Hardcover. Barnsley UK, Pen & Sword Books, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 155 pages., b/w plates., maps, index, This remarkable account describes the open warfare Polish Underground fighters waged against the Nazi occupiers of their city-with a shortage of arms, ammunition, and medical support-in the expectation of Soviet assistance that came too late to help the precipitous uprising.
Hardcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pages. In When Buildings Speak,Anthony Alofsin explores the rich yet often overlooked architecture of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states. He shows that several different styles emerged in this milieu during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, he contends that each of these styles communicates to us in a manner resembling language and its particular means of expression. Covering a wide range of buildings--from national theaters to crematoria, apartment buildings to warehouses, and sanatoria to postal savings banks--Alofsin proposes a new way of interpreting this language. He calls on viewers to read buildings in two ways: through their formal elements and through their political, social, and cultural contexts. By looking through Alofsin's eyes, readers can see how myriad nations sought to express their autonomy by tapping into the limitless possibilities of art and architectural styles. And such architecture can still speak very powerfully to us today about the contradictory issues affecting parts of the former Habsburg Empire.
Hardcover. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 178 pages. Dust jacket slightly worn and with short tears. Some foxing on endpages, top edge stained red.
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, 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. 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. 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.
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.