culture

Softcover. NY, Semiotext(e)/MIT, 1st transl., 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 400 pages. Letters by writer, filmmaker, and cultural revolutionary Guy Debord conjure a vivid picture of the dynamic first years of the Situationist International movement. Debord's letters-published here for the first time in English-provide a fascinating insider's view of just how this seemingly disorganized group drifting around a newly consumerized Paris became one of the most defining cultural movements of the twentieth century. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 216 pages. A collection of pathbreaking essays on Aztec and Maya culture in the sixteenth century. In the title work Inga Clendinnen reconstructs the sequence of experiences through which young Aztec warriors were brought to embrace their duty to their people, to their city, and to the forces that moved the world and the heavens. Subsequent essays explore the survival of Yucatec Maya culture in the face of Spanish conquest and colonisation, the insidious corruption of an austere ideology translated into dangerously novel circumstances, and the multiple paths to the sacred constructed by 'defeated' populations in sixteenth-century Mexico. The collection ends with Clendinnen's transition to the colonial history of her own country: a close and loving reading of the 1841 expedition journal of George Augustus Robinson. Clean copy.

Softcover. US, ILR Press, 1st, 2009-08-06, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 142 pages, illustrated throughout in color. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. Since 2001, Candacy A. Taylor (a former waitress herself) has traveled more than 26,000 miles throughout the United States collecting stories of these "lifers," as many waitresses aged fifty or over playfully call themselves. She interviewed fifty-seven waitresses in thirty-eight towns and cities. Their compelling stories are complemented and enhanced by Taylor's striking color photographs of the waitresses at work.Taylor expected that the waitresses she'd meet would feel overworked and underappreciated, but was surprised and delighted to find that the opposite was true. The proud, capable waitresses Taylor interviewed loved their jobs and, even if given the opportunity, "wouldn't do anything else." Nearly all the waitresses said that the physical labor of waitressing helped them to age more gracefully and that the daily contact with customers and coworkers kept them socially engaged. Lifers generally make more money from serving regular customers with whom they forge bonds over decades and their seniority earns them respect from their coworkers and managers. Taylor's sensitive and respectful portrayal of career waitresses who have turned their jobs into a rewarding lifetime pursuit turns Counter Culture into an invaluable portrait of the continued importance of community in our changing society.

Softcover. NY, ILR Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 170 pages. Softcover with light edgewear to wrappers. Color pictures throughout. "Career waitresses do more than just serve food. They are part psychiatrist, part grandmother, part friend, and they serve every walk of American life: from the retired and the widowed, to the wounded and the lonely, and from the working class to the wealthy. The classic diner waitress is an icon of American culture.... This book takes a moment to honor and recognize waitresses' contribution to our communities. Doing this project has helped me to redefine my perspective on life, work, and happiness. It has made me reevaluate the myth of the American dream that says you need to have an 'important' job to be happy."

Softcover. New York, ILR Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 170 pages. Softcover with light edgewear to wrappers. Color pictures throughout. "Career waitresses do more than just serve food. They are part psychiatrist, part grandmother, part friend, and they serve every walk of American life: from the retired and the widowed, to the wounded and the lonely, and from the working class to the wealthy. The classic diner waitress is an icon of American culture.... This book takes a moment to honor and recognize waitresses' contribution to our communities. Doing this project has helped me to redefine my perspective on life, work, and happiness. It has made me reevaluate the myth of the American dream that says you need to have an 'important' job to be happy."

Hardcover. London, Henry Colburn, 1st, 1848, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two volumes. 1/2 leather bindings with gold marbled covers and end papers. Gilt top edges. Volume 1 - 476 pages plus 16 pages of ads. Raised bands on spine. Rubbing to edges. Clean, unmarked text. Volume 2 - 510 pages. Raised bands on spine. Rubbing to edges. Clean, unmarked text.

Hardcover. New York, Powerhouse Books, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 128 pages, b&w photographs of rodeo performers. In publisher's shrinkwrap. After reading a front-page article in The New York Times about the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo, Arthur Frank took a week off from work to travel around Wyoming, photographing whatever rodeos he could find. Once there, he found the culture of the American cowboy very much alive and kicking. Although their practical skills remain essential to modern ranching, it is the rodeo where their trade is praised, perpetuating the myth and mystique of America?s rough and rugged icon?the cowboy. Cowboy Up, Frank?s first monograph, presents photographs taken at more than fifty rodeos?including high school, college, and women?s competitions in addition to professional rodeos?in Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota, Nevada,Arizona, Calgary, Alberta, even Binghamton, New York. As a former football and rugby player from New York City, Frank approached the roundup with an athlete?s understanding, while his profession provided distance from the cliches associated with the sport. With photographs that capture the vigorous physicality of one of the world?s most erratic and dangerous sports, Cowboy Up delves deeply into the modern cowboy?s life, capturing riders during the jittery wait before the roundup, and back at the ranch, engaging in work that tamed the Wild West. Frank?s outsider perspective and insider access combine to provide a humanistic yet dynamic and inspiring view into a lifestyle that has become an American legend.

Hardcover. Fort Worth TX, Amon Carter Museum, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 48 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. This beautifully made and designed collection of the turn-of-the-century photos by cowboy-photographer Erwin E. Smith covers everything you always wanted to know about cowboys and more. Worcester, who tells the story in Smith's voice, ties the pictures to details of the Wild West world--how cowboys came to be, the ins and outs of roping cattle, and more--and profiles colorful characters, from wranglers to cooks to broncobusters. The frequently overlooked African Americans and Hispanics who contributed greatly to cowboy culture are considered as well. Also included are atmospheric tidbits about the roguish and glorious cowboy life. However, it's Smith's authentic photos that steal the show: the day-to-day routine at camps, the excitement of rodeos, and the ambience of the sweeping dusty plains are a pleasure to behold.

Hardcover. Hoboken, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., First Edition, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 272 pages. Hardcover. Black cloth covered boards with red printed titles to spine. Dust jacket in very good condition. Illustrations in bw throughout. Clean & unmarked copy.

Softcover. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, yellow wrappers, 287 pages. Light fading to spine. In ancient Mediterranean cultures, diamonds were thought to endow their owners with invincibility. In contemporary United States culture, a foreign-made luxury car is believed to give its owner status and prestige. Where do these beliefs come from In this study of craft production and long-distance trade in traditional, nonindustrial societies, Mary W. Helms explores the power attributed to objects that either are produced by skilled artisans and/or come from 'afar.' She argues that fine artisanship and long-distance trade, both of which are more available to powerful elites than to ordinary people, are means of creating or acquiring tangible objects that embody intangible powers and energies from the cosmological realms of gods, ancestors, or heroes. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America, Wendy A. Woloson takes seriously the history of objects that are often cynically-made and easy to dismiss: things not made to last; things we don't really need; things we often don't even really want. Woloson does not mock these ordinary, everyday possessions but seeks to understand them as a way to understand aspects of ourselves, socially, culturally, and economically: Why do we--as individuals and as a culture--possess these things? Where do they come from? Why do we want them? And what is the true cost of owning them? Woloson tells the history of crap from the late eighteenth century up through today, exploring its many categories: gadgets, knickknacks, novelty goods, mass-produced collectibles, giftware, variety store merchandise. As Woloson shows, not all crap is crappy in the same way--bric-a-brac is crappy in a different way from, say, advertising giveaways, which are differently crappy from commemorative plates. Taking on the full brilliant and depressing array of crappy material goods, the book explores the overlooked corners of the American market and mindset, revealing the complexity of our relationship with commodity culture over time.

Hardcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Co., 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 405 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London/NY, Collins Living, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 271 pages, fully illustrated with color reproductions of photographs. Features articles and cover art from October 1969 through December 1987 issues. Fine in original pictorial paper-covered boards and fine pictorial dust jacket.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 191 pages. Matthews Hamabata got off to an unpromising start when he first arrived in Japan to study influential business families. An unmarried, third-generation Japanese-American graduate student, he was there to learn about business executives in their roles as male principals and heads of households. In this engaging and personal narrative, we watch Hamabata in the first disappointing six months of his fieldwork as he attempts to map the boundaries of culture, class, and sexuality. "I became my own biggest fieldwork problem," he writes. "Was I inside or out? When I thought I was in, I was actually out, but when I acknowledged the fact that I was out, I was let in." He soon recognized the importance of marital and filial relations in transmitting power in the business world, and he began to direct his study to examining the social and emotional lives of all members of the Japanese ie (household) and the way they affect business activity and ownership. He takes us behind the scenes of the family enterprise to see how the multiple "layers of reality"-biological, social, religious, emotional, and symbolic-relate and cause dilemmas for ie members. (Names, locations, and other details have been altered for the sake of anonymity.) Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, Poole Brothers, 1st, 1894, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 125 pages. Hardcover. Title and decoration in silver on cloth cover - darkening to edges. Illustrated with Sepia photographs. All edges gilt. Front hinge tender. Clean, unmarked copy.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 458 pages. Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel, delivers a "gripping and essential account" (The Boston Globe) of how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact. Braiding biography with "cultural history and criticism...that honors the complexity of [its] subject, even, perhaps particularly, when it gets ugly" (Los Angeles Times), Crumb is the story of a richly complex life at the forefront of both the underground and popular cultures of post-war America. Including forty-five stunning black-and-white images throughout and a sixteen-page color insert featuring images both iconic and obscure. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner, 2nd pr., 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 458 pages. Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-Century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel, delivers a "gripping and essential account" (The Boston Globe) of how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact. Braiding biography with "cultural history and criticism...that honors the complexity of [its] subject, even, perhaps particularly, when it gets ugly" (Los Angeles Times), Crumb is the story of a richly complex life at the forefront of both the underground and popular cultures of post-war America. Including forty-five stunning black-and-white images throughout and a sixteen-page color insert featuring images both iconic and obscure. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 511 pages. Clean, unmarked copy in excellent condition. From the earliest days of the Cuban Revolution, the Revolutionary High Command was intensely aware of the power of the photographic image to advance the ideals of the Revolution, at home and abroad. If portraying the human side of its leaders was an important part of the Revolution's visual ideology, so too was its conception and depiction of the Cuban populace: as early as 1959, the High Command organized mass rallies in Havana assembling more than a million Cubans from throughout the island to celebrate the victory of the Revolution. Cuba in Revolution captures the complexity and the energy of this moment in all its contradictory beauty. It gathers a colossal array of photographs by both known and anonymous photographers into five thematic, chronologically overlapping sections: "Pre-Revolutionary Cuba: 1933-1959"; "The Years of Struggle and Victory: 1953-1957"; "Sierra Maestra: The Revolutionary Movement: 1956-1959"; "Bay of Pigs 1961"; and "Picturing the Revolution: 1959-1968." From Constantino Arias' portraits of poverty and wealth in pre-revolutionary Havana to the photographs of the dead Che Guevara in Bolivia, this volume offers an epic photo-narrative of the Cuban story. Iconic pictures of Che Guevara by Alberto Korda and Rene Burri are complemented by snapshots of Fidel Castro playing golf or hunting in the Soviet Union. Raul Corrales' pictures of revolutionaries playing the conga drums during the Cuban Missile Crisis also reveal a different face of the Revolution; portraits of individual Cubans by Henri Cartier-Bresson present an equally fluid vision of everyday life in Cuba; and the political and the personal merge in startlingly intimate portraits of Che Guevara by Andrew Saint-George and images of the forbidden pop culture of the mid-1960s by Jose Figueroa. Throughout the publication there is an exhilarating tension between the heroic portrayal of the leaders-Castro, Guevara and Cienfuegos-and the dramatic portrayal of a people in the midst of revolutionary transformation.

Hardcover. Washington, D. C., Smithsonian, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 58 pages. Illustrated with full color photographs. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Pound Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Photographing the intersection between culture and nature for over 25 years, Virginia Beahan creates luminous and finely detailed images with an 8x10 view camera that describe the complexities of this relationship in diverse geographic settings. Her eight-year project in the waning years of Fidel Castro's revolutionary Cuba resulted in a major 2009 monograph entitled CUBA singing with bright tears. The images depict a country both tragic and beautiful, struggling beneath the weight of history. Larger-than-life images of revolutionary heroes Che Guevara and Jose Marti populate the island. The Bay of Pigs is sublime and treacherous; an atmospheric body of water rimmed with jagged black coral is the same unwelcoming shore that greeted invading CIA-trained Cuban exiles over forty-seven years ago. On a billboard, Fidel Castro reminds us that the US might invade again, and if so, he "will die fighting." Virginia Beahan's work falls within the tradition of great American photographers such as Walker Evans and Robert Adams. Her luminous and detailed large-format photographs reveal a landscape imbued with nuanced stories of culture shaped by geography and human action. Cuba's long and complicated relationship with the United States is part of this unfolding drama. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. London ; New York, Routledge, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 270 pages. Light foxing to top edge. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf. Minor wear to dust jacket. Else a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Wyoming RI, Bio-Dynamic , 1st, 1979, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 435 pages, b&w illustrations. Explores the profound connection between human culture and the practice of gardening. Storl delves into the historical, spiritual, and ecological aspects of gardening, highlighting how various cultures have shaped their gardens as reflections of their beliefs and values. The book presents gardening as not only a practical endeavor but also a means of connecting with the natural world and understanding our place in it. Storl's work encourages readers to see gardening as a dynamic and meaningful cultural expression that bridges the gap between humanity and the environment. Light coffee cup rings to wraps, internally clean.

Softcover. University of Chicago Press, 5th pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 333 pages. Pierre Bourdieu is one of the world's most important social theorists and is also one of the great empirical researchers in contemporary sociology. However, reading Bourdieu can be difficult for those not familiar with the French cultural context, and until now a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's oeuvre has not been available. David Swartz focuses on a central theme in Bourdieu's work--the complex relationship between culture and power--and explains that sociology for Bourdieu is a mode of political intervention. Swartz clarifies Bourdieu's difficult concepts, noting where they have been misinterpreted by critics and where they have fallen short in resolving important analytical issues. The book also shows how Bourdieu has synthesized his theory of practices and symbolic power from Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and how his work was influenced by Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Zone Books, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 565 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Dust jacket unclipped, excellent, in protective brodart. Boards bound in black cloth, gilt title on spine. Binding tight. Some light pencil underlining throughout. Boards have a touch of rubbing, but in very good shape. A little light foxing to edges (shelfwear). A stunning, innovative blend of microsociology, cultural history, and philosophical reflection that will fascinate anyone concerned with problems of authenticity, identity, and originality.