Best of
Cultural-Studies

1958

The Klondike Fever: The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush


Pierre Berton - 1958
    For the steamer Portland bore two tons of pure Klondike gold. And immediately, the stampede north to Alaska began. Easily as many as 100,000 adventurers, dreamers, and would-be miners from all over the world struck out for the remote, isolated gold fields in the Klondike Valley, most of them in total ignorance of the long, harsh Alaskan winters and the territory's indomitable terrain. Less than a third of that number would complete the enormously arduous mountain journey to their destination. Some would strike gold. Berton's story belongs less to the few who would make their fortunes than to the many swept up in the gold mania, to often unfortunate effects and tragic ends. It is a story of cold skies and avalanches, of con men and gamblers and dance hall girls, of sunken ships, of suicides, of dead horses and desperate men, of grizzly old miners and millionaires, of the land — its exploitation and revenge. It is a story of the human capacity to dream, and to endure.

The Food of France


Waverley Root - 1958
    Here is France for the traveler, the chef, and the connoisseur of fine prose. Maps and b & w line drawings throughout.

Culture and Society, 1780-1950


Raymond Williams - 1958
    Acknowledged as perhaps the masterpiece of materialist criticism in the English language, this omnibus ranges over British literary history from George Eliot to George Orwell to inquire about the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination.

The Death of Manolete


Barnaby Conrad - 1958
    Conrad recounts Manolete's extraoridinary life here for the first time in English. In combining pictures and text, the reader sees the breeding that made the Spanish boy, the tempering that made the young torero, the sacrifice that made the man, the girl who brought him love, the acclaim that brought him incredible success and finally its price...the undoing that began slowly and ended in one last great afternoon and in a death if not untimely put out the brightest flame in Spain. Manolete had fired the Latin imagination as no one had done since the Cid. He had become a symbol of Latin pride, valor, and chivalry. But the crowds owned him and he did their bidding...and had bid him to die.

The Hokusai Sketchbooks: Selections from the Manga


Katsushika Hokusai - 1958
    

Examination Day


Henry Slesar - 1958
    His parents don't say much about it. They seem to be worried about Dickie's performance.

The Myth of the Negro Past


Melville J. Herskovits - 1958
    Originally published in 1941, his unprecedented study of black history and culture recovered a rich African heritage in religious and secular life, the language and arts of the Americas.