount Whitney; the merging of three biogeographic regions: the Sierra Nevada, the Great Basin Desert, and the Mojave Desert; and the resulting extraordinary diversity of plant and animal life. The book contains chapters on the region's geologic story, weather and climate, plant communities, arthropods, native fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. The authors emphasize relationships and the ingenious ways that plant and animal life have evolved and adapted to the Eastern Sierra's harsh environments. Maps, diagrams, photographs, and exceptional drawings illustrate the text. Written with few technical terms, Sierra East is a fine source book for the layperson and students on university field trips.
Stephen Cavalier
The World History of Animation
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Lavishly illustrated and encyclopedic in scope, The World History of Animation tells the genre’s 100-year-old story around the globe, featuring key players in Europe, North America, and Asia. From its earliest days, animation has developed multiple iterations and created myriad dynamic styles, innovative techniques, iconic characters, and memorable stories. Stephen Cavalier’s comprehensive account is organized chronologically and covers pioneers, feature films, television programs, digital films, games, independent films, and the web. An exhaustive time line of films and innovations acts as the narrative backbone, and must-see films are listed along with synopses and in-depth biographies of individuals and studios. The book explains the evolution of animation techniques, from rotoscoping to refinements of cel techniques, direct film, claymation, and more. A true global survey, The World History of Animation is an exciting and inspirational journey through the large and still-expanding animation universe—a place as limitless as the human imagination.
• A comprehensive international history of animation, featuring all genres,
styles, media, and techniques
• Features film, television, and web-based animation
• Illustrated in full color throughout
• Includes comprehensive biographies of leading practitioners
Stephen Burman
The State of the American Empire
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As the United States casts an increasingly dominant shadow in world affairs, resentment from the international community widens. In The State of the American Empire, Stephen Burman lays bare the global scope of the political, economic, cultural, and military might of a country that, paradoxically, was founded in a rebellion against imperialism. Combining forensic analysis with detailed full-color graphics, Burman provides a comprehensive overview of the countries that are dependent on U.S. trade or investment, or are inhabited by U.S. troops. Liberally illustrated with maps that display America's global footprint, from its military interventions to its trading partners, The State of the American Empire interrogates every aspect of this new empire to reveal its roots, its likely duration, and, most important, its impact on the rest of the world.
Copub: Myriad Editions
Rudolf Arnheim
Art and Visual Perception, Second Edition
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Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one's eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheim's reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.
Paul Monaco
The Sixties
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Amid the turbulence of political assassinations, the civil rights struggle, and antiwar protests, American society was experiencing growing affluence and profound cultural change during the 1960s. The film industry gradually redirected its energies, resulting in a distinctive break from traditional business and stylistic practice and emergence of a new "cinema of sensation." Feature films became faster-paced and more graphic, the antihero took his place alongside the classic Hollywood hero, and "downer" films like Midnight Cowboy proved as popular as those with upbeat fare. Paul Monaco gives a sweeping view of this exhilarating decade, ranging from the visceral sensation of Bonnie and Clyde, to the comic-book satire of Dr. Strangelove, to the youthful alienation of The Graduate.
Marc Treib
An Everyday Modernism
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William Wilson Wurster (1895-1973) has been widely recognized as the foremost proponent of a distinctive Bay Area architectural style. But his ideas extended far beyond California: In private practice and as head of architecture schools at the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wurster shaped an entire generation of architects and city planners.
An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster documents Wurster's fifty-year career and his important place in contemporary American architectural thought. Along with his wife, city planner Catherine Bauer, and landscape architect Thomas Church, Wurster was intimately involved in the rise of modern city planning and landscape design in the United States. In keeping with the social and economic conditions of the late 1930s, Wurster encouraged the development of small houses that offered the livability of those of greater scale, and he influenced the building of affordable mass-produced housing. His designs embodied principles of simplicity and economy, yet incorporated complex human needs. Wurster's legacy is especially relevant today, as uncertain economic conditions and social dislocations affect housing for Americans at every level.
Over fifty of Wurster's projects are featured here, with photographs, drawings, and plans, along with numerous projects by his contemporaries. Essays by distinguished architectural historians and critics—several of whom knew or worked with Wurster—provide insights into his personal as well as professional life. Abundantly illustrated, this first large-scale examination of William Wurster's architectural enterprise offers a full appreciation of the man and his work.
Herwig Wolfram
The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples
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The names of early Germanic warrior tribes and leaders resound in songs and legends; the real story of the part they played in reshaping the ancient world is no less gripping. Herwig Wolfram's panoramic history spans the great migrations of the Germanic peoples and the rise and fall of their kingdoms between the third and eighth centuries, as they invaded, settled in, and ultimately transformed the Roman Empire.
As Germanic military kings and their fighting bands created kingdoms, and won political and military recognition from imperial governments through alternating confrontation and accommodation, the "tribes" lost their shared culture and social structure, and became sharply differentiated. They acquired their own regions and their own histories, which blended with the history of the empire. In Wolfram's words, "the Germanic peoples neither destroyed the Roman world nor restored it; instead, they made a home for themselves within it."
This story is far from the "decline and fall" interpretation that held sway until recent decades. Wolfram's narrative, based on his sweeping grasp of documentary and archaeological evidence, brings new clarity to a poorly understood period of Western history.
Thomas Carlyle
Past and Present
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Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish essayist, historian, cultural critic, and leading man of English letters during the Victorian era, published Past and Present, one of his most influential works, in 1843. Written as a response to the economic crisis of the 1840s—closure of factories, loss of jobs, the growth of slums in industrial centers, the starving poor—Past and Present aimed to lead readers toward a "conversion experience" in order to stimulate social reform. In this work, Carlyle provides a trenchant articulation of the political, social, religious, and economic climate of the mid-nineteenth century and a prophetic vision of the future.
This volume, the fourth of the eight-volume Strouse Edition, includes an informative historical introduction and illustrations, along with complete notes and scholarly apparatus, and is the definitive modern scholarly edition.
Michel Foucault
This Is Not a Pipe
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What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction.
Anne Salmond
Aphrodites Island
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Aphrodite's Island is a bold new account of the European discovery of Tahiti, the Pacific island of mythic status that has figured so powerfully in European imaginings about sexuality, the exotic, and the nobility or bestiality of “savages.” In this groundbreaking book, Anne Salmond takes readers to the center of the shared history to furnish rich insights into Tahitian perceptions of the visitors while illuminating the full extent of European fascination with Tahiti. As she discerns the impact and meaning of the European effect on the islands, she demonstrates how, during the early contact period, the mythologies of Europe and Tahiti intersected and became entwined. Drawing on Tahitian oral histories, European manuscripts and artworks, collections of Tahitian artifacts, and illustrated with contemporary sketches, paintings, and engravings from the voyages, Aphrodite's Island provides a vivid account of the Europeans' Tahitian adventures. At the same time, the book's compelling insights into Tahitian life significantly change the way we view the history of this small island during a period when it became a crossroads for Europe.
S. D. Goitein
A Mediterranean Society, An Abridgment in One Volume
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S. D. Goitein's magisterial five-volume work on Jewish communities in the medieval Mediterranean world offers an unparalleled view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. Living under Muslim rule, the Jews became increasingly urbanized and played a significant part in an expanding world economy. As major actors in the flourishing intellectual life of the period, they forged much of what constitutes traditional Judaism today and served as a conduit of Islamic learning to the Christian West.
Goitein's masterpiece is now abridged and reworked by Jacob Lassner in a single volume that captures the essential narratives and contexts of the original. To understand the value of this distillation, we need to picture the remarkable, all-but-impenetrable cache of unique letters and documents found by accident in a geniza, or repository of sacred writings, in Old Cairo. These materials, unlike historical chronicles and literary texts of the time, represent the living experiences of people in a wide variety of settings throughout the entire Mediterranean and stretching as far east as the Indian subcontinent.
Goitein explored and interpreted these texts as no other scholar had. Lassner, in turn, makes Goitein's findings available to a wide audience and then moves on to raise a host of new and tantalizing questions about the Jews of the Geniza and the relationship of their community to the hegemonic Muslim society.
David Rains Wallace
The Klamath Knot
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Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, the Commonwealth Club Silver Medal for Literature 1984, and named one of the twentieth century's best nonfiction books by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Klamath Knot, originally published by Sierra Club Books in 1983, is a personal vision of wilderness in the Klamath Mountains of northwest California and southwest Oregon, seen through the lens of "evolutionary mythology." David Rains Wallace uses his explorations of the diverse ecosystems in this region to ponder the role of evolution and myth in our culture. The author's new epilogue makes a case for the creation of a new park to safeguard this exceptionally rich storehouse of relict species and evolutionary stories, which has largely been bypassed by conservationists since John Muir.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Calligrammes
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A fully annotated, bilingual edition, Calligrammes is a key work not only in Apollinaire's own development but in the evolution of modern French poetry. Apollinaire--Roman by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), Parisian by choice--died at thirty-eight in 1918. Nevertheless, he became one of the leading figures in twentieth-century poetry, a transitional figure whose work at once echoes the Symbolists and anticipates the work of the Surrealists.
Harald Thorsrud
Ancient Scepticism
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Scepticism, a philosophical tradition that casts doubt on our ability to gain knowledge of the world and suggests suspending judgment in the face of uncertainty, has been influential since its beginnings in ancient Greece. Harald Thorsrud provides an engaging, rigorous introduction to the central themes, arguments, and general concerns of ancient Scepticism, from its beginnings with Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360 B.C. -ca. 270 B.C.) to the writings of Sextus Empiricus in the second century A.D. Thorsrud explores the differences among Sceptics and examines in particular the separation of the Scepticism of Pyrrho from its later form—Academic Scepticism—the result of its ideas being introduced into Plato's Academy in the third century B.C. Steering an even course through the many differences of scholarly opinion surrounding Scepticism, the book also provides a balanced appraisal of the philosophy's enduring significance by showing why it remains so interesting and how ancient interpretations differ from modern ones.
Copub: Acumen Publishing Limited
Pratapaditya Pal
Himalayas
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This sweeping survey of the artistic achievements of Himalayan culture is the first major exhibition to include objects from all the major religions of the region. Created to accompany the landmark art exhibition that will include almost two hundred of the finest works of art created between the sixth and nineteenth centuries in India, Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan, this book explores the particular beauty that evolved from the spiritual traditions unique to the Himalayas. Lavishly illustrated with many rarely seen images, Himalayas conveys the spiritual aspirations of those who defied the physical hardships of an arduous mountain terrain to express their soaring creative spirit.
Currently held in private and public collections in North America and Europe, seventy percent of this art has never been published or publicly exhibited. The works include temple sculptures of stone and wood; works in terracotta; cast bronzes with inlaid gemstones, gilding, and paint; colorful paintings—from reverential portraits to depictions of awe-inspiring deities—on cloth, palm leaf, paper, and wood; and ritual objects in various media. Pratapaditya Pal provides a fascinating description of the cultural milieu in which these works of art were created.
Copublished with the Art Institute of Chicago
Patricia Albers
Shadows, Fire, Snow
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Ten years of research and the discovery of long-forgotten letters and photos enabled Patricia Albers to bring new recognition to this talented, intelligent, and independent photographer whose life embodied the cultural and political values of many artists of the post-World War I generation.
Edmund P. Green
World Atlas of Seagrasses
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Seagrasses, a group of about sixty species of underwater marine flowering plants, grow in the shallow marine and estuary environments of all the world's continents except Antarctica. The primary food of animals such as manatees, dugongs, green sea turtles, and critical habitat for thousands of other animal and plant species, seagrasses are also considered one of the most important shallow-marine ecosystems for humans since they play an important role in fishery production. Though they are highly valuable ecologically and economically, many seagrass habitats around the world have been completely destroyed or are now in rapid decline. The World Atlas of Seagrasses is the first authoritative and comprehensive global synthesis of the distribution and status of this critical marine habitat—which, along with mangroves and coral reefs, has been singled out for particular attention by the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity.
Illustrated throughout with color maps, photographs, tables, and more, and written by a large team of international collaborators, this unique volume covers seagrass ecology, scientific studies to date, current status, changing distributions, threatened areas, and conservation and management efforts for twenty-four regions of the world. As human populations expand and continue to live disproportionately in coastal areas, bringing new threats to seagrass habitat, a comprehensive overview of coastal resources and critical habitats is more important than ever. The World Atlas of Seagrasses will stimulate new research, conservation, and management efforts, and will help better focus priorities at the international level for these vitally important coastal ecosystems.
Paul Rose
Oceans
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The oceans are the single most important feature of our planet. They shape our climate, our culture, and our future. Yet their depths have remained a mysterious and unchartered expanse. This book, which accompanies a major BBC television series, draws on the most exciting stories from the fields of subaquatic archaeology, geology, marine biology, and anthropology to reveal an astonishing landscape of forgotten shipwrecks, submerged volcanoes, and hidden caves. For Oceans, explorer Paul Rose and his team of expert divers filmed fluorescence in Red Sea corals for the very first time and explored the undisturbed waters of the Black Hole off the Bahamas. They witnessed rarely seen behavior in sperm whales in the Sea of Cortez and discovered a potentially unknown species below the arctic ice pack. Undertaking thrilling and often dangerous dives, Rose and his team reveal the importance of the oceans to human existence—and at the same time trace the possible consequences of climate change on their delicate balance. Beautifully illustrated with more than 160 color photographs, Oceans unravels the mysteries of the deep and provides illuminating insights into this vast undersea domain.
"It is my sincere hope that this work will make more urgent the chorus of voices crying out to save the oceans."—From the foreword, by Philippe Cousteau
Copub: BBC
Henry Moore
Henry Moore
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Henry Moore's writings constitute a vivid and comprehensive record of his life and work, of the influences that shaped his vision, and of his reactions to the work of other artists, periods, and cultures. Spanning some seventy years, Moore's writings and conversations are much more than documentary records of his life and times: they have considerable literary merit in their own right.
This fascinating collection of Moore's written and spoken words is the most comprehensive yet compiled, and contains much previously unpublished material. It includes over 150 illustrations: photographs of the sculptures, drawings and prints discussed in the text, illustrations of works by other artists, and photographs of the sculptor and his environment at various stages of his life.
Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations completes and complements the catalogues of his sculpture, drawings, and prints. It will be indispensable for scholars and engrossing reading for Moore enthusiasts worldwide.
James Campbell
Exiled in Paris
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Exiled in Paris provides a compelling look at the personalities who fueled the literary and philosophical dramas of postwar Paris: James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, Boris Vian, Maurice Girodias, and many others. James Campbell provides a fresh look at Samuel Beckett's early career; reveals the facts behind the publication of the scandalous best-seller The Story of O; and tells the poignant story of Richard Wright's years in exile. He captures the sense of deliverance that Wright, so accustomed to daily humiliations in his own country, experienced during his sojourn on the Left Bank, where, for the first time in his life, he was treated as a great man of letters. Here, too, are all the circumstances surrounding Wright's mysterious death, which many close to him regarded as suspicious.
William Desmond
Cynics
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Far from being pessimistic or nihilistic, as modern uses of the term "cynic" suggest, the ancient Cynics were astonishingly optimistic regarding human nature. They believed that if one simplified one's life—giving up all unnecessary possessions, desires, and ideas—and lived in the moment as much as possible, one could regain one's natural goodness and happiness. It was a life exemplified most famously by the eccentric Diogenes, nicknamed "the Dog," and his followers, called dog-philosophers, kunikoi, or Cynics. Rebellious, self-willed, and ornery but also witty and imaginative, these dog-philosophers are some of the most colorful personalities from antiquity. This engaging introduction to Cynicism considers both the fragmentary ancient evidence on the Cynics and the historical interpretations that have shaped the philosophy over the course of eight centuries—from Diogenes himself to Nietzsche and beyond. Approaching Cynicism from a variety of thematic perspectives as well—their critique of convention, praise of natural simplicity, advocacy of self-sufficiency, defiance of Fortune, and freedom—William Desmond offers a fascinating survey of a school of thought that has had a tremendous influence throughout history and is of continuing interest today.
Copub: Acumen Publishing Limited
Hugh Kenner
Geodesic Math and How to Use It
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It was 1976—twenty-five years after R. Buckminster Fuller introduced geodesic domes when literary critic Hugh Kenner published this fully-illustrated practical manual for their construction. Now, some twenty-five years later, Geodesic Math and How to Use It again presents a systematic method of design and provides a step-by-step method for producing mathematical specifications for orthodox geodesic domes, as well as for a variety of elliptical, super-elliptical, and other nonspherical contours.
Out of print since 1990, Geodesic Math and How To Use It is California's most requested backlist title. This edition is fully illustrated with complete original appendices.
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 10
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Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions—until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet.
The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic events in English history. Pepys witnessed the London Fire, the Great Plague, the Restoration of Charles II, and the Dutch Wars. He was a patron of the arts, having himself composed many delightful songs and participated in the artistic life of London. His flair for gossip and detail reveals a portrait of the times that rivals the most swashbuckling and romantic historical novels. In none of the earlier versions was there a reliable, full text, with commentary and notation with any claim to completeness. This edition, first published in 1970, is the first in which the entire diary is printed with systematic comment. This is the only complete edition available; it is as close to Pepys’s original as possible.
Erik Millstone
The Atlas of Food
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What we eat, where we eat, and how we eat: these questions are explored in this remarkable book, first published in 2002. Now in its second edition, The Atlas of Food provides an up-to-date and visually appealing way of understanding the important issues relating to global food and agriculture. In mapping out broad areas of investigation—contamination of food and water, overnutrition, micronutrient deficiency, processing, farming, and trade—it offers a concise overview of today's food and farming concerns. Buttressed by engaging prose and vivid graphics, Erik Millstone and Tim Lang convincingly argue that human progress depends on resolving global inequality and creating a more sustainable food production system.
Copub: Myriad Editions
John Lahr
Coward the Playwright
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In five dexterously argued chapters, John Lahr investigates all the major plays and many of Noël Coward's lesser-known pieces. Hay Fever, Private Lives, and Design for Living, for instance, make a fascinating group of "Comedies of Bad Manners." Blithe Spirit and Relative Values raise the "Ghost in the Fun Machine." And Lahr explores the "politics of charm" oozing through The Vortex, Easy Virtue, and Present Laughter. Further chapters consider the patriotic plays like Cavalcade and This Happy Breed and examples of Coward's later work, such as Waiting in the Wings and A Song at Twilight.
In all Coward's stage work, Lahr detects a coherent philosophy in which charm is both the subject of Coward's comedies and the trap that makes his very public life a perpetual performance.
Norman Myers
The New Atlas of Planet Management
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The New Atlas of Planet Management was regarded as the most groundbreaking survey of the state of our planet when it was first published in 1984. After over twenty years in print, it has become the bible of the environmental movement and the definitive guide to a planet in critical transition. Regularly featured among the top ten books on the environment, the Atlas has been read by millions of people and translated into more than a dozen languages. This enlarged edition brings the classic reference up-to-date. Thoroughly revised with the latest figures and analysis, fresh full-color and easy-to-read graphics, an expanded format, and a wealth of current environmental and political topics that have arisen during the previous two decades, The New Atlas of Planet Management will equip a further generation of readers with information to face the challenges of the new millennium.
THIS REVISED EDITION CONTAINS:
*Updated chapters on land, oceans, elements, evolution, humankind, civilization, and management
*New sections on consumption, globalization, environmental security, refugees, international terrorism, the rise of information technology, china, and more
*Powerful new illustrations that convey a wealth of information Copub: Gaia Books
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 5
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$31.95
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Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions—until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet.
The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic events in English history. Pepys witnessed the London Fire, the Great Plague, the Restoration of Charles II, and the Dutch Wars. He was a patron of the arts, having himself composed many delightful songs and participated in the artistic life of London. His flair for gossip and detail reveals a portrait of the times that rivals the most swashbuckling and romantic historical novels. In none of the earlier versions was there a reliable, full text, with commentary and notation with any claim to completeness. This edition, first published in 1970, is the first in which the entire diary is printed with systematic comment. This is the only complete edition available; it is as close to Pepys’s original as possible.
Matthew Frye Jacobson
Special Sorrows
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$29.95
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"A scholarly study of the real roots of what Jacobson calls 'America's largely assimilated but ultimately "unmeltable" ethics.' It's a startling point of view for readers who are accustomed to the self-congratulatory myth of America as a beacon of liberty to which the 'huddled masses' of the world look with longing."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
Mark M. Smith
Sensing the Past
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Do we rely on different senses now than the ones we relied on in the past? How have our senses affected history? How have the senses themselves changed? What role have the senses played in the ways we discriminate? Exploring illuminating examples from antiquity to the twenty-first century, this lively, concise introduction to the essential, emerging field of sensory history presents a new way of looking at the past that takes the everyday, the average, and the banal as seriously as it takes the history of elites, the intellect, and the exceptional. Considering each of the five senses, Mark M. Smith explores diverse subjects: visual culture in Victorian Britain and South America, sound in nineteenth-century Australia and France, gender politics and touch in early modern Europe and in native America, "race" and olfaction in the United States and scent in ancient Christianity, and the role of taste in shaping national identity in modern China and early America.
Madeleine Grynsztejn
Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco
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This sweeping overview of Ellsworth Kelly's fifty-year career is the first to bring together the twenty-two pieces the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired from Kelly's personal collection in May 1999. The volume also includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and reliefs from the Museum's previous holdings and private collections throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. The primary text by Madeleine Grynsztejn explores the evolution of Kelly's artwork, his longstanding interest in the phenomenology of vision, and his experimentation with compositions generated by the laws of chance. Additional essays by Julian Myers examine key issues and groupings of works, from Kelly's early figural paintings through the shaped panels and relief paintings for which the artist is best known. Produced to accompany the exhibition of the same name, Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco is an elegant presentation of the most significant collection of the artist's work. It secures Kelly's place as one of the most original of American artists.
Kelly's paintings and sculptures are recognized as vital to the evolution of postwar Modernism. One of the chief proponents of hard-edge abstraction during the 1950s, he is also celebrated for his large-scale monochrome canvases. In 1956, Kelly gained critical recognition when the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchased his work and the Betty Parsons gallery presented his first solo exhibition in the U.S. From the 1970s to the present, the scale of Kelly's work increased as he joined canvases of different sizes and shapes into asymmetrical formats and created totems in bronze, wood, and steel. From 1996 to 1998 the artist's work traveled to museums in Los Angeles, London, and Munich. Today Kelly's works are represented in museums and private collections worldwide, and he has received several prestigious awards and honorary degrees.
W. G. Beasley
The Japanese Experience
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The Japanese Experience is an authoritative history of Japan from the sixth century to the present day. Only a writer of W.G. Beasley's stature could render Japan's complicated past so concisely and elegantly. This is the history of a society and a culture with a distinct sense of itself, one of the few nations never conquered by a foreign power in historic times (until the twentieth century) and the home of the longest-reigning imperial dynasty that still survives. The Japanese have always occupied part or all of the same territory, its borders defined by the sea. They have spoken and written a common language, (once it had taken firm shape in about the tenth century) and their population has been largely homogeneous, little touched by immigration except in very early periods. Yet Japanese society and culture have changed more through time than these statements seem to imply. Developments within Japan have been greatly influenced by ideas and institutions, art and literature, imported from elsewhere. In this work Beasley, a leading authority on Japan and the author of a number of acclaimed works on Japanese history, examines the changing society and culture of Japan and considers what, apart from the land and the people, is specifically Japanese about the history of Japan.
The arrival of Buddhism in the sixth century brought a substantially Chinese-style society to Japan, not only in religion but in political institutions, writing system, and the lifestyle of the ruling class. By the eleventh century the Chinese element was waning and the country was entering a long and essentially "Japanese" feudal period—with two rulers, an emperor and a Shogun—which was to last until the nineteenth century. Under the Togukawa shogunate (1600-1868), Chinese culture enjoyed something of a renaissance, though popular culture owed more to Japanese urban taste and urban wealth.
In 1868 the Meiji Restoration brought to power rulers dedicated to the pursuit of national wealth and strength, and Japan became a world power. Although a bid for empire ended in disaster, the years after 1945 saw an economic miracle that brought spectacular wealth to Japan and the Japanese people, as well as the westernization of much of Japanese life.
Jean Bingen
Hellenistic Egypt
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Hellenistic Egypt brings together for the first time the writings of the preeminent historian, papyrologist, and epigraphist Jean Bingen. These essays, first published by Bingen from 1970 to 1999, make a distinctive contribution to the historiography of Hellenistic Egypt, a period in ancient Egypt extending from its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. until its annexation as a province of the Roman Empire by Octavian (later Augustus) in 30 B.C., after his defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Ruled by Ptolemaic kings during this period, Hellenistic Egypt was a sophisticated, rich, and fertile country. Its history is intimately bound up with the history of the Mediterranean as a whole, yet parts of that history remain relatively obscure and open to debate. New evidence, particularly from papyri, emerges frequently and shifts our understanding and interpretation of this significant time. For the last six decades Jean Bingen has been a leading editor and interpreter of such evidence. In particular his work on the Ptolemaic monarchy and economy, which illustrates how the Greeks and Egyptians interacted, has transformed the field and influenced all subsequent work. Historian and classicist Roger Bagnall has selected and introduced Bingen’s most important essays on this topic.
Copub: Edinburgh University Press
Samuel C. Heilman
When a Jew Dies
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Samuel Heilman's eloquent account of the traditional customs that are put into practice when a Jewish person dies provides both an informative anthropological perspective on Jewish rites of mourning and a moving chronicle of the loss of his own father. This unique narrative crosses and recrosses the boundary between the academic and the religious, the personal and the general, reflecting Heilman's changing roles as social scientist, bereaved son, and observant Jew. Not only describing but explaining the cultural meaning behind Jewish practices and traditions, this extraordinary book shows what is particular and what is universal about Jewish experiences of death, bereavement, mourning, and their aftermath.
Heilman describes the many phases of death: the moment between life and death, the transitional period when the dead have not yet been laid to rest, the preparation of the body (tahara), the Jewish funeral, the early seven-day period of mourning (shivah), the nearly twelve months during which the kaddish is recited, and the annual commemorations of bereavement. The richly informative ethnography that surrounds Heilman's personal account deepens our understanding of the customs and traditions that inform the Jewish cultural response to death.
When a Jew Dies concludes by revealing the rhythm that lies beneath the Jewish experience with death. It finds that however much death has thrown life into disequilibrium, the Jewish response is to follow a precisely timed series of steps during which the dead are sent on their way and the living are reintegrated into the group and into life. Filled with absorbing detail and insightful interpretations that draw from social science as well as Jewish sources, this book offers new insight into one of the most profound and often difficult situations that almost everyone must face.
Cover illustration by Max Ferguson
Stephen Prince
A New Pot of Gold
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Facing an economic crisis in the 1980s, the Hollywood industry moved boldly to control the ancillary markets of videotape, video disk, pay-cable and pay-per-view, and the major studios found themselves targeted for acquisition by global media and communications companies. This volume examines the decade's transformation that took Hollywood from the production of theatrical film to media software.
Some of the films discussed in this volume include:
PlatoonDo the Right ThingBlue VelvetDinerE.T.BatmanBody Heat
Francis Maes
A History of Russian Music
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Francis Maes's comprehensive and imaginative book introduces the general public to the scholarly debate that has revolutionized Russian music history over the past two decades. Based on the most recent critical literature, A History of Russian Music summarizes the new view of Russian music and provides a solid overview of the relationships between artistic movements and political ideas.
The revision of Russian music history may count as one of the most significant achievements of recent musicology. The Western view used to be largely based on the ideas of Vladimir Stasov, a friend and confidant of leading nineteenth-century Russian composers who was more a propagandist than a historian. With the deconstruction of Stasov's interpretation, stereotyped views have been replaced by a fuller understanding of the conditions and the context in which composers such as Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Stravinsky created their oeuvres. Even the more recent history of Soviet music, in particular the achievement of Dmitry Shostakovich, is being assessed on new documentary grounds.
A more complex conception of Russian music develops as Maes explores the cultural and historical milieu from which great works have emerged. Questioning and re-examining traditional views, the author considers the personal development of composers, the relationship of art to social and political ideals in Russia, and the ideologies behind musical research.
B. P. Reardon
Collected Ancient Greek Novels
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Prose fiction, although not always associated with classical antiquity, did in fact flourish in the early Roman Empire, not only in realistic Latin novels but also and indeed principally in the Greek ideal romance of love and adventure to which they are related. Popular in the Renaissance, these stories have been less familiar in later centuries. Translations of the Greek stories were not readily available in English before B.P. Reardon’s excellent volume.
Nine complete stories are included here as well as ten others, encompassing the whole range of classical themes: ideal romance, travel adventure, historical fiction, and comic parody. A new foreword by J.R. Morgan examines the enormous impact this groundbreaking collection has had on our understanding of classical thought and our concept of the novel.
John T.
Persons and Masks of the Law
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Legal thought in this country has always focused on the rules rather than on the persons affected by the rules. Persons and Masks of the Law restores the balance by taking a person-centered view of the law. The author shows how even great jurists have chosen the "masks of the law" over persons, his surprising examples being Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, Benjamin Cardozo, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--four of the greatest lawyers of the United States.
Noonan discusses how the concept of property, applied to a person, is a perfect mask since no trace of human identity remains. An auction of slaves in Virginia, the takeover of a banana plantation in Costa Rica, and an accident on the Long Island railroad are the famous cases involving these four legal giants. The stories of the litigations at three different periods of our history provide and new and powerful analyses of American law. This book, breaking through the formalism in which jurisprudence is enshrined, offers a new vision of law and represents a call for reform in the education and even behavior of lawyers.
David Goodman
Fault Lines
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South Africa has experienced one of the world's most dramatic political transformations. David Goodman, a journalist and activist who has witnessed South Africa's struggles since the darkest days of apartheid, chronicles the historic transition from apartheid to democracy. This compelling story is told through the lives of four pairs of South Africans who have experienced apartheid from opposite sides of the racial and political divide. Taken together, these profiles provide the first in-depth look at the social dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa.
Part social history and part personal drama, Fault Lines is an account of what happens to real people when their country is reinvented around them. The struggle to reconcile past evils is captured in the stories of a former police assassin and his intended victim. The rise and fall of South African racism is portrayed through the lives of the late Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd—the notorious "architect of apartheid"—and his grandson, now a member of the ruling African National Congress. The battle to break out of poverty is detailed in the story of two black women: one an impoverished domestic worker and new city councilor, the other a Mercedes-driving member of South Africa's new black elite. The struggle for the land is told through the eyes of two neighbors: a black farmer who was evicted from his lands in the 1980s and has returned to start over, and a conservative white farmer who participated in the eviction and now does business with the man whose life he nearly destroyed. These powerful stories are accompanied by the photography of award-winning South African documentary photographer Paul Weinberg.
Rita Carter
Exploring Consciousness
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Rita Carter ponders the nature, origins, and purpose of consciousness in this fascinating inquiry into the toughest problem facing modern science and philosophy. Building on the foundation of her bestselling book Mapping the Mind, she considers whether consciousness is merely an illusion, a by-product of our brain's workings, some as yet inexplicable feature or property of the material universe or—as the latest physics may suggest—the very fundament of reality. Little, she discovers, is as it first seems.
Carter draws from a solid body of knowledge—empirical findings and theoretical hypotheses--about consciousness, much of it derived from recent discoveries about the brain. Her lively, accessible narrative ranges widely over new ways of thinking about the subject and what direction new research is taking. Leading scholars from a range of perspectives provide topical essays that complement Carter's account. The book also discusses how traditional approaches—philosophical, scientific, and experiential—might be brought together to create a more complete understanding of consciousness.
This excellent collection contains 13 essays from Gadamer's Kleine Schriften, dealing with hermeneutical reflection, phenomenology, existential philosophy, and philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer applies hermeneutical analysis to Heidegger and Husserl's phenomenology, an approach that proves critical and instructive.
Luciano Canfora
Julius Caesar
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In this splendid profile, Luciano Canfora offers a radically new interpretation of one of the most controversial figures in history. Julius Caesar played a leading role in the culture and politics of a world empire, dwarfing his contemporaries in ambition, achievement, and appetite. For that, he has occupied a central place in the political imagination ever since. Yet Caesar, struck down by his own lieutenants because he could not be comprehended nor contained, remains an enigma. The result of a comprehensive study of the ancient sources, Julius Caesar: The Life and Times of the People's Dictator paints an astonishingly detailed portrait of this complex man and the times in which he lived. Based on his many years of research, Canfora focuses on what we actually know about Caesar, the man of politics and war, in a stylish, engaging narrative chronologically structured around the events in Caesar's life. The result is a rich, revelatory, full biographical portrait of the dictator whose mission of Romanization lies at the very heart of modern Europe.
Copub: Edinburgh University Press
barry bluestone
Growing Prosperity
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In this elegantly argued book, political economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison examine America's great surge of economic expansion in its historical context to demonstrate the causes for the vibrancy of our economy.
A Century Foundation Book
Sia Morhardt
California Desert Flowers
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This easy-to-use guide to the most visible families of California desert flowers includes family and genus keys, color photographs of nearly 300 species, and a wealth of diagrams. Created as a primer on identification to family and genus, California Desert Flowers takes readers to a new level of understanding and appreciation of wildflower relationships and their habitats and adaptations.
