europe

Hardcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 208 pages, 174 color plates. Window-Shopping through the Iron Curtain presents a selection of more than 100 images of shop windows shot by David Hlynsky during four trips taken between 1986 and 1990 to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Moscow. Using a Hasselblad camera, Hlynsky captured the slow, routine moments of daily life on the streets and in the shop windows of crumbling Communist countries.The resulting images could be still-lifes representing the intersection of a Communist ideology and a consumerist, Capitalist tool-the shop window-with the consumer stuck in the middle. Devoid of overt branding or calculated seduction, the shop windows were typically adorned with traditional yet incongruous symbols of cheer: homey lace curtains, paper flowers, painted butterflies, and pictures of happy children. Some windows were humble in their simple offerings of loaves and tinned fishes; others were zanily artistic, as in the modular display of military shirts in a Moscow storefront; and some illustrated intense professional pride, such as a sign in a Prague beauty salon depicting a pedicurist smiling fiendishly over an imperfect sole. The photographs are accompanied by essays by art historian Martha Langford and cultural studies specialist Jody Berland, as well as Hlynsky's own account of his time as a flaneur in the shopping plazas of the collapsing Soviet empire-"a vast ad-hoc museum of a failing utopia" that in 1989 began to close forever. No dj issued.

Hardcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 208 pages, 174 color plates. Window-Shopping through the Iron Curtain presents a selection of more than 100 images of shop windows shot by David Hlynsky during four trips taken between 1986 and 1990 to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Moscow. Using a Hasselblad camera, Hlynsky captured the slow, routine moments of daily life on the streets and in the shop windows of crumbling Communist countries.The resulting images could be still-lifes representing the intersection of a Communist ideology and a consumerist, Capitalist tool-the shop window-with the consumer stuck in the middle. Devoid of overt branding or calculated seduction, the shop windows were typically adorned with traditional yet incongruous symbols of cheer: homey lace curtains, paper flowers, painted butterflies, and pictures of happy children. Some windows were humble in their simple offerings of loaves and tinned fishes; others were zanily artistic, as in the modular display of military shirts in a Moscow storefront; and some illustrated intense professional pride, such as a sign in a Prague beauty salon depicting a pedicurist smiling fiendishly over an imperfect sole. The photographs are accompanied by essays by art historian Martha Langford and cultural studies specialist Jody Berland, as well as Hlynsky's own account of his time as a flaneur in the shopping plazas of the collapsing Soviet empire-"a vast ad-hoc museum of a failing utopia" that in 1989 began to close forever. No dj issued.

Hardcover. NY, Dutton Caliber, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 324 pages, b&w illustrations. When the P-51 Mustang began tearing across European skies in early 1944, the Allies had been losing the air war for years. Staggering numbers of bomber crews, both British and American, had been shot down and killed thanks to the Luftwaffe's superior fighter force. Not only did the air war appear grim, but any landing of troops in France was impossible while German fighters hunted overhead. But behind the scenes, a team of visionaries had begun to design a bold new type of airplane, one that could outrun and outmaneuver Germany's best. Wings of War is the incredible true story of the P-51 Mustang fighter and the unlikely crew of designers, engineers, test pilots, and army officers who brought it from the drafting table to the skies over World War II. This is hardly a straightforward tale of building an airplane--for years, the team was stymied by corruption within the defense industry and stonewalled by the Army Air Forces, who failed to understand the Mustang's potential. But when squadrons of Mustangs were finally unleashed over Hitler's empire, the Luftwaffe was decimated within months, clearing the skies for D-Day. Clean copy.

Softcover. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1st US, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 193 pages. Most European prosecutions for the crime of witchcraft occurred between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the peak coming in the hundred years after 1560. This volume brings together the large amount of recent scholarship on witchcraft of this period and provides a novel analysis of the trials by considering the legal systems involved. Witch hunts, methods of torture, and the scientific interest in magic spells and demonology as an intellectual pursuit are also covered in detail. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset & Dunlap, reprint, 1916, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 385 pages, illustrated with b&w photos. Tan cloth stamped in red and dark green on front and spine. No D.J.

Softcover. Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 232 pages. Softcover. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. Black and white photographs throughout. The center of the art world before the war, Paris fired the Nazis' greed. The discovery of more than 1,500 prized paintings and drawings in a private Munich residence, as well as a recent movie about Allied attempts to recover European works of art, have brought Nazi plundering back into the headlines, but the thievery was far from being limited to works of art. From 1942 onwards, ordinary Parisian Jews-mostly poor families and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe-were robbed, not of sculptures or paintings, but of toys, saucepans, furniture, and sheets. Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews tells how this vast enterprise of plunder was implemented in the streets of Paris by analyzing images from an album of photographs found in the Federal Archives of Koblenz. Brought from Paris in 1945, the photographs were cataloged by the staff of the Munich Central Collecting Point. Beyond bearing witness to the petty acts of larceny, these images provide crucial information on how the Germans saw their work. They enable us to grasp the "Nazi gaze" and to confront the issue of the relation between greed and mass destruction.

Hardcover. NY, Routledge, 1st US, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 289 pages, b&w illustrations. In the nineteenth century, major developments in internal surgery were due to operations on ovaries. Women bore the brunt of surgical experimentation and also reaped its rewards. Their need was great, but so was their compliance. From the first operation in America in 1809, much suffering was relieved at the expense of prolonged surgery endured by both black slaves and prosperous whites. Later, in the Victorian era, many surgeons looked at certain types of behavior as reasons for mutilating operations. Such procedures as "spaying" and clitoridectomies were performed to "cure" hysteria and masturbation, as well as questionable interventionalist surgery in pregnancy and childbirth which still continue today. Women Under the Knife is an extraordinary history, giving a vivid picture--medical, literary, and sociological--of Victorian society in America and Europe. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, reprint, undated/c1880, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. History of the art of engraving within a European context. Undated, published c1880. Illustrated with 34 black/white reproductions of engravings. Good condition; pages have gilt edges, cloth bound book has some wear to the edges and introductory pages lightly spotted from age.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, like new in publishers shrinkwrap. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) proudly described his monumental painting Prometheus Bound as first among "the flower of my stock." This singular work demonstrates how Rubens engaged with and responded to his predecessors Michelangelo and Titian, with whom he shared an interest in depictions of physical torment. The Wrath of the Gods offers an in-depth case study of the Flemish artist's creative process and aesthetic, while also demonstrating why this particular painting has appealed to viewers over time. Many scholars have elaborated on Rubens's affinity for Titian, but his connection to Michelangelo has received far less attention. This study presents a new interpretation of Prometheus Bound, showing how Rubens created parallels between the pagan hero Prometheus and Michelangelo's Risen Christ from the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment. Christopher D. M. Atkins expands our understanding of artistic transmission by elucidating how Rubens synthesized the works he saw in Italy, Spain, and his native Antwerp, and how Prometheus Bound in turn influenced Dutch, Flemish, and Italian artists. By emulating Rubens's composition, these artists circulated it throughout Europe, broadening its influence from his day to ours.

Softcover. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1st pbk, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 264 pages. Xenophanes of Colophon was a philosophical poet who lived in various cities of the ancient Greek world during the late sixth and early fifth centuries BC. In this book, James Lesher presents the Greek texts of all the surviving fragments of Xenophanes' teachings, with an original English translation on facing pages, along with detailed notes and commentaries and a series of essays on the philosophical questions generated by Xenophanes' remarks. Also included are English translations of all the ancient testimonia relating to Xenophanes' life and teachings, and a discussion of how many of the testimonia pose the impediments to achieving a consistent interpretation of his philosophy. The Xenophanes who emerges in this account fully warrants classification as a philosophical thinker: moral critic and reflective student of nature, critic of popular religious belief and practice, and perhaps the first to challenge claims to knowledge about divine matters and the basic forces at work in nature. As with earlier works in the Pheonix series, this volume aims to make an important portion of Presocratic writing accessible to all those interested in ancient philosophy and the first phase of European natural science. This paperback edition contains an updated bibliography. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. This revisionist study of Allied diplomacy from 1941 to 1946 challenges Americocentric views of the period and highlights Europe's neglected role. Fraser J. Harbutt, drawing on international sources, shows that in planning for the future Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and others self-consciously operated into 1945, not on "East/West" lines but within a "Europe/America" political framework characterized by the plausible prospect of Anglo-Russian collaboration and persisting American detachment. Harbutt then explains the destabilizing transformation around the time of the pivotal Yalta conference of February 1945, when a sudden series of provocative initiatives, manipulations, and miscues interacted with events to produce the breakdown of European solidarity and the Anglo-Soviet nexus, an evolving Anglo-American alignment, and new tensions that led finally to the Cold War. This fresh perspective, stressing structural, geopolitical, and traditional impulses and constraints, raises important new questions about the enduringly controversial transition from World War II to a cold war that no statesman wanted. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Bobbs-Merrill, 1st, 1949, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth stamped in gilt. 192 pages, illustrated endpapers. Tarkington's letters written and illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches in 1903 and 1904 from Europe addressed to his three nephews. Clean copy, no dust jacket.

Softcover. Cambridge University Press, 1st paperback, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 421 pages. Softcover. Wrapper very good, no rips or tears. B/w illustrations. Pages and edges have a touch of tanning from age, otherwise clean and unmarked. Binding tight. In very good shape. The first book to examine the bloody demise of the former Yugoslavia in the full light of its history and that of its ethnic mosaic.

Hardcover. Milan, Skira, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. An outstanding photographic monograph from the Twenties and Thirties brings back the memory of ways of living, ceremonies, adorned bodies of an Africa that be aptly defined as "lost". These extraordinary, unpublished pictures, taken with great technical skill and with a sense of great dignity of the people portrayed, constitute a monument to the African continent as it was. Kazimir Ostoja Zagourski (1880-1941) was born in Poland and moved to Congo in 1924. Zagourski was the first professional photographer to travel throughout the interior of Congo and visited also the neighboring countries, Tchad, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. During his long stay in Africa he took hundred of pictures, 500 of which, divided in two extraordinary series on different tribes, build up to a unique historic and ethnographic survey. In a sense, Zagourski's work constitutes the first "non-European" look, devoid of the colonial overtones that characterize much contemporary work. His forays into the depths of the African continent took him into the most remote villages of Kuba, Mangbetu, Bwaka, Tutsi, Masai, etc. where he took unprecedented pictures of great ethnographic interest. he documented for example, ceremonies (initiation, circumcision, excision, masked dances, etc.), the great African creativity in body ornament (from scarification to hair dresses, from jewels to lip plugs), clothes and all utilitarian objects placed in their appropriate cultural context (musical instruments, shields, stools, knives, containers, etc.).

Hardcover. NY, Merrell Publishing, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 240 pages. In the early twentieth century Zaida Ben-Yusuf (1869?1933) was one of the busiest photographers in New York City, maintaining a fashionable studio on Fifth Avenue, exhibiting her distinctly modern portraits across America, Europe and Russia, and publishing work in many magazines. Her self-portraits also challenged traditional perceptions of female identity. This striking book celebrates Ben-Yusuf ?s achievement, showcasing a significant selection of her elegant and compelling portraits featuring prominent artistic and political figures of the day, including Lincoln Steffens, Edith Wharton, Elsie de Wolfe and Robert Henri.