Today a brain scan reveals our thoughts, moods, and memories as clearly as an X-ray reveals our bones. We can actually observe a person's brain registering a joke or experiencing a painful memory. Drawing on the latest imaging technology and the expertise of distinguished scientists, Rita Carter explores the geography of the human brain. Her writing is clear, accessible, witty, and the book's 150 illustrations—most in color—present an illustrated guide to that wondrous, coconut-sized, wrinkled gray mass we carry inside our heads.
Mapping the Mind charts the way human behavior and culture have been molded by the landscape of the brain. Carter shows how our personalities reflect the biological mechanisms underlying thought and emotion and how behavioral eccentricities may be traced to abnormalities in an individual brain. Obsessions and compulsions seem to be caused by a stuck neural switch in a region that monitors the environment for danger. Addictions stem from dysfunction in the brain's reward system. Even the sense of religious experience has been linked to activity in a certain brain region. The differences between men and women's brains, the question of a "gay brain," and conditions such as dyslexia, autism, and mania are also explored.
Looking inside the brain, writes Carter, we see that actions follow from our perceptions, which are due to brain activity dictated by a neuronal structure formed from the interplay between our genes and the environment. Without sidestepping the question of free will, Carter suggests that future generations will use our increasing knowledge of the brain to "enhance those mental qualities that give sweetness and meaning to our lives, and to eradicate those that are destructive."
Jay Gummerman
Chez Chance
Regular price
$22.95
Save $-22.95
A freak accident has left young Frank Eastman a paraplegic—a "wild card" who needs to "pair up with someone or something or he won't pass back into existence." Los Angeles, the scene of his accident, is where he imagines this existence to be. He settles into a rundown motel near Disneyland, his neighbors a wild assortment of eccentrics who, though more able-bodied than Frank, have learned the effectiveness of willful inability. What Frank learns from them, in magnificently odd and mesmerizing conversations, will leave him as transformed emotionally as he has been physically with a narrative at once ironic, hilarious, and poignant.
Luis Buñuel
An Unspeakable Betrayal
Regular price
$28.95
Save $-28.95
Although Luis Buñuel, one of the great filmmakers of the century, was notoriously reluctant to discuss his own work in public, he wrote--and wrote well--on many subjects over the years. This collection proceeds chronologically, from poetry and short stories written in Buñuel's youth in Spain to an essay written in 1980, not long before his death. Newly translated into English, the writings offer startling insights into the filmmaker's life and thought.
The earliest pieces came well before Buñuel joined the Surrealist movement in Paris and created the landmark film Un chien andalou with Salvador Dalí. Yet these and the early Surrealist writings reveal the inventiveness of the mind that would later create such masterpieces of cinema as L'Age d'or, Los olvidados, Viridiana, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and That Obscure Object of Desire.
Later writings, which include screenplays and reflections on his own and others' films, illuminate many aspects of Buñuel's career, as well as the ways of thinking and perceiving that underlie his unique cinematic style. The final essay by this extraordinary artist sums up his view of the world--still vibrant and full of contradictions--at the end of his life.
S. D. Goitein
A Mediterranean Society, Volume V
Regular price
$34.95
Save $-34.95
This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the world. Professor Goitein devoted the last thirty years of his long and productive life to their study, deciphering the language of the documents and organizing what he called a "marvelous treasure trove of manuscripts" into a coherent, fascinating picture of the society that created them.
It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century.
Volume V, subtitled The Individual, draws a portrait of the individual—a social person who mingled within the community; addressed the challenges of poverty, illness, aging, and death; possessed friends, enemies, and lovers; prayed and responded within a religious community; learned, created, thought and taught.
Charles Moore
The Place of Houses
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
With a new epilogue
Richly illustrated with houses large and small, old and new, with photographs, plans, and cutaway drawings, this is a book for people who want a house but who may not know what they really need, or what they have a right to expect.
The authors establish the basis for good building by examining houses in the small Massachusetts town of Edgartown; in Santa Barbara, California, where a commitment was made to re-create an imaginary Spanish past; and in Sea Ranch, on the northern California coast, where the authors attempt to create a community. These examples demonstrate how individual houses can express the care, energies, and dreams of the people who live in them, and can contribute to a larger sense of place.
Guy Garcia
Skin Deep
Regular price
$21.95
Save $-21.95
The narrator of Skin Deep is David Loya, a second generation Chicano from the East L.A. barrio. With a degree from Harvard Law School he is a rising star in a major New York law firm. He returns to L.A. in response to an urgent request from a Harvard friend to find a missing illegal Mexican named Josefina Juarez. David's search for Juarez takes him deep into the barrio where the mystery of her fate upends his world and forces him to confront long-buried questions about family, love, friendship, and his own identity. Skin Deep is a novel about coming of age in the new America, a place in which races and cultures have not so much melded as collided and in which no identity is secure. Garcia chronicles this new urban landscape with acuity and informed sympathy.
Rosemary Stevens
American Medicine and the Public Interest
Regular price
$39.95
Save $-39.95
The reissue of Rosemary Stevens's groundbreaking book on the growth of medical specialties offers a new opportunity to consider the state of the American health care system. Updated with an extensive new introduction and a new bibliography, Stevens's book chronicles the development of the medical profession and shows how increasing emphasis on specialization has influenced medical education and public policy. She details specialization's effects on health care costs and on health care providers, and her concerns are especially timely: the implications of technology and the resulting ethical dilemmas, the issues of insurance, many people's limited access to care. As a long-time observer of American medicine, Stevens makes a valuable contribution to the current debate on how best to provide—and pay for—a high level of medical care in this country.
Monica Bohm-Duchen
The Private Life of a Masterpiece
Regular price
$40.00
Save $-40.00
The world's most well known works of art are both instantly familiar and profoundly mysterious. What has made these images so popular, and how did they come into existence? The Private Life of a Masterpiece answers these questions by delving into the secrets of iconic works of art dating from 1501 to 1950. Piecing together a trail of clues, it examines each work from conception through completion to afterlife, detailing how the commission came about, the preparation undertaken by the artist, the way the work was executed, how the finished work was received, and its influence on other artists. We learn, for example, that Leonardo devised a new form of perspective when painting the Mona Lisa, and that four centuries later Picasso was detained for stealing the portrait from the Louvre; that Goya painted The Third of May 1808 as a criticism of the monarchy but nonetheless offered it to the king as a gift; that Van Gogh's Sunflowers owes much to improvements in the postal system; that Munch's The Scream was influenced by the Incas; and that Jackson Pollock's paintings were promoted by the CIA. Along the way, we also learn about each artist's life, including the struggles with family, lovers, patrons, and critics.
The works featured in this book met with a variety of reactions when first unveiled, and the author details them all, from admiration and respect to horror and contempt. Now readers can judge for themselves.
Beautifully illustrated and lucidly written, The Private Life of a Masterpiece offers an innovative and compelling introduction to the extraordinary stories contained in the history of art. It will enthrall all those who wish to know more about this fascinating subject.
Sappho
Sappho
Regular price
$15.95
Save $-15.95
These hundred poems and fragments constitute virtually all of Sappho that survives and effectively bring to life the woman whom the Greeks consider to be their greatest lyric poet. Mary Barnard's translations are lean, incisive, direct--the best ever published. She has rendered the beloved poet's verses, long the bane of translators, more authentically than anyone else in English.
Teresa P. R. Caldeira
City of Walls
Regular price
$32.95
Save $-32.95
Teresa Caldeira's pioneering study of fear, crime, and segregation in São Paulo poses essential questions about citizenship and urban change in contemporary democratic societies. Focusing on São Paulo, and using comparative data on Los Angeles, she identifies new patterns of segregation developing in these cities and suggests that these patterns are appearing in many metropolises.
Steven Platzman
Cézanne
Regular price
$60.00
Save $-60.00
Cézanne revolutionized the way we see and transcribe the essence of the material world. His position is pivotal: his style is part of the canon of early modernism and his iconic images, his still lifes, and landscapes are associated with a unique analytical approach that changed the face of modern art. But how did Cézanne see and portray himself? His self-portraits are a surprisingly neglected area of study and there has been no extended and in-depth analysis of how Cézanne's signature style was used to fashion his self-image. Steven Platzman's accessible and richly illustrated book fills this gap by examining the stylistic development of Cézanne's self-portraits in an effort to understand how the artist saw himself and others, and how he positioned himself in the art world and French society. Platzman's detailed analysis of the paintings offers new explanations and assessments of significant aspects of Cézanne's career and oeuvre. Abundant and exquisitely reproduced illustrations, including crucial details, make Cézanne: The Self-Portraits an essential resource for anyone interested in this French master.
Platzman demonstrates that the expectation of a self- portrait from a master artist goes beyond color and structural analysis. He questions whether a Cézanne self-portrait reveals something of the artist's emotions, or whether it obscures the feelings of the man whose celebrated and groundbreaking style altered the course of the history of art. The author also thoroughly and clearly fleshes out the historical and artistic contexts of mid-nineteenth century France and investigates Cézanne's complex relationship with the avant-garde in the 1860s and early 1870s. He provides a new explanation for Cézanne's flirtation with impressionism and his subsequent adoption of a more personal, idiosyncratic style. He also takes a new and radically different view of Cézanne's so-called "narrative self-portraits," exploring for the first time his relationship with the icon of the femme fatale. Through these close visual analyses, readers will come to a greater understanding of the concerns, ambitions, and relationships that shaped Cézanne's oeuvre.
Otto Friedrich
City of Nets
Regular price
$32.95
Save $-32.95
This dazzling story of Hollywood during the decade of its greatest success is a social and cultural history of the movie capital's golden age. Its cast includes actors, writers, musicians and composers, producers and directors, racketeers and labor leaders, journalists and politicians in the turbulent decade from World War II to Korea.
John F. Oates
Myth and Reality in the Rain Forest
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
John Oates tackles one of the most serious challenges facing the world's conservation leaders today: How can the needs of wildlands and wildlife be reconciled with the needs of people? Current conservation theory holds that wildlife can best be protected through the promotion of human economic development. Oates disagrees. Drawing on his extensive experience as a primate ecologist who has worked on rainforest conservation projects in Africa and India, he argues that the linking of conservation to economic development has had disastrous consequences for many wildlife populations, especially in West Africa. He maintains that in those parts of the world where people are very poor, human well-being is more likely to be promoted by large-scale political, social, and economic reforms than by community development schemes associated with conservation projects.
Samuel Heilman
Defenders of the Faith
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
In this first in-depth portrait of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel today, Samuel Heilman introduces a community that to many may seem to be the very embodiment of the Jewish past. To outsiders who stumble upon these neighborhoods and find bearded men in caftans, children with earlocks, and women in long dresses, black kerchiefs and stockings, it may appear that these people still hold fast to every tradition while turning their backs to the contemporary world. But rather than being a relic from the past, ultra-Orthodox Jews, or haredim, are very much part of the contemporary landscape and are playing an increasingly prominent role in the Jewish world and in Israeli politics. Defenders of the Faith takes us inside the world of this contemporary fundamentalist community, its lifestyle and mores, including education, religious practices and beliefs, sexual ethics, and marriage. Heilman explores the reasons why this group is more militant and extreme than its pre-Holocaust brethren, and provides insight into the worldview of this small but influential sector of modern Jewry.
Yitzhak Rabin
The Rabin Memoirs, Expanded Edition with Recent Speeches, New Photographs, and an Afterword
Regular price
$34.95
Save $-34.95
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November of 1995—one year after he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Yasir Arafat—sent shock waves around the world. Known as both a man of war and of peace, the Jerusalem-born Israeli prime minister played a key role in developing the Jewish state and was instrumental in establishing peace in the Middle East. Yitzhak Rabin's memoirs, first published in 1979 but long out of print, are now available in this expanded edition. They provide a candid appraisal of significant events in Israeli history, and passages censored when the memoirs were first published have been restored. The addition of an afterword by Rabin's political advisor, Yoram Peri, and his most important speeches given after 1979 round out Rabin's life and show the evolution of his beliefs.
Rabin writes of his years in the Haganah (the independent Jewish military) and gives a controversial account of the War of Independence. He details the tactical moves that made him a hero in the Six Day War and recalls his years as ambassador to the United States. He tells of his difficult decision to authorize the 1976 rescue of hijacked hostages from the Entebbe airport. Rabin describes the conflicts that eventually led to his party's defeat after thirty years in power, and he concludes with a shrewd assessment of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty and of prospects for peace with Israel's other neighbors, including the Palestinians.
Yitzhak Rabin's memoirs are important not only for the insider's view they offer about Israel and the Middle East, but also for providing a very human portrait of a heroic world leader.
From the book:"Most of you watched that ceremony on the White House lawn with mixed emotions, many of you grinding your teeth. I knew that the hand outstretched to me . . . was the same hand that held the knife, that held the gun, the hand that gave the order to shoot, to kill. Of all the hands in the world, it was not the hand that I wanted or dreamed of touching. . . . On that world stage, I stood as the representative . . . of a state that is willing to give peace a chance. As I have said, one does not make peace with one's friends. One makes peace with one's enemy."—Jerusalem, December 1993
Mark D. Spalding
World Atlas of Coral Reefs
Regular price
$70.00
Save $-70.00
Coral reefs are one of the most biologically diverse habitats in the world, host to an extraordinary variety of marine plants and animals. They are also one of the world's most fragile and endangered ecosystems. The growth of mass tourism, combined with the boom in popularity of scuba diving, has brought these spectacular ecosystems to public attention across the planet.
Coral reefs provide essential fish habitat, support endangered and threatened species, and harbor protected marine mammals and turtles. They are a significant source of food, provide income and employment through tourism and marine recreation, and offer countless other benefits to humans, including supplying compounds for pharmaceuticals. Yet coral reefs around the world are rapidly being degraded by a number of human activities, such as overfishing, coastal development, and the introduction of sewage, fertilizer, and sediment.
World Atlas of Coral Reefs provides the first detailed and definitive account of the current state of our planet's coral reefs. With its wealth of authoritative and up-to-date information, the finest maps available, and detailed descriptive texts and images by leading experts, this full-color volume will be a critical resource for anyone interested in these vital environments.
World Atlas of Coral Reefs contains eighty-four full-page newly researched and drawn color maps, together with more than two hundred color photos illustrating reefs, reef animals, and images taken from space by NASA astronauts during the 2000 and 2001 space shuttle flights. The authors provide a wealth of information on the geography, biodiversity, and human uses of coral reefs, as well as details about the threats to their existence.
Prepared at the UNEP–World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, England--the United Nations office responsible for providing authoritative information on the condition of global biodiversity--the Atlas will be a critical tool for scientists, students, policymakers, and planners at local, national, and international levels alike.
Publication of the World Atlas of Coral Reefs is supported by international institutions including the United Nations Environment Programme; The Marine Aquarium Council, The International Coral Reef Initiative; ICLARM--The World Fish Center; the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, and the Aventis Foundation.
Maurizio Bettini
The Portrait of the Lover
Regular price
$55.00
Save $-55.00
There are a surprising number of stories from antiquity about people who fall in love with statues or paintings, and about lovers who use such visual representations as substitutes for an absent beloved. In a charmingly conversational, witty meditation on this literary theme, Maurizio Bettini moves into a wide-ranging consideration of the relationship between self and image, the nature of love in the ancient world, the role of representation in culture, and more. Drawing on historical events and cultural practices as well as literary works, The Portrait of the Lover is a lucid excursion into the anthropology of the image.
The majority of the stories and poems Bettini examines come from Greek and Roman classical antiquity, but he reaches as far as Petrarch, Da Ponte, and Poe. The stories themselves—ranging from the impassioned to the bizarre, and from the sublime to the hilarious—serve as touchstones for Bettini's evocative explorations of the role of representation in literature and in culture. Although he begins with a consideration of lovers' portraits, Bettini soon broadens his concerns to include the role of shadows, dreams, commemorative statues, statues brought to life, and vengeful statues—in short, an entire range of images that take on a life of their own.
The chapters shift skillfully from one theme to another, touching on the nature of desire, loss, memory, and death. Bettini brings to the discussion of these tales not only a broad learning about cultures but also a delighted sense of wonder and admiration for the evocative power and endless variety of the stories themselves.
Andrew McClellan
Inventing the Louvre
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
Founded in the final years of the Enlightenment, the Louvre—with the greatest collection of Old Master paintings and antique sculpture assembled under one roof—became the model for all state art museums subsequently established. Andrew McClellan chronicles the formation of this great museum from its origins in the French royal picture collections to its apotheosis during the Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. More than a narrative history, McClellan's account explores the ideological underpinnings, pedagogic aims, and aesthetic criteria of the Louvre. Drawing on new archival materials, McClellan also illuminates the art world of eighteenth-century Paris.
Thomas Carlyle
Historical Essays
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
Thomas Carlyle, renowned nineteenth-century essayist and social critic, came to be thought of as a secular prophet by many of his readers and as the "undoubted head of English letters" by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Historical Essays brings together Carlyle's essays on history and historical subjects in a fully annotated modern edition for the first time. These essays, which were originally collected in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, span Carlyle's career from 1830 to 1875 and represent a major facet of his writings. This edition uses all the extant authoritative versions of the essays to create an accurate critical text and includes a mine of lucidly presented information to enhance readers' understanding of Carlyle's densely allusive prose.
The collection includes essays on the French Revolution, Cromwell, Frederick the Great, and medieval Scandinavia. It also includes such essential pieces as "On History," "On History Again," "Count Cagliostro," and "The Diamond Necklace." Together the essays show Carlyle positioning himself in relation to the new Romantic historiography but not yet ready to adopt the strictures of modern scientific history. They also exhibit his talent for analyzing the historical significance of seemingly minor events. He describes a plot to steal a diamond necklace in which Marie Antoinette became implicated, a visit of Whig sympathizers to the National Assembly during the French Revolution, and the kidnapping of two fifteenth-century German princes, one of whose descendents was Carlyle’s contemporary Prince Albert.
This volume, the third of the eight-volume Strouse Edition of Carlyle’s works, includes a historical introduction and illustrations along with complete textual apparatus.
Peter R. Dallman
Plant Life in the World's Mediterranean Climates
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-36.95
This book provides a wonderful overview of the landscapes, vegetation types, and plants of the five regions of the world that have a Mediterranean climate. This climate of mild, rainy winters and dry, warm summers is found in California, Central Chile, the Cape Region of South Africa, the southwestern part of Australia and the Mediterranean Basin. The regions are widely separated and the flora of each is distinctive, having for the most part developed independently. Nevertheless, the plants share remarkably similar characteristics which allow them to thrive in these unusual conditions.
Peter Dallman's non-technical prose is complemented by numerous maps, tables, and figures, and the book is richly illustrated with photographs of landscapes, plants, and flowers. With its detailed information on some of the world's most resilient plant life, this book will serve as an excellent reference for everyone interested in growing drought-resistant plants and as a naturalist's guide to these beautiful and unusual bioregions.
For the growing number of travelers whose vacations focus on learning about and appreciating natural history, Dallman also includes a chapter on planning trips to the five Mediterranean regions.
Deborah Rudacille
The Scalpel and the Butterfly
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
In this sweeping history of animal research and the animal protection movement, Deborah Rudacille examines the ethical question of whether enhancement of human life justifies the use of animals for research. She shows how the question and the answers provided by both scientists and anti-vivisectionists over the past 150 years have shaped contemporary society. Rudacille anchors her narrative in events from the lives of key players in the history of the war between science and animal protection, describing the work of activists who work outside the law as well as those working to change the system from within.
S. D. Goitein
A Mediterranean Society, Volume III
Regular price
$32.95
Save $-32.95
This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the world. Professor Goitein devoted the last thirty years of his long and productive life to their study, deciphering the language of the documents and organizing what he called a "marvelous treasure trove of manuscripts" into a coherent, fascinating picture of the society that created them.
It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century.
Volume III, subtitled The Family, reveals the Mediterranean family—the extended family, marriage (rituals, economics, social and cultural safeguards), the Mediterranean household, widowhood, divorce, remarriage, and the world of women.
Antony Griffiths
Prints and Printmaking
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-36.95
A print is a pictorial image that has been produced by a process that enables it to be multiplied, and many of the best-known works by some of the world's greatest artists are prints. Yet little is understood about this popular art form. Now Antony Griffiths provides an excellent introduction for anyone who wishes to acquire a basic understanding of prints and printmaking. In succinct and lucid language, he explains the different printmaking techniques and shows both details and whole prints to demonstrate the effects that can be achieved. Woodcuts, engraving, etching, mezzotint, and lithography are among the many processes explained, illustrated, and placed within a historical context.
This fully revised and updated edition of the highly praised 1980 British publication is available for the first time in the United States. With its complete glossary, index, and helpful illustrations, Griffiths's book is the essential foundation for an intelligent appreciation of the printmaker's art.
Gregor Benton
New Fourth Army
Regular price
$90.00
Save $-90.00
In his prizewinning Mountain Fires: The Red Army's Three-Year War in South China, 1934-1938, Gregor Benton traced the fate of the Communist rear guard that stayed behind when the Red Army set off on the Long March. After three bloody years, the survivors regrouped as the New Fourth Army, which later helped to drive the Nationalists from the mainland. In this sequel to Mountain Fires, Benton describes the first three years of this army, and its triangular war with the Nationalists and the Japanese.
Like the Three-Year War from which it stemmed, the New Fourth Army was for many years neglected by historians, mainly because of the absence from it of Mao Zedong, around whom the story of the Chinese Revolution was largely written until his death in 1976. With the downgrading of the Mao cult and the return of some power to the regions (where New Fourth Army veterans held power) in the 1980s, new sources on the New Fourth Army became available. This study, which combines a thematic and a narrative approach, makes exhaustive use of these and other sources to explain the original features of this youthful army, which was no outgrowth or faithful copy of Mao's senior and better-known Eighth Route Army but a body with its own origins and history, and which fought its war in a quite different political, military, and social setting.
Sonia Saldívar-Hull
Feminism on the Border
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
In this bold contribution to contemporary feminist theory, Sonia Saldívar-Hull argues for a feminism that transcends national borders and ethnic identities. Grounding her work in an analysis of the novels and short stories of three Chicana writers--Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Helena María Viramontes--Saldívar-Hull examines a range of Chicana feminist writing from several disciplines, which she collects under the term "feminism on the border." By comparing and defining literary and national borders, she presents the voices of these and other Chicana writers in order to show their connection to feminist literature and to women of color in the United States. This book provides one of the most comprehensive accounts of Chicana feminist writing available.
Saldívar-Hull draws on contemporary literary and post-colonial theory, as well as her own autobiography, or testimonio, to help her define "feminism on the border." Successfully uniting theory with lived social experience, she delineates many of the internal processes that must be acknowledged in order to access larger transnational and geopolitical literary movements. This book thus joins a body of scholarship within feminist theory, working at the intersection of identity politics and political praxis. Saldívar-Hull's close readings of Chicana literary texts are informed by a comparative and cross-cultural perspective that enables her to forge links to a geopolitical feminist literary movement that unites ethnic identity to global solidarity.
Thomas Schatz
Boom and Bust
Regular price
$39.95
Save $-39.95
Boom and Bust traces the movie industry through the momentous decade of the 1940s. It discusses changes in the structure of the studio system—including the shift to independent production—and the dominant stars, genres, and production trends through the period.
James Campbell
This Is the Beat Generation
Regular price
$28.95
Save $-28.95
Beginning in New York in 1944, James Campbell finds the leading members of what was to become the Beat Generation in the shadows of madness and criminality. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs had each seen the insides of a mental hospital and a prison by the age of thirty. A few months after they met, another member of their circle committed a murder that involved Kerouac and Burroughs as material witnesses.
This book charts the transformation of these experiences into literature, and a literary movement that spread across the globe. From "The First Cut-Up"--the murder in New York in 1944--we end up in Paris in 1960 with William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel, experimenting with the technique that made him notorious, what Campbell calls "The Final Cut-Up."
In between, we move to San Francisco, where Ginsberg gave the first public reading of Howl. We discover Burroughs in Mexico City and Tangiers; the French background to the Beats; the Buddhist influence on Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others; the "Muses" Herbert Huncke and Neal Cassady; the tortuous history of On the Road; and the black ancestry of the white hipster.
Roger Daniels
The Politics of Prejudice
Regular price
$24.95
Save $-24.95
This classic study offers a history of anti-Japanese prejudice in California, extending from the late nineteenth century to 1924, when an immigration act excluded Japanese from entering the United States. The Politics of Prejudice details the political climate that helped to set the stage for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and reveals the racism present among middle-class American progressives, labor leaders, and other presumably liberal groups.
Leonard Gardner
Fat City
Regular price
$24.95
Save $-24.95
Originally published in 1969, Fat City is an American classic whose stature has increased over the years. Made into an acclaimed film by John Huston, the book is set in and around Stockton, California.
Simon Karlinsky
Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
Simon Karlinsky has substantially expanded and revised the first edition of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson's correspondence to include fifty-nine letters discovered subsequent to the book's original publication in 1979. Since then, five volumes of Edmund Wilson's diaries have been published, as well as a volume of Nabokov's correspondence with other people and Brian Boyd's definitive two-volume biography of Nabokov. The additional letters and a considerable body of new annotations clarify the correspondence, tracing in greater detail the two decades of close friendship between the writers.
Robert L. Carringer
The Making of Citizen Kane, Revised edition
Regular price
$27.95
Save $-27.95
Citizen Kane, widely considered the greatest film ever made, continues to fascinate critics and historians as well as filmgoers. While credit for its genius has traditionally been attributed solely to its director, Orson Welles, Carringer's pioneering study documents the shared creative achievements of Welles and his principal collaborators. The Making of Citizen Kane, copiously illustrated with rare photographs and production documents, also provides an in-depth view of the operations of the Hollywood studio system. This new edition includes a revised preface and overview of criticism, an updated chronology of the film's reception history, a reconsideration of the locus of responsibility of Welles's ill-fated The Magnificent Ambersons, and new photographs.
Darra Goldstein
The Georgian Feast
Regular price
$27.95
Save $-27.95
According to Georgian legend, God took a supper break while creating the world. He became so involved with his meal that he inadvertently tripped over the high peaks of the Caucasus, spilling his food onto the land below. The land blessed by Heaven's table scraps was Georgia.
Nestled in the Caucasus mountain range between the Black and Caspian seas, the Republic of Georgia is as beautiful as it is bountiful. The unique geography of the land, which includes both alpine and subtropical zones, has created an enviable culinary tradition. In The Georgian Feast, Darra Goldstein explores the rich and robust culture of Georgia and offers a variety of tempting recipes.
The book opens with a fifty-page description of the culture and food of Georgia. Next are over one hundred recipes, often accompanied by notes on the history of the dish. Holiday menus, a glossary of Georgian culinary terms, and an annotated bibliography round out the volume.
Judith Nies
Nine Women
Regular price
$27.95
Save $-27.95
In an expanded edition of her history of American women activists, Judith Nies has added biographical essays on feminist Bella Abzug and civil rights visionary Fannie Lou Hamer and a new chapter on women environmental activists. Included are portraits of Sarah Moore Grimké, who rejected her life as a Southern aristocrat and slaveholder to promote women's rights and the abolition of slavery; Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who led more than three hundred slaves to freedom on the Underground Railway; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the first woman to run for Congress, who advocated for women's rights to own property, to vote, and to divorce; Mother Jones, "the Joan of Arc of the coalfields," one of the most inspiring voices of the American labor movement; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who worked for the reform of two of America's most cherished institutions, the home and motherhood; Anna Louise Strong, an intrepid journalist who covered revolutions in Russia and China; and Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, who fed and sheltered the hungry and homeless in New York's Bowery for more than forty years.
Seton Lloyd
Ancient Turkey
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
Seton Lloyd's lively account of Turkey's early history is for the ever-increasing number of people visiting the ancient sites of this fabled land. Written by an archaeologist who has spent much of his life in the Near East, the book is not a conventional "guide" to the antiquities of Anatolia, nor is it a textbook. It is instead Lloyd's attempt to share his profound interest in an antique land, its inhabitants, and the surviving monuments that link the present to the past.
Lloyd traces the many different cultures that have been a part of Turkey from prehistoric times to the Christian era. He recounts the exploits of the Hittite kings, the confrontation of Croesus and the Persian king Cyrus, the conquests of Alexander the Great, and Mithridates' epic resistance against Rome. Archaeological landmarks discussed include the discovery of the Alaca Hüyük tombs, the attempts to establish the location of Troy, and the opening of the Tomb of Midas. Lloyd shows how each successive culture has left its mark on an astonishing variety of sites, from the shrines of Çatal Hüyük to the temples of Ephesus and the churches founded by St. Paul.
Tracy I. Storer
California Grizzly
Regular price
$28.95
Save $-28.95
The California Bear Flag and the University of California football team the Golden Bears emblemize the great animal that has been extinct in California since the 1920s but once numbered perhaps as many as ten thousand in the state. Forty years after its original publication, University of California Press proudly reissues California Grizzly, still the most comprehensive book on the bear's history in California. The lessons of the book resonate today as the issues of protection of wildlife habitat versus unfettered development of land for human use are debated with increasing urgency.
Richard Fletcher
The Barbarian Conversion
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
In a work of splendid scholarship that reflects both a firm mastery of difficult sources and a keen intuition, one of Britain's foremost medievalists tells the story of the Christianization of Europe. It is a very large story, for conversion encompassed much more than religious belief. With it came enormous cultural change: Latin literacy and books, Roman notions of law and property, and the concept of town life, as well as new tastes in food, drink, and dress. Whether from faith or by force, from self-interest or by revelation, conversion had an immense impact that is with us even today. It is Richard Fletcher's achievement in this superb work that he makes that impact both felt and understood.
Richard H. Rovere
Senator Joe McCarthy
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
The story of Senator Joseph McCarthy's rise to unprecedented power and the decline of his influence is a dramatic one. Richard Rovere documents the process by which a clever, power hungry individual came to mislead and manipulate members of Congress and the American public and to damage countless lives. A new foreword for this edition by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. places the book in historical context and relates it to current issues in American public life.
Ninian Smart
Dimensions of the Sacred
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
A world-renowned religion scholar explores the world's major religions and comparable secular systems of thought in this unusually wide-ranging and accessible work. Ninian Smart considers Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, as well as Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, nationalism, and Native American, African, and other systems of belief. His goal is to advance our understanding of how we as human beings interact thoughtfully with the cosmos and express the exigencies of our own nature and existence.
Smart demonstrates that diverse systems of belief reflect several recurring themes: the tendency to worship, the contemplative life, story-telling, a view of history, ethical instruction, guidelines on bodily practices, rituals, and visual icons. He examines each of these themes in relation to specific belief systems. He points out that religions and comparable worldviews should be studied at least as much through their practices as through their beliefs.
The result of twenty-five years of research, this comprehensive book is nothing less than an analysis of the entire pattern of human spiritual life, viewed through what Smart calls "the grammar of symbols, the modes and forms in which religion manifests itself."
Erich S. Gruen
Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
This book is an examination of the impact of Greek learning, literature, and religion on central aspects of Roman life in the middle Republic. Acclaimed historian Erich S. Gruen discusses the introduction of and resistance to new cults, the relationship between Roman political figures and literary artists schooled in Greek, and the reaction to Hellenic philosophy and rhetoric by the Roman elite. This book contributes new and important information on the place of Greek culture in Roman public life.
Arthur C. Danto
Philosophizing Art
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
Arthur Danto's work has always affirmed a deep relationship between philosophy and art. These essays explore this relationship through a number of concrete cases in which either artists are driven by philosophical agendas or their art is seen as solving philosophical problems in visual terms. The essays cover a varied terrain, with subjects including Giotto's use of olfactory data in The Raising of Lazarus; chairs in art and chairs as art; Mel Bochner's Wittgenstein drawings; the work of Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, and Robert Irwin; Louis Kahn as "Archai-Tekt"; and visual truth in film. Also featured are a meditation on the battle of Gettysburg; and a celebration of the Japanese artist Shiko Munakata, an essay that is partly autobiographical.
Arthur C. Danto is one of the most original and multitalented philosophers writing today, a thinker whose interests traverse the boundaries of traditional understandings of philosophy. Best known for his contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, Danto is also esteemed for his work in the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophical psychology, and action theory. These two volumes, each with an introduction by the author, contain essays spanning more than twenty-five years that have been selected to highlight the inseparability of philosophy and art in Danto's work. Together they present the thinking of Arthur C. Danto at his very best.
Esther Benbassa
Sephardi Jewry
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
Until the publication of this remarkably comprehensive history of the Sephardi diaspora, only limited attention had been given to the distinctive Judeo-Spanish cultural entity that flourished in the Balkans and Asia Minor for more than four centuries. Yet the great majority of Sephardi Jews, after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and subsequently from Portugal, found their way to this region, drawn by the political stability and relatively tolerant rule of the Ottoman Empire, as well as by promising socioeconomic conditions. Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue show how Sephardi society and culture developed in the Levant, sharing language, religion, customs, and communal life as they did nowhere else, both during prosperous times and during the declining fortunes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The impact of westernization, the end of Ottoman power, and the rise of fragmenting nation-states transformed this vital community in the modern era. And, like many other Jewish communities, the unique Judeo-Spanish culture was dispersed and destroyed by the Holocaust and the migrations of the twentieth century. Sephardi Jewry presents its vivid history in a readable, well-documented narrative.
Harold Biswell
Prescribed Burning in California Wildlands Vegetation Management
Regular price
$26.95
Save $-26.95
Harold Biswell's decades of research and field experience were a major factor in developing policies of controlled or prescribed burning, which mimics or reintroduces the natural fire cycle. This comprehensive study introduces the principles and practices of prescribed burning, which apply far beyond California, within a historical and ecological perspective. Available for the first time in paperback, with a new foreword by James Agee, this book places Biswell's study—and his legacy—in the context of recent developments in the field.
Preston Sturges
Four More Screenplays by Preston Sturges
Regular price
$45.00
Save $-45.00
Includes The Palm Beach Story, Triumph over Pain/The Great Moment, The Miracle at Morgan's Creek, and Unfaithfully Yours.
Humorous, sophisticated, and superbly crafted, the cinema of Preston Sturges maintains an enduring presence in the small canon of films that enjoy critical acclaim, scholarly attention, and popular admiration. Following the enthusiastic reception of Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges, the University of California Press returns with Four More.
This volume contains three scripts widely regarded as among the filmmaker's best: The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Unfaithfully Yours. Based on the actual shooting scripts rather than the final screen versions, these screenplays contain scenes that were not filmed or that disappeared on the cutting room floor.
In the fourth script, Triumph over Pain/The Great Moment, Sturges dramatizes the career of W.T.G. Morton, the doctor who first demonstrated the use of ether and thus revolutionized surgery. Arguably the most important biographical film project of the 1940s, this film was recut and rearranged by Paramount before it was released. By reprinting Sturges's original script and explaining its transformation, Brian Henderson has, in effect, discovered a new work by Sturges.
In the introductions that precede each screenplay, Henderson examines every important aspect of the screenplay's composition. He analyzes Sturges's process of constant revision, discusses variant drafts and fragments of drafts, and describes the writer/director's relations with Paramount executives, the Church, the Hayes Office, and Darryl Zanuck.
Alone or as a companion to the earlier volume, this work will be welcomed by scholars, film buffs, screenplay writers, and admirers of Preston Sturges.
Leonard J. Leff
Hitchcock and Selznick
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-36.95
Hitchcock and Selznick is the story of one of the oddest partnerships in Hollywood history, the union of a reticent, overweight Englishman with a flair for striking detail and a penchant for the perverse, and a dynamic movie mogul with a keen eye for successful entertainment on the grand scale. It began in 1938, when producer David O. Selznick agreed to bring director Alfred Hitchcock from England, where he was already gaining widespread acclaim for his "little thrillers," and the collaboration resulted in the making of such masterpieces as Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious.
Hitchcock was soft-spoken and meticulous; Selznick was confrontational and chronically disorganized. They were, moreover, two geniuses with wholly different approaches to filmmaking. The sparks that flew between them over the next eight years ignited into some of Hitchcock's most memorable achievements, but they made collaboration impossible in the end. Drawing on unpublished documents, early drafts of script treatments, and humorous production anecdotes—and including a wealth of previously unseen photographs—Leonard Leff has written a book for specialist and layman alike, a fascinating behind-the-scenes portrait not only of two great Hollywood figures but of the film industry itself.
Betty Rojtman
Black Fire on White Fire
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
Using the tools of contemporary semiotic theory to analyze classical rabbinic hermeneutics and medieval mystical exegesis, Betty Rojtman unveils a striking modernity in these early forms of textual interpretation. The metaphor from rabbinic literature that describes the writing of the Torah—black fire on white fire—becomes, in Rojtman's analysis, a figure for the differential structures that can be found throughout rabbinic discourse. Moving through the successive levels of traditional commentary, from early Midrash to modern Kabbalah, Rojtman examines the tension between the fluidity and nuance of the biblical text and the fixed commitment to ideological and theological content. To examine this strain between open text and sacred language, Rojtman scrutinizes the demonstrative, "this," as a word whose significance changes with every change in context. Her analysis suggests a double-layered meaning for "this," which refers to the existential world in its multiplicity but also to transcendence and the eternal presence of God.
Oliver Moore
Chinese
Regular price
$21.95
Save $-21.95
Any account of reading the Chinese past is enriched by the fact that Chinese writing is both ancient and current. No other writing system of antiquity enjoys this benefit. Since the emergence of the earliest discernible process of writing, in northern China around 1200 b.c., the Chinese system has been used by millions of speakers, and today more people speak a Chinese language than any other. In his accessible, straightforward book, Oliver Moore demystifies one of the world's oldest writing systems, introducing the basic principles of the language, the formation of written characters, and the ways these characters have developed. Drawing on evidence from numerous artifacts in the British Museum and elsewhere, he describes, chronologically, several of the major scripts used to write on each material, from the earliest oracle bones to calligraphic works of art.
Moore defines the Chinese language both as a member of an East Asian language family and as a broad term covering quite distinct variations in speech within the borders of modern China. He discusses how the Chinese writing system works today, demonstrating how it exerts its influence far beyond the traditional borders of China. The last chapter illustrates instances of Chinese characters borrowed to write non-Chinese languages.
Dean MacCannell
The Tourist
Regular price
$24.95
Save $-24.95
Long regarded as a classic, The Tourist is an examination of the phenomenon of tourism through a social theory lens that encompasses discussions of authenticity, high and low culture, and the construction of social reality. It brings the concerns of social science to an analysis of travel and sightseeing in the postindustrial age, during which the middle class acquired leisure time for international travel. This edition includes a new foreword by Lucy R. Lippard and a new afterword by the author.
John Jacobs
A Rage for Justice
Regular price
$37.95
Save $-37.95
This political biography of Phillip Burton (1926-1983) is the riveting story of one of the most brilliant, driven, and productive legislators of his—or indeed any—era of American politics. A ruthless and unabashed progressive, Burton terrified his opponents, ran over his friends, forged improbable coalitions, and from 1964 to 1983 became one of the most influential Representatives in the House. He also acquired more raw power than almost any left-liberal politician ever had.
Moving from grassroots campaigns to epic battles in the California state capital, and finally to the very pinnacle of power on Capitol Hill, John Jacobs's inside account of Burton's life shows how politics really works. He demonstrates the exercise of power in the hands of a superb strategist and shows an unheralded master going about his life's work during the glory years of postwar American liberalism.
Burton was an unforgettable, uncontrollable figure whose relentless day-and-night politicking distilled the raw essence of American politics. Jacobs brings to life Burton's seething, perpetual sense of outrage, gargantuan appetites, and dedication to the disenfranchized. Animated by a sometimes frightening drive for power—his only modern counterpart is Lyndon Johnson—Burton played a pivotal role in California and U.S. politics, championing welfare and civil rights, landmark labor legislation, environmentalism and congressional reform. His achievements included the groundbreaking black lung bill for miners and their families; Supplemental Social Security for the aged, blind, and disabled; and helping to secure America's extensive national park system.
Burton's failures were equally dramatic: in 1976, at the height of his power, he lost, by one vote, the chance to become House Majority Leader. Had he won this critical political fight, he no doubt would have become Speaker of the House.
Jacobs's account is based on Burton's personal papers and hundreds of interviews with people at every stage of his life, including four Democratic Speakers of the House. The result is a book that brilliantly demonstrates how one person can make a difference in public life.
David Mitchinson
Celebrating Moore
Regular price
$80.00
Save $-80.00
This book is a celebration of The Henry Moore Foundation's collection—the most important and comprehensive single group of Moore's drawings, graphics, and sculpture.
More than 300 of Moore's acclaimed works are reproduced in full color, and extensive captions are provided by distinguished sculptors, art critics, and art historians, many of whom knew and worked with Moore. Their fresh insights and personal anecdotes provide a detailed and compelling analysis of Moore's artistry.
David Mitchinson's introductory essay traces the formation of The Henry Moore Foundation's collection, a fascinating story that has never been told before. He explains Moore's somewhat haphazard way of working, the confused ownership between the Foundation and its trading company, the strengths and weaknesses of the Collection itself, and the evolution of the Foundation's property at Perry Green in Hertfordshire. With a foreword by Sir Alan Bowness, Celebrating Moore will be a welcome addition to the study and appreciation of Henry Moore for years to come.
From the Foreword:"Henry Moore talked well and liked talking about sculpture, but he rarely gave any verbal explanation of his own works. That was for others to do: He was the man who had made the piece and put it out in the world. This is the form that the catalogue takes—twenty-five sculptors, art historians, critics, curators, and film makers write about sculptures and drawings that particularly interest them."
Frank O'Hara
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.
Stephanie Barron
Reading California
Regular price
$34.95
Save $-34.95
This companion volume to the exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity,1900-2000 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art offers in-depth, illustrated essays on the making of California culture in the twentieth century. Written by a stellar cast of art historians and scholars in the humanities, the essays look closely at the forces that shaped fine art and material culture in California. The contributors weave their subjects around themes that are central to the milestone exhibition: the California landscape—both the natural and built environments—and the state's cultural and political relationships with Latin America and Asia.
These provocative essays cover topics such as counterculture architecture, Watts Towers, border culture, identity and gender issues, the role of schools in California art, auto tourism, Hollywood, music, Beat culture, politics, literature, photography, and much more. Accessibly written and intellectually engaging, these essays sharpen our understanding of California in the twentieth century and bring together many diverse, yet interrelated, aspects of its art and culture.
Jane Holtz Kay
Asphalt Nation
Regular price
$28.95
Save $-28.95
Asphalt Nation is a powerful examination of how the automobile has ravaged America's cities and landscape over the past 100 years together with a compelling strategy for reversing our automobile dependency. Jane Holtz Kay provides a history of the rapid spread of the automobile and documents the huge subsidies commanded by the highway lobby, to the detriment of once-efficient forms of mass transportation. Demonstrating that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions to the problem, she shows that radical change is entirely possible. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.
John M. G. Barclay
Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-36.95
Most studies of Jews in the period from Alexander to Trajan have concentrated almost exclusively on Jerusalem and Judea. In this book, John Barclay assembles and analyzes evidence about the Jewish communities in Egypt, Syria, Cyrenaica, Rome, and Asia. Barclay's ambitious goal is to describe, as precisely as the evidence allows, the varying levels of assimilation and antagonism between Jews and the non-Jewish communities in these areas for this 440-year period. With a concluding review of Jewish identity in the Diaspora as a whole, this book provides our first comprehensive and multi-faceted survey of Diaspora communities and Diaspora literature.
Alice Shepherd
Proto-Wintun
Regular price
$45.00
Save $-45.00
This volume represents a reconstruction of Proto-Wintun, the parent language of a group of California Indian languages. It includes a grammatical sketch of Proto-Wintun, cognate sets with reconstructions and an index to the reconstructions. The book fulfills a need for in-depth reconstructions of proto-languages for California Indian language families, both for theoretical purposes and deeper comparison with other proto- or pre-languages.
Tino Balio
Grand Design
Regular price
$39.95
Save $-39.95
The advent of color, big musicals, the studio system, and the beginning of institutionalized censorship made the thirties the defining decade for Hollywood. The year 1939, celebrated as "Hollywood's greatest year," saw the release of such memorable films as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Stagecoach. It was a time when the studios exercised nearly absolute control over their product as well as over such stars as Bette Davis, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart. In this fifth volume of the award-winning series History of the American Cinema, Tino Balio examines every aspect of the filmmaking and film exhibition system as it matured during the Depression era.
Robert Paul Wolff
In Defense of Anarchism
Regular price
$24.95
Save $-24.95
"A deep and provocative discussion of some of the most fundamental issues in political philosophy, written crisply, with candor, in a style that I find very winning. It is a most useful book, and a very good one."—Carl Cohen, author of Communism, Fascism, and Democracy
"A provocative and engrossing introduction to current questions of political legitimacy, consent, deliberative democracy, the basis of majority rule, workers collectives, etc., that have been taken up by contemporary political theorists."—Georgia Warnke, author of Justice and Interpretation
Mary Louise Flint
Natural Enemies Handbook
Regular price
$34.95
Save $-34.95
This book is the best-ever practical guide to the identification and biology of beneficial organisms that control pests. Growers, pest control advisers, landscape professionals, home gardeners, pest management teachers and students, and anyone fascinated by natural enemies and their prey will want this book to find, identify, and use natural enemies to control pests in almost any agricultural crop, garden, or landscape.
The Natural Enemies Handbook is superbly illustrated with 180 high-quality color photographs and 140 expertly rendered drawings, showing hundreds of predators, parasites, and pathogens that attack pest insects, mites, nematodes, plant pathogens, and weeds. The handy Quick Guide allows readers to locate natural enemies that they are likely to find on almost any crop or in the garden and landscape. They can then go to the main text for clear, detailed information.
Natural enemies are organisms that kill, decrease the reproductive potential, or otherwise reduce the numbers of other organisms. Biological control is the practical use of natural enemies to manage pests. Living natural enemies are the agents of biological control. Virtually every pest has natural enemies that reduce its populations under certain circumstances. The book features chapters on biological control of plant pathogens, nematodes, and weeds as well as individual chapters on parasites, predators, and pathogens of arthropods.
References, suppliers, and a comprehensive index make this an indispensable source book. The up-to-date review of applied biological control literature will appeal to scholars.
Marina Warner
Monuments and Maidens
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
Marina Warner explores the tradition of personifying liberty, justice, wisdom, charity, and other ideals and desiderata in the female form, and examines the tension between women's historic and symbolic roles. Drawing on the evidence of public art, especially sculpture, and painting, poetry, and classical mythology, she ranges over the allegorical presence of the woman in the Western tradition with a sharply observant eye and a piquant and engaging style.
Herbert W. Meyer
The Oligocene Bridge Creek Flora of the John Day Formation, Oregon
Regular price
$40.00
Save $-40.00
This comprehensive systematic revision of the Bridge Creek flora is based on large collections of megafossil specimens from the John Day and Crooked River basins. The flora was found to be more diverse than previously recognized, with at least 125 species. At least 11 genera are extinct, but the majority are extant members of deciduous forests. The flora was derived from a variety of sources and represents a classic example of the broadleaved deciduous forests that became widespread at mid-latitudes following the Eocene-Oligocene climatic cooling.
Susan Schaller
A Man Without Words
Regular price
$24.95
Save $-24.95
For more than a quarter of a century, Ildefonso, a Mexican Indian, lived in total isolation, set apart from the rest of the world. He wasn't a political prisoner or a social recluse, he was simply born deaf and had never been taught even the most basic language. Susan Schaller, then a twenty-four-year-old graduate student, encountered him in a class for the deaf where she had been sent as an interpreter and where he sat isolated, since he knew no sign language. She found him obviously intelligent and sharply observant but unable to communicate, and she felt compelled to bring him to a comprehension of words.
A Man without Words vividly conveys the challenge, the frustrations, and the exhilaration of opening the mind of a congenitally deaf person to the concept of language.
Richard Longstreth
On the Edge of the World
Regular price
$45.00
Save $-45.00
Richard Longstreth provides a detailed picture of the early careers of four architects—Bernard Maybeck, Willis Polk, Ernest Coxhead, and A.C. Schweinfurth—who had a decisive impact on the course of design in the San Francisco Bay Area and who stand as significant contributors to American architecture.
Gerard L'E Turner
Scientific Instruments, 15001900
Regular price
$36.00
Save $-36.00
The impulse to collect is an almost universal one, satisfying the hunting and acquisitive instincts, the love of beauty, and intellectual curiosity. The wealthy have collected rare and beautiful things from the earliest days of civilization, but the collection, or "cabinet," containing natural curiosities dates from the sixteenth century, and it was this type of collection in which scientific instruments found a home. In the twentieth century, we have come to accept a vast range of technical, often complex, equipment for everyday use. Science has become the very substance of our life style. But the appeal of historic scientific instruments remains, and from them much can be learned of the practice and development of science over four centuries.
This book traces the historical origins and development of instruments as they spread across the globe, explaining their manufacture, use, and adaptations. This must-have book for the active collector gives practical advice on dealing with instruments and checking their authenticity. It features a comprehensive international list of major museums and instrument collections. Over 100 superb illustrations show the instruments to their full advantage.
Nelson H. H. Graburn
Catalogue Raisonné of the Alaska Commercial Company Collection
Regular price
$45.00
Save $-45.00
This book documents, with photographs and complete descriptions, the more than 2,200 Native Alaskan (Eskimo, Aleut, Northwest Coast, and Athapaskan) objects originally collected by the Alaska Commercial Company and donated to the University of California in 1897. Introducing the catalogue are essays on the historical background and cultural context and significance of the collection. Also included are indexes of personal and geographical names and a concordance.
William Buck
Ramayana
Regular price
$24.95
Save $-24.95
Few works in world literature have inspired so vast an audience, in nations with radically different languages and cultures, as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, two Sanskrit verse epics written some 2,000 years ago.
In Ramayana (written by a poet known to us as Valmiki), William Buck has retold the story of Prince Rama--with all its nobility of spirit, courtly intrigue, heroic renunciation, fierce battles, and triumph of good over evil--in a length and manner that will make the great Indian epics accessible to the contemporary reader.
The same is true for the Mahabharata--in its original Sanskrit, probably the longest Indian epic ever composed. It is the story of a dynastic struggle, between the Kurus and Pandavas, for land. In his introduction, Sanskritist B. A. van Nooten notes, "Apart from William Buck’s rendition [no other English version has] been able to capture the blend of religion and martial spirit that pervades the original epic."
Presented accessibly for the general reader without compromising the spirit and lyricism of the originals, William Buck’s Ramayana and Mahabharata capture the essence of the Indian cultural heritage.
George Perle
Twelve-Tone Tonality, Second edition
Regular price
$70.00
Save $-70.00
In this classic work, George Perle argues that the seemingly disparate styles of post-triadic music in fact share common structural elements. These elements collectively imply a new tonality as "natural" and coherent as the major-minor tonality that was the basis of a common musical language in the past. His book describes the foundational assumptions of this post-diatonic tonality and illustrates its compositional functions with numerous musical examples.
The second edition of Twelve-Tone Tonality is enlarged by eleven new chapters, some of which are "postscripts" to earlier chapters—clarifying, elucidating, and expanding upon concepts discussed in the original edition. Others discuss new developments in the theory and practice of twelve-tone tonality, including voice-leading implications of the system and dissonance treatment.
John Warfield Simpson
Visions of Paradise
Regular price
$60.00
Save $-60.00
The American Revolution gave birth not just to a new nation, but to a new landscape. America was paradise to its native inhabitants, while to the colonists, it was an unlimited land of opportunity, a moral and physical wilderness from which they could create paradise. Powerful people like Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton struggled to shape it to their opposing visions. Over the ensuing two hundred years, many other visions shaped the American landscape. Today, their imprints form a complex layering of messages—past and present, physical and cultural, public and private, local and national—that tell a story of many interwoven meanings. John Warfield Simpson traces this fascinating story in Visions of Paradise, providing a fresh perspective from which to understand not only our landscape but also the way we steward our environment.
Simpson describes the transformation of America from wilderness into an agrarian and suburban landscape as the nation expanded westward after the Revolution. He highlights the role of influential people in this transformation and the critical policies and programs they used to acquire, survey, and dispose of the public domain. He shows how their actions reflected changes in our traditional values that considered land as property and a commodity primarily for functional use.
This transformation in values has yielded a landscape of contradictions: It is at once a landscape of freedom and opportunity, order and disorder, permanence and transience. Ours is an egalitarian and litigated landscape shaped by reason and mobility, he argues, one that reflects our historical sense of separation from and superiority over a limitless land of endless abundance and resilience. These perceptions, he shows, have blinded us to the environmental consequences of our actions and created a people who behave as though they are temporary occupants of the land rather than residents who enjoy a deep connection to the land. That connection, he concludes, holds the key to our contemporary environmental debate.
A. Richard Turner
Inventing Leonardo
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
As he examines the changing views of Leonardo since the sixteenth century, A. Richard Turner both gives the reader a cultural history in brief of western Europe during this period and provides a context for examining Leonardo's relevance to our own ways of perceiving and interpreting the world.
Frans B. M. de Waal
Bonobo
Regular price
$39.95
Save $-39.95
This remarkable primate with the curious name is challenging established views on human evolution. The bonobo, least known of the great apes, is a female-centered, egalitarian species that has been dubbed the "make-love-not-war" primate by specialists. In bonobo society, females form alliances to intimidate males, sexual behavior (in virtually every partner combination) replaces aggression and serves many social functions, and unrelated groups mingle instead of fighting. The species's most striking achievement is not tool use or warfare but sensitivity to others.
In the first book to combine and compare data from captivity and the field, Frans de Waal, a world-renowned primatologist, and Frans Lanting, an internationally acclaimed wildlife photographer, present the most up-to-date perspective available on the bonobo. Focusing on social organization, de Waal compares the bonobo with its better-known relative, the chimpanzee. The bonobo's relatively nonviolent behavior and the tendency for females to dominate males confront the evolutionary models derived from observing the chimpanzee's male power politics, cooperative hunting, and intergroup warfare. Further, the bonobo's frequent, imaginative sexual contacts, along with its low reproduction rate, belie any notion that the sole natural purpose of sex is procreation. Humans share over 98 percent of their genetic material with the bonobo and the chimpanzee. Is it possible that the peaceable bonobo has retained traits of our common ancestor that we find hard to recognize in ourselves?
Eight superb full-color photo essays offer a rare view of the bonobo in its native habitat in the rain forests of Zaire as well as in zoos and research facilities. Additional photographs and highlighted interviews with leading bonobo experts complement the text. This book points the way to viable alternatives to male-based models of human evolution and will add considerably to debates on the origin of our species. Anyone interested in primates, gender issues, evolutionary psychology, and exceptional wildlife photography will find a fascinating companion in Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape.
Lawrence K. Altman
Who Goes First?
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
Lawrence Altman has authored the only complete history of the controversial and understudied practice of self-experimentation. In telling the stories of pioneering researchers, Altman offers a history of many of the most important medical advancements in recent years as well as centuries past—from anesthesia to yellow fever to heart disease. With a new preface, he brings readers up to date and continues his discussion of the ethics and controversy that continue to surround a practice that benefits millions but is understood by few.
Daniel I. Axelrod
The Eocene Thunder Mountain Flora of Central Idaho
Regular price
$24.95
Save $-24.95
An Eocene (45 Ma) flora from Thunder Mountain caldera shows that montane conifer forest species from upper slopes descended to interfinger with mixed conifer-deciduous hardwood forest on the caldera floor then near 1700 m. Most species are allied to those in the western United States, but a few genera are in China. Precipitation was near 100 cm yearly, with most in summer.
Spiro Kostof
The Architect
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
The Architectwas the first book in fifty years to survey the role of the profession from its beginnings in ancient Egypt to the present. Without claiming to cover every period in every country, it is nonetheless the most complete synthesis available of what is known about one of the oldest professions in the world. Dana Cuff considers the continuing relevance of the book and evaluates changes in architectural practice and the profession since 1965, most particularly digital technology, globalization, and environmental concerns.
Nawal El Saadawi
Memoirs from the Women's Prison
Regular price
$27.95
Save $-27.95
Often likened to Rigoberta Menchu and Nadine Gordimer, Nawal El Saadawi is one of the world's leading feminist authors. Director of Health and Education in Cairo, she was summarily dismissed from her post in 1972 for her political writing and activities. In 1981 she was imprisoned by Anwar Sadat for alleged "crimes against the State" and was not released until after his assassination.
Memoirs from the Women's Prison offers both firsthand witness to women's resistance to state violence and fascinating insights into the formation of women's community. Saadawi describes how political prisoners, both secular intellectuals and Islamic revivalists, forged alliances to demand better conditions and to maintain their sanity in the confines of their cramped cell.
Saadawi's haunting prose makes Memoirs an important work of twentieth-century literature. Recognized as a classic of prison writing, it touches all who are concerned with political oppression, intellectual freedom, and personal dignity.
Frederic
Strangers at the Gate
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
Now available again, this pioneering work examines one of the most controversial periods in Chinese history: the relationship between the Chinese civil and military authorities and the British trading community in Guangdong province on the eve of the Taiping Rebellion, one the most calamitous events in Chinese history. Wakeman shows how prevailing rural discontent, urban riots, secret society activity, and the imbalance of class and clan affected the mechanisms of regional power and gentry control, demonstrating the progression of rebellion and the historical inevitability of revolution.
David Nokes
Jane Austen
Regular price
$34.95
Save $-34.95
In this new biography of Jane Austen, David Nokes plays master sleuth and storyteller in presenting the great novelist "not in the modest pose which her family determined for her, but rather, as she most frequently presented herself, as rebellious, satirical, and wild."
Avedis K. Sanjian
Medieval Armenian Manuscripts at the University of California, Los Angeles
Regular price
$85.00
Save $-85.00
This catalog contains detailed descriptions of ninety-one items in the Armenian Manuscript Collection in the Department of Special Collections at the University Research Library of the University of California, Los Angeles. Acquired by the library in 1968 from Dr. Garo Owen Minasian, the collection includes manuscripts of ecclesiastical character as well as theological and philosophical works, medical treatises, and anthologies of poetry.
George Mitchell
Making Peace
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
UPDATED WITH A NEW PREFACE
Fifteen minutes before five o'clock on Good Friday, 1998, Senator George Mitchell was informed that his long and difficult quest for an Irish peace effort had succeeded--the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland, and the governments of the Republic of Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom, would sign the agreement. Now Mitchell, who served as independent chairman of the peace talks for the length of the process, tells us the inside story of the grueling road to this momentous accord and the subsequent developments that may threaten, or strengthen, the chance for a lasting peace in Northern Ireland.
David Reid
Sex, Death and God in L.A.
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
David Reid has gathered together the novelists, journalists, and cultural critics who could best address the myths, define the truths, and interpret the media images of the second largest city in the U.S. They report on the new Latino and Asian populations of South Central and the East Side and the old establishment of the West side; Downtown with its heavily mortgaged office towers held by Canadian and Japanese landlords; shuttered factories and thriving sweatshops; architecture from Irving Gill to Frank O. Gehry; messiahs from Krishnamurti to L. Ron Hubbard; rituals of power in Movieland and yoga and seduction in Beverly Hills. Ranging from acute political commentary to evocative literary impressions, this is a collection that will engage not only those who live in southern California but all those curious about this megalopolis in the desert.
Carlos Fuentes
A New Time for Mexico
Regular price
$24.95
Save $-24.95
Fuentes's bold and timely study discusses the origins and nature of the tumultuous events that have recently transformed Mexican politics and society. The rebellion in Chiapas, a rash of assassinations, the break between Presidents Salinas and Zedillo, the continual struggle for democratic self-rule: These and other developments are addressed by one of Mexico's wisest, most influential commentators.
Denys Johnson-Davies
Arabic Short Stories
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
An alleyway of Tangier as seen through the eyes of a prostitute, the price paid by a sophisticated Cairene philanderer for his infatuation with a young bedouin girl, the callous treatment a young wife receives from the man to whom she has been married. These are some of the themes of the twenty-four stories in this volume, each by a different author and rendered into English by one of the finest translators of Arabic fiction. Among the authors represented are Edward El-Kharrat, Bahaa Taher, Alifa Rifaat, and Ghassan Kanafani. Through the eyes of insiders, these stories show us the intimate texture of life throughout the diverse countries and cultures of the Arabic world.
Oakley Hall
Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades
Regular price
$35.00
Save $-35.00
The Morton Street Slasher has been leaving the corpses of his victims around San Francisco's Union Square. On the women's naked bodies are spade playing cards. The city's infamous newspaperman, Ambrose Bierce, blames the rash of murders on his old enemy, the Southern Pacific Railroad. A naive reporter at Bierce's Hornet pursues the case, uncovering conspiracy at every turn.
In a fast-paced novel that is a combination of murder mystery, historical fiction, and quirky biography, Oakley Hall draws the reader into 1880s San Francisco and the changing world that was California in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Local and state politics, the exploitation of the Chinese, the power of the mining and railroad barons, and San Francisco's colorful history provide a backdrop for this irresistible thriller.
The novel's chapters are introduced by appropriate excerpts from Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary and narrated by the young reporter Tom Redmond. Redmond is interested in the murders because of his attraction to a woman threatened by the Slasher, and Bierce encourages him because of his personal vendetta against the Big Four of the Railroad. Bierce's misogyny is an influence as well, which Hall uses to advantage in portraying the enigmatic journalist.
Hall knows his territory and his characters well. The sights and smells of late-nineteenth-century California are cleverly evoked, and the story's key players are refreshingly authentic. Bierce brandishes his famed cynicism with all the aplomb of the sharp-eyed, sharp-witted newspaperman he was. Cameo appearances by such California worthies as Ina Coolbrith and Joaquin Miller add to the novel's historical richness.
Intelligent, gripping, and often quite funny, Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades will satisfy any reader who craves adventure, mystery, romance, and fine writing.
Gunter Gebauer
Mimesis
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
Mimesis, the notion that art imitates reality, has long been recognized as one of the central ideas of Western aesthetics and has been most frequently associated with Aristotle. Less well documented is the great importance of mimetic theories of literature, theater, and the visual arts during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In this book, the most comprehensive overview of the theory of mimesis since Auerbach's monumental study, Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf provide a thorough introduction to the complex and shifting meanings of the term. Beginning with the Platonic doctrine of imitation, they chart the concept's appropriation and significance in the aesthetic theories of Aristotle, Molière, Shakespeare, Racine, Diderot, Lessing, and Rousseau. They examine the status of mimesis in the nineteenth-century novel and its reworking by such modern thinkers as Benjamin, Adorno, and Derrida. Widening the traditional understanding of mimesis to encompass the body and cultural practices of everyday life, their work suggests the continuing value of mimetic theory and will prove essential reading for scholars and students of literature, theater, and the visual arts.
Lila Abu-Lughod
Veiled Sentiments
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
Updated Edition With a New Preface
Lila Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But her analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of a system of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the relationship between ideology and human experience.
Eileen Chang
The Rice Sprout Song
Regular price
$25.95
Save $-25.95
The first of Eileen Chang's novels to be written in English, The Rice-Sprout Song portrays the horror and absurdity that the land-reform movement brings to a southern village in China during the early 1950s. Contrary to the hopes of the peasants in this story, the redistribution of land does not mean an end to hunger. Man-made and natural disasters bring about the threat of famine, while China's involvement in the Korean War further deepens the peasants' misery. Chang's chilling depiction of the peasants' desperate attempts to survive both the impending famine and government abuse makes for spellbinding reading. Her critique of communism rewrites the land-reform discourse at the same time it lays bare the volatile relations between politics and literature.
Jane E. Sloan
Alfred Hitchcock
Regular price
$39.95
Save $-39.95
Here is the definitive resource for fans and students of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. For the paperback edition, Jane Sloan has updated the annotated bibliography and indexes.
Judith Stacey
Brave New Families
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
Judith Stacey has added a new preface to her classic study of how the traditional nuclear family has been supplanted by a variety of new relationships that are not defined by blood ties and traditional gender roles.
Aeschylus
Oresteia
Regular price
$24.95
Save $-24.95
The most famous series of ancient Greek plays, and the only surviving trilogy, is the Oresteia of Aeschylus, consisting of Agamemnon, Choephoroe, and Eumenides. These three plays recount the murder of Agamemnon by his queen Clytemnestra on his return from Troy with the captive Trojan princess Cassandra; the murder in turn of Clytemnestra by their son Orestes; and Orestes' subsequent pursuit by the Avenging Furies (Eumenides) and eventual absolution.
Hugh Lloyd-Jones's informative notes elucidate the text, and introductions to each play set the trilogy against the background of Greek religion as a whole and Greek tragedy in particular, providing a balanced assessment of Aeschylus's dramatic art.
Patrick Marnham
Dreaming with His Eyes Open
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
This engrossing biography of Diego Rivera, the brilliant Mexican artist and revolutionary, captures the explosively passionate nature that made Rivera one of the twentieth-century's most gifted and controversial painters.
Lynn Margulis
Microcosmos
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
BACK IN PRINT WITH A REVISED PREFACE
Microcosmos brings together the remarkable discoveries of microbiology of the past two decades and the pioneering research of Dr. Margulis to create a vivid new picture of the world that is crucial to our understanding of the future of the planet. Addressed to general readers, the book provides a beautifully written view of evolution as a process based on interdependency and thei nterconnectedness of all life on the planet.
Gail Vines
Raging Hormones
Regular price
$26.95
Save $-26.95
Are menopausal women happier if they have hormone replacement therapy?
Does testosterone make men more aggressive than women?
Are hormones responsible for homosexuality?
Is fatness caused by hormones?
Hormones—the very word conjures images of distraught women suffering from premenstrual tension or menopausal instability. Can a man blame his behavior on the fact that he's a man—"the testosterone made me do it?" The belief that our hormones control how we behave runs deep in both scientific and popular culture. Now Gail Vines examines this enduring belief, and her timely study illuminates the differences in the perceived role of hormones in women and men's lives.
Sexual deviance, stress, athletic prowess, criminal behavior, eating disorders—these and other conditions are commonly linked to the effects of hormones. Circadian rhythms, light, sleep, as well as social environment, can influence the intricate chemical flow within our bodies. Vines looks at the many ways that hormones are now being used to gain control over our lives. She discusses hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women and the current notions that homosexuals are born with a "hormonally imprinted gay brain."
Being at the mercy of certain hormones, and thus potentially out of control, is part of the popular image of "being a woman." The issue of control and the anxieties surrounding difference and equality form the leitmotif of Raging Hormones. In questioning the easy promise of a "hormonal fix," Gail Vines alerts us to one of the most challenging arenas of contemporary social and scientific debate.
Carroll F. Terrell
A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound
Regular price
$39.95
Save $-39.95
The Companion is a major contribution to the literary evaluation of Pound's great, but often bewildering and abstruse work, The Cantos. Available in a one-volume paperback edition for the first time, the Companion brings together in conveniently numbered glosses for each canto the most pertinent details from the vast body of work on the Cantos during the last thirty years. The Companion contains 10,421 separate glosses that include translations from eight languages, identification of all proper names and works, Pound's literary and historical allusions, and other exotica, with exegeses based upon Pound's sources. Also included is a supplementary bibliography of works on Pound, newly updated, and an alphabetized index to The Cantos.
George Grosz
George Grosz
Regular price
$31.95
Save $-31.95
This acclaimed autobiography by one of the twentieth century's greatest satirical artists is as much a graphic portrait of Germany in chaos after the Treaty of Versailles as it is a memoir of a remarkable artist's development. Grosz's account of a world gone mad is as acute and provocative as the art that depicts it, and this translation of a work long out of print restores the spontaneity, humor, and energy of the author's German text. It also includes a chapter on Grosz's experience in the Soviet Union—omitted from the original English-language edition—as well as more writings about his twenty-year self-imposed exile in America, and a fable written in English.
Arthur Kleinman
Social Suffering
Regular price
$32.95
Save $-32.95
"Social suffering" takes in the human consequences of war, famine, depression, disease, torture—the whole assemblage of human problems that result from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people—and also human responses to social problems as they are influenced by those forms of power. In the same way that the notion of social suffering breaks down boundaries between specific scholarly disciplines, this cross-disciplinary investigation allows us to see the twentieth century in a new frame, with new emphases.
Anthropologists, historians, literary theorists, social medicine experts, and scholars engaged in the study of religion join together to investigate the cultural representations, collective experiences, and professional and popular appropriations of human suffering in the world today. These authors contest traditional research and policy approaches. Recognizing that neither the cultural resources of tradition nor those of modernity's various programs seem adequate to cope with social suffering in our times, they base their distinctive vision on the understanding that moral, political, and medical issues cannot be kept separate.
Tara Bahrampour
To See and See Again
Regular price
$27.95
Save $-27.95
A compelling and intimate exploration of the complexity of a bicultural immigrant experience, To See and See Again traces three generations of an Iranian (and Iranian-American) family undergoing a century of change--from the author's grandfather, a feudal lord with two wives; to her father, a freespirited architect who marries an American pop singer; to Bahrampour herself, who grows up balanced precariously between two cultures and comes of age watching them clash on the nightly news.
Richard Koszarski
An Evening's Entertainment
Regular price
$39.95
Save $-39.95
The silent cinema was America's first modern entertainment industry, a complex social, cultural, and technological phenomenon that swept the country in the early years of the twentieth century. Richard Koszarski examines the underlying structures that made the silent-movie era work, from the operations of eastern bankers to the problems of neighborhood theater musicians. He offers a new perspective on the development of this major new industry and art form and the public's response to it.
Romuald Misiunas
The Baltic States
Regular price
$37.95
Save $-37.95
In this updated edition of their renowned The Baltic States, Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera bring the story of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia up to the 1990s. The authors describe and analyze how the Baltic nations survived fifty years of social disruption, language discrimination, and Russian colonialism. The nations' histories are fully integrated and compared, and some notable differences between them are pointed out.
With two new chapters, a revised preface, and an appendix on the end of Soviet domination, this expanded study covers a tumultuous period of political, economic, cultural, and ecological reform.
Victor Davis Hanson
The Other Greeks
Regular price
$34.95
Save $-34.95
For generations, scholars have focused on the rise of the Greek city-state and its brilliant cosmopolitan culture as the ultimate source of the Western tradition in literature, philosophy, and politics. This passionate book leads us outside the city walls to the countryside, where the vast majority of the Greek citizenry lived, to find the true source of the cultural wealth of Greek civilization. Victor Hanson shows that the real "Greek revolution" was not merely the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, but rather the historic innovation of the independent family farm.
The farmers, vinegrowers, and herdsmen of ancient Greece are "the other Greeks," who formed the backbone of Hellenic civilization. It was these tough-minded, practical, and fiercely independent agrarians, Hanson contends, who gave Greek culture its distinctive emphasis on private property, constitutional government, contractual agreements, infantry warfare, and individual rights. Hanson's reconstruction of ancient Greek farm life, informed by hands-on knowledge of the subject (he is a fifth-generation California vine- and fruit-grower) is fresh, comprehensive, and absorbing. His detailed chronicle of the rise and tragic fall of the Greek city-state also helps us to grasp the implications of what may be the single most significant trend in American life today—the imminent extinction of the family farm.
Lawrence Gowing
Vermeer
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
Lawrence Gowing's classic study has long been treasured for the painterly sensibilities he brought to this greatly loved body of work. Finally the text is available again, with a new foreword and fresh reproductions of Vermeer's paintings.
John Lahr
Notes on a Cowardly Lion
Regular price
$27.95
Save $-27.95
With a New Preface by the Author
First published in 1969, Notes on a Cowardly Lion has established itself as one of the best-ever show business biographies. Drawing on his father's recollections and on the memories of those who worked with him, John Lahr brilliantly examines the history of modern American show business through the long and glorious career of his father--the raucous low-comic star of burlesque, vaudeville, the Broadway revue and musical, Hollywood movies, and the legitimate stage. Here in rich detail is Lahr evolving from low--dialect comic to Ziegfeld Follies sophisticate, hamming it up with the Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman on the set of TheWizard of Oz, and debuting Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in America, which Kenneth Tynan called "one of the most noble performances I have ever seen." In the examination of Bert Lahr's chronic insecurity and self-absorption, the breakdown of his first marriage, and the affectionate arm's length he kept between himself and his adoring second family, John Lahr's book also brings the reader closer than any other theater biography to the private torment of a great funny man.
This edition of the book includes the award-winning essay "The Lion and Me," John Lahr's intimate reflections on family life with his distant, brooding, but lovable father. A first-class stylist, John Lahr takes the reader beyond the magic of show business to a dazzling examination of how a performing self is constructed and staged before the paying customers. Both as theater history and biography, Lahr's book is superb.
Benedicte Ingstad
Disability and Culture
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
Spurred by the United Nation's International Decade for Disabled Persons and medical anthropology's coming of age, anthropologists have recently begun to explore the effects of culture on the lives of the mentally and physically impaired. This major collection of essays both reframes disability in terms of social processes and offers for the first time a global, multicultural perspective on the subject. Using research undertaken in a wide variety of settings—from a longhouse in central Borneo to a community of Turkish immigrants in Stockholm—contributors explore the significance of mental, sensory, and motor impairments in light of fundamental, culturally determined assumptions about humanity and personhood.
Fernand Braudel
Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. II
Regular price
$45.00
Save $-45.00
The subject of The Wheels of Commerce is the development of mechanisms of exchange—shops, markets, trade networks, and banking—in the pre-industrial stages of capitalism.
