With a new foreword for the American edition. There may be no cultural practice more global than soccer. Rites of birth and marriage are infinitely diverse, but the rules of soccer are universal. No world religion can match its geographical scope. The single greatest simultaneous human collective experience is the World Cup final. In this extraordinary tour de force, David Goldblatt tells the full story of soccer's rise from chaotic folk ritual to the world's most popular sport-now poised to fully establish itself in the USA. Already celebrated internationally, The Ball Is Round illuminates soccer's role in the political and social histories of modern societies, but never loses sight of the beauty, joy, and excitement of the game itself.

    Johnson’s hard-hitting investigative series won a Pulitzer Prize, inspired a screenplay by Arthur Miller, and prompted Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront. And yet J. Edgar Hoover denied the existence of organized crime - even as the government’s dramatic hearings into waterfront misdeeds became mustsee television.Nathan Ward tells this archetypal crime story as if for the first time, taking the reader back to a city, and an era, at once more corrupt and more innocent than our own.

    Randall Fuller takes us back to one of those turning points, in 1860, with the story of the influence of Charles Darwin's just-published On the Origin of Species on five American intellectuals, including Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, the child welfare reformer Charles Loring Brace, and the abolitionist Franklin Sanborn.Each of these figures seized on the book's assertion of a common ancestry for all creatures as a powerful argument against slavery, one that helped provide scientific credibility to the cause of abolition. Darwin's depiction of constant struggle and endless competition described America on the brink of civil war. But some had difficulty aligning the new theory to their religious convictions and their faith in a higher power. Thoreau, perhaps the most profoundly affected all, absorbed Darwin's views into his mysterious final work on species migration and the interconnectedness of all living things.Creating a rich tableau of nineteenth-century American intellectual culture, as well as providing a fascinating biography of perhaps the single most important idea of that time, The Book That Changed America is also an account of issues and concerns still with us today, including racism and the enduring conflict between science and religion.

    Illuminations includes Benjamin's views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his thesis on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and prefaces them with a substantial, admirably informed introduction that presents Benjamin's personality and intellectual development, as well as his work and his life in dark times. Reflections the companion volume to this book, is also available as a Schocken paperback.Unpacking My Library, 1931The Task of the Translator, 1913The Storyteller, 1936Franz Kafka, 1934Some Reflections on Kafka, 1938What Is Epic Theater?, 1939On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 1939The Image of Proust, 1929The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936Theses on the Philosophy of History, written 1940, pub. 1950

    Originally published in 1931, Only Yesterday has an exuberance and proximity to its subject—the Roaring Twenties in all its scandal and glory—that uniquely captures the feel of the era.

    His range is wide, and his insights are acute, frequently ironic, and often downright funny. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

    It was the year that began with the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and ended with the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: respectively, the most influential English-language novel and poem of the century. To this day, these two works remain the titanic figures of modern literature—some would say, of modernity itself. And it was the indefatigable Pound who played a significant part in the launch of both writers’ careers. In Constellation of Genius, Kevin Jackson puts the accomplishments of Joyce and Eliot in the context of the world in which their works first appeared. We see the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the end of Dada, and the death of Proust. Meanwhile, Hollywood transformed the nature of fame, making Charlie Chaplin the most recognizable man on the planet. Hitchcock directed his first feature, Kandinsky and Klee joined the Bauhaus, and Louis Armstrong took the train from New Orleans to Chicago, heralding the start of modern jazz. Gloriously entertaining, erudite, and idiosyncratic, this is a biography of a year, a journey through the diaries of the anthropologists, actors, artists, dancers, designers, filmmakers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians, and scientists whose lives and works collided over twelve months, creating a frenzy of innovation that split the world in two.Some of the people discussed are: Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel, Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud, E. M. Forster, George Gershwin, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, Carl Jung, James Joyce, Sergei Prokofiev, Luis Buñuel, Bertolt Brecht, Wyndham Lewis, Fritz Lang, D. H. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, Katherine Mansfield, Aleister Crowley, Bronisław Malinowski, Eugene O’Neill, George Orwell, Nikola Tesla, Alfred Hitchcock, Pablo Picasso, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Bertrand Russell, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Walt Disney, Lois Armstrong, Franz Kafka, Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, W. B. Yeats, Benito Mussolini, Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, Le Corbusier, John Maynard Keynes, F. W. Murnau, Sergei Diaghilev, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wassily Kandinsky, André Breton, Rudyard Kipling, Ronald Firbank, Marcel Duchamp, Dashiell Hammett, Georges Bataille, Aldous Huxley, Andrei Bely, Henri Matisse, Marcel Proust, Ludwig Wittgenstein

    At eighteen, fate would take his remaining family, sending him on the road with three hundred dollars and into the life of a Depression Era migrant worker, but his appetite for knowledge--history, science, mankind--remained and became the basis for his insights on human nature. Filled with timeless aphorisms and entertaining stories, Truth Imagined tracks Hoffer's years on the road, which served as the breeding ground for his most fertile thoughts.

    They exhibit an extreme passion for freedom of choice—which has turned law circumvention into an art and has made them incapable of comprehending words like “discipline,” “co-ordination,” or “system.” There's no such thing as a meek GreekA Greek cannot talk unless he has his hands free, and a soft-spoken Greek is one who can be heard only as far as across the street. Two Greeks having an amiable conversation sound as if they are ready to murder each other, and a party of exuberant Greeks having a good time could be described as a pack of hounds that has just sighted the fox. Free spiritsMercurial in the extreme, the Greeks' temperament flourishes uninhibited throughout their waking hours. This is probably why the ancient sages saw fit to carve their maxims “Nothing in excess” and “Know thyself” on the portals of the Delphic Oracle, in an attempt to persuade their fellow Greeks to curb their emotions. They were not heeded then any more than they are now. How much does a Greek urn?In general, Greeks believe in free trade, fair dealing, and keeping one's word. They are quick at grasping (and inventing) complicated business and financial arrangements and they are past masters in acting as middlemen—which means that they are paid by both parties while risking nothing themselves.

    

    Buried beneath these parallel conflicts--one for the soul of baseball, the other for the soul of the city--was the subtext of race. Deftly intertwined by journalist Jonathan Mahler, these braided Big Apple narratives reverberate to reveal a year that also saw the opening of Studio 54, the acquisition of the New York Post by Rupert Murdoch, a murderer dubbed the "Son of Sam," the infamous blackout, and the evolution of punk rock. As Koch defeated Cuomo, and as Reggie Jackson rescued a team racked with dissension, 1977 became a year of survival--and also of hope.

    The book introduces readers to an unlikely hero in the titular “ugly American”—and to the ignorant politicians and arrogant ambassadors who ignore his empathetic and commonsense advice. In linked stories and vignettes set in the fictional nation of Sarkhan, William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick draw an incisive portrait of American foreign policy gone dangerously wrong—and how it might be fixed.Eerily relevant sixty years after its initial publication, The Ugly American reminds us that “today, as the battle for hearts and minds has shifted to the Middle East, we still can’t speak Sarkhanese” (New York Times).

    Men and women from every walk of life talk to him, telling him of their likes and dislikes, fears, problems, and happinesses on the job. Once again, Terkel has created a rich and unique document that is as simple as conversation, but as subtle and heartfelt as the meaning of our lives.... In the first trade paperback edition of his national bestseller, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel presents "the real American experience" (Chicago Daily News) -- "a magnificent book . . .. A work of art. To read it is to hear America talking." (Boston Globe)

    From this foundation of expectation and experience, America and American thought grew in turn, enriched by the bounties of theEnlightenment, the philosophies of liberty and individuality, the tenets of religion, and the doctrines of republicanism and democracy. Crucial to this development were the thinkers who nurtured it, from Thomas Jefferson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. DuBois to Jane Addams, and Betty Friedan toRichard Rorty. The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History traces how Americans have addressed the issues and events of their time and place, whether the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the culture wars of today.Spanning a variety of disciplines, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism. In engaging and accessible prose, this introduction to American thought considers how notions about freedom and belonging, the market and morality -- and even truth -- have commanded generations of Americans and been the cause of fierce debate.

    secularist, denomination vs. denomination, liberal vs. conservative -- in the last forty years, American Jews have increasingly found themselves torn apart by their diversity. In this chronicle of the evolution of American Jewry, Samuel G. Freedman illuminates the forces that have undermined the traditional peaceful coexistence among the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist branches, and secular and unaffiliated Jews. Examining recent headline-making stories as well as less publicized controversies, Freedman discusses the vitriolic battles that have arisen over intermarriage, standards of conversion, the role of women in religious ritual, the Middle East peace process, and the secular influence on religious life. As he weighs the arguments of both extremes, Freedman comes to the controversial conclusion that the Jewish-American community is headed for a Reformation, a permanent fracture of one faith into many.