Softcover. Los Angeles, CA, Taschen, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 192 pages. Softcover. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Luis Bunuel, one of the most brilliant representatives of the surrealist movement, chose to make films and was able to make them with unflagging fidelity to his principles for fifty years. After an audacious Parisian showing of Un Chien Andalou in 1929 (Bunuel carried stones in his pockets in case he needed them to fend off the audience), Bunuel's subsequent career in Spain (Las Hurdes), Hollywood and Mexico (Los Olvidados, Robinson Crusoe, El, Nazarin) before returning to France (Diary of a Chambermaid, Belle de jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, That Obscure Object of Desire), showed that the only subjects he cared to make films about were the three that are never supposed to be discussed in polite society: sex, religion, and politics.
Softcover. Spain, Editorial Escudo de Oro. S.A., 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 93 pages. Softcover. Mild soiling throughout. An otherwise unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. Color photographs throughout.
Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, reprint, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 997 pages, color and b&w illustrations. A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world. When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor's envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals-the sack of Magdeburg; the Dutch revolt; the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus; the imperial generals, opportunistic Wallenstein and pious Tilly; and crafty diplomat Cardinal Richelieu. In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict. By war's end a recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at what price? The Thirty Years War condemned the Germans to two centuries of internal division and international impotence and became a benchmark of brutality for centuries. As late as the 1960s, Germans placed it ahead of both world wars and the Black Death as their country's greatest disaster. Clean, bright copy.