Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st pbk, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 282 pages. 113 color plates, 47 in b&w. The painters who came to be known as the Hudson River School - Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and others - found inspiration in our young country's natural wonders and were the first to paint many of its still-wild vistas. As America was settled and the wilderness receded, their successors - most notably Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran - carried their quest for the sublime to the Far West, communicating its breathtaking grandeur in brilliant views of Rocky Mountain peaks, roaring waterfalls, and vast canyons. Within a single generation these artists established the dramatic approach to American landscape painting that is celebrated in this stirringly beautiful book. The freshness of their vision, the intensity of their invention, and the energy of their execution were all born of the urgency these artists sensed in the life of America itself. Clean copy. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
Atgen PA, Schiffer, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 144 pages illustrated in color and b&w. In 1942, Ed Vebell landed with the US Army in North Africa and was recruited by Stars & Stripes, the US armed forces newspaper, as their official staff artist. Daily, he drew illustrations and reported on the progress of World War II throughout Europe. This book offers a selection of his sketches, drawings, paintings, and photographs from that time, and presents one artist's view of the war from North Africa, through the campaigns in Italy, France, and Germany. After the war, the author spent two weeks with the Russians in Berlin, and was then assigned as the courtroom artist during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Along the way are Ed's reminiscences about such personalities as famed war correspondent and artist Bill Mauldin, singers Josephine Baker and Edith Piaf, Charles de Gaulle, Gen. Teddy Roosevelt Jr., and many others. Ed also reminisces about his two years photographing backstage at the Folies Bergere in Paris, as well as his time as an Olympic fencer. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Warner/Amistad, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright. unclipped dust jacket. Wonderful, inspiring stories of dozens of black women in opera and classical music. Features in-depth portrais of such notables as Sissieretta Jones, Elizabeth Taylor-Greenfield, Marie Selika, Marian Anderson, Flora Batson, Dorothy Maynor and many more. 236 pages including index. B&W photos. Inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. "During its first two centuries, opera was dominated by sopranos. There were male sopranos, or castrati, whose supercharged voices (female vocal cords powered by male lungs) were capable of feats of vocalism that are hard to imagine today. And there were female sopranos, or prime donne, whose long battle for social acceptance and top billing was crowned in the early nineteenth century when the castrati disappeared from the opera stage and left them supreme.", "Whether they were male or female, these singers wre amazing vertuosi, perhaps the greatest singers there have ever been - "angels." Unfortunately, some of them (and often the most famous) were also capable of behaving extremely badly, both on and off stage - "monsters." This book tells their colorful stories." Clean copy.
Hardcover. Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 143 pages. An unprecedented look at a moving photographic series that chronicles the gay communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1969 to 1972. For more than forty years, American photographer Anthony Friedkin (b. 1949), creating full-frame black-and-white images, has documented people, cities, and landscapes primarily in his home state of California. During the culturally tumultuous years of 1969 and 1970, Friedkin made a series of photographs that together offer an eloquent and expressive visual chronicle of the gay communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco at the time. This is the first book to explore the series, titled The Gay Essay, in depth, within the broader historical context that gave rise to it. 1969 witnessed the Stonewall riots in New York City and was a turning point in the history of community building and organized political activism among homosexuals in the United States. The Gay Essay provides a singular, intimate record of this crucial moment. Friedkin's portraits, taken in streets, hotels, bars, and dancehalls, demonstrate a sensitivity and an understanding that has imbued the photographs with an enduring resonance. This handsome book features seventy-five full-page plates and is accompanied by engaging essays and a poem by Eileen Myles.
Hardcover. Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 143 pages. An unprecedented look at a moving photographic series that chronicles the gay communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1969 to 1972. For more than forty years, American photographer Anthony Friedkin (b. 1949), creating full-frame black-and-white images, has documented people, cities, and landscapes primarily in his home state of California. During the culturally tumultuous years of 1969 and 1970, Friedkin made a series of photographs that together offer an eloquent and expressive visual chronicle of the gay communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco at the time. This is the first book to explore the series, titled The Gay Essay, in depth, within the broader historical context that gave rise to it. 1969 witnessed the Stonewall riots in New York City and was a turning point in the history of community building and organized political activism among homosexuals in the United States. The Gay Essay provides a singular, intimate record of this crucial moment. Friedkin's portraits, taken in streets, hotels, bars, and dancehalls, demonstrate a sensitivity and an understanding that has imbued the photographs with an enduring resonance. This handsome book features seventy-five full-page plates and is accompanied by engaging essays and a poem by Eileen Myles.
Softcover. New York , Aperture, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. This issue features the work of Raghubir Singh, Raghu Rai, Roaslind Solomon, Linda Connor, Mitch Epstein, Alex Webb and others.
Softcover. NY, Aperture Foundation, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 80 pages. A large, beautifully designed photography publication with many full page photographs in black and white and color. Glossy wraps. Aperture's second Explorations issue presents heretofore undiscovered images by photographers whose work is bound to become widely known. They probe the metaphysical through ritual, invoke dark metaphors in circus performance, find religion in nocturnal deserts, and study the ties that bind. The convergence of these uniquely powerful images and the artists' personal stories provokes an examination of the ever expanding boundaries of contemporary photography.Artists included are Stephen Barker, Neil Folberg, Jill Graham, Kimberly Gremillion, Jan van Leeuwen, Anne Arden McDonald, Andreas Rentsch, Maruch Santiz Gomez, and Dayanita Singh.
Hardcover. NY, Bantam, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 518 pages, b&w illustrations. Appetite for America is the incredible real-life story of Fred Harvey--told in depth for the first time ever--as well as the story of this country's expansion into the Wild West of Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid, of the great days of the railroad, of a time when a deal could still be made with a handshake and the United States was still uniting. As a young immigrant, Fred Harvey worked his way up from dishwasher to household name: He was Ray Kroc before McDonald's, J. Willard Marriott before Marriott Hotels, Howard Schultz before Starbucks. His eating houses and hotels along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad (including historic lodges still in use at the Grand Canyon) were patronized by princes, presidents, and countless ordinary travelers looking for the best cup of coffee in the country. Harvey's staff of carefully screened single young women--the celebrated Harvey Girls--were the country's first female workforce and became genuine Americana, even inspiring an MGM musical starring Judy Garland. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York, HarperCollins, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY ROSENTHAL with sketch of monkey drinking from coconut. Ahoy, landlubbers, prepare yerselves for a rip-roaring adventure . . . with a shipwrecked monkey, a sweet-singing ibis, a ferocious tiger, and a band of rough, smelly, no-good pirates! Coconuts fly, danger lurks, and only one clever monkey can save the day: Archie!
Hardcover. Charlottesville VA, University Press of Virginia, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 553 pages, 348 full-page portraits in b&w. Includes a catalogue of 3,800 silhouettes by the artist. Very good in a crisp, unclipped dust jacket. Auguste Edouart was the most prolific silhouettist ever to work in this country. Arriving from France in 1839, he traveled throughout the United States contracting enough projects in six years to fill over fifty albums; at the same time he created a biographical record of the most famous Americans of the period. This volume contains the most, and the best, of Edouard's silhouettes every to appear under a single cover.
Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly rubbed dust jacket, 560 pages, b&w illustrations. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald's death, music historian Judith Tick draws on deep archival research, family interviews and newly available recordings and concert footage to show how Fitzgerald fused a Black vocal aesthetic with mainstream popular repertoire to revolutionise American music. From Fitzgerald's first audition at the Apollo Theatre to swing-era success at the Savoy, Tick shows how this 'girl singer' broke new ground: as a female bandleader, as a ground-breaking bebop improviser and as the arbiter of the American canon with her Song Book recordings. Yet even as she electrified concert halls and sold millions of records, jazz critics belittled her as 'naive'. Tick reveals instead an ambitious risk-taker with a stunningly diverse repertoire, whose exceptional musical spontaneity (often radically different on stage than in the studio) made her a transformational artist. Remainder dot to top edge otherwise a clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 325 pages. Slight wear to dust jacket, else like new. Overweight Esme Singer eats her way into adolescence--as her beautiful, divorced mother boozes and searches for the perfect man, and her irresponsible father promises the moon but delivers nothing. "Benedict's masterful second novel evokes the anxieties of childhood and adolescence with rare clarity,'' (Publisher's Weekly)
Hardcover. Lanham MD, Rowman & Littlefield , 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 314 pages. A fascinating history of motion pictures through the lens of the Academy Awards, the Best Picture winners, and the box-office contenders. In Best Pick: A Journey through Film History and the Academy Awards, John Dorney, Jessica Regan, and Tom Salinsky provide a captivating decade-by-decade exploration of the Oscars. For each decade, they examine the making of classic films, trends and innovations in cinema, behind-the-scenes scandals at the awards ceremony, and who won and why. Twenty films are reviewed in-depth, alongside ten detailed "making-of" accounts and capsule reviews of every single Best Picture winner in history. In addition, each Best Picture winner is carefully scrutinized to answer the ultimate question: "Did the Academy get it right?" Full of wonderful stories, cogent analysis, and fascinating insights, Best Pick is a witty and enthralling look at the people, politics, movies, and trends that have shaped our cinematic world. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. Hes also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robins emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mothers brain With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and sons ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers' most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet? Powers' thirteenth novel, his first since winning the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Overstory. BEWILDERMENT was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Clean copy.
Hardcover. US, Yale University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 549 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. This book presents a survey of Chinese painting from the eighth to the 14th century, a period during which the nature of China's pictorial art changed dramatically. Illustrated by works in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the author begins by describing the advent toward the end of the Bronze Age of figural representation in Chinese art, and next traces the development of Chinese landscape painting from the third to the tenth century. He then moves on to discuss the art of the Sung dynasty, when the imperial government was increasingly absolute and repressive. In this period artists shifted from a realistic rendition of nature to more symbolic representation of single flowers, rocks and trees. By the time of the Yuan dynasty, following the Mongol conquest of 1279, objective representation in art had been replaced by imagery that drew on the artist's inner response to his world. Because it was believed that the meaning of a painted subject, made complex by personal and symbolic associations, could no longer be expressed without language, the painter began to inscribe poems and incorporate calligraphy in his works, the multiple relationships among word, image and calligraphy forming the basis of a new art. At this stage Chinese art entered its richest and most diverse stage f development.
Hardcover. NY, Praeger Publishers, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 214 pages. Social history on two wheels (sometimes more or less), many b&w pictures, early photographs of the famous Dursley-Pedersen (1893), complete with hammock-saddle; the astonishing Crypto "Bantam" (1895); and the stylish Singer de luxe of the Edwardian period, to name but a few. There is even a photograph of the legendary G.P. Mills on the Humber tricycle aboard which he beat the Land's End to John O'Groats record in 1893. Small owner's stamp on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 328 pages. INSCRIBED BY CO-EDITOR GODELIER on the front fly leaf. The societies of Melanesia have been a constant stimulus to anthropological theory. In this collection of essays, anthropologists who have worked in all parts of the Melanesian region of the Pacific bring their expertise to bear on a single theoretical issue. This is a hypothesis formulated by Maurice Godelier concerning the relationship between power, kinship and wealth. Although tightly focused on Godelier's work, the book opens up a major enquiry into the constitution of society in a part of the world where men of prominence come to personify the nature of power. 'Big men', entrepreneurs of exchanges, and 'great men', who flourish in societies characterized by restricted exchanges and ritual complexity, appear to belong to quite different systems. This book considers how substantial the difference between them really is. Clean copy.
Hardcover. US, Reel Art Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Large heavy book, 448 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. This breathtaking tome is the definitive and comprehensive collection of Billy Name's black-and-white photographs from Warhol's Factory. Name's photographs from this period (1964-68) are one of the most important photographic documents of any single artist in history. Name lived in a tiny closet at the Factory. He was responsible for the legendary "silverizing" of the space using aluminum paint and foil to complete the instillation. When Warhol gave Name a Pentax Honeywell 35mm camera, he took on the role of resident photographer and archivist. This visual essay, produced in collaboration with Billy name, offers an extensive trip through Warhol's world. Name photographed the day-to-day happenings at The Factory with Andy, including visits from Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Ivy Nicholson and Bob Dylan, and filming Screen Tests and features such as Chelsea Girls, Vinyl and My Hustler.
Hardcover. NY, Abrams Comicarts, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 168 pages. B&w art by Wagner Willan. Author Julian Voloj and award-winning illustrator Wagner Willian's Black & White is the first graphic novel biography following the life of Bobby Fischer, from chess wunderkind and national hero to his eventual spiral into madness and infamy. It begins in Brooklyn, where Fischer was born and raised by a single mother. By the time he was a teen, he had established himself as a loner and dropped out of school. But none of that mattered; he had found his true calling--chess. In 1972, Fischer played what many consider "the game of the century" against the Soviet Union's chess champion Boris Spassky at the height of the Cold War. Later, Fischer became the youngest-ever US Chess Champion and the game's youngest grandmaster. Never before had chess received such international attention. Fischer, whose sole focus in life up until then was chess, reached the Olympus of chess at 29, and then . . . he disappeared. Suffering from mental illness, the chess genius became increasingly paranoid, lost in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories--despite the fact that he himself was Jewish--and died as a fugitive in Iceland. Clean copy.
Hardcover. San Antonio TX, Wings Press, reprint, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 208 pages, b&w photos. On October 28, 1959, John Howard Griffin underwent a transformation that changed many lives beyond his own he made his skin black and traveled through the segregated Deep South. His odyssey of discovery was captured in journal entries, arguably the single most important documentation of 20th-century American racism ever written. More than 50 years later, this newly edited edition which is based on the original manuscript and includes a new design and added afterword gives fresh life to what is still considered a contemporary book. The story that earned respect from civil rights leaders and death threats from many others endures today as one of the great human and humanitarian documents of the era. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Foreword by Michael Connelly. 414 pages. In 2010, Ted Geltner drove to Gainesville, Florida, to pay a visit to Harry Crews and ask the legendary author if he would be willing to be the subject of a literary biography. His health rapidly deteriorating, Crews told Geltner he was on board and would even sit for interviews and tell his stories one last time. Ask me anything you want, bud, Crews said. But you'd better do it quick. The result is Blood, Bone, and Marrow, the first full-length biography of one of the most unlikely figures in twentieth-century American literature, a writer who emerged from a dirt-poor South Georgia tenant farm and went on to create a singularly unique voice of fiction. With books such as Scar Lover, Body, and Naked in Garden Hills, Crews opened a new window into southern life, focusing his lenson the poor and disenfranchised, the people who skinned the hogs and tended the fields, the grits, as Crews affectionately called his characters and himself. Clean copy.
Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 141 pages. This volume contains the essential points of Jean Bodin's theory of sovereignty, a landmark in legal theory and royalist ideology. The four chapters presented form the core of Bodin's classic work, Six Livres de la Republique. Bodin was primarily responsible for introducing the seductive but erroneous notion that sovereignty is indivisible, that the entire power of the state had to be vested in a single individual or group. This thesis, combined with the prevailing crisis of authority during the French religious wars, led Bodin to a systematically absolutist interpretation of the French and other European monarchies. This is the first complete translation of this material into English since 1606, and is accompanied by a lucid introduction, chronology, and bibliography. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 495 pages. Boogaloo--the synonym of choice among the cognoscenti for rhythm and blues--is a stylish and profound meditation on the art, influence, and commerce of black American popular music. At once deeply knowing and keenly observant, Arthur Kempton reveals the tensions between the sacred and the profane at the heart of "soul music," and the complex centrality of "Aframericans" in the evolution of our mass musical culture. What that culture is all about, who owns it, and who gets paid--these are issues of moment in his epic narrative. Kempton brilliantly traces the interconnections among a century's worth of signal personalities, events, and achievements: from Thomas A. Dorsey, the so-called Father of Gospel Music, whose career ("Got to Know How to Work Your Show") sheds light on Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown, among others, to the rise of that "handsome Negro lad," Sam Cooke (perhaps the greatest of soul singers) and his definitive crossover dreams; from Berry Gordy Jr.'s infatuation with Doris Day and his sharp business plan to capture and exploit the sounds of young America through Motown ("It's What's in the Grooves That Counts") to the founding of Stax Records and Memphis Soul by a white farm kid who grew up dreaming of being a country fiddler; from the visionary funk of George Clinton to the ascendancy of hip hop ("Sharecropping in Wonderland"), the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, and the story of Death Row Records. Clean copy.