Hardcover. london, Reaktion Books, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 444 pages, b&w illustrations. Show People offers a comprehensive history of the idea of the film star from Mary Pickford to Andy Serkis, traversing more than one hundred years and drawing on examples from America, Britain, Europe, and Asia. Renowned film writer Michael Newton explores our enduring love affair with fame, glamour, and the cinematic image. Newton builds up an expansive picture of movie stardom through explorations of striking and diverse figures such as Ingrid Bergman and John Wayne, Anna Karina and Sidney Poitier, Maggie Cheung, and Raj Kapoor. He celebrates the great performers of the past, and he looks forward to developments in the future, while also illuminating the inner workings of the movie industry and what moves us in a film and in an actor's performance. An encyclopedic, illustrated history of film idols ready for their close-ups, Show People is ultimately a book about cinephilia, the love of cinema, and our complex connection to that celebrated and beleaguered figure, the movie star. Clean, like new.
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.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 418 pages, b&w illustrations. From the author of the best-selling One Minute to Midnight, a riveting account of the pivotal six-month period spanning the end of World War II, the dawn of the nuclear age, and the beginning of the Cold War. When Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met in Yalta in February 1945, Hitler's armies were on the run and victory was imminent. The Big Three wanted to draft a blueprint for a lasting peace--but instead set the stage for a forty-four-year division of Europe into Soviet and western spheres of influence. After fighting side by side for nearly four years, their political alliance was rapidly fracturing. By the time the leaders met again in Potsdam in July 1945, Russians and Americans were squabbling over the future of Germany and Churchill was warning about an "iron curtain" being drawn down over the Continent. These six months witnessed some of the most dramatic moments of the twentieth century: the cataclysmic battle for Berlin, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps, Churchill's electoral defeat, and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. While their armies linked up in the heart of Europe, the political leaders maneuvered for leverage: Stalin using his nation's wartime sacrifices to claim spoils, Churchill doing his best to halt Britain's waning influence, FDR trying to charm Stalin, Truman determined to stand up to an increasingly assertive Soviet superpower.
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.
Softcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 336 pages. Softcover. Color and b/w illustrations throughout. Covers in excellent condition. Touch of foxing to top edge. Pages clean and bright. The ever-rapacious Nazis looted staggering quantities of great art and antiques from the nations they occupied. Much of it found its way back to Germany, and following the Allied victory, many thousands of rare (and some priceless) pieces were identified, and returned to the countries from which they had been taken. But not all of the paintings, statues, and archaeological treasures were recovered: Some were taken by Soviet troops and disappeared into Russia. Still others slipped into the black market in western Europe, and were snapped up by wealthy (if unprincipled) collectors. A 1995 symposium at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts brought together European and American investigators and historians to discuss both the the Nazi thefts and the current state of knowledge of the whereabouts of the many still missing treasures. Those papers are reprinted here. While the pieces are detailed, dry, and likely to be of most interest to specialists, there are some extraordinary stories, most prominently the description of the recent rediscovery of ``Priam's treasure,'' excavated by Schliemann at Troy and hidden since WW II in a Russian museum. (123 illustrations, 25 in color).
Hardcover. London, Smith, Elder and Co., Second Edition, 1858, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Three hardcover volumes with blue leather covers featuring marbled endpapers, raised bands along brown spines with red title plates, gilt decoration. Second Edition. Black & white, and some color illustrations in all 3 volumes by John Ruskin. Volume 1 - "The Foundations". 400 pages. Top edge gilt. Light, faint pencil marginalia to a few pages. Minor abrasion to covers. Clean, tight copy. Volume 2 - "The Sea Stories". 394 pages. Top edge gilt. Faint foxing to some pages. a few moderate abrasions to rear cover. Clean, tight copy. Volume 3 - "The Fall". 362 pages. Top edge gilt. Light pencil marginalia scattered throughout. Faint foxing to some pages. Minor abrasions to covers. Clean, tight copy. A nice set.
Hardcover. London, England, Adam and Charls Black, 1st Edition, 1969, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 328 pages. Hardcover. Color and b/w illustrations by Victor Ambrus throughout. Decorated cover boards, cover boards slightly warped, but no moisture damage present. Back endpaper has an horizontal air-bubble. pages clean and unmarked with exception of half title page with has a small brown smudge. Dust jacket unclipped, slightly tanned from age. Light tanning to edges. Binding tight. Spine straight. Here is the story of the British people, written by an author renowned as 'the young reader's historian' and illustrated by an artist who is amongst the most talented book illustrators of our time.
Softcover. Paris, S.N.E.P., 1st, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. very good. 116 tipped-in color plates, folio, printed beige boards. Paris: Editions SNEP, (1952). Very good (+). The evolution of painting in Europe, from the Middle Ages to the 18th century. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
Softcover. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1st pbk, 1998, Book: Very Good, Softcover, 330 pages. Twelve literary scholars and historians investigate the ways in which space and place are politically, religiously, and culturally inflected. Exploring medieval texts as diverse as Icelandic sagas, Ptolemy's Geography, and Mandeville's Travels, the contributors illustrate the intimate connection between geographical conceptions and the mastery of land, the assertion of doctrine, and the performance of sexuality. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 543 pages. This is the history of how two countries on the northern edge of Europe built societies in the twentieth century that became objects of inspiration and envy around the world. Francis Sejersted, one of Scandinavia's leading historians, tells how Norway and Sweden achieved a rare feat by realizing grand visions of societies that combine stability, prosperity, and social welfare. It is a history that holds many valuable lessons today, at a time of renewed interest in the Scandinavian model. The book tells the story of social democracy from the separation of Norway and Sweden in 1905 through the end of the century, tracing its development from revolutionary beginnings through postwar triumph, as it became a hegemonic social order that left its stamp on every sector of society, the economy, welfare, culture, education, and family. The book also tells how in the 1980s, partly in reaction to the strong state, a freedom and rights revolution led to a partial erosion of social democracy. Yet despite the fracturing of consensus and the many economic and social challenges facing Norway and Sweden today, the achievement of their welfare states remains largely intact.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 334 pages, b&w photos. In May 1941, Gertrude van Tijn arrived in Lisbon on a mission of mercy from German-occupied Amsterdam. She came with Nazi approval to the capital of neutral Portugal to negotiate the departure from Hitler's Europe of thousands of German and Dutch Jews. Was this middle-aged Jewish woman, burdened with such a terrible responsibility, merely a pawn of the Nazis, or was her journey a genuine opportunity to save large numbers of Jews from the gas chambers? In such impossible circumstances, what is just action, and what is complicity? A moving account of courage and of all-too-human failings in the face of extraordinary moral challenges, The Ambiguity of Virtue tells the story of Van Tijn's work on behalf of her fellow Jews as the avenues that might save them were closed off. Between 1933 and 1940 Van Tijn helped organize Jewish emigration from Germany. After the Germans occupied Holland, she worked for the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council in Amsterdam and enabled many Jews to escape. Some later called her a heroine for the choices she made; others denounced her as a collaborator. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Knoxville, University Of Tennessee Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 432 pages. Shields shows how both the myth of Adam and the myth of Aeneas, in crossing over to America from Europe, dynamically intermingled in the thought of the earliest American writers. This rearticulation of the myths of Adam and Aeneas became peculiarly adapted to the demands of the American adventure in freedom. Shields argues that uncovering and acknowledging the classical roots of our culture can allay the American fear of "pastlessness" that the long-standing emphasis on the Adamic myth has generated. The authors probing analysis sheds new light on the works of such seminal figures as Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, Phillis Wheatley, George Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.
Hardcover. Boston, Thomas & Andrews , 6th Ed., 1812, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in contemporary calf, with gilt letting on red leather spine label and sound and bright internally with 3 fold-out maps (Africa, Asia/Arabia and Europe). Covers worn, bottom of spine has a small chunk gone from bottom, about a square inch. Interior clean, minor foxing. VOLUME 2 ONLY.
Hardcover. NY, MacMillan Company, 1st US, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 312 pages. Includes footnotes, bibliography, and index. Foreword by Stephen Spender. A narrative study of the troubling phenomenon why many European intellectuals and artists were drawn to and embraced Fascism during the period between the world wars. This conundrum may find expression today. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Public Affairs, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 329 pages. When Katharine Greider was told to leave her house or risk it falling down on top of her and her family, it spurred an investigation that began with contractors' diagnoses and lawsuits, then veered into archaeology and urban history, before settling into the saltwater grasses of the marsh that fatefully once sat beneath the site of Number 239 East 7th Street.During the journey, Greider examines how people balance the need for permanence with the urge to migrate, and how the home is the resting place for ancestral ghosts. The land on which Number 239 was built has a history as long as America's own. It provisioned the earliest European settlers who needed fodder for their cattle; it became a spoil of war handed from the king's servant to the revolutionary victor; it was at the heart of nineteenth-century Kleinedeutschland and of the revolutionary Jewish Lower East Side. America's immigrant waves have all passed through 7th Street. In one small house is written the history of a young country and the much longer story of humankind and the places they came to call home.
Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 309 pages. The classic study, looking at Habsburg Spain's handling of the Dutch Revolt. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 335 pages. The Barbarians Speak re-creates the story of Europe's indigenous people who were nearly stricken from historical memory even as they adopted and transformed aspects of Roman culture. The Celts and Germans inhabiting temperate Europe before the arrival of the Romans left no written record of their lives and were often dismissed as "barbarians" by the Romans who conquered them. Accounts by Julius Caesar and a handful of other Roman and Greek writers would lead us to think that prior to contact with the Romans, European natives had much simpler political systems, smaller settlements, no evolving social identities, and that they practiced human sacrifice. A more accurate, sophisticated picture of the indigenous people emerges, however, from the archaeological remains of the Iron Age. Here Peter Wells brings together information that has belonged to the realm of specialists and enables the general reader to share in the excitement of rediscovering a "lost people." In so doing, he is the first to marshal material evidence in a broad-scale examination of the response by the Celts and Germans to the Roman presence in their lands.
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 335 pages with b&w illustrations. Re-creates the story of Europe's indigenous people who were nearly stricken from historical memory even as they adopted and transformed aspects of Roman culture. The Celts and Germans inhabiting temperate Europe before the arrival of the Romans left no written record of their lives and were often dismissed as "barbarians" by the Romans who conquered them. Accounts by Julius Caesar and a handful of other Roman and Greek writers would lead us to think that prior to contact with the Romans, European natives had much simpler political systems, smaller settlements, no evolving social identities, and that they practiced human sacrifice. A more accurate, sophisticated picture of the indigenous people emerges, however, from the archaeological remains of the Iron Age. Here Peter Wells brings together information that has belonged to the realm of specialists and enables the general reader to share in the excitement of rediscovering a "lost people." Clean copy.
Softcover. London, Routledge, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 325 pages with index, b&w illustrations. An outstanding piece of scholarship and a fascinating read, The Body Emblazoned is a compelling study of the culture of dissection the English Renaissance, which informed intellectual enquiry in Europe for nearly two hundred years. In this outstanding work, Jonathan Sawday explores the dark, morbid eroticism of the Renaissance anatomy theatre, and relates it to not only the great monuments of Renaissance art, but to the very foundation of the modern idea of knowledge.Though the dazzling displays of the exterior of the body in Renaissance literature and art have long been a subject of enquiry, The Body Emblazoned considers the interior of the body, and what it meant to men and women in early modern culture. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 3rd pr., 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket. 411 pages; index; 24 illustrations, including color frontispiece of Abigail and John; from the Introduction: " 'The Book of Abigail and John' is a Bicentennial updating of Charles Francis Adams' contribution ('Familiar Letters') to the nation's Centennial. It contains what the present editors consider the best letters of John and Abigail Adams, written from their courtship beginning late in 1762 to their reunion in Europe in August 1784.To these letters have been added a number of letters to "third parties" and selected diary and autobiographical passages that reveal the two as man and woman, husband and wife, father and mother." Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 310 pages. One of the incidental consequences of the success of British arms in eighteenth-century India was the appearance of a number of publications which reflect the intense curiosity of contemporary Europeans about strange peoples, their manners and religions. Of the three principal religions of India, Hinduism attracted the most attention. European contact with Islam was several centuries old, while few travellers could identify Buddhism with any certainty. This book reprints some of the most significant English contributions to the early European understanding of Hinduism. Paper covers with light wear.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar & Rinehart, 1st US, 1939, Book: Good, Hardcover, blue cloth with dark blue lettering, 251 pages. Endpapers tanned and soiled at edges. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with mild fading to spine, 949 pages. Volume 1 only of a 2-volume set. The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy offers a uniquely comprehensive and authoritative overview of early-modern philosophy written by an international team of specialists. As with previous Cambridge Histories of Philosophy the subject is treated by topic and theme, and since history does not come packaged in neat bundles, the subject is also treated with great temporal flexibility, incorporating frequent reference to medieval and Renaissance ideas. The basic structure corresponds to the way an educated seventeenth-century European might have organized the domain of philosophy. Thus, the history of science, religious doctrine, and politics feature very prominently. Name on front fly leaf, about 12 pages with light pencil markings. Otherwise clean.
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.