Hardcover. London, Souvenir Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 251 pages. Illustrated with phtographs, line drawings and maps. Translated from the Dutch by Adrienne Dixon. The autobiography of a Dutch youth who "joined the German navy in a spirit of bravado, only to find himself trapped in the final, agonising throes of Germany's defeat." Subsequent tours in the French Foreign Legion and Korea led from his being a devotee of war to a confirmed pacifist. A fancnating life told with honesty and passion.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 20, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Drawing on original and exhaustive research from interviews and never-before-seen material in the Picasso family archives, this book opens with a visit by the Hungarian-French photographer Brassai to Picasso's chateau in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Marie-Therese, Picasso's mistress and muse. Picasso was contributing to Andre Breton's Minotaur magazine and he was also spending more time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dali, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul Eluard, in Paris as well as in the south of France. It was during this time that Picasso began writing surrealist poetry and became obsessed with the image of himself as the mythic Minotaur--head of a bull, body of a man--and created his most famous etching, Minotauromachie. Richardson shows us the artist is as prolific as ever, painting Marie-Therese, but also painting the surrealist photographer Dora Maar who has become a muse, a collaborator and more. In April 1937, the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War inspires Picasso's vast masterwork of the same name, which he paints in just a few weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair. When the Nazis occupy Paris in 1940, Picasso chooses to remain in the city despite the threat that his art would be confiscated. In 1943, Picasso meets Francoise Gilot who would replace Dora, and as Richardson writes, "rejuvenate his psyche, reawaken his imagery and inspire a brilliant sequence of paintings." As always, Richardson tells Picasso's story through his work during this period, analyzing how it shows what the artist was feeling and thinking. His fascinating and accessible narrative immerses us in one of the most exciting moments in twentieth century cultural history, and brings to a close the definitive and critically acclaimed account of one of the world's most celebrated artists.
Hardcover. Shippensburg PA, White Mane, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 267 pages, b&w illustrations, front endpapers map. A Melancholy Affair at the Weldon Railroad examines what occurred on a single afternoon to a brigade of Vermonters during the last year of the Civil War, and why it happened. Vermont, though a small, rural state, contributed far beyond its size and wealth to preserve the Union in the struggle of the Civil War. The worst moment and greatest sacrifice for Vermont was the disaster that befell the proud Vermont Brigade of the Army of the Potomac on June 23, 1864--forever "Black Thursday" in the Green Mountain State. Cowardliness, negligence and inept behavior by multiple officers resulted in the needless capture of more than four hundred Vermonters. The enlisted men were sent to Andersonville and later to other Confederate prisons where 60 percent of them perished. Many of the survivors came home mere wrecks of men. Exactly what occurred at the Weldon Railroad--what went wrong and who was to blame--is thoroughly examined for the first time. Previous owner's inscription on title page, small notation on rear flap of dj, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. New York, G. K. Hall & Company, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 319 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Minor dust jacket edge wear, otherwise, spotless and tight copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 457 pages, b&w illustrations. Few of us question the slips of green paper that come and go in our purses, pockets, and wallets. Yet confidence in the money supply is a recent phenomenon: prior to the Civil War, the United States did not have a single, national currency. Instead, countless banks issued paper money in a bewildering variety of denominations and designs - more than ten thousand different kinds by 1860. Counterfeiters flourished amid this anarchy, putting vast quantities of bogus bills into circulation. Their success, Stephen Mihm reveals, is more than an entertaining tale of criminal enterprise: it is the story of the rise of a country defined by a freewheeling brand of capitalism over which the federal government exercised little control. It was an era when responsibility for the country's currency remained in the hands of capitalists for whom "making money" was as much a literal as a figurative undertaking. Mihm's witty tale brims with colorful characters: shady bankers, corrupt cops, charismatic criminals, and brilliant engravers. Based on prodigious research, it ranges far and wide, from New York City's criminal underworld to the gold fields of California and the battlefields of the Civil War. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Faber and Faber, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, pages. "I write of peoples and of a struggle." So begins A New World, an ambitious and extraordinary book that challenges conventional historical narrative by presenting episodes in North America's history through the eyes and voices of the Europeans who established the first colonial outposts here. Beginning with the swaggering John Smith at Jamestown and ending with the beleaguered Montcalm at Quebec, Arthur Quinn allows towering historical figures to emerge from an often beautiful, sometimes forbidding early American landscape and speak. An elderly William Bradford looks back with growing despair at the early promise of the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth. Governor John Winthrop tries to administer a dose of practicality to the Puritans of Massachusetts. Jesuit missionaries bring Christianity and disaster to the Huron Confederacy. A blustering Peter Stuyvesant watches Manhattan slip from Dutch grasp. William Penn's Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania goes increasingly awry. And, finally, the British and the French fight history's first world war for supremacy in the New World. Telling each story using the literary conventions of the day, Quinn casts North America's colonial beginnings as a multicultural epic, gripping the reader throughout with his uncanny eye and storytelling skill. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY/LA, Indochina Information Project, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, stapled wraps, 44 pages including cover. Presumed first edition/first printing. Photos by Philip Jones Griffith and Marc Rimboud. This was written and researched by the Indochina Information Project whose members included: Jill Rodewald, Vicki Camilli, Terry Poxon, Kim Shanley, Drew Bonthius, Mike Picker, Mark Thompson, and Tom Hayden. Paper age-toned. A valuable document of the Peace Movement. Page 13 with short tear to margin, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Holiday House, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Color illustrations by Ronald Himler. This picture-book biography focuses mainly on the War of 1812, but also mentions Madison's contributions to the Constitution and the creation of the three branches of government. Although this is a biography of the couple, there is more specific information on James Madison than on Dolley. Still, readers do learn some interesting facts about her, such as how she rescued a portrait of George Washington while the Executive Mansion burned. Adler's writing is clear yet not oversimplified, and is without fictionalization.
Hardcover. NY, Quadrangle Books, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 201 pages. Stated first edition, 1972, but actually a book club edition with the telltale little indentation at the bottom right of the rear cover, no price on dj flap. Warren served as the 14th Chief Justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969 and is generally considered to be one of the most influential Supreme Court justices and political leaders in the history of the United States. This is a great book on the foundations of our republic and on how to preserve it. Chief Justice Warren explains history and Constitutional law in common terms that are easy to digest. This book stresses the importance of civic engagement, the Bill of Rights, and the need for ethics and respect in a republic. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press , 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Timothy Connor, a rebel sailing on an American privateer during the Revolutionary War, was captured and imprisoned for 2 years; keeping a book of 56 "coarse sailor songs" he heard or read, and here are the lyrics! with an introduction on privateering and prison life "from the bottom up." 164 pages, Clean copy.
Hardcover. Williamstown MA, Corner House, reprint, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 122 pages. An Official account of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770. This is an exact reprint from an original in the library of the New York Historical Society, containing the full appendix, certificates, and circular of the Committee. It also contains events of the few days preceding the massacre drawn up by the Hon. Alden Bradford; and the Report made by John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren and other, presented at the meeting of the citizens on the 12th of March plus explanatory notes by the author.
Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this extraordinary memoir is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history. It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was twelve and a half years old, his mother committed suicide, a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen and joins a kibbutz, changes his name, marries, has children, and finally becomes a writer as well as an active participant in the political life of Israel. Clean copy.
Softcover. Waco TX, J. S. Hill & Co., 1st, 1901, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, brown paper wraps, stapled binding, 189 pages. Covers worn and chipped, last 50 pages with top corner chipped or chewed away, not affecting text. West served in Company E., 4th Texas Regiment. "A diary kept by West from April 12 to June 13, 1863, and February 28 to April 20, 1864." Subtitled on cover: A trip of a private soldier from Texas to Gettysburg and Chickamauga in 1863. Paper tanned and fragile.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 592 pages, b&w illustrations. Samuel Fuller, independent director-producer extraordinaire, tells the story of his life, a life that spanned most of the twentieth century. His twenty-nine tough, gritty pictures made from 1949 to 1989 set out to capture the truth of war, racism, and human frailties, and incorporate some of his own experiences. He writes of his years in the newspaper business--selling papers as a boy on the streets of New York, working for Hearst's New York Journal American, first as a copyboy, then as personal runner for the famous Hearst editor in chief Arthur Brisbane. His film Park Row was inspired by his years as a reporter for the New York Evening Graphic, where his beat included murders, suicides, state executions, and race riots--he scooped every other New York paper with his coverage of the death by drug overdose of the legendary Jeanne Eagels. Fuller talks about directing his first picture (he also wrote the script), I Shot Jesse James . . . and how, as a result, he was sought after by every major studio, choosing to work for Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth Century Fox. We see him becoming one of the most prolific, independent-minded writer-directors, turning out seven pictures in six years, among them Pickup on South Street, House of Bamboo, and China Gate. He writes about making Underworld U.S.A., a movie that shows how gangsters in the 1960s were no longer seen as thugs but as "respected" tax-paying executives . . . about the making of the movie Shock Corridor--about a journalist trying to solve a murder in a lunatic asylum--which exposed the conditions in mental institutions . . . and about White Dog (written in collaboration with Curtis Hanson), a film so controversial that Paramount's then studio heads, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, refused to release it. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Barre VT, Vermont Historical Society, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 232 pages. Foreword by Harold Holzer & Donald H. Wickman. A very well done book on the history of the Union Soldiers of Vermont. B&w photos. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Washington DC, Potomac Books, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 166 pages. The attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the most perplexing cases in living memory of a weaker power seeming to believe that it could vanquish a clearly superior force. On closer inspection, however, Record finds that Japan did not believe it could win; yet, the Japanese imperial command decided to attack the United States anyway. Conventional explanations that Japan's leaders were criminally stupid, wildly deluded, or just plumb crazy don't fully answer all our questions, Record finds. Instead, he argues, the Japanese were driven by an insatiable appetite for national glory and economic security via the conquest of East Asia. The scope of their ambitions and their fear of economic destruction overwhelmed their knowledge that the likelihood of winning was slim and propelled them into a war they were always going to lose. Clean copy.
Softcover. London, Black Dog Publishing, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 190 pages, pictorial wrappers. Now the world's foremost blues, rockabilly, soul and rock 'n' roll reissue label, Ace Records has been responsible for unearthing lost classics and neglected pioneers for over three decades, and provided some of the finest and most influential records of the post-war era. Illustrated with many unseen archive photographs dating back to the 1920s, rare artwork and newspaper clippings. Written by established music journalist and author David Stubbs.
Hardcover. East Sussex, Ammonite Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 300 pages, color and b&w photographs. Hardcover in a very good dust jacket, clean. As pointed out in the introduction by Elizabeth Roberts, this book isn't aiming to be a history of fashion of the past century. It explores the ideas behind it; the influences of clothing by society we live in, and to convey this the outstanding work of the Press Association is used. This book is a visual, eye-watering history that tells the story of how we've become today.The book is split into five chapters followed by a page-to-page picture index.1. FILMSTARS, FULL SKIRTS AND FUR: POST-WAR GLAMOUR2. ROMANCE AND REVOLUTION: 1960's3. FROM THE QUEEN TO POSH: FASHION ICONS4. ON THE STREETS AND IN THE SHOPS: WHAT WE REALLY WORE5. FANTASY AND REALITY: LONDON FASHION WEEK 2008-2009
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A revelatory history of the transformational decade that followed World War II, when Germany raised itself put of the ashes of defeat, turned away from fascism, and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust.
Hardcover. NY, Free Press , 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 464 pages, b&w illustrations. A great but frequently overlooked figure in America during the early decades of the 19th century now gets his due. Military historian Eisenhower (son of the late president) describes a natural leader of imposing stature, overweening pride, exceptional courage, and wide learning, who possessed considerable organizational and diplomatic skills along with outstanding martial instincts. As the nation's youngest general, Scott distinguished himself in the War of 1812, and he was a hero of the Mexican War in the 1840s. After a brilliant campaign fought entirely on foreign soil, he stormed and captured Mexico City despite considerable political maneuvering on the battlefield and the homefront by a variety of influential enemies. In peacetime, he served successfully as a diplomat to the Canadians, the British, the Seminoles, and the Cherokees. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1st, 1951, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Volume VII in The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, 369 pages, illustrated with maps (one fold-out) and b&w photos. Gilt on spine with light fading, lacks dust jacket, otherwise clean, tight copy.
Softcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 283 pages. A particularly vicious and bloody civil war has racked Algeria for a decade. Amnesty International notes that since 1992, in a population of 28 million, 80,000 people have been reported killed, and the actual total is almost certainly higher. This terrible war overshadows Algeria's long and complex history and its prominence on the world economic stage-second in size among African nations, Algeria has the longest Mediterranean coastline and contains the world's fifth-largest natural gas reserves. Algeria, 1830-2000 is a comprehensive narrative history of the country. Benjamin Stora, widely recognized as the leading expert on Algeria, presents the story of this turbulent area from the start of formal French colonialism in the early nineteenth century, through the prolonged war for independence in the latter 1950s, to the internal strife of the present day.This book adapts and updates three short volumes published originally in French by La Decouverte. For this English edition, Stora has written a new introductory chapter on Algeria's colonial period (1830-1954) and has revised the final section to bring the volume up to date.