Hardcover. NY, New York University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 267 pages. A compelling true story of how a maid's daughter moves from a girlhood of rage and resentment to a level of empowerment, as a grown woman. Clean copy.
Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, reprint, 1987, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 242 pages. Scholars have only recently discovered that the human body itself has a history. Not only has it been perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, but it has also been lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimilar material cultures, subjected to various technologies and means of control, and incorporated into different rhythms of production and consumption, pleasure and pain. The eight articles in this volume support, supplement, and explore the significance of these insights. They belong to a new historical endeavor that derives partly from the crossing of historical with anthropological investigations, partly from social historians' deepening interest in culture, partly from the thematization of the body in modern philosophy (especially phenomenology), and partly from the emphasis on gender, sexuality, and women's history that large numbers of feminist scholars have brought to all disciplines. Lightly worn copy, clean, solid binding.
Hardcover. NY, St Martin's Press, 1st US, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with sun fading to spine, 220 pages, b&w illustrations. Jack Lindsay uses Defoe's detailed journalism & other contemporary writings to create a striking picture of London in a tumultuous age. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1964, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 96 pages, illustrated wraps. A documentation and moving tribute to the Civil Rights activists of the 1960s, many b&w photographs by Danny Lyons. Stated First Printing. Wrappers have chipping, rubbing. Lorraine Hansberry, best known for her award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun, contributed the text.
Softcover. New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1st pbk, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 154 pages. Michael Harrington was a political scientist and activist best known for The Other America, an examination of poverty in the midst of affluence in the U.S. Here, he reexamines the state of the U.S. twenty years after his landmark book. Bob Adelman is a respected photojournalist, b&w photos throughout; 11 x 8.5 inches. SIGNED BY ADELMAN. "Adelman has moved beyond the familiar cliches of most documentary photography into that rare sphere wherein technical ability and social vision combine to create a great work of art." Quote by Ralph Ellison.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 541 pages. b&w illustrations. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among John-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the 'white negro' and Black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 425 pages, b&w illustrations. The word "prison" immediately evokes stark images: forbidding walls spiked with watchtowers; inmates confined to cramped cells for hours on end; the suspicious eyes of armed guards. They seem to be the inevitable and permanent marks of confinement, as though prisons were a timeless institution stretching from medieval stone dungeons to the current era of steel boxes. But centuries of development and debate lie behind the prison as we now know it--a rich history that reveals how our ideas of crime and practices of punishment have changed over time. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Malden MA, Blackwell , 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 311 pages, b&w illustrations. A succinct narrative of Iranian history from the time of Cyrus the Great in 558 BC to the present day. The book traces events from the rise of the Persian empire, through competition with Rome and conquest by the Arabs, through to the re-establishment of a Persian state in the sixteenth century, and finally the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the establishment of the current Islamic Republic. For each period, the author utilizes the most recent scholarship in order to examine Iran's political, social, and cultural history. He presents this history within an analytical framework which focuses on rulership as the central theme of identity for Iranians. He also considers the part played in Iranian identity by land, political culture, religion, and the arts. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, W W Norton & Co., 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 281 pages, minor dust jacket edge wear and foxing on edges, otherwise, very clean and tight copy. A brilliant, daring, and utterly original book that analyzes (even as it exemplifies) the effect that the image saturation of a hundred years of moving pictures have had on human culture and consciousness.
Hardcover. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul , 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 366 pages. This book concerns itself with the different ways in which money is used, the relationships which then arise, and the institutions concerned in maintaining its various functions. Thomas Crump examines the emergence of institutions with familiar and distinctive monetary roles: the state, the market and the banking system. However, other uses of money - such as for gambling or the payment of fines - are also taken into account, in an exhaustive, encyclopedic treatment of the subject, which extends far beyond the range of conventional treatises on money. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 276 pages. Are there any commonalities between such phenomena as soccer hooliganism, sabotage by peasants of landlords' property, road rage, and even the events of September 11? With striking historical scope and command of the literature of many disciplines, this book seeks the common causes of these events in collective violence. In collective violence, social interaction immediately inflicts physical damage, involves at least two perpetrators of damage, and results in part from coordination among the persons who perform the damaging acts. Charles Tilly argues that collective violence is complicated, changeable, and unpredictable in some regards, yet also results from similar causes variously combined in different times and places. Pinpointing the causes, combinations, and settings helps to explain collective violence and also helps to identify the best ways to mitigate violence and create democracies with a minimum of damage to persons and property. Clean copy.
Hardcover. UK, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1st, 1971, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn yellow dust jacket with sunning to spine, 201 pages. Some pencil underlining to about 20 pages. Some b&w photos.
Hardcover. Oxford UK, Clarendon Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 412 pages including index. Dispelling the general assumption that social institutions survive because of their sophisticated adaptive advantages, this ground-breaking work asserts that the commonest customs and institutions may endure because of their very simplicity or as a result of simple human proclivity. Usingreligious, military, and kinship institutions to illustrate this argument, the author shows that a precise combination of these factors may lead to the emergence of new forms of social evolution. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 3rd pr., 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 369 pages. Evans "tells of his grandparents' debate to leave Lithuania for America, the first few years in the Baltimore slums, and their decision to gamble on the South. He writes about the family store, and describes his boyhood in Durham, in the North Carolina tobacco belt, where his father was mayor from 1950 to 1962 during the stormiest years of the Civil Rights era. " Also a history of earlier German & Sephardic Jewish communities in the South & the role of Southern Jews in the Civil War & Reconstruction. Previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Review slip laid-in. During the summer before her senior year, a Catholic girl runs away from her well-meaning but narrow-minded mother to live with a sociology professor she saw on television. But life there has complications, too. Clean copy.
Softcover. London/NY, Verso, 1st, 1990, Softcover, 397 pages. In this acclaimed historical study, Alexander Saxton establishes the centrality of white racism to American politics and culture. Examining images of race at a popular level - from blackface minstrels to the construction of the Western hero, from grassroots political culture to dime novels - as well as the philosophical constructions of the political elite, it is a powerful and comprehensive account of the ideological forces at work in the formation of modern America. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 2nd pr., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 261 pages, previous owner's signature on front fly leaf. "Evil is the most serious of our moral problems. All over the world cruelty, greed, prejudice, and fanaticism ruin the lives of countless victims. Outrage provokes outrage. Millions nurture seething hatred of real or imagined enemies, revealing savage and destructive tendencies in human nature. Understanding this challenges our optimistic illusions about the effectiveness of reason and morality in bettering human lives. But abandoning these illusions is vitally important because they are obstacles to countering the threat of evil. The aim of this book is to explain why people act in these ways and what can be done about it." The first part of this book is a detailed discussion of six horrible cases of evil: the Albigensian Crusade of about 1210; Robespierre's Terror of 1793?94; Franz Stangl, who commanded a Nazi death camp in 1943?44; the 1969 murders committed by Charles Manson and his "family"; the "dirty war" conducted by the Argentinean military dictatorship of the late 1970s; and the activities of a psychopath named John Allen, who recorded reminiscences in 1975. John Kekes includes these examples not out of sensationalism, but rather to underline the need to hold vividly in our minds just what evil is. The second part shows why, in Kekes's view, explanations of evil inspired by Christianity and the Enlightenment fail to account for these cases and then provides an original explanation of evil in general and of these instances of it in particular.
Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 286 pages, b&w illustrations. This book examines the sense of smell in humans, comparing it with the known functions of the same sense in other animals. Odorous cues play a role in sexual physiology and behavior in animals and there are claims that odor can play the same role in humans. The place of odors and scents in aesthetics and in psychoanalysis serves to illustrate the link between the emotional centers and the brain. The book presents arguments to explain the way in which our ancestral past has given rise to our modern day olfactory enigmas. Contains a glossary and chapter summaries. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a unclipped dust jacket with fading to spine, 260 pages. This fascinating and unusual book tells the story of an arguably catastrophic German habit - that of valuing cultural achievement above all else and envisioning it as a noble substitute for politics. Lepenies examines how this tendency has affected German history from the late eighteenth century to today. He argues that the German preference for art over politics is essential to understanding the peculiar nature of Nazism, including its aesthetic appeal to many Germans (and others) and the fact that Hitler and many in his circle were failed artists and intellectuals who seem to have practiced their politics as a substitute form of art. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 335 pages. In a society where trust is in short supply and democracy weak, the Mafia sells protection, a guarantee of safe conduct for parties to commercial transactions. Drawing on the confessions of eight Mafiosi, Diego Gambetta develops an elegant analysis of the economic and political role of the Sicilian Mafia. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 399 pages. Citing newly uncovered archival sources, Simpson first argues that Hitler emulated the Turkish government's 1915-1918 policy regarding the massacre of the Armenians by offering economic incentives and other rewards to citizens willing to participate in the extermination of the Jews. He then examines the Us Government's response to both genocidal campaigns. Of utmost interest is the evidence he presents that President Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and Dulles' brother Allen, director of the CIA, deliberately stymied efforts to bring to justice many German bankers and industrialists involved in the Nazis' extermination-through-labor programs. The study leaves little doubt that many members of Germany's corporate elite not only were aware of the genocidal programs during the war but sponsored innumerable supplementary side camps staffed by company employees. Simpson argues that while genocide is still widely practiced today, it is usually tolerated by those who benefit from it through the theft of land and natural resources.
Softcover. Madras, Government Press, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Heavy gray paper wraps, 158 pages. 12 plates of b/w photographs. A complete survey of the origin and development of the Brahmanas as well as an authoritative exposition of their liturgical codes and an accurate account of their cultural life. This work also deals with Vaishnavism of south India. Azhvars, Acharyas, Ramanuja, Visistadvaita philosophy, cardinal principles of Sri Vaishnavism. Some interesting illustrations enhance the beauty of this volume. Light wear to wrappers, clean copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press , 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, blue clith with gilt lettering on spine, 328 pages. Dr Moore's enterprising book focuses on an apparent paradox: the failure of Sri Lanka's highly politicized smallholder electorate to place on the national political agenda issues relating to the public distribution of material resources. Sri Lanka has more than fifty years' history of pluralist democracy and such issues directly affect the interests of the smallholder population. Yet successive Sri Lankan governments have pursued economic policies favouring food consumers and the state itself at the expense of agricultural producers. In exploring the features of Sri Lanka's history, geography, politics and economy which explain this paradox, the author looks in detail at some of the dominant features of contemporary Sri Lanka: the political consequences of the plantation experience; the persistence of elite political leadership; and the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict. Clean copy, paper tanning slightly.