Books
Showing 1057–1088 of 1120 results
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Black Fire
$19.95In prose the Washington Post hailed as Wolfean or Whitmanesque , Peery writes eloquently of the passions that led him to fight abroad for opportunities denied him at home. Whether describing his childhood in rural Minnesota or his tour of duty as a soldier in the all-black 93rd Infantry Division, Peery s is an intimate account of one soldier s political awakening.
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Words of Fire
An Anthology of African-AmericanFeminist Thought$26.99 – $29.99The timeless and essential anthology of Black Feminist thought—showing that Black women have always understood the need for feminism to be intersectional
“In this pathbreaking collection of articles, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall has taken us from the early 1830s to contemporary times. . . . She has refused to cut off contemporary African American women from the long line of sisters who have righteously struggled for the liberation of African American women from the dual oppressions of racism and sexism.” —from the epilogue by Johnnetta B. Cole
The first major anthology to trace the development of Black Feminist thought in the United States, Words of Fire is Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s comprehensive collection of writings by more than sixty Black women. From the pioneering work of abolitionist Maria Miller Stewart and anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett to the writings of feminist critics Michele Wallace and bell hooks, Black women have been writing about the multiple jeopardies—racism, sexism, and classism—that have made it imperative to forge a brand of feminism uniquely their own. In the words of Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”—Words of Fire provides the tools to dismantle the interlocking systems that oppress us and to rebuild from their ashes a society of true freedom.
Contributors include:
- Shirley Chisholm
- The Combahee River Collective
- Anna Julia Cooper
- Angela Davis
- Alice Dunbar-Nelson
- Lorraine Hansberry
- bell hooks
- Claudia Jones
- June Jordan
- Audre Lorde
- Beth E. Richie
- Barbara Smith
- Sojourner Truth
- Alice Walker
- Michele Wallace
- Ida Wells-Barnett
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Civil Wars
$9.95In Civil Wars, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Germany’s most astute literary and political critic, chronicles the global changes taking place as the result of evolving notions of nationalism, loyalty, and community. Enzensberger sees similar forces at work around the world, from America’s racial uprisings in Los Angeles to the outright carnage in the former Yugoslavia. He argues that previous approaches to class or generational conflict have failed us, and that we are now confronted with an “autism of violence”: a tendency toward self-destruction and collective madness.
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Century of War
Politics, Conflicts, and Society Since 1914$18.95Over the last three decades the historian Gabriel Kolko has redefined the way we look at modern warfare and its social and political effects. Century of War gives us a masterly synthesis of the effects of war on civilian populations and the political results of these traumatizing experiences in the twentieth century.
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Talking to Myself
A Memoir of My Times$17.95In Talking to Myself, Pulitzer Prizing–winning author Studs Terkel offers us an autobiography for our times—the stirring story of a man whose life has been so vivid that its telling mirrors the events of our century. From Mahalia Jackson to Bertrand Russell, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Frederico Fellini, Studs has met them all and captured their voices for us. With the addition of a marvelous new postscript, Talking to Myself is as enjoyable now as when it was first published—a work that is as unusual as it is compelling.
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The WPA Guide to New York City
$25.95This tour guide for time travelers offers New York lovers and 1930s buffs an endlessly fascinating look at life as it was lived in the days when a trolley ride cost five cents, a room at the Plaza was $7.50, and the new World s Fair was the talk of the town. Hailed by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books ever written about the city. Photos. Maps.
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“I Won’t Learn from You”
And Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment$18.00“I Won’t Learn From You,” Herb Kohl’s now-classic essay on “not learning,” or refusing to learn, is available for the first time in an affordable paperback edition along with four other landmark essays. Drawing on an idea of Martin Luther King Jr.’s, Kohl argues for “creative maladjustment” in the classroom and anywhere else that students’ intelligence, dignity, or integrity are compromised by a teacher, an institution, or a larger social mindset.This volume also includes “The Tattooed Man,” Kohl’s autobiographical essay about “hopemongering,” which Kohl finds essential for all effective teaching in these difficult times.
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Stubborn Hope
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Art on My Mind
Visual Politics$17.99 – $18.99The canonical work of cultural criticism by the “profoundly influential critic” (Artnet), in a beautiful thirtieth-anniversary edition, featuring a new foreword by esteemed visual artist Mickalene Thomas
“Sharp and persuasive.” —The New York Times Book Review on the original publication of Art on My MindArt on My Mind, “one of the country’s most influential feminist thinkers“ (Artforum) offers a tender yet potent suite of writings for a world increasingly concerned with art and identity politics. This collection of bell hooks’s essays, each with art at its center, explores both the obvious and obscure: from ruminations on the fraught representation of Black bodies, to reflections on the creative processes of women artists, to analysis of the use of blood in visual art.
bell hooks has been “instrumental in cracking open the white, western canon for Black artists” (Artnet), with searing essays complemented by conversations with Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, Margo Humphrey, and LaVerne Wells-Bowie. Featuring full-color artwork from giants such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lorna Simpson, and Alison Saar, Art on My Mind “examines the way race, sex and class shape who makes art, how it sells and who values it” (The New York Times), while questioning how art can be instrumental for Black liberation. In doing so, hooks urges us to unravel the forces of oppression that colonize our imaginations.
With a new foreword from acclaimed contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas, this thirtieth-anniversary edition passes the torch to a new generation of artists, capturing hooks’s simple yet evergreen affirmation: art matters—it is a life force in the struggle for freedom. Art on My Mind is essential reading for anyone looking to find lessons on liberation and creativity in the world of color—the free world of art.
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Art of the American Indian Frontier
A Portfolio$22.95The art contained in this portfolio—all from the renowned Chandler-Pohrt Collection—includes colorful men’s and women’s clothing, buckskin and porcupine quill bags, woven sashes, jewelry, smoking pipes, and other decorative and ceremonial objects, all made between 1800 and 1920. The design and craftsmanship are witness to the creative spirit that endured even in the face of continual governmental attempts at forced assimilation. Replete with twenty-four beautifully printed, unbound, full-color plates, Art of the American Indian Frontier opens the door to the rich world of North American Woodlands and Plains Indian art. -
The New Field Guide to the U.S. Economy
A Compact and Irreverent Guide to Economic Life in America$12.95Revised and expanded with the most up-to-the-minute data, The New Field Guide to the U.S. Economy brings key economic issues to life, reflecting the collective wit and wisdom of the more than forty progressive economists affiliated with the Center for Popular Economics. Complete with a glossary and analytical tool kit, the ten chapters range from “Banking Behemoths” to “Bye Bye Ozone,” covering owners, workers, women, people of color, government spending, welfare, education, health, the environment, macroeconomics, and the global economy.
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Under the Frog
A Black Comedy$11.00The Hungarians have an expression for the worst place in the world to be: “Under the frog’s ass down a coal mine.”
Under the Frog, Tibor Fischer’s brilliant recreation of postwar Eastern Europe, was the surprise literary success of London, where it won the Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is the very witty and very sad account of two young men who survive the chaos of communism as part of a traveling basketball team in pursuit of sex and the avoidance of work.
Exuberant and energetic, Tibor Fischer’s first novel is a fascinating and oblique commentary on everyday life during those dramatic years. Fischer writes with the verve and irreverence of Martin Amis, but the world he recreates is one we know from George Konrad and Milan Kundera.
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The Thought Gang
$18.95Tibor Fischer’s first novel Under the Frog was one of the most widely praised books in England in 1993. That book followed the fortunes of two young men in the pursuit of sex and the avoidance of work as part of a traveling basketball team in the Hungary of the 1950s, and everyone from Salman Rushdie to A.S. Byatt responded with unbridled enthusiasm.
Now comes his eagerly awaited follow-up, another hilarious chronicle of an unusual dynamic duo—this time chasing after something quite different—and the London papers are even more enthusiastic. The Thought Gang is an unabashedly comic novel of ideas and uncertainty. It is a philosophical novel (or perhaps just a novel about a philosopher). It is also an unusually cinematic novel. As the Sunday Telegraph said, “There are novels which are crying out so loudly to be made into films that you cannot read them without a cinematic version taking shape in your mind, frame by frame, as you turn the pages. Tibor Fischer’ The Thought Gangis one of them.” Perhaps it could best be described as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction crossed with Woody Allen’s classic comedy Love and Death.
The setting is France; our hero, a washed-up middle-aged British philosopher named Eddie Coffin. Broke and unsure as to his next meal, he meets Hubert, an incompetent, freshly released, one-armed robber, and the “thought gang” is born. Applying philosophy to larceny, these unlikely bandits question the meaning of life, the value of money, and the role of banks as they wind their way from Montpellier to Toulon in search of the greatest heist in history. Unexpected and volatile, The Thought Gang is the hilarious and thought-provoking story of their travails.
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Mexican Lives
$16.95On the eve of the most significant trade agreement in recent Mexico-U.S. history, Judith Adler Hellman, a leading authority on Mexican politics, went into the homes and workplaces of a variety of Mexicans, from rich industrialists to poor street vendors. In bringing us their stories, Hellman puts a human face on the political and economic transformation currently under way in this rapidly changing country, and puts in context the rage and frustration that is feeding the current rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas.
The Mexicans interviewed in this remarkable book share their views on an array of subjects, including pollution, the political elite, corruption, economics, and the migrant experience in the United States. Some seek collective solutions to the challenges they face; others, for a variety of interesting reasons, have no involvement with any group beyond their immediate or extended family, and rely for their well-being only on themselves and their kin.
Here we meet a small subsistence farmer, eager to break into the more profitable gourmet fruit and vegetable export market; a very wealthy family pondering how best to position its company to profit from NAFTA; and a former housewife turned union organizer, who must figure out what to do with her life savings: underwrite her son’s migration to the United States, put down a payment on a new house with running water, or buy an industrial sewing machine with which to start her own business.
These personal portraits, combined with Hellman’s concise and engaging presentation of recent Mexican economic and political history, make this essential reading for those concerned about Mexico and the growing global economy.
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The True Cost of Conflict
Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society$16.00The True Cost of Conflict is the first book to show in clear and accessible terms the vast price of conflict to the human race. The result of a unique collaboration among six international humanitarian organizations, this book reveals not only the number of deaths and injuries resulting from war, but also the less-publicized consequences, such as the extreme economic damage incurred by both the participants and other communities, the dire social and developmental damage, and the environmental damage, which are often ignored in calculating the ravages of war.
The seven conflicts examined in detail are:
The Gulf War
Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor
The civil war in Mozambique
The civil war in Sudan
The guerilla war in Peru
The struggle for independence in Kashmir
The war in the former YugoslaviaBy laying bare the true cost of conflict, this book adds an essential new perspective to debates on national security, and asks who, if anyone, really benefits from war. Finally, it considers the effects of current approaches to conflict management and prevention.
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English Is Broken Here
Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas$18.95When Coco Fusco and collaborator Guillermo Gomez-Pena toured the country in a cage as “authentic natives,” their provocative performance piece enraged some and enthralled others. Known for using performance to explore the boundaries of ethnicity in art, Coco Fusco has now brought her talents to bear in a volume of cultural criticism and theory, English is Broken Here. Infused with a unique cultural sensibility, English is Broken Here examines cross-cultural art issues in America at a crucial moment. Coco Fusco adds an original and eloquent voice to a growing debate over cultural identity and visual politics. -
Professor Martens’ Departure
$20.00Widely read in Europe, the Estonian novelist Jaan Kross is considered one of the most important writers of the Baltic region, and is an often-named candidate for the Nobel Prize.
His new historical novel, Professor Martens’ Departure, is written in a classic elegiac style reminiscent of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and it evokes the complex world of czarist Russian society at the turn of the century. The character of Professor Martens is based on an actual official of the czarist reign, a distinguished Estonian jurist curiously reminiscent of Henry Kissinger.
Faced with a dire financial crisis in Russia, Professor Martens orchestrates a major loan from the French government to stave off famine; as time passes, however, he realizes that he has managed to perpetuate a brutal regime that keeps its political prisoners in chains.
This fictional memoir, written at the end of Martens’ life, finds him reliving his past and questioning the degree to which he has sacrificed himself to maintain a corrupt regime, one that ultimately disdains both him and his people. Considered an outsider by the czar’s adviser, Martens is nonetheless needed for his skills. Still, he is marginalized and kept in the shadows.
Far more than just a political or philosophical novel, Professor Martens’ Departure is an astonishing reconstruction of czarist Russia.
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The Way Things Aren’t
Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error : Over 100 Outrageously False and Foolish Statements from America's Most Powerful Radio and TV$9.95Recently, the media watch organization FAIR had a novel idea for a stinging response to Rush Limbaugh’s reign of error: the truth. The Way Things Aren’t documents and corrects over 100 whoppers told by The Lyin’ King, pitting Limbaugh versus Reality in areas ranging from American history to the environment, health care to rock and roll. It also has features such as “Limbaugh versus Limbaugh” with examples of Limbaugh contradicting himself, cartoons by Garry Trudeau and Tom Tomorrow, seven things you can do about Rush Limbaugh, a postcard to mail to the talk show host about his Limbecile statements, and a foreword to Limbaughland by Molly Ivins that is as scary as it is funny.
If you know a dittohead who needs deprogramming or if you want to see for yourself how far out on a Limbaugh Rush really is, pick up a copy of The Way Things Aren’t—it’s cheaper than The Way Things Ought to Be, and it’s been fact checked.
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Paradise: By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021
$22.95 – $29.99From the Nobel Prize winner, a coming-of-age story that illuminates the harshness and beauty of an Africa on the brink of colonization
“[Gurnah’s novels] recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.” —Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “breakthrough” work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boy’s coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism.
Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa. Through Yusuf’s eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. The result is what Publishers Weekly calls a “vibrant” and “powerful” work that “evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge of full-scale imperialist takeover.”
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Japan in War and Peace
Selected Essays$23.95Drawing on decades of experience and research, John W. Dower, author of the award-winning War Without Mercy, highlights for the first time the resemblances between wartime, postwar, and contemporary Japan. He argues persuasively that the origins of many of the institutions responsible for Japan’s dominant position in today’s global economy derive from the rapid military industrialization of the 1930s, and not from the post-occupation period, as many have assumed. A brilliant lead essay, “The Useful War,” sets the tone for the volume by incisively showing how much of Japan’s postwar political and economic structure was prefigured in the wartime organization of that country. -
Subversion as Foreign Policy
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Reef
$30.00Reef is the elegant and moving story of Triton, a talented young chef so committed to pleasing his master’s palate that he is oblivious to the political unrest threatening his Sri Lankan paradise. It is a personal story that parallels the larger movement of a country from a hopeful, young democracy to troubled island society. It is also a mature, poetic novel which the British press has compared to the works of James Joyce, Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul, and Anton Chekhov.
With his collection of short stories Monkfish Moon—a New York Times Notable Book of 1993—Romesh Gunesekera quickly established himself as a leading literary voice. Reef earned universal praise from European critics and landed the young author on the short list for the 1994 Booker Prize, England’s highest honor for fiction.
Reef explores the entwined lives of Mr. Salgado, an aristocratic marine biologist and student of sea movements and the disappearing reef, and his houseboy, Triton, who learns to polish silver until it shines like molten sun; to mix a love cake with ten eggs, creamed butter, and fresh cadju nuts; to marinate tiger prawns; and to steam parrot fish. Through these characters and the forty years of political disintegration their country endures, Gunesekera tells the tragic, sometimes comic, story of a lost paradise and a young man coming to terms with his destiny.
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Overlay
Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory$21.00Back in print, Overlay is Lucy Lippard’s classic book on contemporary art and its connection to prehistoric sites and symbols. Viewed by critics, artists, art historians, and students as the essential text on how prehistoric images have been “overlayed” onto contemporary art by today’s artists, Overlay is for anyone interested in the possibility of reintegrating art into the fabric of society as a whole, as in prehistoric times.
From megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge to Richard Long’s minimalism, from the earliest examples of cave drawings to Ana Mendieta’s Cuban site art, from the matriarchal fertility rituals of the ancient Celts to Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, Lippard shows a continuum in the forms, materials, symbols, and imagery that artists have employed for thousands of years.
Lavishly illustrated with over 320 black-and-white photographs and 8 pages of color images, Overlay includes the work of artists Carl Andre, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Charles Simonds, Mary Beth Edelson, Anna Sofaer, Michelle Stuart, Sol LeWitt, Ad Reinhardt, Alice Aycock, Nancy Holt, Emily Carr, Dennis Oppenheim, and many others.
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May It Please the Court
$19.95 – $59.95Now available in paperback, this bestselling collection of Supreme Court transcripts presents 23 of the most significant oral arguments made before the court since 1955. Also includes an introduction in which lawyers discuss their historic arguments, background to each of the cases, and excerpt s from the Courts opinions.
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The Pink Glass Swan
Selected Essays on Feminist Art$20.00In the 1970s, Lucy R. Lippard, author of the highly original and popular Mixed Blessings, merged her art-world concerns with those of the then-fledgling women’s movement. In a career that spans sixteen books and scores of articles, catalogs, and essays on art, political activism, feminism, and multiculturalism, her engaging and provocative writings have heralded a new way of thinking about art and its role in the feminist movement.
This new collection of previously published essays covers more than two decades of Lippard’s thinking on the ever-evolving definitions of feminist art, the convergence of high and low art, political and activist art, and the contributions of feminist theory to the politics of identity that infuses the production and exhibition of much of today’s fine and popular art.
With a new introduction from the author, The Pink Glass Swan brings together selections from two of Lippard’s leading works, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Art and Get the Message?: A Decade of Art for Social Change, and numerous other articles written for newspapers, magazines, and art catalogs across the country.
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Russia/USSR/Russia
The Drive and Drift of a Superstate$30.00Moshe Lewin’s major new book is an original and important work that clarifies the sweeping changes that transformed Russia in the twentieth century from a muzhik country to the urban power we read about today. As in his previous works, Moshe Lewin’s extraordinary breadth of knowledge and sympathy allows him to deal with the “grand narrative of cultural transformation” that goes well beyond simple studies of urban growth or industrialization.
The Soviet Union, as Lewin reminds us, was a rural country well into the post–World War II era, becoming predominantly urban only in the mid-1960s. The fascinating story that emerges from this book is one of a country that is becoming increasingly more complex even as it retains a “relatively primitive configuration of power.”
Professor Lewin goes on to show the historical roots of recent change. In the 1920s it was the government that was impatient to change, while society was transforming itself slowly. Recent years have seen a reversal of this situation, where a largely bureaucratic state simply lost its ability to govern a rapidly changing society. Professor Lewin’s analysis lays bare the underlying causes behind the present chaos in the former Soviet Union, where a government that barely understands the new forces that have been so dramatically unleashed finds itself totally unable to control them.
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Witness Against the Beast
William Blake and the Moral Law$17.00Witness Against the Beast is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study in which the renowned social historian E.P. Thompson contends that most of the assumptions scholars have made about William Blake are misleading and unfounded. Brilliantly reexamining Blake’s cultural milieu and intellectual background, Thompson detects in Blake’s poetry a repeated call to resist the usury and commercialism of the “Antichrist” embodied by contemporary society—to “witness against the beast.” -
Making History
Writings on History and Culture$17.00Bringing together E.P. Thompson’s writings and lectures delivered over a number of years, Making History covers the key debates in history and cultural theory that occupied Thompson throughout his career. Making History includes such landmark writings as Thompson’s influential and sympathetic assessments of the historians Raymond Williams and Herbert Gutman, as well as his judgments of the lasting value of classic English writers such as William Morris and Mary Wollstonecraft. Also included are Thompson’s perceptive and always witty contributions to current issues of debate, such as the role of poetry as a political act and the historical method and imagination. The book concludes with “Agenda for Radical History,” Thompson’s inspiring and oft-cited lecture on the future of history and the task of historians in years to come, a fitting conclusion to the book and to Thompson’s own exemplary career.
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Greening International Law
$30.00Environmental problems do not respect international boundaries, and as a consequence, environmental issues are increasingly a matter for negotiation in which the role of international law is crucial. However, the law itself and the accompanying institutions are only beginning to recognize the full implications of the issues.
Greening International Law is a collection of essays by leading legal scholars and lawyers, who asses the extent to which the law and legal institutions have been “greened” and discuss the ways in which these laws will have to adapt to deal effectively with the issues now arising. These essays reflect the excitement of watching a new system being formed—just as if one were able to witness again the early days of American federal decision making. Cases such as the Mexican tuna case and the Danish bottle-deposit return case will have enormous significance in deciding the degree to which individual countries will be able to maintain their own environmental policies in the face of economic pressure from other, and at times larger, neighbors.
The battles over the future of the oceans and the arctic territories are fraught with enormous portent for future economic development, much as were our early political and legal battles over the open lands of the American frontier. With essays by distinguished American experts such as Christopher Stone, Richard Stewart, and Daniel Bodansky, and an extensive historical introduction on the evolution of the field by Philippe Sands, Greening International Law is a book of importance not only for lawyers and environmentalists, but for all concerned with our economic and political future.
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Anatomy of a War
Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience$19.95Kolko’s groundbreaking and widely cited study of the Vietnam War, with a new postscript by the author. -
A Queer Reader
$25.00A Queer Reader is a rich and provocative collection of writings about male homosexuality—a gay version of Bartlett’s Quotations, with authors ranging from Plato to Andy Warhol. Arranging entries chronologically and drawing on sources from the Satyricon to Gay News, from Michelangelo&squo;s sonnets to a speech in the House of Lords, from sexually explicit graffiti found in Pompeii to a Playboy interview with David Bowie, Patrick Higgins uses novels, biographies, autobiographies, histories, and ephemera to present gay history as never before. -
The Traveler’s Tree
$20.00Bruno Bontempelli’s The Traveler’s Tree is a spellbinding and most unusual tale of desperation and suspense, which takes place in the eighteenth-century maritime setting Patrick O’Brian made so familiar to American readers. A modern fable reminiscent of Camus’s classic The Plague, The Traveler’s Tree is at its core an exploration of man’s nature.
Somewhere in the Caribbean Sea the French ship Entremetteuse lies stranded without a breeze, its crew racked by starvation and disease, its wood rotting, and its masts limp. An island and the dim outline of the fabled traveler’s tree appear on the horizon. Although only a gunshot away, the island’s sheer cliffs and coral reefs make it cruelly unreachable. The heat grows unbearable, the ship’s stores are nearly depleted, and the rats eagerly await the remains.
As listless as the ship and increasingly feeble with scurvy, the embattled crew dispatches one longboat after another against raging waves, barrier reefs, and poisonous fish in order to reach the island, but to no avail. As mutiny, rebellion, and utter starvation loom, they pin their last hopes on a direct charge of the ship across the reefs, in one last valiant effort to reach the traveler’s tree.
Hailed in France as “a superb allegory” (Le Monde), The Traveler’s Tree is an enthralling novel that tells a story of the human condition and man’s limitations. Writing with extraordinary realism and historical accuracy, Bruno Bontempelli lures us into this absorbing morality tale that will be remembered for years to come.
Showing 1057–1088 of 1120 results
