Search results for ""University of California Press""
University of California Press From a Trickle to a Torrent: Education, Migration, and Social Change in a Himalayan Valley of Nepal
What happens to a community when the majority of young people leave their homes to pursue an education? From a Trickle to a Torrent documents the demographic and social consequences of educational migration from Nubri, a Tibetan enclave in the highlands of Nepal. The authors explore parents’ motivations for sending their children to distant schools and monasteries, social connections that shape migration pathways, young people’s estrangement from village life, and dilemmas that arise when educated individuals are unable or unwilling to return and reside in their native villages. Drawing on numerous decades of research, this study documents a transitional period when the future of a Himalayan society teeters on the brink of irreversible change.
£30.00
University of California Press Global East Asia: Into the Twenty-First Century
Home to a rapidly rising superpower and the two largest economies in the world after the US, a global East Asia is seen and felt everywhere. This dynamic text views the global square from the perspective of the world’s most important rising global center. East Asia’s global impact is built on a dizzying combination: a strong and deep civilizational self-consciousness fused with hypermodernity, wealth, influence, and power, which have made the region a beacon for the world and an alternative to the West. Short, accessible essays by prominent experts on the region cover the core of East Asian—Japan, China, and Korea—as well as Mongolia and Taiwan. Topics include contemporary culture, artistic production, food, science, economic development, digital issues, education and research, and international collaboration. Students will glean new perspectives about the region using the insights of global studies.
£30.00
University of California Press Between Families and Frankenstein: The Politics of Egg Donation in the United States
In the United States, egg donation for reproduction and egg donation for research involve the same procedures, the same risks, and the same population of donors—disadvantaged women at the intersections of race and class. Yet cultural attitudes and state-level policies regarding egg donation are dramatically different depending on whether the donation is for reproduction or for research. Erin Heidt-Forsythe explores the ways that framing egg donation itself creates diverse politics in the United States, which, unlike other Western democracies, has no centralized method of regulating donations, relying instead on market forces and state legislatures to regulate egg donation and reproductive technologies. Beginning with a history of scientific research around the human egg, the book connects historical debates about the “natural” (reproduction) and “unnatural” (research) uses of women’s eggs to contemporary political regulation of egg donation. Examining egg donation in California, New York, Arizona, and Louisiana and coupled with original data on how egg donation has been regulated over the last twenty years, this book is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the politics of egg donation across the United States.
£71.00
University of California Press God and the Green Divide: Religious Environmentalism in Black and White
American environmentalism historically has been associated with the interests of white elites. Yet religious leaders in the twenty-first century have helped instill concern about the earth among groups diverse in religion, race, ethnicity, and class. How did that happen and what are the implications? Building on scholarship that provides theological and ethical resources to support the "greening" of religion, God and the Green Divide examines religious environmentalism as it actually happens in the daily lives of urban Americans. Baugh demonstrates how complex dynamics related to race, ethnicity, and class factor into decisions to "go green." By carefully examining negotiations of racial and ethnic identities as central to the history of religious environmentalism, this work complicates assumptions that religious environmentalism is a direct expression of theology, ethics, or religious beliefs.
£25.00
University of California Press The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930-1951
Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters in this essential volume are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction by German studies scholar Adrian Daub that contextualizes the impact these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.
£30.00
University of California Press Life without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay
Life without Lead examines the social, political, and environmental dimensions of a devastating lead poisoning epidemic. Drawing from a political ecology of health perspective, the book situates the Uruguayan lead contamination crisis in relation to neoliberal reform, globalization, and the resurgence of the political Left in Latin America. The author traces the rise of an environmental social justice movement, and the local and transnational circulation of environmental ideologies and contested science. Through fine-grained ethnographic analysis, this book shows how combating contamination intersected with class politics, explores the relationship of lead poisoning to poverty, and debates the best way to identify and manage an unprecedented local environmental health problem.
£80.00
University of California Press Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction
Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction offers a fresh and revealing assessment of the artist’s prolific and innovative painterly career. The comprehensive exhibition and accompanying catalogue will feature approximately seventy paintings and works on paper by Hofmann from 1930 through the end of his life in 1966, including works from public and private collections across North America and Europe. Curator Lucinda Barnes builds on new scholarship published over the past ten years and the 2014 catalogue raisonné to present Hofmann as a unique synthesis of student, artist, teacher, and mentor who transcended generations and continents. His singular artistic achievement drew on artistic influences and innovations that spanned two world wars and transatlantic avant-gardes. Over the last fifty years Hofmann has come to be understood primarily from the vantage of his late color-plane abstractions. Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction expands our understanding and reinvigorates our appreciation of Hofmann through an inclusive presentation of his artistic arc, showing the vibrant interconnectedness and continuity in his work of European and American influences from the early twentieth century through the advent of abstract expressionism. Published in association with the Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Exhibition dates: Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA): February 27–July 21, 2019 The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA: September 21, 2019–January 6, 2020
£41.40
University of California Press Technologies for Intuition: Cold War Circles and Telepathic Rays
Since the Cold War, Americans and Russians alike have cultivated a special fascination with the workings and failures of communication. Each has accused the other of media jamming and propaganda, posed competing claims to expression and creativity, and even released mirroring rumors of telepathic connections and interstellar contacts. Technologies for Intuition explores the ways in which people hone techniques to discern and describe channels and contacts, including those that seem weak and failed, or blocked and invisible. Specifically, it explores stagings of communicative "energy" through paranormal experiments in telepathy, drills to build theatrical empathy, and other phenomena. The author examines settings where media and performance professionals encounter neophytes, where insiders mix with foreigners, and where skeptics debate naifs. Moving back and forth across geopolitical borders, the book shows how the phenomena at hand have developed through historical events and relations, in conflict and in conversation. The author suggests that Cold War preoccupations and strategies have marked theoretical models of communication and mediation, even while infusing everyday, practical technologies for intuition.
£30.00
University of California Press Reproductive Justice: An Introduction
Reproductive Justice is a first-of-its-kind primer that provides a comprehensive yet succinct description of the field. Written by two legendary scholar-activists, Reproductive Justice introduces students to an intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender politics. Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger put the lives and lived experience of women of color at the center of the book and use a human rights analysis to show how the discussion around reproductive justice differs significantly from the pro-choice/anti-abortion debates that have long dominated the headlines and mainstream political conflict. Arguing that reproductive justice is a political movement of reproductive rights and social justice, the authors illuminate, for example, the complex web of structural obstacles a low-income, physically disabled woman living in West Texas faces as she contemplates her sexual and reproductive intentions. In a period in which women's reproductive lives are imperiled, Reproductive Justice provides an essential guide to understanding and mobilizing around women's human rights in the twenty-first century. Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the Twenty-First Century publishes works that explore the contours and content of reproductive justice. The series will include primers intended for students and those new to reproductive justice as well as books of original research that will further knowledge and impact society. Learn more at www.ucpress.edu/go/reproductivejustice.
£26.60
University of California Press Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell
Americans, on average, spend between six and ten seconds with individual artworks in museums or galleries-hardly time enough. But how, in our culture of distraction, might we extend attention? Slow Art models sustained ways of looking, through encounters with various media both present and past-including photography, painting, sculpture, "living pictures," film, video, digital and performance art-even light and space. Works by Diderot, Emma Hamilton, Oscar Wilde, Jeff Wall, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Andy Warhol, and Richard Serra, among others, shape a new and distinct aesthetic field. But rather than a collection of objects, slow art is participatory-it directly engages beholders to bring artworks to life. Against current orthodoxy, Arden Reed argues that, for contemporary viewers, the contemplation of slow art is akin to religious practices during the ages of faith.
£50.00
University of California Press The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science, and Culture
This lively book sweeps across dramatic and varied terrains - volcanoes and glaciers, billabongs and canyons, prairies and rain forests - to explore how humans have made sense of our planet's marvelous landscapes. In a rich weave of scientific, cultural, and personal stories, "The Face of the Earth" examines mirages and satellite images, swamp-dwelling heroes and Tibetan nomads, cave paintings and popular movies, investigating how we live with the great shaping forces of nature - from fire to changing climates and the intricacies of adaptation. The book illuminates subjects as diverse as the literary life of hollow Earth theories, the links between the Little Ice Age and Frankenstein's monster, and the spiritual allure of deserts and their scarce waters. Including vivid, on-the-spot accounts by scientists and writers in Saudi Arabia, Australia, Alaska, England, the Rocky Mountains, Antarctica, and elsewhere, "The Face of the Earth" charts the depth and complexity of our interdependence with the natural world.
£58.00
University of California Press Deeply into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage
Over the past two decades, North Americans have become increasingly interested in understanding and reclaiming the rites that mark significant life passages. In the absence of meaningful rites of passage, we speed through the dangerous intersections of life and often come to regret missing an opportunity to contemplate a child's birth, mark the arrival of maturity, or meditate on the loss of a loved one. Providing a highly personal, thoroughly informed, and cross-cultural perspective on rites of passage for general readers, this book illustrates the power of rites to help us navigate life's troublesome transitions. The work of a major scholar who has spent years writing and teaching about ritual, "Deeply into the Bone" instigates a conversation in which readers can fruitfully reflect on their own experiences of passage.Covering the significant life events of birth, initiation, marriage, and death, chapters include first-person stories told by individuals who have undergone rites of passage, accounts of practices from around the world, brief histories of selected ritual traditions, and critical reflections probing popular assumptions about ritual. The book also explores innovative rites for other important events such as beginning school, same-sex commitment ceremonies, abortion, serious illness, divorce, and retirement. Taking us confidently into the abyss separating the spiritual from the social scientific, the personal from the scholarly, and the narrative from the analytical, Grimes synthesizes an impressive amount of information to help us find more insightful ways of comprehending life's great transitions. As we face our increasingly complex society, "Deeply into the Bone" will help us reclaim the power of rites and understand their effect on our lives.
£27.00
University of California Press Reptiles and Amphibians of the Pacific Islands: A Comprehensive Guide
The Pacific is not only the world's largest body of water; its vast expanse also includes an extraordinary number and diversity of oceanic islands, from Palau and the Marianas east of the Philippines to Cocos Island and the Galapagos west of the Americas. The isolation of these islands and the extreme distances between them long prevented scientists from studying their floras and faunas in a comparative context. But now George R. Zug, one of the world's foremost experts on the diverse reptiles and amphibians of the Pacific Basin, offers the first such systematic overview in more than half a century. Reptiles and Amphibians of the Pacific Islands is a compendium of frogs, lizards, snakes, and turtles living on these lands and in the adjacent waters of the oceanic islands in the tropical Pacific. The means to identify each species is included, along with entries that describe each animal's form, coloration, habitat, distribution, reproductive biology, and natural history. Color plates of more than 75 percent of the species also help to facilitate visual identification. This accessible and informative guide is the most comprehensive field guide available and will appeal to both novice sightseers and professional naturalists.
£27.00
University of California Press A History of Ethiopia
In this eminently readable, concise history of Ethiopia, Harold Marcus surveys the evolution of the oldest African nation from prehistory to the present. For the updated edition, Marcus has written a new preface, two new chapters, and an epilogue, detailing the development and implications of Ethiopia as a Federal state and the war with Eritrea.
£27.00
University of California Press Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture
"Adventures in Yiddishland" examines the transformation of Yiddish in the six decades since the Holocaust, tracing its shift from the language of daily life for millions of Jews to what the author terms a postvernacular language of diverse and expanding symbolic value. With a thorough command of modern Yiddish culture, as well as its centuries-old history, Jeffrey Shandler investigates the remarkable diversity of contemporary encounters with the language. His study traverses the broad spectrum of people who engage with Yiddish - from Hasidim to avant-garde performers, Jews as well as non-Jews, fluent speakers, as well as those who know little or no Yiddish - in communities across the Americas, in Europe, Israel, and other outposts of "Yiddishland."
£24.30
University of California Press At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology
Nature writing, as Thoreau knew, can be deeply subversive because it points to ways of living that diverge fundamentally from dominant attitudes. Thoreau would have welcomed these essays by America's most important nature writers, for in exploring our intrinsic relationship with the earth, they also consider our alienation from nature and how that alienation is manifested. The book's principal focus is on the possibilities of being at home on the earth: finding place, reinhabitation, and becoming native. The collection begins with essays by N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, who accentuate the links between culture and nature. Other essays speak to the loss of place and to being stewards of nature and of bioregionalism, nativeness, and of interdependent communities, be they in rural areas or urban neighborhoods. Several essays address how our current ideologies of growth and individualism run counter to a sustainable relationship to the land and to each other. In the final three essays, Gary Snyder critiques various views of nature, Alice Walker articulates a vision of a responsive universe, and Linda Hogan celebrates the interaction of nature and human habitation. The contributors' views, writings, and contexts are variegated, but all share a sense that human identity is intimately tied to the land one lives on. And as in an ecosystem, the collection's great diversity yields abundant riches. At Home on the Earth represents the cutting edge of environmental thinking in the United States today. Throughout, the interactions between humans and nature convey a politics of hope, one sustained by faith in place itself. As Gary Snyder writes, 'We are all indigenous to this planet, this mosaic of wild gardens we are being called by nature and history to reinhabit in good spirit'.
£26.00
University of California Press The Creative Process: Reflections on the Invention in the Arts and Sciences
This unique anthology brings together material from 38 well-known writers, artists, and scientists who attempt to describe the process by which original ideas come to them. Contributors include Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Amy Lowell, Rudyard Kipling, Max Ernst, Katherine Anne Porter, Henry Miller, Carl Gustav Jung, Mary Wigman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Henri Poincare and many others.
£25.00
University of California Press Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine, and Psychiatry
From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman:Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered in field research in Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, from materials gathered in similar research in Boston. The reader will find this book contains a dialectical tension between two reciprocally related orientations: it is both a cross-cultural (largely anthropological) perspective on the essential components of clinical care and a clinical perspective on anthropological studies of medicine and psychiatry. That dialectic is embodied in my own academic training and professional life, so that this book is a personal statement. I am a psychiatrist trained in anthropology. I have worked in library, field, and clinic on problems concerning medicine and psychiatry in Chinese culture. I teach cross-cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, but I also practice and teach consultation psychiatry and take a clinical approach to my major cross-cultural teaching and research involvements. The theoretical framework elaborated in this book has been applied to all of those areas; in turn, they are used to illustrate the theory. Both the theory and its application embody the same dialectic. The purpose of this book is to advance both poles of that dialectic: to demonstrate the critical role of social science (especially anthropology and cross-cultural studies) in clinical medicine and psychiatry and to encourage study of clinical problems by anthropologists and other investigators involved in cross-cultural research.
£26.10
University of Texas Press Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580–1822
Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil was originally published by the University of California Press in 1992. Alida Metcalf has written a new preface for this first paperback edition.
£23.39
Skinner House Books A Documentary History of Unitarian Universalism, Volume 2: From 1900 to the Present
Dan McKanan is the Emerson Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of five books, most recently Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition (Beacon Press, 2011) and Eco-Alchemy: Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy and the Environmental Movement (University of California Press, 2017). A member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Medford, he lives with his spouse and daughter in Somerville, Massachusetts.
£16.95
James Currey General History of Africa volume 5 [pbk abridged]: Africa from the 16th to the 18th Century
SPECIAL COMMENDATION in Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. The series is illustrated throughout with maps and black and white photographs. A history of Africa from the 16th to the 18th centuries, this study concentrates on the continuing evolution of African states and cultures, the increase in external trade, and the consequences of the slave trade. The seriesis co-published in Africa with seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCO Press.
£29.99
James Currey General History of Africa volume 8 [pbk unabridged]: Africa since 1935
SPECIAL COMMENDATION in Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. The series is illustrated throughout with maps and black and white photographs. Africa has moved from international conflict under foreign domination to struggles for political sovereignty and economic independence. Looking at the changes in Africa's fortunes since 1935, this volume examines the challenges ofnation-building and socio-cultural changes affecting the continent. The series is co-published in Africa with seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCO Press.
£29.99
Zephyr Press The Boy Who Catches Wasps: Selected Poetry of Duo Duo
Duo Duo is the same generation as Bei Dao, and was likewise heavily involved in restarting the anthology of Chinese literature, “Today.” Duo Duo is the proverbial “poets’ poet,” and a major collection of his work has not previously appeared due to the complexity of his verse. This book was originally accepted by the University of California Press, but the editor who accepted the MS departed, and Eliot Weinberger helped me to extricate it from their vaults. ND had originally hoped to do a book of Duo Duo’s, but after Laughlin’s death, less enthusiasm existed for new Chinese literature in the ND line.
£13.66
James Currey Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social and Cultural History
Demonstrates the reciprocal influences between Christianity and politics throughout South African history. Almost three-quarters of South Africans in the late-1990s call themselves Christians. From colonial times, when missionaries embroiled themselves in frontier conflicts, until recently, when both defenders and opponents of apartheid draw heavily upon Christian doctrine and ritual, Christian impulses have shaped South Africa. North America: University of California Press; South Africa: David Philip/New Africa Books
£24.99
Wave Books Touché
With a mix of political commentary and lyricism in a range of forms, Touche evokes an adrenaline rush as the reader is swept up into Rod Smith's unique blend of humor. I am no I I slight I've taught myself to unwrite & then wreathed, saturate, blank the severed glinting worlds rebelieve or they all access overall not-so, a not-so lucid, a lucid one, the squirrels that I live there ^.^ ~ alright then, alright mr squirrel there, yep. Rod Smith edits the journal Aerial, publishes Edge Books, and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. Smith co-edited The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, (University of California Press, 2014).
£13.97
James Currey General History of Africa volume 6 [pbk abridged]: Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s
SPECIAL COMMENDATION in Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. The series is illustrated throughout with maps and black and white photographs. Covers the major forces at work in African society at the beginning of the 19th century until the onset of the European scramble for colonial territory in the 1880s. This study also looks at Africa's changing role in the world economy, and the effects of the abolition of the slave trade. The series is co-published in Africa with seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCOPress.
£24.99
James Currey General History of Africa volume 4 [pbk abridged]: Africa from the 12th to the 16th Century
SPECIAL COMMENDATION in Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. The series is illustrated throughout with maps and black and white photographs. The twelfth to the sixteenth centuries constitute a crucial phase in the continent's history, and a period in which written records became more common. The period covered by this volume has several major themes: the triumph of Islam; the extension of trading relations; cultural exchanges and human contacts; and the development of kingdoms and empires. The series is co-published in Africa with seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCO Press.
£24.99
James Currey General History of Africa volume 1 [pbk abridged]: Methodology and African Prehistory
SPECIAL COMMENDATION in Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. The series is illustrated throughout with maps and black and white photographs. Assesses the importance attached by African societies to their past and the growth and development of African historiography. This is followed by accounts of the primary literary sources, the oral and living traditions and Africanarchaeology and its techniques. There are further chapters on linguistics, migrations and historical geography before the second part of the book which deals specifically with earliest man and the prehistory of Africa according to geographical area. Specific chapters are also devoted to prehistoric art, agricultural techniques and the development of metallurgy. The series is co-published in Africa with seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCO Press.
£24.99
Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies,US Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (1974): A Bibliographic Supplement to 2016
Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theoryfrom Saint Augustine to the Renaissance was first published in 1974 by the University of California Press and won the national book award of the Speech Communication Association. It has since been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Polish. In 2001 it, along with its companion anthology, Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, was reprinted by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), and remains in print. In the more than four decades since the book first appeared, a vast number of studies of medieval rhetoric have appeared and the field has advanced enormously. This Bibliographic Supplement allows readers to survey scholarly developments since 1974. It is organized into four chapters following the four sections of the original book: ancient rhetoric and its continuations, ars dictaminis, arts of poetry and prose, and ars praedicandi. Each chapter consists of a bibliographic essay discussing key works since 1974 in context and a bibliography specific to that chapter’s subject.
£53.00
Peeters Publishers The King's Crown: Essays on XVIIIth and XIXth Century Literature, Art, and History honoring Basil J. Guy
Basil Guy is Professor Emeritus of French, University of California, Berkeley. A decorated World War II veteran, he is the author of several books and editions, including an outstanding translation of Charles-Joseph de Ligne «Coup d'oeil sur Beloeil» (University of California Press, 1986). His work reflects a wide variety of academic interests, ranging from Voltaire and Rousseau to art history and the literature of gardens, to European perceptions of China in the 18th century. He has directed and participated in directing numerous theses and dissertations in French, history, and art history at the University of California, Berkeley. He has forged enduring academic and intellectual friendships across both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. His former students teach at universities across the United States.
£55.29
James Currey Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe
Lan shows that to understand the meaning that Zimbabwe's war of independence had for its people, the role of the spirit mediums must also be understood. Almost every anti-colonial struggle in the 20th century was led by an army of guerrillas, and no such struggle has succeeded without cooperation between the guerrillas and the local peasantry. This book examines what such 'cooperation' meant in the context of Zimbabwe's war of independence between 1966 and 1980 when hundreds of thousands of peasants provided the guerrillas with practical help and support. But throughout the country scores of spirit mediumsalso gave active support to the resistance, and with their help the scale of the war expanded into an astonishing act of collaboration between ancestors and their descendants, the past and the present, the living and the dead. North America: University of California Press
£24.99
Heyday Books Hansen's Field Guide to the Birds of the Sierra Nevada
Delight in the Sierra Nevada’s diverse avifauna with this long-awaited field guide.Identify and learn about over two hundred and fifty birds of the Sierra Nevada. From tiniest hummingbirds to condors with nine-foot wingspans; from lower-elevation wrens to the rasping nutcrackers of the High Sierra; from urban House Sparrows to wild water–loving American Dippers, Hansen’s Field Guide to the Birds of the Sierra Nevada showcases artist-naturalist Keith Hansen’s sixteen-year project to illustrate the birds of the Sierra Nevada. Paired with stunningly detailed portraits is text informed by decades of birding experience—prose that while firmly grounded in expertise will nonetheless delight readers with its whimsy, allusion, and affection. Take the Bufflehead: "A diminutive and endearing diving duck," which moves "with spirited abandon." Or the "scrappy and antagonistic" Merlin, "holding dominion over winter skies, tormenting eagles, hawks, and vultures alike." The White-tailed Kite is "angelic in poise, a streamlined bird of unblemished tailoring"; the Blue-gray Gnatcatcher sports a black eye-to-eye brow, imparting a "Frida Kahlo–like stare." This book is the field guide companion to the Birds of the Sierra Nevada: Their Natural History, Status, and Distribution, also coauthored by Edward C. Beedy and illustrated by Keith Hansen (University of California Press, 2013).
£19.99
James Currey General History of Africa volume 3 [pbk abridged]: Africa from the 7th to the 11th Century
SPECIAL COMMENDATION in Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. The series is illustrated throughout with maps and black and white photographs. The period covered by Volume 3 is dominated by two movements of major and lasting significance in the history of Africa: the influence of Islam in the north and west, interacting with traditional African culture; and the Bantu expansion in the south. The book first places Africa in the context of world history at the opening of the seventh century. Detailed chapters follow discussing the successive Islamic dynasties, the Christian Nubia, the civilizations of the savannas, forests and coast of West Africa, the Horn of Africa, the East African coast and interior, Central Africa, Southern Africa, and Madagascar's internal development and international contacts. The three concluding chapters trace the African diaspora in Asia, examine international relations and the spread of technology and ideas, and assess the overall impact of the period on African history. The series is co-published in Africawith seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCO Press.
£25.99
James Currey General History of Africa volume 7 [pbk abridged]: Africa under Colonial Domination 1880-1935
SPECIAL COMMENDATION in Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. The series is illustrated throughout with maps and black and white photographs. Volume 7 examines the period of partition, conquest and occupation from the beginnings of the 'European Scramble for Africa' to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Throughout the volume the focus is on the responsesof Africans themselves to the challenge of colonialism. A general overview is followed by more detailed regional analyses. Chapters 13 to 21 concern the impact of economic and social aspects of colonial systems in Africa from1919 to 1935; the operation of colonial economies; the emergence of new social structures and demographic patterns; and the role of religion and the arts in Africa during the colonial period. The final section traces the growth of anti-colonial movements, the strengthening of African political nationalism and the interaction between black Africa and blacks of the New World. Liberia and Ethiopia are discussed in special chapters. The seriesis co-published in Africa with seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCO Press.
£24.99
City Lights Books Joie de Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012
Inspired by the Beats, Black Mountain, and the New York School, Lisa Jarnot emerged in the 1990s as one of the foremost poets of the post-Language avant-garde. Joie de Vivre draws on twenty years of work, from the bold fragmentation of her mixed media debut, Some Other Kind of Mission, to the experimental lyricism of her recent Night Scenes. Following the poet's evolution through her engagements with form and music, Joie de Vivre showcases Jarnot's restless virtuosity and relentless curiosity. The archaic, the surreal, the pastoral, the political--no register of language proves too recalcitrant for her expansive sense of song. Praise for Joie de Vivre: "Riveting ...Reading this work is truly a joy."--Publishers Weekly "This compilation includes the best of Jarnot's Whitmanesque reflections and Ginsbergian outcries, speech acts that list always toward an avant-garde."--Booklist "Her ideas meddle in the traditions of form, medium, sound, and arrangement to recall the modernism of Joyce and Stein ...This selection highlights her inventiveness." --Library Journal About the Author: Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1967, Lisa Jarnot studied with Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo and later earned an MFA at Brown University. The author of four full-length poetry collections and the former editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter, she has also just published Robert Duncan: The Ambassador From Venus (University of California Press, 2012), the definitive biography of the San Francisco poet. Since the mid-1990s, she has lived in New York City.
£11.97
Wave Books Retrievals
"I adore [Caples'] prescription to read widely and even perversely; and his breezy style is engaging." --Don Share "Caples' discussions are careful, nuanced, personal, and opinionated." --Steven Fama "Caples is part of a younger generation of writers reinvigorating contemporary poetry by combining modernist and Language-poetic verbal angularity with the sheer enthusiasm and lustiness of adolescence." --Publishers Weekly "Caples supplies us with a full aesthetic meal, with alarming images right out of the French Surrealists. He also means what he says; regardless of any implications to the contrary, Caples is writing out of emotion, even well-done sentiment." --Rain Taxi From "Theory on Retrievals": The concept of the poet-critic has always been a compelling one to me; it's hard not to admire 19th century French poets like Gautier, writing elegant prose in newspapers on topics the general public was more interested in reading about than it was in reading his poetry. (I've never been one to hold the general public's lack of interest in poetry against it; that's the way of the world.) The compensation was that being a poet gave one a certain license as a critic to roam among all the arts. Retrievals is a book of essays written over the course of ten years about underrecognized poets, unfairly discredited critics, and artists obscured by more famous relations. Garrett Caples is the author of The Garrett Caples Reader (Angle Press/Black Square Editions, 1999), Complications (Meritage Press, 2007), and Quintessence of the Minor (Wave Books, 2010). He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (University of California Press, 2013). He is the poetry editor at City Lights Books, and curates the Spotlight Poetry Series there. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Oakland.
£17.10