Social Sciences

Hardcover. Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press, 1st Edition, 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 274 pages. Hardcover. Tan cloth cover boards, brown title on spine. Some tanning from age to covers, pages and edges. Top edge dyed red. Clear plastic mylar included. Good clean, tight copy. Social statement and opinion about those who live happily below the poverty line in the southern United States.

Hardcover. London, Tavistock Publications , 1st UK, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, blue cloth covers in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with light edgewear. 342 pages. The author offers an important contribution to the interpretation of the Rorschach ink blots and brings to light new test data. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Bloomington IN, Indiana University Press, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 324 pages. Poet and anthropologist Michael Jackson brings to this study of the folktales of the Kuranko people of Sierra Leone a sensitivity to the philosophical nuances of literature. Clean copy. Review slip laid in.

Softcover. Canberra, Australian National University, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 159 pages, black and white photographic illustrations and maps in the text.

Hardcover. Oxford/NY, Berg, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, glossy boards, 601 pages. This book explores the Yafar society, a forest people living by shifting cultivation, hunting and gathering. Based on fifteen years' research, it offers a detailed examination of all aspects of a society whose material and nutritional relations with their rainforest environment are mediated by a sociocultural system based on a carefully negotiated relationship with natural forces, and harmony between the sexes. Pencil marking to 10 pages otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2nd Ed., 1974, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with fading to spine. This revised and expanded second edition, again tackles the question of procreation within the aboriginal tribes. As Ernest Jones said of the first edition (from the rear panel of the dust wrapper) " ... by far the most valuable study among the large literature that has accumulated over the vexed question of whether Australian aborigines are really ignorant of the physiological effects of procreation and whether they are " so to speak " pretending for social and religious reasons to be thus ignorant ". This landmark study was first published in 1937, and this second edition takes into account later fieldwork and new information that became available on the subject.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 295 pages including index.The polymathic Rivers was a pioneering neuroscientist, psychologist, and anthropologist who made substantial contributions to all these fields in the pre-WWI period. Interest in Rivers increased in recent years because he appears as a major and particularly sympathetic character in Pat Barker's outstanding trilogy of novels on WWI. Slobodin's book, which is the only effort at a biography of Rivers, deals mainly with his work as a pioneering ethnologist. Light foxing to rear dj panel, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wrappers, 311 pages. For generations of anthropologists, the Baining people have presented a challenge, because of their apparent lack of cultural or social structure. This group of small-scale horticulturists seems devoid of the complex belief systems and social practices that characterize other traditional peoples of Papua New Guinea. Their daily existence is mundane and repetitive in the extreme, articulated by only the most elementary familial relationships and social connections. The routine of everyday life, however, is occasionally punctuated by stunningly beautiful festivals of masked dancers, which the Baining call play and to which they attribute no symbolic significance.  In a new work sure to evoke considerable repercussions and debate in anthropological theory, Jane Fajans courageously takes on the "Baining Problem," arguing that the Baining define themselves not through intricate cosmologies or social networks, but through the meanings generated by their own productive and reproductive work.

Softcover. New Haven CT, HRAF Press, 2nd Ed., 1957, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, blue wrappers, 359 pages, map, charts, errata slip tipped-in.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 305 pages. The Wrestler's Body tells the story of a way of life organized in terms of physical self-development. While Indian wrestlers are competitive athletes, they are also moral reformers whose conception of self and society is fundamentally somatic. Using the insights of anthropology, Joseph Alter writes an ethnography of the wrestler's physique that elucidates the somatic structure of the wrestler's identity and ideology.Young men in North India may choose to join an akhara, or gymnasium, where they subject themselves to a complex program of physical and moral fitness. Alter's first-hand description of each detail of the wrestler's regimen offers a unique perspective on South Asian culture and society. Wrestlers feel that moral reform of Indian national character is essential and advocate their way of life as an ideology of national health. Everyone is called on to become a wrestler and build collective strength through self-discipline. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Salem MA, Peabody Museum, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price clipped dust jacket. 192 pages with frontispiece, maps, color plates, black and white plates, figures, facsimiles and index. Admiral Henry Byam Martin's first command in the British Navy was Captain of the 50-gun frigate, H.M.S. Grampus, in the year 1846. He was ordered to a sail from Plymouth 'round the Horn to Hawaii for further orders. Those orders sent him to Tahiti for a full year, the fatal year in which the French subjugated the Tahitians by bloody force, made the island a "Protectorate" of France but allowed the glamorous Queen Pomare to be the titular ruler until they took it over completely, as a colony, in 1880. This Polynesian portion of Captain Martin's daily Journal has lain unnoticed in the depths of the British Museum until this publication. But it still sparkles with wit and with acute observations of the personalities and events of that critical year in the struggle between the French and English for the conquest of the Pacific and the hopeless struggles of the poor islanders to defend their homelands and their freedom. Inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Ausyin TX, University of Texas Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 282 pages, b&w illustrations. The simple question "How did the Maya come up with a calendar that had only 260 days?" led Vincent Malmstrom to discover an unexpected "hearth" of Mesoamerican culture. In this boldly revisionist book, he sets forth his challenging, new view of the origin and diffusion of Mesoamerican calendrical systems--the intellectual achievement that gave rise to Mesoamerican civilization and culture. Malmstrom posits that the 260-day calendar marked the interval between passages of the sun at its zenith over Izapa, an ancient ceremonial center in the Soconusco region of Mexico's Pacific coastal plain. He goes on to show how the calendar developed by the Zoque people of the region in the fourteenth century B.C. gradually diffused through Mesoamerica into the so-called "Olmec metropolitan area" of the Gulf coast and beyond to the Maya in the east and to the plateau of Mexico in the west. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2nd pr., 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 193 pages, b&w illustrations. Two color maps in rear pocket in excellent condition. The relationship between people and terrain in a small densely settled area in the New Guinea Highlands. Clean copy.

Softcover. UK, Clarendon Press, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 499 pages. R. J. Hankinson traces the history of ancient Greek thinking about causation and explanation, from its earliest beginnings through more than a thousand years to the middle of the first millennium of the Christian era. He examines ways in which the Ancient Greeks dealt with questions about how and why things happen as and when they do, about the basic constitution and structure of things, about function and purpose, laws of nature, chance, coincidence, and responsibility. Clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 272 pages. Shadow Mothers shines new light on an aspect of contemporary motherhood often hidden from view: the need for paid childcare by women returning to the workforce, and the complex bonds mothers forge with the "shadow mothers" they hire. Cameron Lynne Macdonald illuminates both sides of an unequal and complicated relationship. Based on in-depth interviews with professional women and childcare providers- immigrant and American-born nannies as well as European au pairs-Shadow Mothers locates the roots of individual skirmishes between mothers and their childcare providers in broader cultural and social tensions. Macdonald argues that these conflicts arise from unrealistic ideals about mothering and inflexible career paths and work schedules, as well as from the devaluation of paid care work. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 264 pages illustrated in b&w and color. Androgynous Objects explores the way meaning is encoded in material culture by focusing on the androgynous symbolism of the looped string bag, or bilum, of the Telefol people of Central New Guinea. The web of meanings 'woven' into the bag is shown to extend beyond women's lives and bodies. It is open to manipulation and reformation in a variety of contexts and is used by both Telefol women and men to explore, and so explain the complexities and ambiguities inherent in their social life. Clean copy.

Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 141 pages. This volume contains the essential points of Jean Bodin's theory of sovereignty, a landmark in legal theory and royalist ideology. The four chapters presented form the core of Bodin's classic work, Six Livres de la Republique. Bodin was primarily responsible for introducing the seductive but erroneous notion that sovereignty is indivisible, that the entire power of the state had to be vested in a single individual or group. This thesis, combined with the prevailing crisis of authority during the French religious wars, led Bodin to a systematically absolutist interpretation of the French and other European monarchies. This is the first complete translation of this material into English since 1606, and is accompanied by a lucid introduction, chronology, and bibliography. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, inc., Reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 304 pages. Hardcover. Color and b/w illustrations throughout (more than 400). Previous owner's bookplate on front endpaper. Brown cloth cover boards, bold gilt title on spine. In beautiful condition. Dust jacket unclipped, has small rip at bottom of front cover and wear at top of spine, otherwise very good. A look at the jewelry and body art of the African people.

Softcover. NY, Vintage, reprint, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 510 pages, b&w illustrations. This monumental work of cultural history was nominated for a National Book Award. It chronicles America's transformation, beginning in 1880, into a nation of consumers, devoted to a cult of comfort, bodily well-being, and endless acquisition. 24 pages of photos. Like new, clean.

Softcover. Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 136 pages, typed manuscript, double spaced. The section headings are: the universe: the mythical origins of men; the ghosts or spirits; how men obtained food and the necessities of life; sickness & death; geographical myths; hunting stories; stories of cunning; social relations of people; love stories. Mild cover wear, clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press/Universitetsforlaget , 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 292 pages, b&w illustr4ations. 'Analyzes the culture, particularly the ritual life, of a recently contacted aboriginal society--the Baktaman, a nation of 183 persons occupying a tract of mountain rain forest near the center of New Guinea.' - Front flap blurb. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2004, Hardcover, red cloth stamped in gilt, 356 pages. Lacks dust jacket. Provides an exhaustive, accessibly written overview of Bengali goddess worship or Shakti. McDaniel identifies three major forms of goddess worship, and examines each through its myths, folklore, songs, rituals, sacred texts, and practitioners. She traces these strands through Bengali culture and explores how they are interwoven with each other as well as with other forms of Hinduism and other forms of religion. McDaniel also discusses how Shakti practices have been reinterpreted in the West, where goddess worship has gained the values of sexual freedom and psychological healing, but lost its emphases on devotion and asceticism. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Manchester University Press, reprint, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 322 pages, b&w illustrations. This work examines the reasons why anthropologists have not used the camera as a research instrument or film as a means of communicating ethnographic knowledge. It suggests that images and words in this discipline operate on different logical levels. Subjects: Motion pictures in ethnology. Ethnology Fieldwork. Motion pictures Social aspects. Motion pictures in ethnography. Documentary television programs. Mild fading to covers. No marking.

Softcover. Prospect Heights IL, Waveland Press, reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, blue wrappers, 374 pages. A detailed anthropological study of the Mayan people of Tzo? ontahal made during four field sessions between 1957 and 1965.

Softcover. NY, Museum of Primitive Art, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover,112 pages. Original color illustrated wrappers with black lettering on cover and spine. Outline guide to the objects used in upper Sepik River rituals and the context in which they are employed. Based on author's field trips to the region in 1964, 1965, and mainly 1967. Profusely illustrated with b/w photographs and drawings throughout.

NY/Sydney AU, Academic Press , 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark blue cloth with silver and gilt stamping, 286 pages. Numerous tables, maps, plans and illustrations (some from photographs, others by Margrit Koettig). Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 625 pages, b&w illustrations, maps. Contents: Principles of Status; The Maori of New Zealand; Manihiki-Rakahanga; Tongareva; Magaia; Easter Island; The Marquesas; Mangareva; The Society Islands; The Hawaiian Islands; The Samoan Islands; Tongs; Uvea; Futuna; The Tokelaus; Tikopia; Pukpuka; Niue; Ontong Java; The Status Lineage; Principles of Kinship; The Economics of Status; The Rituals of Status; Status and Evolution. Owner's name inside front cover otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. With the same piercing intelligence as the bestselling Say it Loud!, Interracial Intimacies hits a nerve at the center of American society: race relations and our most intimate ties to each other. Analyzing the tremendous changes in the history of America's racial dynamics, Randall Kennedy challenges us to examine how prejudices and biases still fuel fears and inform our sexual, marital, and family choices. He takes us from the injustices of the slave era up to present-day battles over race matching adoption policies, which seek to pair children with adults of the same race. He tackles such subjects as the presence of sex in racial politics, the historic role of legal institutions in policing racial boundaries, and the real and imagined pleasures that have attended interracial intimacy. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Duke University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 352 pages, b/w illustrations throughout. Dust jacket unclipped, excellent. Black cover boards, gilt title on spine. Binding tight. Spine straight. In great shape. Claiming that our culture has yet to come to terms with the bungled legacy of Victorian sexuality, Kincaid examines how children and images of youth are idealized, fetishized, and eroticized in everyday culture.

Hardcover. Mountain View CA, Review and Herald Publishing , 1st, 1949, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 256 pages. A well-intentioned and very campy book of advice and encouragement for a married couple from the well-known Adventist, Harold Shryock. Circa 1949 and reflects the attitudes of the period. Color and b&w photos illustrate this domestic fantasy. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. London, Vincent Stuart, 2nd pr., 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket., black cloth with gilt stamping. A nice copy of the Second Edition (1962, original published in 1894). Limited to 500 copies. Clean.

Softcover. NY, Palgrave Macmillan, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 337 pages. Now a widely cited classic, this innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of ongoing quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms. Clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st pbk, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, yellow wrappers, 258 pages. Examines the unique religious brotherhoods of Morocco, tracing their origins to two saints from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Sidi Ali ben Hamdush and Sidi Ahmed Dghughi. Known for their dramatic and sometimes controversial rituals, such as trance dances and acts of self-mutilation, the Hamadsha are healers who address spiritual and psychogenic ailments through symbolic and therapeutic practices. Their activities, deeply rooted in the Moroccan cult of saints, reflect a complex interplay of Islamic mysticism, local traditions, and social dynamics. Through these rituals, the Hamadsha incorporate patients into their brotherhoods, providing them with new roles and a symbolic framework to articulate and resolve personal and societal tensions. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, historical analysis, and psychoanalytic perspectives, this study explores the Hamadsha's history, their organizational structure, and their relationship with Moroccan culture and religion. It examines the saints' tombs as focal points of veneration, the social dynamics of the brotherhoods, and their therapeutic methods, including pilgrimages and trance dances. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Vintage Books, 2nd Ed., 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 248 pages. Clean, bright copy of the revised edition with $1.25 price on cover.

Hardcover. New York, Augustus M. Kelley, reprint, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 256 pages, with photographs, illustrations and charts. Minor dust jacket edge wear and price clipped, otherwise,bright and tight copy.

Softcover. Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 276 pages. Softcover. B/w illustrations throughout. In excellent condition, clean inside and out.

Hardcover. NY, Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, 1st, 1933, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers with black and gilt lettering on spine. A scarce study of suicide published in the thirties. B&w photo of co-author Dublin laid-in. Both writers worked for the Metropolitan Insurance Company. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Funk & Wagnalls, 1st US, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with spine faded, small piece gone from rear panel, 253 pages, b&w and color illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Methuen and Co., 1st, 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, soiled dust jacket, 296 pages. Russet cloth lettered in silver on spine. Illustrated with 2-color line frontispiece, 16 half-tone photographsic plates and 5 line illustrations in the text. An important and early anthropoliogical study of a little known phenomenon. The title is taken from the given name of a native New Guinean who started the cargo cult, circa 1935. Similar to other messianic movements, Burridge's first hand account is a scholarly examination of the religious, political, and economic aspects which make up the cult.

Hardcover. London, The Athlone Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, orange cloth covers, 287 pages. Anthropological essays by the author based on his 30 years of field work in Ghana. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Pittsburgh PA, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, orange cloth stamped in black, 227 pages. Contents : "Dance when I die!": context and role in the clowning of Murik women / Kathleen Barlow -- Exaggeration and reversal: clowning among the Lusi-Kalai / David R. Counts and Dorothy A. Counts -- Clowning with food: mortuary humor and social reproduction among the north Mekeo / Mark S. Mosko -- Reflections of an anthropologist who mistook her husband for a yam: female comedy on Tubetube / Martha McIntyre -- Horrific humor and festal farce: carnival clowning in Wape society / William E. Mitchell -- When she reigns supreme: clowning and culture in Rotuman weddings / Vilsoni Hereniko -- Where the spirits laugh last: comic theater in Samoa / Caroline Sinavaiana. Clean, bright copy. No dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Praeger Publishers, 1st US, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket with light edgewear, faded spine. 276 pages, 81 photos, 27 drawings, 11 maps. Volume 65 in the series 'Ancient People and Places', edited by Glyn Daniel. Owner name inked on inside front cover, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Honolulu HI, The Institute for Polynesian Studies , 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 250 pages. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf, about 15 pages with light pencil marking.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Co,, reprint, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket. The true story of an African medicine man as he leaves his home to practice his medicine in the city. Wulf Sachs was born in Russia and trained at the Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg. A citizen of South Africa who resided in Johannesburg, he was a practicing psychoanalyst and the author of many books on psychiatry and literary criticism. Classic account of a two and half year psychoanalysis of a South African witch doctor. This book was earlier published with the title Black Anger. Derived from a review posted on-line: Black Hamlet is at the same time a case study in psychoanalytic therapy, the report of a scientific investigation, a political polemic, a collection of ethnographic observations, and the biography of a common man whose remarkable features would otherwise have been overlooked. Clean copy.

Softcover. Wellington AU, The Polynesian Society, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, illustrated wrappers, 187 pages. Clean, bright copy. With notes, glossary, index.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Society for Visual Anthropology, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, magazine format, 124 pages. illustrated collection of provocative essays, occasional pieces, and dialogues with contributions from anthropologists, from cultural, literary and film critics and from image makers themselves. Includes: Post-Bourgeois Tattoo, The Ethnographer's Tale, Who's Story Is It?, other essays and reviews. Clean.

Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 230 pages. Jean Baudrillard is one of the most topical and controversial theorists in France today. He has played a major role in the development of critical social theory and cultural sociology, and his writings are currently at the center of the 'post-modernism' debate. This volume makes his most important work widely available in English for the first time. It includes selections from the entire range of his writings, from his early work on advertising and commodity culture to his most recent writings on simulation and desire. Throughout the selections Baudrillard stresses the ways in which our lives are embedded in a world if images which have no clear reference and which are reproduced by the new mechanisms of cultural production in contemporary societies. Clean copy.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 331 pages. Based on her experiences as a stripper in a city she calls Laurelton-a southeastern city renowned for its strip clubs-anthropologist Katherine Frank provides a fascinating insiders account of the personal and cultural fantasies motivating male heterosexual strip club regulars. Given that all of the clubs where she worked prohibited physical contact between the exotic dancers and their customers, in G-Strings and Sympathy Frank asks what-if not sex or even touching-the repeat customers were purchasing from the clubs and from the dancers. She finds that the clubs provide an intermediate space-not work, not home-where men can enjoyably experience their bodies and selves through conversation, fantasy, and ritualized voyeurism. At the same time, she shows how the dynamics of male pleasure and privilege in strip clubs are intertwined with ideas about what it means to be a man in contemporary America. Franks ethnography draws on her work as an exotic dancer in five clubs, as well as on her interviews with over thirty regular customers-middle-class men in their late-twenties to mid-fifties. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Brattleboro VT, Stephen Greene Press, 1, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket, 99 pages. A collection of colonial, pioneer, and frontier American tombstone inscriptions. Previous owners name at top right corner of front end paper. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, E.J. Brill, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 578 pages plus charts, b&w photos in rear. Translation and notes by H.P. Salomon and I.S.D. Sassoon. Da Costa's long-lost book rejects the divine origin of the rabbinic tradition. His insight was that what he calls Pharisaism is irreconcilable with the religion of the Pentateuch and therefore cannot derive from the same source. He claims, for example, that the Law of Moses does not allow for a belief in an afterlife for individual human beings. Concomitantly he denied the Mosaic origin of the notion of eternal punishment. The rabbinic reading of the Mosaic Law appeared to him almost as great a falsification as the Christian one. Yet there could be no reversion to Christianity and despite his deep rift with the synagogue he still believed in ultimate redemption for the Jewish people. As he so dramatically declares in his closing sonnet, Israel's rehabilitation depends on its shedding man-made doctrines, and holding fast to the Law in its purity.