culture

Softcover. NY, Scala, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages. The diversity of New York City's people, cultures, religions, and backgrounds make it the indicator of American sexuality. It is black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, rough, and tender all at once. From Margaret Sanger's dissemination of birth control to the Stonewall riot of 1969, New York City has repeatedly seen its sexual dynamics changed and American and international culture follow suit. Published to coincide with the much-anticipated opening of the Museum of Sex in New York, NYC Sex features conversations between major cultural figures and historians on sexual topics, including Grady T. Turner on "Sodom on the Hudson"; Martin Duberman and Joan Nestle on queers; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Xaviera Hollander, and Tracy Quan on whores; Karen Finley, Luc Sante, Gene Simmons, and Art Spiegelman on the underground; and Vanessa del Rio, Legs McNeil, and Annie Sprinkle on porn. And what's a book about sex without pictures? In between the steamy conversation, NYC Sex posts photographs by Mapplethorpe, Ferrato and Gatewood; 19th-century drawings and photographs; film stills; posters; magazine pin-ups; and images of sex symbols past and present. It's a treat the whole family can enjoy. NYC Sex is the official book of the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Sex, which will open in New York in September.

Softcover. NY, Scala, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages. The diversity of New York City's people, cultures, religions, and backgrounds make it the indicator of American sexuality. It is black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, rough, and tender all at once. From Margaret Sanger's dissemination of birth control to the Stonewall riot of 1969, New York City has repeatedly seen its sexual dynamics changed and American and international culture follow suit. Published to coincide with the much-anticipated opening of the Museum of Sex in New York, NYC Sex features conversations between major cultural figures and historians on sexual topics, including Grady T. Turner on "Sodom on the Hudson"; Martin Duberman and Joan Nestle on queers; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Xaviera Hollander, and Tracy Quan on whores; Karen Finley, Luc Sante, Gene Simmons, and Art Spiegelman on the underground; and Vanessa del Rio, Legs McNeil, and Annie Sprinkle on porn. And what's a book about sex without pictures? In between the steamy conversation, NYC Sex posts photographs by Mapplethorpe, Ferrato and Gatewood; 19th-century drawings and photographs; film stills; posters; magazine pin-ups; and images of sex symbols past and present. It's a treat the whole family can enjoy. NYC Sex is the official book of the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Sex, which will open in New York in September.

Hardcover. Focal Point, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. Spanning almost a century of global upheaval and riveting human drama, this magnificent book follows the careers of Maynard Owen Williams, Volkmar Wentzel, Luis Marden, and Tom Abercrombie--a stellar quartet of National Geographic photographers who used their cameras to record a truly remarkable era. While the lensmen were all supported and nurtured both technically and creatively by the Geographic, each had his own interests and his own distinctive style--and each made his own unique contribution to world culture, science, and history. Following a thoughtful introduction that sets the scene, the book is divided into four parts, each devoted to one man's life and work. Chapters open with an essay and then display up to 50 pages of breathtaking historic images, many of which lay hidden in National Geographic archives for decades. Close associates and loved ones authored each photographer's intimate story, calling on journals, anecdotes, and behind-the-scenes correspondence to portray the real person behind the lens. Our four subjects, taken together, represent the entire and quite glamorous progression of National Geographic photography--a chronicle that will be eagerly embraced by all who love world history, biography, and great pictures.

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. London, Tate Publishing, 1st, 2007, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. 136 pages, 40 color & 50 black & white illustrations. Helio Oiticia (1937-80) was one of the most influential artists of the late twentieth century. At the end of the 1960s Oiticica was invited to exhibit at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. This book captures not only a pivotal moment in the life and career of a unique artist but also in the development of the avant-garde in London.

Hardcover. New York, Norton, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. For over twenty-five years Tim Barnwell has explored the southern Appalachian region, documenting the farm culture, visiting with and photographing the people of its isolated mountain enclaves. The photographs in this collection provide a window onto a world that is quickly fading. Barnwell honors the richness and rhythms of everyday life-people in their homes and at work in the fields-and captures the beauty of the North Carolina mountains. These intimate portraits are complemented by oral histories, derived from conversations between the author and his subjects, through which individual stories unfold, rich in humor, joy, loss, and wisdom. 100 duotone photographs

Softcover. Hanover NH, Wesleyan University Press, 3rd pr., 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wraps, 343 pages. The focus of this book is the secular cultures of pagan Greece and imperial Rome, and the religious cultures of Judaism and Christianity which, in turn, grew from and influenced them and the modern world. For Momigliano, religion, secular ideology, and politics live in and illuminate the present. Brings together nineteen essays written over five years from sources such as The New York Review of Books, The American Scholar, and the Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Daytona Beach FL, Southeast Museum of Photography, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 152 pages with 69 color plates. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. The memorable and sometimes aggressive photographic portraits of On The Beach are the result of a six year project by two well-known photographers, Douglas McCulloh and Jacques Garnier. They placed a studio lighting setup directly in the sand, making California and Florida beaches their backdrop. The beach eliminates conceits, concealment, and clothing. People who cross onto the sand become a little naked. To this equation of vulnerability, the two photographers add unforgiving strobe lights and a ruthless high resolution camera.

Hardcover. NY, The New Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 182 pages, b&w illustrations. Lucy R. Lippard weaves together cultural criticism, anthropology, and community activism for an in-depth look at how tourism sites are conceived and represented, and how they affect the places they transform. Critic Andrew Ross calls Lippard "the most surefooted tour guide you could hope for" in her exploration of being a tourist in one's own home, of how advertising and photography define place, of how antique shops function as populist museums, and of the commodification of indigenous cultures. With her characteristic breadth and critical eye, Lippard discusses the political economies of leisure spaces, the tourist's fascination with tragic destinations (such as the sites of massacres and nuclear weapons tests, or Holocaust memorials), and our willingness to let national parks and heritage sites define nature and history. Clae copy.

Hardcover. NY, Longman's, Green and Co., 1st, 1936, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, orange cloth covers stamped in black. B&w illustrated in b&w by Sanford Tousey. An authentic adventure story of the California gold mining camps, contrasting east and west coast cultures. Author was Nathaniel Hawthorne's granddaughter. Bookplate on inside front cover. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Gottingen GR, Steidl, 1st thus, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 180 pages. This edition of On the Mines is a re-designed and expanded version of David Goldblatts influential book published in 1973. Goldblatt grew up in the South African town of Randfontein. which was shaped by the social culture and financial success of the gold mines surrounding it. When these mines started to fail in the mid-sixties Goldblatt began taking photos of them. The book features an essay on the human and political dimensions of mining in South Africa by Nadine Gordimer.

Hardcover. New York, Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 381 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Color and b&w photos throughout. Bill Cunningham's photography captured the evolution of style, of trends, and of the everyday, both in New York City and in Paris. But his work also shows that street style is not only about fashion; it's about the people and the changing culture. These photographs (many never before seen, others having originally appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere) move from decade to decade, beginning in the 1970s and continuing until Cunningham's death in 2016. Here you'll find Cunningham's distinctive chronicling of the 1980s transit strike, the rise of 1990s casual Fridays, the sadness that fell over the city following 9/11, Inauguration Day 2009, the onset of selfies, and many other significant moments. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Bloomsbury USA, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 509 pages. The relationship between man and horse on the Eurasian steppe gave rise to a succession of rich nomadic cultures. Among them were the Mongols of the thirteenth century - a small tribe, which, under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, created the largest contiguous land empire in history. Inspired by the extraordinary life nomads lead, Tim Cope embarked on a journey that hadn't been successfully completed since those times: to travel on horseback across the entire length of the Eurasian steppe, from Karakorum, the ancient capital of Mongolia, through Kazakhstan, Russia, Crimea and the Ukraine to the Danube River in Hungary. From horse-riding novice to spending months in the saddle, he learnt to fend off wolves and would-be horse-thieves, and grapple with the haunting extremes of the steppe as he crossed sub-zero plateaux, the scorching deserts of Kazakhstan and the high-mountain passes of the Carpathians. As he travelled he formed a close bond with his horses and especially his dog Tigon, and encountered essential hospitality - the linchpin of human survival on the steppe - from those he met along the way. Cope bears witness to how the traditional ways hang in the balance in the post-Soviet world - an era that has brought new-found freedom, but also the perils of corruption and alcoholism, and left a world bereft of both the Communist system upon which it once relied, and the traditional knowledge of the nomadic forefathers.

Hardcover. NY, Regan Books, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 259 pages, b&w photos. There were few figures among America's media-saturated landscape that loomed larger than the National Basketball Association's undeniable superstar Allen Iverson. He was the first overall pick of the 1996 NBA draft, and the spotlight never left him since. Defiantly tattooed, with his hair in cornrows, the six-foot Philadelphia 76ers point guard was been vilified by a sports press still fawning over Michael Jordan's non-threatening, clean-cut visage. From Iverson's rap sheet to his rap album, from his on-court feats to his off-court antics, breathless fans and journalists alike seem determined to track his every move. Part sports star, part antihero, part hip-hop icon, Iverson managed to cross over into the mainstream of American culture -- without compromise. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Rizzoli, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 176 pages illustrated in color. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Flammarion, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 204 pages. The century that spanned from the 1850-1950 witnessed the golden age of travel and the exposure of an increasing number of Westerners to foreign cultures. The Maghreb became a source of exotic fascination and people grew particularly enchanted by the landscapes, peoples, and cultures of countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. Orientalist Photographs pays homage to the ultimate travel dream of that era. This collection of over 100 autochrome, sepia, and black and white photographs captures delicate, lost details: the dusty, labyrinthine walls of the casbah; the dappled sunlight on the market stall of a souk; the intricate metal work of traditional jewelry. Each image is accompanied by an informative text that situates the photograph in its historical reality, revealing how, for example, the richness of Algerian embroidery is not the product of hermetic tradition, as once perceived, but rather that of an innovative fusion of Spanish, Turkish, and native cultures. This book's haunting photographs and incisive texts vividly render all the mystery, the beauty, and the naivete of the West's encounter with a culture it found so radically different from its own.

Softcover. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 271 pages. Confronting the cultural stereotypes that have been attached to Asian-Americans over the last 150 years, this title seizes the label Oriental and asks where it came from. It shows how the bewildering array of racialized images first proffered by music hall songsters and social commentators have evolved and become generalized to Asian-Americans. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 168 pages. In The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, Thierry Smolderen presents a cultural landscape whose narrative differs in many ways from those presented by other historians of the comic strip. Rather than beginning his inquiry with the popularly accepted "sequential art" definition of the comic strip, Smolderen instead wishes to engage with the historical dimensions that inform that definition. His goal is to understand the processes that led to the twentieth-century comic strip, the highly recognizable species of picture stories that he sees crystallizing around 1900 in the United States. Featuring close readings of the picture stories, caricatures, and humoristic illustrations of William Hogarth, Rodolphe Topffer, Gustave Dore, and their many contemporaries, Smolderen establishes how these artists were immersed in a very old visual culture in which images--satirical images in particular--were deciphered in a way that was often described as hieroglyphical. Across eight chapters, he acutely points out how the effect of the printing press and the mass advent of audiovisual technologies (photography, audio recording, and cinema) at the end of the nineteenth century led to a new twentieth-century visual culture. In tracing this evolution, Smolderen distinguishes himself from other comics historians by following a methodology that explains the present state of the form of comics on the basis of its history, rather than presenting the history of the form on the basis of its present state. This study remaps the history of this influential art form.

Hardcover. London, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. Reprint of the 1928 edition. Concerning the indigenous peoples of Papua it covers the Taro primitive religious cult and the "garden culture" and magic of the Orokaiva. Dark-blue cloth boards with gilt lettering to spine. 231 pages includes index, glossary & fwd., + frontis. and 6 b&w illus, a diagram and a fold-out map at back. Francis Edgar Williams (9 February 1893 - 12 May 1943) was an Australian anthropologist who worked for the government of the Territory of Papua from 1922 to 1942. One of the few anthropologists of his time able to spend two continuous decades in the same location without having to regularly return to a metropolitan university or institution, he performed during those twenty years heavy field work, and published many books and articles. Several pages with light pencil marks in margins. Otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Umbrage Editions, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 112 pages. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Clayton Burkhart adopts the view of an anonymous wanderer in this mythic city and speaks of absence and loss against a backdrop of steel, stone, concrete, and neon. It is a story of love and redemption after the rain falls, when the damp sidewalks take on the saturated colors of the night.

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 302 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Light sun-fade along dust jacket spine. Clean, tight copy. Touring America as the "Apostle of Aestheticism" in 1882, Oscar Wilde brought a witty and controversial message of regeneration through art and beauty to a nation still shaken by the trauma of the Civil War. In this book, the first cultural history of the aesthetic movement in the United States, Mary W. Blanchard shows that it was a wide-ranging popular movement resisted by the moral guardians of Victorianism but advanced by visionary women.

Softcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 330 pages. In this analysis of three generations of women in a Chinese silk factory, Lisa Rofel brilliantly interweaves the intimate details of her observations with a broad-ranging critique of the meaning of modernity in a postmodern age.The author based her study at a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou in eastern China. She compares the lives of three generations of women workers: those who entered the factory right around the Communist revolution in 1949, those who were youths during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s, and those who have come of age in the Deng era. Exploring attitudes toward work, marriage, society, and culture, she convincingly connects the changing meanings of the modern in official discourse to the stories women tell about themselves and what they make of their lives. Clean.

Hardcover. Washington DC /London, Smithsonian/Giles, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 366 pages including index. E. Carmen Ramos addresses the whole issue of the definition of "Latino art" and how this emerged within the context of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as American artists of Latino descent (Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and, more recently, Dominican) began to give a tangible face to their culture and history. Highlights include an installation altar by Amalia Mesa-Bains, the "recycled" films of Raphael Montanez Ortiz, and a 1960 geometric painting by Carmen Herrera. Other notable artists include Olga Albizu, Melesio "Mel" Casas, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Margarita Cabrera, Enrique Chagoya, Teresita Fernandez, Ken Gonzales-Day, Luis Jimenez, Ana Mendieta, Pepon Osorio, Sophie Rivera, Freddy Rodriguez, and John M. Valadez, among many others. Color illustrations explore how one group of Latin American artists express their relationship to American art, history and culture. Clean, bright copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Softcover. Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 3rd pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 325 pages with index. The devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, based on the story of apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego, an Indian neophyte, at the hill of Tepeyac in December 1531, is one of the most important formative religious and national forces in the history of Mexico. It has variously been interpreted as the source of Mexican national identity, a means of continuity between the Indian past and Spanish domination, a symbol of national liberation, and a way of evangelizing and pacifying the Indians. The aphorism "Mexico was born at Tepeyac" aptly summarizes its importance. In this, the first work ever to examine in depth every historical source of the Guadalupe apparitions, Stafford Poole traces the origins and history of the account, and in the process challenges many commonly accepted assumptions and interpretations. Small corner clip to front fly leaf, otherwise a clean, tight copy.