Robert Capa's dispatches from the beach at Normandy and Joe Rosenthal's photographic report of Iwo Jima stirred a nation, as did-in quite an opposite way-Eddie Adams' and Larry Burrows' searing imagery from Vietnam. LIFE thinks outside the box in this book: Did Marilyn Monroe's pinup change the world? Did Harry Benson's photography of the Beatles deplaning in New York in 1964 alter our cultural focus? The pictures in this book are sometimes beautiful, often striking-and undeniably powerful.

    The ancient Greeks scorned it as ugly and barbaric, but most Americans and Europeans now cite it as their favorite color. In this fascinating history, the renowned medievalist Michel Pastoureau traces the changing meanings of blue from its rare appearance in prehistoric art to its international ubiquity today.Any history of color is, above all, a social history. Pastoureau investigates how the ever-changing role of blue in society has been reflected in manuscripts, stained glass, heraldry, clothing, paintings, and popular culture. Beginning with the almost total absence of blue from ancient Western art and language, the story moves to medieval Europe. As people began to associate blue with the Virgin Mary, the color became a powerful element in church decoration and symbolism. Blue gained new favor as a royal color in the twelfth century and became a formidable political and military force during the French Revolution. As blue triumphed in the modern era, new shades were created and blue became the color of romance and the blues. Finally, Pastoureau follows blue into contemporary times, when military clothing gave way to the everyday uniform of blue jeans and blue became the universal and unifying color of the Earth as seen from space.Beautifully illustrated, Blue tells the intriguing story of our favorite color and the cultures that have hated it, loved it, and made it essential to some of our greatest works of art.

    In Light at the Edge of the World, Davis—best known for The Serpent and the Rainbow—presents an intimate survey of the ethnosphere in 80 striking photographs taken over the course of his wide exploration. In eloquent accompanying text, Davis takes readers deep into worlds few Westerners will ever experience, worlds that are fading away even as he writes. From the Canadian Arctic and the rain forests of Borneo to the Amazon and the towering mountains of Tibet, readers are awakened to the rituals, beliefs, and lives of the Waorani, the Penan, the Inuit, and many other unique and endangered traditional cultures. The result is a haunting and enlightening realization of the limitless potential of the human imagination of life. While globalization has become the battle cry of the 21st century, Davis's magisterial work points out that the erosion of the ethnosphere will diminish us all. “The human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention,” he writes, and reminds us that “there are other means of interpreting our existence, other ways of being.”

    The book reflects the revisionist interpretation of 19th-century art.

    With an exquisite sense of romantic melancholy, we encounter the teenage Byron in the moldering Newstead Abbey, Flaubert watching the buzzards on the pyramids, Henry James in the Colosseum, and Freud at Pompeii. We travel the Appian Way with Dickens and behold the Baths of Caracalla with Shelley. An exhilarating tour, at once elegant and stimulating, In Ruins casts an exalting spell as it explores the bewitching power of architectural remains and their persistent hold on the imagination.

    Based on several years' worth of exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to all three bands' personal archives, 'England's Hidden Reverse' is the first, definitive, biography of Nurse With Wound, Coil and Current 93.

    Moving away from the Marxist/Freudian approaches that had concerned him earlier, Baudrillard developed in this book a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure.Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacra—the copy without an original—and simulation. These terms are crucial to an understanding of the postmodern, to the extent that they address the concept of mass reproduction and reproduceability that characterizes our electronic media culture.Baudrillard's book represents a unique and original effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a new concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.Sheila Glaser is an editor at Artforum magazine.

    "What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?" In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die.

    Integrating the experiential and the scholarly, as well as the emotional and intellectual dimensions of death and dying, this seventh edition provides coverage of death studies.

    He found in the fabric of familiar episodes new shades of meaning, new configurations of character and intent. He brought a poetic imagination to the task of reconstructing a live tradition for Americans, and the result is a genuinely consistent and integrated expression of the American inheritance. Williams did not invent the native conscience, but he rediscovered it, often in the more remote gestures of history, and has here given it enduring stature in prose."In the American Grain is a fundamental book, essential if one proposes to come to terms with American literature." -- Times Literary Supplement

    The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States.Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De León uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of “Prevention through Deterrence,” the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, this policy has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field.In harrowing detail, De León chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert.The Land of Open Graves will spark debate and controversy.

    Often architectural treasures in themselves, they were constructed in styles that befitted the riches they stored, from Neoclassical temples to Baroque palaces to Jeffersonian athaeneums. Both public in purpose and intensely private in feel, they have served the noble role of preserving and disseminating that key cultural artifact of mankind - the book - and in doing so, their role has been central to the nourishment and development of the world's great civilizations. To this day the great libraries of the world remain extraordinary environments for scholarship and enlightenment." "Here, for the first time, architectural photographer Guillaume de Laubier takes the reader on a privileged tour of twenty-three of the world's most historic libraries, representing twelve countries and ranging from the great national monuments to scholarly, religious, and private libraries: the baroque splendor of the Institut de France in Paris; the Renaissance treasure-trove of the Riccardiana Library in Florence; the majestic Royal Monastery in El Escorial, Spain; the hallowed halls of Oxford's Bodleian Library; and the New York Public Library, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece. Also included are the smaller abbey and monastic libraries - often overlooked on tourist itineraries - each containing its own equally important collections of religious and philosophical writings, manuscripts, and church history. Through color photography one can marvel at the grandeur of the great public libraries while relishing the rare glimpses inside scholars-only private archives." The accompanying text by journalist and translator Jacques Bosser traces the history of libraries from the Renaissance to the present day, vividly describing how they came to serve the famous men of letters of centuries past and the general public of the ni

    Rothko’s other written works have yet to be brought together into a major publication. Writings on Art fills this significant void; it includes some 90 documents—including short essays, letters, statements, and lectures—written by Rothko over the course of his career. The texts are fully annotated, and a chronology of the artist’s life and work is also included. This provocative compilation of both published and unpublished writings from 1934--69 reveals a number of things about Rothko: the importance of writing for an artist who many believed had renounced the written word; the meaning of transmission and transition that he experienced as an art teacher at the Brooklyn Jewish Center Academy; his deep concern for meditation and spirituality; and his private relationships with contemporary artists (including Newman, Motherwell, and Clyfford Still) as well as journalists and curators. As was revealed in Rothko’s The Artist’s Reality, what emerges from this collection is a more detailed picture of a sophisticated, deeply knowledgeable, and philosophical artist who was also a passionate and articulate writer.

    Davies has re-edited them to produce a single volume and in the prefatory "A Drink with Marchbanks" even given us his own view of the journalist he created. A pleasant entertainment covering such diverse topics as politics, theater, and manners, this volume offers a humorous and insightful picture of postwar Canadian life as seen through the eyes of a delightful eccentric who reminds this reader of a boozeless W. C. Fields.

    He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art. "A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."--New York Times"Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."--New York Review of Books