Zaida Ben-yusuf: New York Portrait Photographer
by Frank H., III Goodyear
Hardcover $59.95 - 10%
In the early twentieth century Zaida Ben-Yusuf (1869–1933) was one of the busiest photographers in New York City, maintaining a fashionable studio on Fifth Avenue, exhibiting her distinctly modern portraits across America, Europe and Russia, and publishing work in many magazines. Her self-portraits also challenged traditional perceptions of female identity. This striking book celebrates Ben-Yusuf ’s achievement, showcasing a significant selection of her elegant and compelling portraits featuring prominent artistic and political figures of the day, including Lincoln Steffens, Edith Wharton, Elsie de Wolfe and Robert Henri. ”
Architecture: A World History
by Daniel Borden, Jerzy Elzanowski, Joni Taylor, Stephanie Tuerk
Paperback $19.95
Lavishly illustrated and super-condensed, Architecture: A World History is the perfect gift for any architecture buff. In this pocket-sized book bursting with 600 illustrations, page after page is dedicated to significant architectural movements, time lines that explore the evolution of the practice, and capsule biographies of great architects and examinations of their masterpieces.
Organized chronologically, the book travels from prehistory to the present, highlighting noteworthy examples of important architectural styles, and showcasing the work of significant architects, including Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas. From the pyramids of Egypt to the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower to the Glass House, Architecture: A World History takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the most spectacular examples of architecture from around the world and throughout time.
Why You Shouldn’t Eat Your Boogers and Other Useless or Gross Information About Your Body: Information About Your Body
by Francesca Gould
Paperback $12.95
This delightful book is full of random and, at times, scatological facts about the human anatomy. Broken down by the systems of the body, it answers questions you may be too embarrassed to ask or even think about, such as:
- Do bugs live in your eyelashes?
- What does human flesh taste like?
- Can you really catch a cold by standing in the rain?
- How do astronauts poo in space?
- What foods can cure a hangover?
- Why is yawning contagious?
- Is eating boogers bad for you?
This oddball yet erudite book is full of fascinating factoids that those of us in search of guilty pleasures (or gross thrills!) will delight in.
The Life and Death of Images
Edited by Diarmuid Costello & Dominic Willsdon
Paperback $24.95
During the 1970s and 1980s the discourse surrounding aesthetics largely disappeared from the study of art history, theory, and cultural studies. Claims for the aesthetic value of artworks were thought elitist and politically regressive. The 1990s witnessed a return to aesthetics, but one that stressed the independent claims of beauty in reaction to its perceived suppression by ethical and political imperatives. Beauty, however, is just one aspect of the aesthetic. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the ways in which aesthetics and ethics are intertwined.
In The Life and Death of Images some of the world’s leading cultural thinkers engage in dialogue with one another concerning this “new” aesthetics. In provocative and accessible fashion, they demonstrate its relevance to a range of disciplines including analytic and continental philosophy, art history, theory and practice, cultural history and visual culture, rhetoric and comparative literature. While the focus is primarily on artworks, contributors also consider other forms of imagery that raise questions about the boundaries between art and non-art, about beauty, and about the ethics of aesthetics.
Little Criminals
by Gene Kerrigan
Paperback $16.95
Justin and Angela Kennedy are doing fine. Better than fine-they have wealth, position, love, children, and a limitless future. Into their lives comes Frankie Crowe, an ambitious criminal tired of risking his life for small change. Together with a crew of singularly dangerous men, Frankie decides that a kidnapping could be the first step toward a better life. Set in modern Dublin, Little Criminals is a story that bristles with tension and expectation, a story about what happens to the fragile things-friendship, love, compassion-when all rules are broken.
The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up
by Liao Yiwu
Hardcover $25.00 - 10%
The Corpse Walker is a compilation of twenty-seven extraordinary oral histories that opens a window, unlike any other, onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the “new†China-the China of economic growth and globalization-—is no more beneficial than the old. By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, he manages to get his subjects to talk openly about their lives.
Here are a professional mourner, a trafficker in humans, a leper, an abbot, a retired government official, a former landowner, a mortician, a feng shui master, a former Red Guard, a political prisoner, a village teacher, a blind street musician, a Falun Gong practitioner, and many others–people who have been battered by life but who have managed to retain their dignity, their humor, and their essential, complex humanity.
Liao crafted the interviews (conducted between 1990 and 2003) with sensitivity and patience, working both from notes and from his own memory of these remarkable conversations. The result is an idiosyncratic, powerful, and richly revealing portrait of a people, a time, and a place we might otherwise have never known.
A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World
by Tony Horwitz
Hardcover $27.50 - 10%
On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz realizes he’s mislaid more than a century of American history, from Columbus’s sail in 1492 to Jamestown’s founding in 16-oh-something. Did nothing happen in between? Determined to find out, he embarks on a journey of rediscovery, following in the footsteps of the many Europeans who preceded the Pilgrims to America.
An irresistible blend of history, myth, and misadventure, A Voyage Long and Strange captures the wonder and drama of first contact. Vikings, conquistadors, French voyageurs—these and many others roamed an unknown continent in quest of grapes, gold, converts, even a cure for syphilis. Though most failed, their remarkable exploits left an enduring mark on the land and people encountered by late-arriving English settlers.
Tracing this legacy with his own epic trek—from Florida’s Fountain of Youth to Plymouth’s sacred Rock, from desert pueblos to subarctic sweat lodges—Tony Horwitz explores the revealing gap between what we enshrine and what we forget. Displaying his trademark talent for humor, narrative, and historical insight, A Voyage Long and Strange allows us to rediscover the New World for ourselves.
A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
by Augusten Burroughs
Hardcover $24.95 - 10%
With A Wolf at the Table, Augusten Burroughs makes a quantum leap into untapped emotional terrain: the radical pendulum swing between love and hate, the unspeakably terrifying relationship between father and son. Told with scorching honesty and penetrating insight, it is a story for anyone who has ever longed for unconditional love from a parent. Though harrowing and brutal, A Wolf at the Table will ultimately leave you buoyed with the profound joy of simply being alive. It’s a memoir of stunning psychological cruelty and the redemptive power of hope.
A School Leader’s Guide to Excellence: Collaborating Our Way to Better Schools
by Carmen Farina & Laura Kotch
Paperback $22.00
- Lucy Calkins
Author of Units of Study for Primary Writing
by Michael Chabon
Chabon’s storytelling, in this alternate history of a world where Jews were settled in Alaska after World War II, is vivid enough, with inventive metaphors packed in like tapestry threads, but Peter Riegert’s versatile voice makes the invented society even more tangible. Told through the eyes of Meyer Landsman, a police detective investigating a murder, the novel occurs in a strange time to be a Jew, as several characters ruefully put it: the special Jewish district will soon be controlled by Alaska again. In a bonus interview on the last disc, Chabon relates his desire to write about a place where Yiddish was an official language. The book is shot through with Yiddish phrases and names, which melodically roll off Riegert’s tongue. He gives Landsman and his tough but warmhearted partner Berko similar yet distinct gruff voices that contrast well with the effeminate-sounding sect leader and the Southern-accented Americans who come to start the land reversion process. Riegert’s pacing increases the enjoyment of this expertly spun mystery.
by Barbara Kingsolver
In her engaging though sometimes preachy new book, Kingsolver recounts the year her family attempted to eat only what they could grow on their farm in Virginia or buy from local sources. The book’s bulk, written and read by Kingsolver in a lightly twangy voice filled with wonder and enthusiasm, proceeds through the seasons via delightful stories about the history of their farmhouse, the exhausting bounty of the zucchini harvest, turkey chicks hatching and so on. In long sections, however, she gets on a soapbox about problems with industrial food production, fast food and Americans’ ignorance of food’s origins, and despite her obvious passion for the issues, the reading turns didactic and loses its pace, momentum and narrative. Her daughter Camille contributes recipes, meal plans and an enjoyable personal essay in a clear if rather monotonous voice. Hopp, Kingsolver’s husband and an environmental studies professor, provides dry readings of the sidebars that have him playing Dr. Scientist, as Kingsolver notes in an illuminating interview on the last disc. Though they may skip some of the more moralizing tracks, Kingsolver’s fans and foodies alike will find this a charming, sometimes inspiring account of reconnecting with the food chain.
by Mildred Armstrong Kalish
Kalish’s memoir of her Iowa childhood, set against the backdrop of the Depression, captures a vanished way of traditional living and a specific moment in American history in a story both illuminating and memorable. Kalish lived with her siblings, mother and grandparents-seven in all-both in a town home and, in warmer weather, out on a farm. The lifestyle was frugal in the extreme: “The only things my grandparents spent money on were tea, coffee, sugar, salt, white flour, cloth and kerosene.” But in spite of the austere conditions, Kalish’s memories are mostly happy ones: keeping the farm and home going, caring for animals, cooking elaborate multi-course meals and washing the large family’s laundry once a week, by hand. Here, too, are stories of gossiping in the kitchen, digging a hole to China with the “Big Kids” and making head cheese at butchering time. Kalish skillfully rises above bitterness and sentiment, giving her memoir a clear-eyed narrative voice that puts to fine use a lifetime of careful observation: “Observing the abundance of life around us was just so naturally a part of our days on the farm that it became a habit.” Simple, detailed and honest, this is a refreshing and informative read for anyone interested in the struggles of average Americans in the thick of the Great Depression.
by Arianna Huffington
Huffington makes the case that America has been hijacked from within by a radical element—the “lunatic fringe†of the Right that has taken over the Republican Party. Despite holding views at odds with the majority of Americans, these zealots have given us an endless war in Iraq, a sputtering economy, a health care system on life support, a war on science and reason, and an immoral embrace of torture.
But they haven’t done it on their own: they have been enabled by a compliant media that act as if there is no such thing as truth and are more interested in cozying up to those in power than in holding them accountable, and by feckless Democrats who have allowed themselves to be intimidated into backing down again and again.
Both a withering indictment and a hopeful call to arms, Right Is Wrong is an explosive, boldly incisive work that will help set the national agenda.
by Arthur Herman
“A fast-paced narrative history…Herman brings to life the twilight of the British Empire and reminds us how the twists and turns of fate helped propel these two men to their places in history. He shows us that there was more common ground between the two than most realize and that the seemingly simple tale of the imperialist and the nationalist is far more nuanced than it seems.†— Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, The Hindustan Times, Bernard Schwartz Fellow, Asia Society
“Cutting through decades of narrow or shallow reporting, Arthur Herman offers a balanced and elegant account which captures both Churchill’s generosity of spirit and Gandhi’s greatness of soul. While recognizing their faults, he shows what motivated them and made them great-with impressive research that in Churchill’s words leaves “no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked.” The last two chapters, and the author’s Conclusion, are alone worth the price of what must become the standard work on the subject.”—Richard M. Langworth, Editor, Finest Hour
“A forceful portrait of the emergence of the postcolonial era in the fateful contrast—and surprising affinities—between two historic figures…. Fascinating.”—Publishers Weekly
” Brisk narrative flow…. Showing history eluding Gandhi and Churchill, Herman provocatively presents their efforts to shape it.”—Booklist
by Haruki Murakami
Murakami’s 12th work of fiction is darkly entertaining and more novella than novel. Taking place over seven hours of a Tokyo night, it intercuts three loosely related stories, linked by Murakami’s signature magical-realist absurd coincidences. When amateur trombonist and soon-to-be law student Tetsuya Takahashi walks into a late-night Denny’s, he espies Mari Asai, 19, sitting by herself, and proceeds to talk himself back into her acquaintance. Tetsuya was once interested in plain Mari’s gorgeous older sister, Eri, whom he courted, sort of, two summers previously. Murakami then cuts to Eri, asleep in what turns out to be some sort of menacing netherworld. Tetsuya leaves for overnight band practice, but soon a large, 30ish woman, Kaoru, comes into Denny’s asking for Mari: Mari speaks Chinese, and Kaoru needs to speak to the Chinese prostitute who has just been badly beaten up in the nearby “love hotel” Kaoru manages. Murakami’s omniscient looks at the lives of the sleeping Eri and the prostitute’s assailant, a salaryman named Shirakawa, are sheer padding, but the probing, wonderfully improvisational dialogues Mari has with Tetsuya, Kaoru and a hotel worker named Korogi sustain the book until the ambiguous, mostly upbeat dénouement.
by Robert L. Bowden
by Editors Of Nylon Magazine
by Osamu Tezuka
Daigo Kagemitsu, who works for a samurai general in Japan’s Warring States period, promises to offer body parts of his unborn baby to 48 devils in exchange for complete domination of the country. Knowing the child to be deficient, Kagemitsu orders the newborn thrown into the river.
The baby survives. Callling himself Hyakkimaru, ge searches the world for the 48 demons. Each time he eliminates one, he retrieves one of his missing parts. Hyakkimaru meets a boy thief named Dororo, and together they travel the countryside, confronting mosters and ghosts again and again. This the first in a 3 - volume series.
Tezuka’s manga and animated films had a tremendous impact on the shaping of the psychology of Japan’s postwar youth. His work changed the concept of Japanese comics, transforming it into an art form and incorporating a variety of new styles in creating “story comics.”
by Ellen Datlow
Declaring that short stories are the heart and soul of fantastical fiction, prolific and venerable editor Datlow collects 16 impressive original stories in this unthemed anthology. Standout selections include Margo Lanagan’s deeply disturbing The Goosle, which eloquently corrupts the Hansel and Gretel fable with bubonic plague, sexual slavery and mass murder; Jason Stoddard’s The Elephant Ironclads, which describes an emergent 20th-century Navajo nation struggling to become a world power while staying true to its culture; Elizabeth Bear’s Sonny Liston Takes the Fall, a poignant tale about the life, death and sad legacy of the troubled heavyweight fighter; and Pat Cadigan’s Jimmy, a strange and supernatural coming-of-age story set in the moments just after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The thematic diversity and consistently high quality of narrative throughout make for a solid and enjoyable anthology.
by Al Gore
by Agnes Desarthe, trans. by Adriana Hunter
Edited by Walter Laqueur & Barry Rubin
by Jim Sheeler
by Slavoj Zizek
by Javier Marias, Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa
Fever and Spear, the first volume of MarÃas’s ongoing novel Your Face Tomorrow, launches the reader at once on a literary adventure and into the peculiar world of British intelligence. Our Spanish hero Jaime Deza possesses very sophisticated powers of perception. He has the rare gift for seeing behind the masks people wear. Lured into observing interviews conducted by Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he studies variously shady international business people one day and would-be coup leaders the next. But Deza is stepping into shady areas of his own….This strange and original intellectual thriller has been acclaimed “exquisite” (Publishers Weekly), “gorgeous” (Kirkus), and “outstanding” (Independent [London]).
by Marcel Dzama