38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier's End


Scott W. Berg - 2012
    Knowing the strength and resilience of the young American nation, Little Crow counseled caution, but anger won the day. Forced to either lead his warriors in a war he knew they could not win or leave them to their fates, he declared, “[Little Crow] is not a coward: he will die with you.” So began six weeks of intense conflict along the Minnesota frontier as the Dakotas clashed with settlers and federal troops, all the while searching for allies in their struggle. Once the uprising was smashed and the Dakotas captured, a military commission was convened, which quickly found more than three hundred Indians guilty of murder. President Lincoln, embroiled in the most devastating period of the Civil War, personally intervened in order to spare the lives of 265 of the condemned men, but the toll on the Dakota nation was still staggering: a way of life destroyed, a tribe forcibly relocated to barren and unfamiliar territory, and 38 Dakota warriors hanged—the largest government-sanctioned execution in American history. Scott W. Berg recounts the conflict through the stories of several remarkable characters, including Little Crow, who foresaw how ruinous the conflict would be for his tribe; Sarah Wakefield, who had been captured by the Dakotas, then vilified as an “Indian lover” when she defended them; Minnesota bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple, who was a tireless advocate for the Indians’ cause; and Lincoln, who transcended his own family history to pursue justice.Written with uncommon immediacy and insight, 38 Nooses details these events within the larger context of the Civil War, the history of the Dakota people, and the subsequent United States–Indian wars. It is a revelation of an overlooked but seminal moment in American history.

The Naked Ape


Desmond Morris - 1967
    Here is the Naked Ape at his most primal in love, at work, at war. Meet man as he really is: relative to the apes, stripped of his veneer as we see him courting, making love, sleeping, socializing, grooming, playing. The Naked Ape takes its place alongside Darwin’s Origin of the Species, presenting man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape, remarkable in his resilience, energy and imagination, yet an animal nonetheless, in danger of forgetting his origins. With its penetrating insights on man's beginnings, sex life, habits and our astonishing bonds to the animal kingdom, The Naked Ape is a landmark, at once provocative, compelling and timeless.

My Cocaine Museum


Michael Taussig - 2004
    Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la República, Taussig's museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's wealth for almost four hundred years.Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine.This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories.

Molave and the Orchid and Other Children's Stories


F. Sionil José - 2004
    Gallado whose talents in magazine, book design and illustrating were first honed in the old and defunct Philippines Herald and Manila Times. From there, he became Art Director of The Asia Magazine and subsequently a series of publishing firms in Hong Kong, including Asian Finance, Ltd., Pacific Communications, Ltd., Communication Management Ltd., and Flair Publishing Asia Ltd., before returning to Manila, where he has held several one-man exhibitions of his paintings, the most recent of which was a collection of pen and ink drawings. Bert Gallardo's flair for drawing recommends this book to young artists.These four stories as crafted by the country's foremost novelist are meant for children but in reality, they are also for adults. Readers will find in these stories the author's familiar themes as depicted in his longer fiction. F. Sionil Jose's latest distinction comes from Chile—The Pablo Neruda Centennial Award.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers: A professional image editor's guide to the creative use of Photoshop for the Macintosh and PC


Martin Evening - 2010
    In this acclaimed reference work, Martin covers everything from the core aspects of working in Photoshop to advanced techniques for professional results. Subjects covered include organizing a digital workflow, improving creativity, output, automating Photoshop, and using Camera RAW. The style of the book is extremely clear, with real examples, diagrams, illustrations, and step-by-step explanations supporting the text throughout. This is, quite simply, the essential reference for photographers of all levels using Photoshop. All DVD content is now available online at http://booksite.focalpress.com/compan... for kindle and eBook readers. * Learn Photoshop the Martin Evening way! Everything you need to know for superb photographic results using Photoshop CS5 * Accompanying DVD includes the images used in the book, as well as QuickTime movie tutorials that show you how to get results fast * Packed with diagrams, step-by-steps, and over 750 color images

Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman


Marjorie Shostak - 1981
    This book is the story of the life of Nisa, a member of the !Kung tribe of hunter-gatherers from southern Africa's Kalahari desert. Told in her own words--earthy, emotional, vivid--to Marjorie Shostak, a Harvard anthropologist who succeeded, with Nisa's collaboration, in breaking through the immense barriers of language and culture, the story is a fascinating view of a remarkable woman.

How the Other Half Lives


Jacob A. Riis - 1890
    With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Bukowski in Pictures


Howard Sounes - 2000
    Including drawings, cartoons, manuscripts, personal letters and illustrations as well as prose and poetry by Bukowski, this pictorial and textual biography of the great polemicist also features revelations gleaned from FBI documentation.

The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology


Joseph Campbell - 1959
    The author of such acclaimed books as Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth discusses the primitive roots of mythology, examining them in light of the most recent discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology.

Where Children Sleep


James Mollison - 2010
    Each pair of photographs is accompanied by an extended caption that tells the story of each child: Kaya in Tokyo, whose proud mother spends $1,000 a month on her dresses; Bilal the Bedouin shepherd boy, who sleeps outdoors with his father’s herd of goats; the Nepali girl Indira, who has worked in a granite quarry since she was three; and Ankhohxet, the Kraho boy who sleeps on the floor of a hut deep in the Amazon jungle.Photographed over two years with the support of Save the Children (Italy), “Where Children Sleep” is both a serious photo-essay for an adult audience, and also an educational book that engages children themselves in the lives of other children around the world. Its cover features a child’s mobile printed in glow-in-the-dark ink.

Lance Armstrong: Images of a Champion


Lance Armstrong - 2004
    His heroic survival from deadly cancer and his hard-fought triumphs in the bicycle race that is thought to be the most grueling endurance test in sports are a tribute to the strength of the human spirit. Filled with never-before-seen pictures--including photos of his historic seventh Tour win--and revealing insights by the people who know him best, this treasured keepsake celebrates in words and photographs Armstrong's indomitable will and champion's heart. See inside Lance's tour with intimate pictures of Armstrong in competition and off the bike, as well as stunning full-color views capturing the grandeur of the sport, by cycling's top photographer, Graham Watson.

The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences


David Cannadine - 2013
     Investigating the six most salient categories of human identity, difference, and confrontation—religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilization—David Cannadine questions just how determinative each of them has really been. For while each has motivated people dramatically at particular moments, they have rarely been as pervasive, as divisive, or as important as is suggested by such simplified polarities as “us versus them,” “black versus white,” or “the clash of civilizations.” For most of recorded time, these identities have been more fluid and these differences less unbridgeable than political leaders, media commentators—and some historians—would have us believe. Throughout history, in fact, fruitful conversations have continually taken place across these allegedly impermeable boundaries of identity: the world, as Cannadine shows, has never been simply and starkly divided between any two adversarial solidarities but always an interplay of overlapping constituencies. Yet our public discourse is polarized more than ever around the same simplistic divisions, and Manichean narrative has become the default mode to explain everything that is happening in the world today. With wide-ranging erudition, David Cannadine compellingly argues against the pervasive and pernicious idea that conflict is the inevitable state of human affairs. The Undivided Past is an urgently needed work of history, one that is also about the present—and the future.

Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology


C.W. Ceram - 1949
    Ceram visualized archeology as a wonderful combination of high adventure, romance, history and scholarship, and this book, a chronicle of man's search for his past, reads like a dramatic narrative. We travel with Heinrich Schliemann as, defying the ridicule of the learned world, he actually unearths the remains of the ancient city of Troy. We share the excitement of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter as they first glimpse the riches of Tutankhamen's tomb, of George Smith when he found the ancient clay tablets that contained the records of the Biblical Flood. We rediscover the ruined splendors of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the wonders of the ancient wold; of Chichen Itza, the abandoned pyramids of the Maya: and the legendary Labyrinth of tile Minotaur in Crete. Here is much of the history of civilization and the stories of the men who rediscovered it.From the Paperback edition.

Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior


Christopher Boehm - 1999
    Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist whose fieldwork has focused on the political arrangements of human and nonhuman primate groups, postulates that egalitarianism is in effect a hierarchy in which the weak combine forces to dominate the strong.The political flexibility of our species is formidable: we can be quite egalitarian, we can be quite despotic. Hierarchy in the Forest traces the roots of these contradictory traits in chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and early human societies. Boehm looks at the loose group structures of hunter-gatherers, then at tribal segmentation, and finally at present-day governments to see how these conflicting tendencies are reflected.Hierarchy in the Forest claims new territory for biological anthropology and evolutionary biology by extending the domain of these sciences into a crucial aspect of human political and social behavior. This book will be a key document in the study of the evolutionary basis of genuine altruism.

About Looking


John Berger - 1992
    In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twentieth century? What is it about looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti? In asking these and other questions, Berger quietly -- but fundamentally -- alters the vision of anyone who reads his work.