eastern

Hardcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 168 pages. A native of Kazakhstan, Ljalja Kuznetsova traversed the expanses of the Central Asian steppe to photograph the gypsies, or Roma people, whose mysterious comings and goings have fascinated her since she was a child. Shaking the Dust of Ages: Gypsies and Wanderers of the Central Asian Steppe is the first book devoted to these pictures, for which Kuznetsova won the Mother Jones Leica Medal of Excellence and the Paris Grand Prix for Photography.Kuznetsova's photographs present rare, intimate portraits of gypsies-- whose freedom from the ties of civilization is reflected in the wild winds and unlimited vistas of the steppe landscape. As Kuznetsova traveled through Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and the Ukraine, the gypsies continually inspired her. She found in them a people without frontiers, living independent of politics, religious dispute, or social class. Though their presence on the steppe is becoming a thing of the past, Kuznetsova's cast of characters and their world seem timeless in these images.

Hardcover. NY, Coward-Mccann, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light blue cloth, silver gilt title on spine, 256 pages B&w photos. endpaper map. Inscription on half-title page, otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Overlook Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 180 pages. Jeff Gusky, a doctor of emergency medicine, decided at the age of 42 that he wanted to better confront the reality of modern Jewish history. A self-taught photographer who subsequently learned to make museum quality prints, he bought what he calls "a good, journalist-type camera and some lenses" and traveled to Poland-once the home of the largest concentration of Diaspora Jews. He read the instruction manuals on the plane en route. Over four trips, accompanied each time by a top Polish guide, Gusky traveled through the country, beyond the city ghettos and the sites of concentration camps, into remote villages where Jews had lived and worked for almost 1,000 years before the Holocaust-capturing on film the austere landscapes and the remains of a once thriving Jewish culture. The silence is deafening: here are Jewish cemeteries full of broken gravestones, ruined synagogues filled with trash and disfigured with graffiti, a Jewish home now used as a public toilet-"where people lived, walked, worshipped, and were, ultimately, exterminated," says Gusky. The doleful, understated clarity of what he saw and photographed captures a poignant sense of loss-making at the same time an indelible connection to the past.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 443 pages. In the first political analysis of unemployment in a socialist country, Susan Woodward argues that the bloody conflicts that are destroying Yugoslavia stem not so much from ancient ethnic hatreds as from the political and social divisions created by a failed socialist program to prevent capitalist joblessness. Under Communism the concept of socialist unemployment was considered an oxymoron; when it appeared in postwar Yugoslavia, it was dismissed as illusory or as a transitory consequence of Yugoslavia's unorthodox experiments with worker-managed firms. In Woodward's view, however, it was only a matter of time before countries in the former Soviet bloc caught up with Yugoslavia, confronting the same unintended consequences of economic reforms required to bring socialist states into the world economy. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Bloomington IN, Indiana University Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped with gilt lettering and design. artfully explains the initial spirit and modern understanding of Tamil bhakti poetry. His fluent translations make the poems -- songs of the experience of God -- live for us as they did for their first audience nearly fifteen centuries ago. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. University of Washington Press, 1st pbk., 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 365 pages. Provides an over-all picture of the least studied and most obscured part of Balkan history, the Ottoman period. The book begins with the early history of the Ottomans and with their establishment in Europe, describing the basic Muslim and Turkish features of the Ottoman state. The author goes on in subsequent sections to show how these features influenced every aspect of life in the European lands administered directly by the Ottomans (the "core" provinces) and left a permanent mark on states that were vassals of or paid tribute to the empire. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Vancouver, CN, University of British Columbia Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like New. Black & white illustrations. Harcover in a bright dust jacket, 302 Pages.

Softcover. New York, Aperture, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. In original shrink wrap, spotless and tight. Poet, scholar, philosopher, and master of Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhism, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche led a life of profound dedication to spiritual enlightenment and teaching. During the final fourteen years of his life his personal assistant was Matthieu Ricard. Together they traveled throughout Tibet, Bhutan, India, and Nepal, returning to the places of Khyentse Rinpoche's youth: his birthplace in Eastern Tibet; the monastery of Shechen which he had entered at the age of eleven; and the retreats where he spent years in meditation and study. At every stop on his journey, Khyentse Rinpoche was welcomed with elaborate ceremonies and outpourings of devotion. Ricard's deeply personal photographs of this journey are enhanced by a biographical narrative that is interspersed with extensive passages from the writings and teachings of Khyentse Rinpoche. Together, these images and texts form an inspiring portrait of one of the great spiritual leaders and teachers of our time. Many masters of Tibetan Buddhism studied with Khyentse Rinpoche, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who regarded him as his principal instructor in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

Hardcover. Prague, SNDK, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, SIGNED BY WENIG. Czech language. Black & white pen-line drawings in color by Mikolase Alse. Red cloth with gilt decoration.

Hardcover. US, Carpet Bombing Culture, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Unpaginated. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy. If America is the Roman Empire of our time then New York City is Rome. The pulsating heart of the West pumps greenbacks through the veins of Manhattan, the richest place in the world. Power emanates from it's corporate brains and financial muscle across the whole surface of the globe. So how is it that even in the body of America, land of eternal youth, there is failure, death and decay hidden just beneath its glossy surfaces? A new breed of urban adventurers take a savage ride through the invisible story of the North Eastern USA. From NYC to the infamous Rust Belt, once home to America's heavy industry, States of Decay brings you a glimpse of the broken, the doomed, the entropic dreamlands on the flipside of the silver dollar coin. A unique exploration of everything from abandoned power plants, hospitals, asylums, schools, theatres, steel mills, prisons, factories, hotels, cathedrals, blast furnaces, convents to a boat graveyard. This extended photo-essay functions as a visual poem allowing the reader to draw their own experiences and conclusions from the images themselves. No interpretation necessary. This book will ask disturbing questions and inspire unexpected answers from anyone with an imagination and a heart. Sit back and let us take you on a walk around the Bad Apple.

Hardcover. NY, Tudor Publishing, reprint, 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an edgeworn dust jacket. 436 pages. A history of American steamboats from its earliest days to the twentieth century. Covers the steamboat vessels on all of America's major waterways and regions with a focus on the eastern seaboard. Many illustrations.

Softcover. Sanbornton, Sant Bani Press, First Edition, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 333 pages. Softcover. Full page, full color illustrations and a few in bw. Interviews & reflections with Kirpal Singh, Baba Sawan & Sant Ajaib. Light wear to spine edges, light sunfading to lower spine. Discolored smudge to top edge. Previous owner's signature to preliminary pages. Otherwise, clean & unmarked copy.

Softcover. Bloomington IN, iUniverse, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 155 pages including epilogue. This is the story of Checiny, the author's hometown in southern Poland, and of the people who lived there between the two world wars of the 20th Century. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CONNECTICUT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 317 pages, b&w illustrations, red cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Bright dust jacket with price-clip.

Hardcover. College Station TX, Texas A & M University Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 174 pages, b&w photos. The show traveled in West Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Eastern Colorado from 1920 to 1945. Clean copy in a bright dust jacket.

Softcover. UK, Faber & Faber, reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 271 pages. In the twelfth century, Languedoc, in the far south, was among the most beautiful parts of France, far away from the world of the feudal north. However, it was in this rich region that a heresy of Eastern origin took hold, forcing the Catholic Church to confront a rival whose teachings questioned the foundations of Christian thought. These heretics, called Cathars, held a profoundly pessimistic view of the world that was based on the duality of all things, including good and evil: according to one heretic, "The one, the good God, made the invisible world, while the other, the evil God, made the visible one." Jonathan Sumption's acclaimed history examines the roots of this heresy as well as of the crusade the Church undertook in 1208 to stamp out the infidels, who ultimately were conquered by the Catholic armies. But this book does more than simply describe this terrible war; it reconstructs a lost world of great cultural richness, one that saw the creation in Languedoc of the troubadour tradition as well as the magnificent castles at Cabaret and Carcassonne. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, Counterpoint, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 144 pages. Walter Murch first came across Curzio Malaparte's writings in a chance encounter in a French book about cosmology, where one of Malaparte's stories was retold to illustrate a point about conditions shortly after the creation of the universe. Murch was so taken by the strange, utterly captivating imagery he went to find the book from which the story was taken. The book was Kaputt, Malaparte's autobiographical novel about the frontlines of World War II. Curzio Malaparte, an Italian born with a German heritage, was a journalist, dramatic, novelist and diplomat. When he wrote a book attacking totalitarianism and Hitler's reign, Mussolini, in no position to support such a body of work, stripped him of his National Fascist Party membership and sent him to internal exile on the island of Lipari. In 1941, he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera, the Milano daily newspaper. His dispatches from the next three years would be largely suppressed by the Italian government, but reverberated among readers as painfully real depictions of a landscape at war.

Hardcover. London, Ruskin House, George Allen and Unwin, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn dust jacket, 194 pages. This study traces the origin of Buddhism in Brahmanism, and fixes its relationship to Hinduism, describing and stressing the basic importance of Buddhist contemplation. No markings.

Softcover. McGill-Queen's University Press, reprint, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 913 pages, b&w illustrations, maps. Trigger's work integrates insights from archaeology, history, ethnology, linguistics, and geography. This wide knowledge allows him to show that, far from being a static prehistoric society quickly torn apart by European contact and the fur trade, almost every facet of Iroquoian culture had undergone significant change in the centuries preceding European contact. He argues convincingly that the European impact upon native cultures cannot be correctly assessed unless the nature and extent of precontact change is understood. His study not only stands Euro-American stereotypes and fictions on their heads, but forcefully and consistently interprets European and Indian actions, thoughts, and motives from the perspective of the Huron culture. The Children of Aataentsic revises widely accepted interpretations of Indian behaviour and challenges cherished myths about the actions of some celebrated Europeans during the "heroic age" of Canadian history. In a new preface, Trigger describes and evaluates contemporary controversies over the ethnohistory of eastern Canada.

Softcover. Ithaca NY, Snow Lion Publications, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 151 pages. SIGNED ON HALF TITLE PAGE BY THE 14TH DALAI LAMA IN OCTOBER OF 2012 AT MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE. Light wear. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 346 page with index. This unique book weaves linguistic, cultural, and historical themes together to form a concise and accessible account of the development of the Slavic languages. Alexander Schenker demonstrates that inquiry into early Slavic culture requires an understanding of history, language, and texts and that an understanding of early Slavic writing is incomplete outside the context of medieval culture. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Hill & Wang, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 544 pages. A bold new history of the Deng years by a leading China scholar. Unlike the former Soviet Union and the once "socialist" countries of Eastern Europe, China's current economy is now the world's second largest and most rapidly growing. Remarkably, today's problems in China are spiritual in nature-"a crisis of faith"-stemming from the clash between capitalist realities and lingering socialist values and ideas. "The Deng Xiaoping Era "is the story of that crisis and of Deng Xiaoping's promise of socialist democracy that has degenerated into bureaucratic capitalism. Maurice Meisner shows how the social contract between the Chinese Communist Party and the people was grossly violated by the Deng regime, and why capitalism has emerged as the dynamic force in today's socioeconomic and cultural life. Now, after more than a decade of capitalist reforms, he argues that Chinese spiritual malaise is deepening with the brutal suppression of the 1989 Democracy Movement and its politically repressive aftermath. This is an indispensable study of contemporary Chinese history-from the Chinese Revolution and the founding of the Maoist state to the establishment of the Deng regime and the social consequences of Deng's reforms-as well as a formidable analysis of the failure of the world's greatest socialist experiment. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Salem, MA, The Essex Institute, 2nd pr., 1922, Book: Good, Hardcover, 122 pages. Ex-library copy with white tape on spine and small stamp on copyright page, otherwise clean. Blue cloth, gilt title to spine, no dust jacket. The second edition adds additional material and illustrations. Clean, tight copy.