culture

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 721 pages, many b&w illustrations, come color. John Brewster's landmark book shows us how British artists, amateurs, entrepeneurs, and audiences created a culture that is still celebrated for its wit and brilliance. Light notations to five pages, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1st, 1971, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn yellow dust jacket with sunning to spine, 201 pages. Some pencil underlining to about 20 pages. Some b&w photos.

Softcover. NY, Citadel Press, reprint, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, b&w illustrations, 240 pages. More than 50 years after Timothy Leary encouraged an entire generation to "turn on, tune in, drop out," there's been a resurgence of scientific research and popular interest in the use of psychedelic drugs for everything from therapeutic treatments to productivity boosts. The Psychedelic Reader collects the writings of luminaries from the dawn of the psychedelic era. With words from Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Sir Julian Huxley, Ralph Metzner, and more, this powerful anthology presents the entire psychedelic spectrum with both the seriousness and open-mindedness it requires. Once an alternative doorway into radical culture, LSD is now being re-examined for its possible mental health benefits. Take a visionary trip back to where it all began in The Psychedelic Reader. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Hermes Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages. Music inspired, science fiction and fantasy combined in a way that revolutionized poster art of the Psychedelic 1960's-era. Famous for his rock posters, The Psychedelic Rock Art of Carl Lundgren, a Detroit, Michigan based artist, showcases his posters which were as important to the Detroit Music and Art history as were the music legends themselves; The Who, Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd to name a few. The book's forward is written by Mitch Ryder, who was lead vocalist of a Detroit 1960's rock group The Detroit Wheels. The introduction is by Russ Gibb, a former radio personality and rock promoter from Dearborn, Michigan, who played a major role in the late sixties/early seventiesMotor City music scene.

Softcover. Berlin/NY, Mouton de Gruyter, reprint, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 266 pages. Edward Sapir (1884-1939), one of this century's leading figures in American anthropology and linguistics, planned to publish a major theoretical statement on culture and psychology. He developed his ideas in a course of lectures presented at Yale University in the 1930s, which attracted a wide audience from many social science disciplines. Unfortunately, he died before the book he had contracted to publish could be realized. Like de Saussure's (ours de Linguistique Generale before it, this work has been reconstructed from student notes, in this case twenty-two sets, as well as from Sapir's manuscript materials. Judith Irvine's meticulous reconstruction makes Sapir's compelling ideas - of surprisingly contemporary resonance - available for the first time. Clean, unmarked copy.

Hardcover. NY, Hastings House, 1st, 1941, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, gray cloth stamped with dark blue design, 124 pages, sepia tone photos throughout. This work is Gilpin's photographic love letter to the Pueblos of the southwest. Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) attained international recognition as photographer and her images of the Navajo and Pueblo peoples of the four corners area offer an important record of these cultures. She excelled in a field that up to the point, had largely been the purview of men. Cloth covers with edgewear, light soil. Inscription on inside front cover. Covers fair, interior good+.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 223 pages. The Nzema of West Africa, who inhabit a land of forest and lagoons along the Atlantic, continue a heritage untapped by anthropologists and scarcely influenced by Western civilization. Vinigi L. Grottanelli first discovered the rich culture of this southern Ghanaian tribe in 1954. Over the next three decades, intermittent sojourns enabled Grottanelli to develop friendships with the Nzema and learn about their beliefs, traditions, and practices. In twenty absorbing vignettes, The Python Killer renders a vivid portrayal of Nzema life. B&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 340 pages. Few thinkers have stood as squarely at both the center and the periphery of an intellectual movement as has Shao Yung (1011-1077). Ethical model and eccentric, socialite and eremite, Shao Yung is perhaps not only the greatest enigma of early Neo-Confucianism, but also one of its undisputed giants. In this impressive life-and-thought study, Don J. Wyatt painstakingly sifts through all available evidence relating to Shao Yung and his scholarship to provide a portrait that fully exposes the moral center of the man and his work. 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. Chicago, University of Chicago Press;, reprint, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wrappers, 123 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page and INSCRIBED by him on front fly leaf. Poems inspire our trust, argues James Longenbach in this bracing work, because they don't necessarily ask to be trusted. Theirs is the language of self-questioning--metaphors that turn against themselves, syntax that moves one way because it threatens to move another. Poems resist themselves more strenuously than they are resisted by the cultures receiving them. But the resistance to poetry is quite specifically the wonder of poetry. Considering a wide array of poets, from Virgil and Milton to Dickinson and Gluck, Longenbach suggests that poems convey knowledge only inasmuch as they refuse to be vehicles for the efficient transmission of knowledge. In fact, this self-resistance is the source of the reader's pleasure: we read poetry not to escape difficulty but to embrace it. An astute writer and critic of poems, Longenbach makes his case through a sustained engagement with the language of poetry. Each chapter brings a fresh perspective to a crucial aspect of poetry (line, syntax, figurative language, voice, disjunction) and shows that the power of poetry depends less on meaning than on the way in which it means--on the temporal process we negotiate in the act of reading or writing a poem. Readers and writers who embrace that process, Longenbach asserts, inevitably recoil from the exaggeration of the cultural power of poetry in full awareness that to inflate a poem's claim on our attention is to weaken it.

Hardcover. Lawrence KS, University Press of Kansas, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. In more than four decades as president of The Land Institute, Wes Jackson became widely known as one of the founders of the sustainable agriculture movement for his work on perennial grains and Natural Systems Agriculture. But Jackson's contribution to contemporary intellectual and political life goes well beyond plant breeding. Ever since he created one of the first university environmental studies programs in the early 1970s, Jackson has been exploring the human predicaments around sustainability and justice, asking questions that pull not only on agriculture and ecology but also on politics, economics, and culture. That work has appeared in four sole-authored books by Jackson, but nowhere is there an accessible summary of his key ideas. Robert Jensen provides a short, elegant introduction to Jackson's ideas on ways to provide humanity with a truly sustainable foundation in grain agriculture, presented in a way that connects to the growing concern about climate change and other ecological crises. Clean copy.

Softcover. Lincoln NE, Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 247 pages, b&w illustrations. In the spring of 1968, the Omaha Central High School basketball team made history with its first all-black starting lineup. Their nickname, the Rhythm Boys, captured who they were and what they did on the court. Led by star center Dwaine Dillard, the Rhythm Boys were a shoo-in to win the state championship. But something happened on their way to glory. In early March, segregationist George Wallace, in a third-party presidential bid, made a campaign stop in Omaha. By the time he left town, Dillard was in jail, his coach was caught between angry political factions, and the city teetered on the edge of racial violence. So began the Nebraska state high school basketball tournament the next day, caught in the vise of history. The Rhythm Boys of Omaha Central tells a true story about high school basketball, black awakening and rebellion, and innocence lost in a watershed year. The drama of civil rights in 1968 plays out in this riveting social history of sports, politics, race, and popular culture in the American heartland.

Softcover. London/NY, Verso, 1st, 1990, Softcover, 397 pages. In this acclaimed historical study, Alexander Saxton establishes the centrality of white racism to American politics and culture. Examining images of race at a popular level - from blackface minstrels to the construction of the Western hero, from grassroots political culture to dime novels - as well as the philosophical constructions of the political elite, it is a powerful and comprehensive account of the ideological forces at work in the formation of modern America. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 2001, Softcover, 442 pages. The barristers were the most powerful and prosperous professional group in early modern England. This book systematically examines the barrister's working life during a half-century of rapid growth and structural change within the legal profession. Prest analyzes patterns of professional recruitment, training, and mobility and explores the participation of barristers in the cultural, religious, and political life of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Remainder lines to bottom edge. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 333 pages. With his marvelous eye for detail and his contagious enthusiasm, Ted Conover explores six key byways worldwide. In Peru, he traces the journey of a load of rare mahogany over the Andes to its origin, an untracked part of the Amazon basin soon to be traversed by a new east-west route across South America. In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels have been linked to the worldwide spread of AIDS. In the West Bank, he monitors highway checkpoints with Israeli soldiers and then passes through them with Palestinians, witnessing the injustices and danger borne by both sides. He shuffles down a frozen riverbed with teenagers escaping their Himalayan valley to see how a new road will affect the now-isolated Indian region of Ladakh. From the passenger seat of a new Hyundai piling up the miles, he describes the exuberant upsurge in car culture as highways proliferate across China. And from inside an ambulance, he offers an apocalyptic but precise vision of Lagos, Nigeria, where congestion and chaos on freeways signal the rise of the global megacity. Clean copy.

Softcover. Tema Ghana, Ghana Publishing Corp. , 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 83 pages, b&w illustrations. Part of a doctoral thesis accepted by the University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. A study of the wooden stools and their religious meaning in the culture of the Akan people of Ghana. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 286 pages, b&w illustrations. This book examines the sense of smell in humans, comparing it with the known functions of the same sense in other animals. Odorous cues play a role in sexual physiology and behavior in animals and there are claims that odor can play the same role in humans. The place of odors and scents in aesthetics and in psychoanalysis serves to illustrate the link between the emotional centers and the brain. The book presents arguments to explain the way in which our ancestral past has given rise to our modern day olfactory enigmas. Contains a glossary and chapter summaries. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a unclipped dust jacket with fading to spine, 260 pages. This fascinating and unusual book tells the story of an arguably catastrophic German habit - that of valuing cultural achievement above all else and envisioning it as a noble substitute for politics. Lepenies examines how this tendency has affected German history from the late eighteenth century to today. He argues that the German preference for art over politics is essential to understanding the peculiar nature of Nazism, including its aesthetic appeal to many Germans (and others) and the fact that Hitler and many in his circle were failed artists and intellectuals who seem to have practiced their politics as a substitute form of art. 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. Montreal, Drawn and Quarterly, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. British cartoonist Tom Gauld (Mooncop, You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, Goliath) has created countless iconic strips for The Guardian over the course of his illustrious career. A master of condensing grand, highbrow themes into one- to eight-panel comics, his weekly strips embody his trademark British humor while simultaneously opening comics to an audience unfamiliar with the artistry that cartooning has to offer. Funny but serious, these postcards allow Gauld to put his impressive knowledge of history, literature, and pop culture on full display-his impeccable timing and distinctive visual style setting him apart from the rest.

Softcover. Toronto CA, McClelland and Stewart, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 264 pages, 125 color, 135 black & white. Published in conjunction with an exhibition. "A major study of the artistic traditions of Canada's Native peoples and of their place in the cultures and belief systems in which they originated. Here, for the first time, is Native Canadian work from museums and private collections around the world. The works, and the essays that describe their contexts, bring to life the spiritual and aesthetic identity of the craftspeople and their societies. From richly ornamented costumes displaying the wealth of their owners to practical techologies that enabled the peoples to thrive in their environments, these treasures reflect Native life at the time of contact with Europeans." Clean copy.

Softcover. Boston, Back Bay Books, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 246 pages, b&w illustrations. Documents the history of swing music and dancing, covering the important artists, style and fashion, albums, and dance moves of swing. A bright, clean copy that has a light smoker's odor.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 385 pages, b&w illustrations. In this highly original history of the world's most famous bicycle race, Christopher S. Thompson, mining previously neglected sources and writing with infectious enthusiasm for his subject, tells the compelling story of the Tour de France from its creation in 1903 to the present. Weaving the words of racers, politicians, Tour organizers, and a host of other commentators together with a wide-ranging analysis of the culture surrounding the event including posters, songs, novels, films, and media coverage Thompson links the history of the Tour to key moments and themes in French history. He argues persuasively that this hugely popular sporting event has been instrumental in French attempts to grapple with the great challenges they have confronted during their tumultuous twentieth century from World Wars, political divisions, and class conflict to economic modernization, women's emancipation, and threats to public health. Name on half title page, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1940, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light blue cloth with red and dark blue lettering on the spine and cover, 302 pages. A moving novel of the beginning of the American trek to the west. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, the land west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River was an unbroken sea of trees. Beneath them the forest trails were dark, silent, and lonely, brightened only by a few lost beams of sunlight. Here, in the first novel of Conrad Richter's Awakening Land trilogy, the Lucketts, a wild, woods-faring family, lived their roaming life, pushing ever westward as the frontier advanced and as new settlements threatened their isolation. This novel gives an excellent feel for America's lost woods culture, which was created when most of the eastern midwest was a vast hardwood forest---virtually a jungle. The Trees conveys settler life, including conflicts with Native Americans, illness, hunting, family dynamics, and marriage. INSCRIBED BY RICHTER on the front fly leaf. A bright, sharp copy missing the dust jacket. Related ephemera laid in.