ancient

Hardcover. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 200 pages, large format. Profusley illustrated with color photographs of trees. Trees are vital- without them we simply wouldn't be here. Not only essential, they have been an inspiration throughout our history. In breathtaking photographs and stories we are taken on a journey from the boreal forest at the edge of the Arctic to the rainforests girdling the planet; from ancient bristlecones to fresh-leaved seedlings; from the charming and familiar to the scary and rare. An elegantly written and highly accessible text is complemented by an extraordinary collection of images created by some of the world's leading nature photographers.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 250 pages. With The Lucretian Renaissance, Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. Passannante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of two fundamental opposites: atoms, as the philosopher Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and moving about the void; and the void itself, or nothingness. Passannante considers the fact that this strain of ancient Greek philosophy survived and was transmitted to the Renaissance primarily by means of a poem that had seemingly been lost--a poem insisting that the letters of the alphabet are like the atoms that make up the universe. Name and date on front fly leaf, light pencil marginalia and a few underlinings.

Softcover. NY, Penguin Classic, reprint, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 412 pages. Full of pungency and wit, this luminous work is Bulgakov's crowning achievement, skilfully blending magical and realistic elements, grotesque situations and major ethical concerns. Written during the darkest period of Stalin's repressive reign and a devastating satire of Soviet life, it combines two distinct yet interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient Jerusalem, each brimming with incident and with historical, imaginary, frightful and wonderful characters. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 3rd pr., 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth stamped in gilt, 532 pages. Translated by John Carman. Monumental work by the Norwegian professor on ancient religion, cosmology, and anthropology. Spine cloth lightly faded. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2001-12-01, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Contains 136 illustrations, 126 in color. A collection of photographs of the ancient and spiritual lands of Indochina: Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia taken during a lifetime of traveling and living there by Tim Page. They provide an account of a deeply religious society whose age-old Buddhist principles have endured to this day. The book also represents a personal passage for Page himself, drawing a line beneath the loss of many friends and colleagues in the Vietnam War.

Hardcover. New York, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2001-12-01, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Contains 136 illustrations, 126 in color. A collection of photographs of the ancient and spiritual lands of Indochina: Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia taken during a lifetime of traveling and living there by Tim Page. They provide an account of a deeply religious society whose age-old Buddhist principles have endured to this day. The book also represents a personal passage for Page himself, drawing a line beneath the loss of many friends and colleagues in the Vietnam War.

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 79 pages. The first full flowering of Chinese poetry occurred in the illustrious T'ang Dynasty, and at the beginning of this renaissance stands Meng Hao-jan (689-740 c.e.), esteemed elder to a long line of China's greatest poets. Deeply influenced by Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism, Meng was the first to make poetry from the Ch'an insight that deep understanding lies beyond words. The result was a strikingly distilled language that opened new inner depths, non-verbal insights, and outright enigma. This made Meng Hao-jan China's first master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify ancient Chinese poetry. And as a lifelong intimacy with mountains dominates Meng's work, such innovative poetics made him a preeminent figure in the wilderness (literally rivers-and-mountains) tradition, and that tradition is the very heart of Chinese poetry. This is the first English translation devoted to the work of Meng Hao-jan. Meng's poetic descendents revered the wisdom he cultivated as a mountain recluse, and now we too can witness the sagacity they considered almost indistinguishable from that of rivers and mountains themselves. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 2nd Ed., 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 291 pages, b&w illustrations. Records the findings and methodology of archaeologists concerned with the civilizations of ancient Italy. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Somerville MA, Candlewick Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 251 pages in color. With bold imagery and an ear tuned to the music of Homers epic poem, Gareth Hinds reinterprets the ancient classic as its never been told before. Retells, in graphic novel format, Homer's epic tale of Odysseus, the ancient Greek hero who encounters witches and other obstacles on his journey home after fighting in the Trojan War. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 304 pages. The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before, insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way.

Hardcover. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, reprint, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 368 pages. Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933) was an important and fascinating figure in German philosophy in the early twentieth century, founding the well-known journal Kantstudien. Yet he was overshadowed by the burgeoning movements of phenomenology and analytical philosophy, as well as hostility towards his work because of his defense of Jewish scholars in a Germany controlled by Nazism. However, it is widely acknowledged today that The Philosophy of 'As If' is a philosophical masterwork. Vaihinger argues that in face of an overwhelmingly complex world, we produce a simpler set of ideas, or idealizations, that help us negotiate it. When cast as fictions, such ideas provide an easier and more useful way to think about certain subjects, from mathematics and physics to law and morality, than would the truth in all its complexity. Even in science, he wrote, we must proceed "as if" a material world exists independently of perceiving subjects; in behavior, we must act "as if" ethical certainty were possible; in religion, we must believe "as if" there were a God. He also explores the role of fictions in the history of philosophy, going back to the ancient Greeks and the work of Leibniz, Adam Smith and Bentham. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 334 pages. This revised edition of The Poem of Empedocles (1992) integrates substantial new material from a recently discovered papyrus and published by A. Martin and O. Primavesi. The papyrus contains evidence of over seventy lines or part lines of poetry, of which more than fifty are both new and usable. The integration of this material into the previously known fragments has significant impact on our understanding of Empedocles, one of the most influential philosophers and poets of antiquity. Name on front fly leaf otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Boston, Shambhala, 1st, 1981, Softcover, 160 pages. The Power of Limits was inspired by those simple discoveries of harmony. The author went on to investigate and measure hundreds of patterns--ancient and modern, minute and vast. His discovery, vividly illustrated here, is that certain proportions occur over and over again in all these forms. Patterns are also repeated in how things grow and are made--by the dynamic union of opposites--as demonstrated by the spirals that move in opposite directions in the growth of a plant.

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. Boyds Mills Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Long ago in a part of the world once known as Mesopotamia, a nomadic tribesman led his people through the wilderness in search of a mystical land called Canaan. This journey would change the course of human history. Since that time, entire civilizations have flourished and vanished, along with their religions. Only one people has survived the tumult of the centuries--the Jews. What accounts for their remarkable survival? Neil Waldman tells the story of the Jewish people from their arrival in Canaan to the Exodus from Egypt. His paintings capture emotional scenes of Jewish life in the ancient world and in Europe. He shows how generation upon generation of Jews, in the face of profound crisis, have drawn strength from God's promise of a land flowing with milk and honey. The key to the Jewish people's survival is found in the story of their birth. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brick-red cloth, 477 pages, b&w illustrations. Offers an illustrated history of sexual politics in ancient Athens. This work examines the ideology and practices that underlay the reign of the phallus. It demonstrates that classical Athens was more sexually polarized and repressive of women than any other culture in Western history. The phallus was pictured everywhere in ancient Athens: painted on vases, sculpted in marble, held aloft in gigantic form in public processions, and shown in stage comedies. This obsession with the phallus dominated almost every aspect of public life, influencing law, myth, and customs, affecting family life, the status of women, even foreign policy. This is the first book to draw together all the elements that made up the "reign of the phallus"--Men's blatant claim to general dominance, the myths of rape and conquest of women, and the reduction of sex to a game of dominance and submission, both of women by men and of men by men. In her elegant and lucid text Eva Keuls not only examines the ideology and practices that underlay the reign of the phallus, but also uncovers an intense counter-movement--the earliest expressions of feminism and antimilitarism. Clean, bright copy, lacks dust jacket.

Softcover. Cambridge University Press, reprint, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two softcover volumes: Vol. 1: Books 1-V, 364 pages. Vol. 2: Books VI-X and Indexes, 531 pages. Previous owner's name, otherwise clean. James Adam (1860-1907) was a Scottish classics scholar who taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A strong defender of the importance of Greek philosophy in a well-rounded education, Adam published a number of Plato's works including Protagoras and Crito. This two-volume critical edition of the Republic (1902) was another major contribution to the field. Though his preface claims 'an editor cannot pretend to have exhausted its significance by means of a commentary,' Adam's depth of knowledge and erudite analysis of the Greek text ensured that his edition remained the standard reference for decades to follow, and it remains a thought-provoking evaluation of one of the great works of Western thought.

Hardcover. Lanham MD, Lexington Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 143 pages. American nature writing characteristically embodies an appreciative, lyrical evocation of the natural world. But often, too, green-disposed authors have been moved to dramatize diverse, anthropogenic perils to environmental health. John Gatta freshly reveals how this dark yet graced and hopeful strain of environmental literature enlarges upon a jeremiad tradition of prophecy inherited from Puritan New England. Across successive historical periods, such expression has assumed a rich variety of American form--as creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, or film documentary. In the spirit of ancient Hebrew prophecy, jeremiads--unlike diatribes--reach beyond effusions of doom and gloom toward the prospect of change through a conversion of heart. Accordingly, the new climate fiction and much other writing steeped in what Gatta terms this "Green Jeremiad" tradition not only warn of material threats to life's flourishing, but may also look to stir spiritual understanding and renewal. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, repriny, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 290 pages. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself.Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system forinterpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey--perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore--and signification and Signifyin(g). Exploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the "Talking Book," a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 410 pages, b&w illustrations. This book is about the first comprehensive and serious account of an important group of prehistoric monuments in the stone Circles of The British Isles. Aubrey Burl, author provides a hypothetical chronological framework for the circle, examining in particular their possible astronomical function. Special attention is paid to Stonehenge and Avebury, the two best known and most spectacular rings. Clean copy. Due to size and weight, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, Lumos/Scholastic, reprint, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 160 pages. No dust jacket issued. The Tales of Beedle the Bard contains five richly imaginative stories of adventure, cunning, heartache, and, of course, magic. They are to the wizarding community what the tales of the Brothers Grimm are to Muggle families. This lush new illustrated edition has been translated from the ancient runes by Hermione Granger and is presented here with extensive commentary by Albus Dumbledore. And now Hans Christian Andersen Medalist Lisbeth Zwerger interprets these classic tales with beauty and tenderness (and wit), illuminating them for modern readers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 346 pages. Dr. Notomi presents a new interpretation of one of Plato's most important dialogues, the Sophist, addressing both historical context and philosophical content. He shows how important the issues concerning the sophist (professional teacher and rhetorician in ancient Greece) are to the possibility of philosophy. His new approach to the whole dialogue reveals that Plato struggles with difficult philosophical issues in a single line of inquiry; and that Plato shows, in defining the sophist, his conception of the authentic philosopher. Name, date on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, This is the first volume in the four-volume edition of The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, the first-ever collected edition of the writings of the pioneering author and translator. Hutchinson (1620-81) had a remarkable range of her interests, from Latin poetry to Civil War politics and theology. In two parts, two volumes: 797 total pages. This edition of her translation of Lucretius's De rerum natura offers new biographical material, demonstrating the changes and unexpected continuities in Hutchinson's life between the work's composition in the 1650s and its dedication in 1675. Hers is the first complete surviving English translation of one of the great classical epics, a challenging text at the borderlines of poetry and philosophy. For the first time, the Lucretius translation is made available alongside the Latin text Hutchinson used, which differs in innumerable ways from versions known today. The commentary, the fullest in any edition of a literary translation, provides multiple ways into further understanding of the translation and its contexts. Written at a momentous period in political and literary history, Hutchinson's Lucretius throws light on the complex transition between 'ancient' and 'modern' conceptions of the classical canon and of natural philosophy. It offers a case study in the history of reading, and more specifically of reading by a woman. Name on front fly leaves, pencil notations to front fly leaf, a dozen pages in Part 1. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.