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Babel, Isaac, Nathalie Babel, et al. (2002). The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. New York, Norton.
One of the great Russian writers of the 20th century, Babel (1894-1941) was arrested in 1939 and later executed by Stalin's regime. In 1954, his work was largely republished, but much of his correspondence, drafts, and manuscripts was confiscated when he was arrested and has never resurfaced. Now, for the first time, all of Babel's surviving work has been assembled into one volume. Readers new to Babel will discover his Red Cavalry stories, plays, diaries, screenplays, and short stories. In addition to an introduction by Cynthia Ozick, the book is graced with an excellent preface and afterword by Babel's daughter, who also edited the volume. She provides recently uncovered information about her father's arrest and execution as well as personal remembrances.

Bach, Steven (1999). Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists. New York, Newmarket Press.
A compulsively readable account of adventures in the film trade. An intimate view of what goes on in the corridors of Hollywood power, distinguished by its awesome objectivity. Buffs will love this one -inside and fascinating looks at Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Sellers, writer William Goldman, Dino De Laurentiis, Truman Capote, Martin Scorsese, et al.

Bacon, David (2008). Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. Boston, Beacon Press.
For two decades veteran photojournalist David Bacon has documented the connections between labor, migration, and the global economy. In Illegal People Bacon explores the human side of globalization, exposing the many ways it uproots people in Latin America and Asia, driving them to migrate. At the same time, U.S. immigration policy makes the labor of those displaced people a crime in the United States. Illegal People explains why our national policy produces even more displacement, more migration, more immigration raids, and a more divided, polarized society.

Bader, Robert S. (2016). Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press.
From Groucho's debut in 1905 to their final live performances of scenes from A Night in Casablanca in 1945, the brothers' stage career shows how their characters and routines evolved before their arrival in Hollywood. Four of the Three Musketeers draws on an unmatched array of sources, many not referenced elsewhere. Bader's detailed portrait of the struggling young actors both brings to vivid life a typical night on the road for the Marx Brothers and also illuminates the inner workings of the vaudeville business, especially during its peak in the 1920s.

Baensch, Hans A.; Rudiger Riehl (2007). Baensch Aquarium Atlas, Vol. 1 (7th Revised Edition). Melle, Germany, Mergus Verlag GmbH.
This new edition has been entirely revised and over 800 color photos have been exchanged for better quality and more detailed photography. Also all the name changes and the new scientific names have been updated. A new section about the freshwater invertebrates (snails, crabs, shrimps, crayfishes) has been added. Over 90 pages have been added. Included in this book are photos of over 600 species of fish and 100 aquatic plants, yet this is not an encyclopedia of fish and plants but a practical guide on the keeping, care, breeding and adaptation of aquarium fish and plants. A color photo is included for each plant or fish, together with extensive information regarding its preferred environment, temperature, maximum size, degrees of difficulty, sexual differences, propagation or breeding technique, maintenance procedure, food requirement, and social behavior (for fish).

Baensch, Hans A.; Rudiger Riehl (2008). Baensch Aquarium Atlas, Vol. 2 (4th Revised Edition). Melle, Germany, Mergus Verlag GmbH.
All names have been updated, mistakes of previous editions corrected, and about 30 extra pages added to complete this reference work. Over 850 species of fish and over 150 aquatic plants are presented in this second volume.

Bailey, Martin and Albrecht Durer (1995). Durer. London, Phaidon Press.
From a look at the Durer's life and times, to the historical and social context in which he worked, to an analysis of his masterpieces, this is a vital visual resource with more than 300 superb full-color illustrations.

Bailey, Paul (1995). The Oxford Book of London. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
In this sparkling anthology Paul Bailey captures the essence of London's allure for visitors and inhabitants--from the Middle Ages to the present day--with wit, humor, and pathos. Among the many contributors are those whose evocations of the city have forever fixed it in the popular mind: Charles Dickens's descriptions of fogbound London streets, the bustle and hustle of the Victorian city; Ben Jonson's satires on London low life from 1616; William Wordsworth rhapsodizing on the view from Westminster Bridge; George Bernard Shaw's archetypal Cockney, Eliza Doolittle. Less well known but equally vivid are descriptions of everyday life for the down and out and the aristocrat, of the museums, theaters, galleries and churches, the restaurants and pubs, the parks and institutions, the topography of London mapped out in unforgettable verse and prose. The great set pieces, Daniel Defoe's description of the Plague year, John Evelyn's and Samuel Pepys's daily records of the Great Fire, join eyewitness accounts of coronations and funerals, unequaled in their immediacy. The bemusement of foreign visitors, the joys and horrors of London buses and the London Underground, the sprawl of the suburbs and the excitement of the city, all add to the dazzling panorama.

Bailie, J. M. (1999). The Da Capo History of Western Classical Music. New York, Da Capo Press.

Bailyn, Bernard (1992). The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
The leaders of the American Revolution drew on many traditions of political and social thought, ranging from English conservative philosophers to exponents of the continental Enlightenment, from backward-looking interpretations of ancient Roman civilization to forward-looking views of a new American people. Bailyn carefully examines these sources of sometimes conflicting ideas and considers how the framers of the Constitution resolved them in their inventive doctrine of federalism.

Bailyn, Bernard (1993). The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification: Part One: September 1787 to February 1788. New York, Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Viking Press.
Bernard Bailyn, editor. Part One charts the course of the revolution that created the government of the United States and the world's oldest working national charter in a collection of speeches, newspaper articles, pamphlets and letters. Highlights include the state ratifying convention in Pennsylvania, where James Wilson confronted the democratic skepticism of the frontier delegates, and in Massachusetts, where John Hancock and Samuel Adams forged a crucial compromise that saved the country from political convulsion.

Bailyn, Bernard (1993). The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification: Part Two: January to August 1788. New York, Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Viking Press.
Bernard Bailyn, editor. Part Two features press polemics and private commentaries from January to August 1788, along with amendments proposed by state ratifying conventions. Highlights include dramatic confrontations from the Virginia convention, where Patrick Henry pitted his legendary oratorical skills against the incisive logic of Madison. A detailed chronology of events, biographical profiles, and notes provide fascinating background.

Bakan, Joel (2004). The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. New York, Free Press.
A brilliantly argued account of the corporation's pathological pursuit of profit and power. An eminent law professor and legal theorist, Bakan contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality whose destructive behavior, if left unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin.

Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway, the Writer as Artist. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.
Insightful analysis of Hemingway's work.

Baker, Carlos (1988). Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York, Collier Books.
Brilliantly conveying the immense gusto of Hemingway's life, the story spans six full decades: from a happy and surprisingly conventional boyhood in a middle-class suburb of Chicago, to worldwide fame as a literary genius and heroic activist, to the tragic denouement of the last years. At each stage Carlos Baker provides new information and fresh insights: the passionately enjoyed summers in northern Michigan; the apprenticeship as a re-porter with the Kansas City Star; Hemingway's first experience of war in Italy in World War 1, with the climactic wounding at Fossalta; his marriage to Hadley and the years in Europe; his deep involvement in the Spanish Civil War as a part of his lifelong attachment to Spain itself; the long period in Florida and Wyoming and in Cuba before Hemingway was inevitably drawn into World War II, where he trod a thin, often controversial line between correspondent and combatant; the slump in creativity during the postwar years before the writing of The Old Man and the Sea, which brought him the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes.

Baker, Dean (2016). Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Washington, D.C., Center for Economic and Policy Research.
There has been an enormous upward redistribution of income in the United States in the last four decades. In his most recent book, Baker shows that this upward redistribution was not the result of globalization and the natural workings of the market. Rather, it was the result of conscious policies that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of ordinary workers while protecting and enhancing the incomes of those at the top. Baker explains how rules on trade, patents, copyrights, corporate governance, and macroeconomic policy were rigged to make income flow upward.

Baker, Geoffrey H. (1994). Le Corbusier - the Creative Search: The Formative Years of Charles Edouard Jeanneret. London, E & FN Spon (An imprint of Chapman & Hall).
The special value of this study by Baker (architecture, Tulane) is the close attention it pays to the early architectural work of Le Corbusier, arguably the 20th century's greatest architect. Baker examines drawings, sketches, and all manner of visual evidence from Le Corbusier's early years (up to 1920) to explain in a step-by-step fashion his creative search for modern architecture.

Baker, Geoffrey H. (1996). Le Corbusier: An Analysis of Form. New York, E & FN Spon.
Dr. Geoffrey Baker explains the complexities of Le Corbusier's oeuvre using three-dimensional diagrammatic analysis to identify major themes and influences. The narrative and fine illustration, enhanced by the inclusion of color plates, cover the key buildings from the four developmental stages of his work, making it an excellent guide for architect and student alike. Inclusion of the Villa Shodhan in India concludes the cubic domestic progression that begins with the Maison Citrohan, developing through such key examples as the La Roche Jeanneret houses, the Villa Stein-de-Monzie, Villa Savoye, and Villa at Carthage.

Baker, Nicholson (2001). Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. New York, Random House.
Baker (The Mezzanine; Vox; etc.) has written a startling expose of an ugly conspiracy. In 1999, he discovered that the only existing copies of several major U.S. newspapers were going to be auctioned off by the British Library. Not only were U.S. libraries not interested, it turned out they'd tossed their own copies years before. Why? Baker uncovered an Orwellian universe in our midst in which preservation equals destruction and millions of tax dollars have funded and continue to fund the destruction of irreplaceable books, newspapers and other print media. The instruments of that destruction -- microfilm, microfiche, image readers and toxic chemicals -- are less to blame than the cadre of former CIA and military operatives at the Library of Congress in the 1950s who refused to acknowledge that those technologies were, in fact, inferior to preserving and storing the originals. They were more concerned with ways to (in the words of one) "extract profit and usefulness from" old books, while at the same time "preventing them from clogging the channels of the present."

Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Bakhtin insists that within the scatological writing of Rabelais exist the necessary evidence to discover the history of folk humor, as well as the shocking practices of the Renaissance carnival. Bakhtin is quick to distinguish the carnival culture of old from the holiday culture that exists now. Those that lived the carnival immersed themselves in the frolicking physical mutilation, bingeing and primordial gaiety that was the carnival. Bakhtin divides the carnivalesque into three forms: ritual spectacles, comic verbal compositions, and various genres of billingsgate or abusive language. Although Bakhtin separates the forms of the carnivalesque, they are often connected within the carnival. With its masks and monsters and feasts and games and dramas and processions, carnival was many things at once. It was festive pleasure, the world turned topsy-turvy, destruction and creation; it was a theory of time and history and destiny; it was utopia, cosmology, and philosophy. The very pleasures of carnival were at the same time philosophical modes. The extravagant juxtapositions, the grotesque mixing and confrontations of high and low, upper-class and lower-class, spiritual and material, young and old, male and female, daily identity and festive mask, serious conventions and their parodies, gloomy medieval time and joyous utopian visions. The Renaissance carnival culture involves the "temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men - and of the prohibitions of usual life."

Balanchine, George and Francis Mason (1975). 101 Stories of the Great Ballets: The Scene-by-Scene Stories of the Most Popular Ballets, Old and New. New York, NY, Anchor.
Authored by one of the ballet's most respected experts, this volume includes scene-by-scene retellings of the most popular classic and contemporary ballets, as performed by the world's leading dance companies.

Baldwin, James (1985). The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985. New York, St. Martin's/Marek.
The works of James Baldwin constitute one of the major contributions to American literature in the twentieth century, and nowhere is this more evident than in The Price of the Ticket, a compendium of nearly fifty years of Baldwin's powerful nonfiction writing. Here are the full texts of Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Devil Finds Work, along with dozens of other pieces, ranging from a 1948 review of Raintree Country to a magnificent introduction to this book. In a way, The Price of the Ticket is an intellectual history of the twentieth-century American experience; in another, it is autobiography of the highest order.

Baldwin, James (1998). Collected Essays. New York, Library of America.
This compilation reproduces in their entirety his early essay collections - Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963), as well as his later, less successful book-length essays, the pessimistic, doom-laden No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976), a semi-autobiographical gloss on American movies. The book charts his trajectory from eloquent voice of the civil rights movement to disillusioned expatriate increasingly prone to grandiloquence and angry rhetoric. Also included is a miscellany of 36 articles, polemics and reviews, 26 of which were previously collected in The Price of the Ticket (1985), published just two years before Baldwin's death from cancer in France at age 63.

Baldwin, James (1998). Early Novels and Stories. New York, Library of America.
Toni Morrison, editor. Presents the novels and short stories that established Baldwin's reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism with rare verbal eloquence. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin's own experience, of a preacher's son coming of age in 1930's Harlem. Giovanni's Room (1956) is a searching treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America's racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted drummer and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin's short fiction, including the masterful Sonny's Blues," his portrait of a jazz pianist struggling with drug addiction.

Baldwin, Natylie and Kermit E. Heartsong (2015). Ukraine: ZBIG's Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated. Tayen Lane Publishing.
Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives has long been the operative canon for State Department Hawks, Neoconservatives and Russophobes. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the implementation of Zbig's Grand strategy has moved at a feverish pace, gobbling up former Soviet satellites and then converting them into NATO forward bases. The endgame for the West, via these moves, has been to quash Russian and ostensibly Chinese independence, economic viability and, thus, their ability to project power in Eurasia. Ukraine: ZBIG's Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated speaks to the historical and geostrategic moves by the West to control the Eurasian landmass: the broken promises and treaties, the geostrategic missteps and, finally, how Grand Chessboard fundamentalism actually catalyzed Russia's re-emergence as a global power, shifted geostrategic power eastward and, proverbially, snatched defeat from the jaws of a U.S./NATO victory.

Ballard, J. G. (1990). The Atrocity Exhibition. San Francisco, CA, RE/Search Publications.
Easily one of the 20th century's most visionary writers, J. G. Ballard still lives far ahead of his time. Called his "prophetic masterpiece" by many, The Atrocity Exhibition practically lies outside of any literary tradition. Part science fiction, part eerie historical fiction, part pornography, its characters adhere to no rules of linearity or stability. This reissued edition features an introduction by William S. Burroughs, extensive text commentary by Ballard, and four additional stories. Of specific interest are the illustrations by underground cartoonist and professional medical illustrator Phoebe Gloeckner. Her ultrarealistic images of eroticism and destruction add an important dimension to Ballard's text.

Ballard, J. G. (1995). The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard. New York, H. Holt.
First published in 1978, this collection of nineteen of Ballard's best short stories is as timely and informed as ever. His tales of the human psyche and its relationship to nature and technology, as viewed through a strong microscope, were eerily prescient and now provide greater perspective on our computer-dominated culture. Ballard's voice and vision have long served as a font of inspiration for today's cyber-punks, the authors and futurist who brought the information age into the mainstream.

Ballard, J. G. (1998). Cocaine Nights. Washington, D.C., Counterpoint.
When travel writer Charles Prentice arrives at Estrella de Mar, a resort town near Gibraltar populated primarily by British retirees, to find out why his brother Frank has been jailed, he's shocked to find that Frank has confessed to a spectacular act of arson that left five people dead. Charles tries to find the real culprit by hanging around Estrella de Mar, which one resident describes as "like Chelsea or Greenwich Village in the 1960s. There are theatre and film clubs, a choral society, cordon blue classes. Stand still for a moment and you find yourself roped into a revival of Waiting for Godot. But the longer he stays, the more confused Charles is by the residents' breezy lack of concern about the constant background of vandalism, rape, prostitution, and drug dealing.

Ballard, J. G. (1985). Concrete Island. New York, Vintage Books.
On a day in April, just after three o'clock in the afternoon, Robert Maitland's car crashes over the concrete parapet of a high-speed highway onto the island below, where he is injured and, finally, trapped. What begins as an almost ludicrous predicament soon turns into horror as Maitland - a wickedly modern Robinson Crusoe - realizes that, despite evidence of other inhabitants, this doomed terrain has become a mirror of his own mind. Seeking the dark outer rim of the everyday, Ballard weaves private catastrophe into an intensely specular allegory.

Ballard, J. G. (2001). Crash. New York, Picador.
In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

Ballard, J. G. (1966). The Crystal World. New York, Farrar.
J. G. Ballard's fourth novel, which established his reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent and imaginative powers, tells the story of a physician specializing in the treatment of leprosy who is invited to a small outpost in the interior of Africa. Finding the roadways blocked, he takes to the river, and embarks on a frightening journey through a strange petrified forest whose area expands daily, affecting not only the physical environment but also its inhabitants.

Ballard, J. G. (2002). The Day of Creation. New York, Picador USA: Distributed by Holtzbrinck Publishers.
Part spellbinding story, part fable for our time, Ballard's new novel is a vividly cinematic but nightmarish vision of a corrupted world. Dr. Mallory has come to a backward, drought-plagued and poverty ridden African country to run a WHO clinic, but constant warfare between a ragged band of guerrillas and the local chief of police has caused the tribal residents to flee. By accident, Mallory uncovers a mysterious stream that soon becomes a swiftly flowing river, and he dreams of creating a green Sahara and "saving" the Third World. Naming the river after himself and obsessively identifying with it, he immediately finds himself in conflict with Dr. Sanger, a charlatan maker of TV documentaries, who believes that his "flattering revision of nature was an act of creation as significant as the original invention of the river." Mallory undergoes a sinister change of heart, acknowledging a self-destructive impulse whose origins in his past are only dimly described. Suddenly deciding he must destroy the river, he travels toward its source on a derelict ferry with a former guerrilla, a 12-year-old girl he names Noon, who progresses in a matter of weeks from Stone Age primitivism to a fascination with technology. Mallory encounters terrifying dangers at every stage of his quest. The area surrounding the river, which at first seemed Edenic, becomes poisoned by the water's now miasmic influence, the people along its banks falling deathly ill with fever and starvation. Mallory himself slides into full-fledged dementia and delirium as he battles the guerrillas, the militia and the forces of nature.

Ballard, J. G. (2005). Empire of the Sun. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.
Ballard's enduring novel of war and deprivation, internment camps and death marches, and starvation and survival is an honest coming-of-age tale set in a world thrown utterly out of joint. Jim is separated from his parents in a world at war. To survive, he must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him. Shanghai, 1941 -- a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp, he is witness to the fierce white flash of Nagasaki, as the bomb bellows the end of the war, and the dawn of a blighted world.

Ballard, J. G. (1991). High-rise. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
The unnerving tale of life in a modern tower block running out of control -- now reissued in new cover style. Within the concealing walls of an elegant forty-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hell-bent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on 'enemy' floors and the once-luxurious amenities become an arena for technological mayhem!In this classic visionary tale, human society slips into violent reverse as the inhabitants of the high-rise, driven by primal urges, recreate a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.

Ballard, J. G. (1991). The Kindness of Women. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
This elegantly structured sequel to Empire of the Sun begins again with a boy's traumatic experiences in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and ends some 40 years later with his viewing a film based on his novel about those experiences. Before this "last act in a profound catharsis," however, the narrator Jim stumbles through medical study at Cambridge, trains briefly as an RAF pilot in Canada, marries, and suffers domestic tragedy. Jim both documents and participates in the violence and excess of the 1960s, but at various moments of crisis he is fortunate enough to experience the redemptive love of women.

Ballard, J. G. (2001). Super-Cannes. New York, Picador USA.
Eden-Olympia is more than just a multinational business park, it is a virtual city-state in itself, built for the most elite high-tech industries. Isolated and secure, the residents lack nothing, yet one day, a doctor at the clinic goes on a suicidal shooting spree. Dr. Jane Sinclair is hired as his replacement, and her husband Paul uncovers the dangerous psychological vents that maintain Eden-Olympia's smoothly-running surface.

Balliett, Whitney (2000). Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000. New York, St. Martin's Press.
Balliett has earned the title of one of America's preeminent, and certainly prolific, jazz critics. Since 1954 he has penned literally hundreds of album and concert reviews, musician profiles, book reviews, and other critical essays on jazz music for the New Yorker magazine. This anthology brings them together under one cover. Years of writing for a general audience sharpened Balliett's impressionistic writing style, which manages to convey the excitement and nuances of jazz music to the uninitiated without compromising his critical ear. Balliett remained an impartial critic and embraced the mainstream and avant-garde alike. Key players - John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus - reappear consistently throughout the volume.

Barzini, Luigi (1968). The Italians. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books.
Barzini is startlingly frank as he examines "the two Italies": the one that created and nurtured such luminaries as Dante Alighieri, St. Thomas of Aquino, and Leonardo da Vinci; the other, feeble and prone to catastrophe, backward in political action if not in thought, "invaded, ravaged, sacked, and humiliated in every century." Deeply ambivalent, Barzini approaches his task with a combination of love, hate, disillusion, and affectionate paternalism, resulting in a completely original, thoughtful, and probing picture of his countrymen.

Baum, Gregory (2009). The Theology of Tariq Ramadan: A Catholic Perspective. Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press.
Gregory Baum presents for the first time an introduction to several key aspects of Ramadan's theological enterprise. Baum examines Ramadan's work historically within an interfaith perspective, drawing several parallels between Islamic and Catholic encounters with modernity. His comparison of the debates in the two traditions suggests that reform and renewal are compatible with the substance of both Catholic and Muslim traditions.

Balzac, Honore de (1970). A Harlot High and Low (Splendeurs Et Misères Des Courtisanes). Harmondsworth, Penguin.
A splendid and powerful novel from the 'Scenes of Parisian Life.' In it, Balzac brings to bear his encyclopaedic knowledge of finance, fashinonable intrigue, and the ramnifications both of the underworld and of the police system. The harlot of the title, elevated to the heights of luxury only to be reduced to the depths of misery, is no more than a pawn in what is essentially a duel of wits and ruthlessness fought between criminal master-minds. It is the figure of Vautrin, the Satanic genius at the heart of the web and one of the great characters of world literature, that effortlessly dominates the novel.

Balzac, Honore de and Kathleen Raine (2002). Cousin Bette. New York, Modern Library.
Part of Balzac's epic series La Comedie humaine (The Human Comedy). Thematically a testament to female vindictiveness, Cousin Bette recounts the story of Lisbeth Fischer, an embittered, unmarried peasant woman who hides her envy and hatred behind a mask of kindness as she attempts to ruin the Hulot family. She succeeds up to a point, but eventually the family regains its wealth through judicious and fortuitous marital and business connections. Bette herself, bitterly disappointed, sickens and dies.

Balzac, Honore de and Marion Ayton Crawford (1955). Eugenie Grandet. [Harmondsworth, Middlesex], Penguin Books.
Balzac's spare, classical story of a girl whose life is blighted by her father's hysterical greed. One of the most magnificent of his tales of early nineteenth-century French provincial life, this novel is the work of a writer who represents most fully the ability of the human animal to understand and illuminate its own condition.

Balzac, Honore de and Kathleen Raine (2001). Lost Illusions. New York, Modern Library.
"Balzac [was] the master unequalled in the art of painting humanity as it exists in modern society," wrote George Sand."He searched and dared everything."

Balzac, Honore de and A. J. Krailsheimer (1991). Père Goriot. Oxford [England]; New York, Oxford University Press.
Nobody writes about money like Balzac, and his classic chronicle of a young man from the provinces clawing his way to success in 19th century Paris, even as an older man is victimized by the same milieu, shrewdly captures the financial dimension of so much that goes on between people. The boarding house in which the two protagonists live is a microcosm of their world, and Goriot's treatment by his daughters would make Lear blanch. Written between 1837 and 1843, Lost Illusions reveals, perhaps better than any other of Balzac's ninety-two novels, the nature and scope of his genius. The story of Lucien Chardon, a young poet from Angoulême who tries desperately to make a name for himself in Paris, is a brilliantly realistic and boldly satirical portrait of provincial manners and aristocratic life. Handsome and ambitious but naïve, Lucien is patronized by the beau monde as represented by Madame de Bargeton and her cousin, the formidable Marquise d'Espard, only to be duped by them. Denied the social rank he thought would be his, Lucien discards his poetic aspirations and turns to hack journalism; his descent into Parisian low life ultimately leads to his own death.

Balzac, Honore de (1915). Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau. Boston, Little, Brown, and Company.
A 1837 novel by Honore de Balzac as part of his series La Comedie humaine. Its main character is a Parisian perfumier who achieves success in the cosmetics business, but becomes bankrupt due to property speculation. The novel is a partly satirical, partly sympathetic portrayal of the Parisian middle class.

Bamford, James (1983). The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency. Harmondsworth, Middlesex; New York, N.Y., U.S.A., Penguin Books.
In 1947, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand signed a secret treaty in which they agreed to cooperate in matters of signals intelligence. In effect, the governments agreed to pool their geographic and technological assets in order to listen in on the electronic communications of China, the Soviet Union, and other Cold War bad guys--all in the interest of truth, justice, and the American Way, naturally. The thing is, the system apparently catches everything. Government security services, led by the U.S. National Security Agency, screen a large part (and perhaps all) of the voice and data traffic that flows over the global communications network. Fifty years later, the European Union is investigating possible violations of its citizens' privacy rights by the NSA, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public advocacy group, has filed suit against the NSA, alleging that the organization has illegally spied on U.S. citizens.

Being a super-secret spy agencyl, it's tough to get a handle on what's really going on at the NSA. However, James Bamford has done great work in documenting the agency's origins and Cold War exploits in The Puzzle Palace. Beginning with the earliest days of cryptography (code-making and code-breaking are large parts of the NSA's mission), Bamford explains how the agency's predecessors helped win World War II by breaking the German Enigma machine and defeating the Japanese Purple cipher. He also documents signals intelligence technology, ranging from the usual collection of spy satellites to a great big antenna in the West Virginia woods that listened to radio signals as they bounced back from the surface of the moon.

Bamford, James (2002). Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. New York, Anchor Books.
The National Security Agency (NSA), writes Bamford, has made the United States an "eavesdropping superpower," capable of capturing, deciphering and analyzing "signal intelligence" communications in whatever form it may exist and from whatever nation it may be transmitted. Yet with a budget ($4 billion a year) and staff (numbering in the tens of thousands) that dwarf its more famous cousin, the CIA, and with a headquarters, known as "Crypto City," that is its own self-contained community, little is known of NSA among the public and, more troublingly, even within other parts of government. Uncovering the secrets of NSA, its history and operations, has become Bamford's life's work, first begun in his now classic The Puzzle Palace (1982) and continued in this significantly revised and expanded present volume. With remarkable access to highly sensitive documents and information, Bamford takes the reader from the beginnings of NSA during the early cold war, through its roles in such watershed events as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, to the amazingly sophisticated developments in information technology taking place within NSA today. What Bamford discovers is at times surprising, often quite troubling but always fascinating.

Banes, Sally (1993). Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body. Durham, Duke University Press.
Banes offers a genealogy of the neighborhood, then shows how art and arts institutions like the Living Theater helped reconstitute community there. Her approach is thematic: she explores avant-garde artists' appropriation of folkloric techniques and suggests that choreographers like Yvonne Rainer and artists like Andy Warhol mirrored the "equalizing impulse of the Sixties" in their work. She discusses the impact of growing racial consciousness on an art world in flux, and shows how American art became caught up in Cold War cultural competition with the Soviets. Most interesting is her analysis of how, during a time when American culture began to liberate the body, artists led the way with portrayals of the "effervescent body "--concerned with eating, excretion, birth and death.

Bangs, Lester and John Morthland (2003). Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. New York, Anchor Books.
Before his untimely death in 1982, Lester Bangs was inarguably the most influential critic of rock and roll. Writing in hyper-intelligent Benzedrine prose that calls to mind Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, he eschewed all conventional thinking as he discussed everything from Black Sabbath being the first truly Catholic band to Anne Murray's smoldering sexuality. In Mainlines, Blood Feasts, Bad Taste fellow rock critic John Morthland has compiled a companion volume to Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, the first, now classic collection of Bangs's work. Here are excerpts from an autobiographical piece Bangs wrote as a teenager, travel essays, and, of course, the music pieces, essays, and criticism covering everything from titans like Miles Davis, Lou Reed, and the Rolling Stones to esoteric musicians like Brian Eno and Captain Beefheart.

Banks, Russell (1985). Continental Drift. New York, Harper & Row.
On the extravagant, shallow promises of his brother, Bob Dubois, 30, a burnt-out New Hampshire oil burner repairman, takes his family to Florida. There the Duboises meet their destiny in the form of a counterpoint familythat of Vanise Dorsinville, a woman who has fled Haiti with her infant and nephew for a better life in the U.S. PW praised Continental Drift as a "vital, compelling novel." Early in Continental Drift, Russell Banks compares the migrations of humanity to those of the elements: tides, winds, whole landmasses making their well-mapped, decorous circuit of the planet. One of the marvels of this book is the way it combines such an aerial perspective with particular, earthbound lives. Seen from ground level--the vantage point of most lives--this perpetual exodus has little of the bland and unimpeachable brutality of natural disaster. Instead, it can look heroic--a dogged determination to cheat entropy and death for as long as possible. - The Nation, James Marcus

Baptist, Edward E. (2016). The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York, Basic Books.
Thoroughly researched, expansive, and provocative, it will force scholars of slavery and its aftermath to reconsider long held assumptions about the 'peculiar institution's' relationship to American capitalism and contemporary issues of race and democracy.

Baraka, Imamu Amiri and Larry Neal (2007). Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Baltimore, MD, Black Classic Press.
The defining work of the Black Arts Movement, Black Fire is at once a rich anthology and an extraordinary source document. Nearly 200 selections, including poetry, essays, short stories, and plays, from over 75 cultural critics, writers, and political leaders, capture the social and cultural turmoil of the 1960s. In his new introduction, Amiri Baraka reflects nearly four decades later on both the movement and the book.

Baraka, Imamu Amiri (2009). Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music. Berkeley, University of California Press.
In this brilliant assemblage of Baraka's writings on music, the first such collection in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends autobiography, history, musical analysis, and political commentary to recall the sounds, people, times, and places he's encountered. As in his earlier classics, Blues People and Black Music, Baraka offers essays on the famous--Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane--and on those whose names are known mainly by jazz aficionados--Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style, with its deep roots in poetry, makes palpable his love and respect for his jazz musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm show us again how much Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers mattered.

Baraka, Imamu Amiri and William J. Harris (2000). The Leroi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader. New York.
Baraka is a writer who readily embraces change and this collection reflects a life full of changes. Selections are arranged chronologically in four periods: The Beat Period (1957-62), The Transitional Period (1963-65), The Black Nationalist Period (1965-74), and The Third World Marxist Period (1974-present). Editor Harris, in collaboration with Baraka, has chosen representative examples of Baraka's poems, plays, jazz writings, and social criticism. Among several new works are a eulogy for James Baldwin and an emotional analysis of Jesse Jackson's role in Democratic politics.

Baraka, Amiri (2012). Razor: Revolutionary Art for Cultural Revolution. Chicago, Ill., Third World Press.
Intended to cut clean through the oppression imposed upon the mainstream by society's "intellectual superstructure," this collection of revolutionary essays by literary and cultural legend Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones) is eye-opening and raises numerous issues concerning contemporary African American life. The socially conscious will appreciate the creative analyses and stimulating critiques on display here, buoyed by Baraka's distinctive, bold, and aggressive opinions about the ways our culture bestows ignorance upon the ignorant merely to exploit them. Further developing the ideals of black nationalism and social justice that put Baraka on the cultural map, these essays dissect the sedentary attitudes of the American majority to promote a finer tomorrow.

Baraka, Imamu Amiri (1995). Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka / Leroi Jones (1961-1995). New York and Saint Paul, MN, Marsilio Publishers; distributed in the US by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.
Poems selected here span Baraka's first collection, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), to the long poem Wise, Why's, Y'z. The best work is culled from his second and third books, The Dead Lecturer (1964) and Black Magic (1969). These works combine the personal and political in highly charged ways. When Baraka writes of "the roaring harmonies of need" or of "stumbling over our souls in the dark, for the sake of unnatural advantage" he succeeds as both an activist and a poet. The entire book resonates with jazz rhythms and homages to Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane. This use of jazz as inspiration and artistic model is just one of many signs that Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) came of age during the Beat movement and remains perhaps its truest practitioner. His poems are aggressive challenges to the status-quo, relying on daring images, short chant-like lines, neologisms, slang, blues lyrics, and scat-singing: "BaBa Ree Bopp/Ooo Shoobie/Doobie.Transbluesency is a chronicle of nearly 40 years of poetic output.

Baran, Paul A. and Paul M. Sweezy (1968). Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Throughout its history, Monthly Review has advanced a theoretical view known as monopoly capital or stagnation theory. This perspective, outlined in Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital, argued that Marx's "law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" was no longer directly applicable to the monopoly capitalist economy that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and had to be replaced by a "law of the tendency of surplus to rise " - where surplus was defined as the difference between the wages of production workers and total value added. A key contradiction of capitalism in its monopoly stage is therefore that of rising surplus and the associated problems of surplus absorption.

Rising surplus and the accumulation of a mountain of surplus means that capitalist firms are faced with the problem of how to employ all of it, i.e., how to use the piled-up cash to make more profit. True, capitalists can use or waste some of this surplus for personal pleasure. But that is peanuts compared to the size of the growing surplus. So the problem remains one of how to absorb all of the surplus actually and potentially available. Generally, the answer is sought in new investment, but that expansion of capital comes up against consumption limits imposed by the distribution of income: who will buy the increased volume of output? New epoch-making innovations - resembling the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile in the overall effect on accumulation could provide sufficient profitable investment outlets, but such epoch-making innovations are historical rather than economic factors that cannot be counted on to appear when needed or on the scale necessary. All of this means that the system has a powerful tendency towards stagnation, arising from an inability to find outlets for all of the surplus actually and potentially generated at the level of production - a problem only partly compensated for by the rise of various countervailing factors, such as the growing sales effort, military spending, and financial expansion.

Barbusse, Henri (1916). Under Fire. New York, Penguin Books.
For the group of ordinary men in the French Sixth Battalion, thrown together from all over France and longing for home, war is simply a matter of survival, lightened only by the arrival of their rations or a glimpse of a pretty girl or a brief reprieve in the hospital. Reminiscent of classics like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Under Fire (originally published in French as La Feu) vividly evokes life in the trenches: the mud, stench, and monotony of waiting while constantly fearing for one's life in an infernal and seemingly eternal battlefield. Based on his own experience of the Great War, Henri Barbusse's novel is a powerful account of one of the greatest horrors mankind has inflicted on itself.

Barden, Leonard (1964). Chess. An Introduction to Chess Moves and Tactics Simply Explained. New York, Dover Publications.
Informal intermediate introduction to chess, quite strong in explaining reasons for moves. Covers basic material, tactics, important openings, traps, positional play in middle game, end game.

Barks, Carl (2024). Walt Disney's Donald Duck Adventures Mini Collection. Seattle, Fantagraphics.
In “Ghost in the Grotto,” Donald Duck and his nephews try to harvest kelp at Skull-Eye Reef but are soon menaced by a ducknapping ghost in armor, a centuries-old curse, and a giant octopus who — well, what do you think giant octopuses do? (Plus: two bonus stories, by Barks!) Next, when Blacksnake McSquirt’s high-tech gang moves into town in “Sheriff of Bullet Valley,” Donald Duck, who learned everything he knows about fighting bad guys from the movies, boldly dons a badge and swaggers into the fray. Can Donald solve the mystery? Can you? (The first clue is on the back cover!) Then Donald Duck and his nephews hoist sail on their most momentous quest ever in “The Golden Helmet”! In a rip-roaring race full of twists, turns, and tumultuous upsets, they bound over treacherous seas, slog across treacherous terrain — and get waylaid by treacherous opponents! The prize: a fabulous Viking artifact that will make its finder king of North America! (Plus: three more Barks bonus stories!). Features nearly 300 pages of comic adventures in three handy landscape format paperback volumes inside a nifty little slipcase.

Barlett, Donald L. and James B. Steele (1979)). Howard Hughes: His Life & Madness. New York, W.W. Norton.
"Donald Barlett and James Steele of The Philadelphia Inquirer, the finest team of reporters west of The Times of London, herewith present the perfect biography of the weirdest, most fascinating, most god-awful corporate creature you will ever encounter in broad daylight." -- Robert Sherrill, The Nation

"Now the full story of the life and death of Howard Hughes has been published, told not as cheap gossip but as a dazzlingly reported, hard-nosed account...[A] fat, beautifully researched book." -- John Justin Smith, Chicago Sun-Times

Barlow, William (1989). Looking up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture. Philadelphia, Temple University Press.
Barlow explores the lyrics, describes the musical styles, and portrays the musicians and performers who created this uniquely American music. He describes how the blues sound - with its recognizable dissonance and African musical standards - and the blues text, which provided a bottom up view of American society, became bulwarks of cultural resistance.

Barnes, Julian (1990). Flaubert's Parrot. New York, Vintage Books.
A kind of detective story, relating a cranky amateur scholar's search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, and the obsession of this detective whose life seems to oddly mirror those of Flaubert's characters.

Barnes, Peter (1969). The Ruling Class; a Baroque Comedy. New York, Grove Press.
Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class exploded onto the theatre scene when it was produced in Nottingham, England, in 1968. Its acerbic wit and tightly woven plot openly criticize England's social hierarchy, specifically targeting the foibles and greed of the upper - the ruling - class. Barnes's play peels back the veneer of respectability to reveal the ugly underneath, the rot that can exist at the very core of a life of privilege. The protagonist of the drama, Jack, the Fourteenth Earl of Gurney, is insane: he thinks he is Jesus Christ. His creed of Love proves completely unacceptable to the rest of the Gurney family, who try to get him committed so that they can take over the family estate.

Barnes-Svarney, Patricia L. (1995). The New York Public Library Science Desk Reference. New York, Macmillan USA.
From formulas to the periodic table of the elements, from a list of endangered animals to computer terminology, this is an excellent sourcebook of scientific information. Thirteen chapters cover major divisions of science (e.g., astronomy, biology, chemistry, computer and environmental sciences, technology) listing basic facts, formulas, terms, and processes. One additional chapter lists "useful resources" such as books, organizations, museums, zoos, national parks, and planetariums. Topically arranged under headings such as "Scientific Measurement," "Time," "Biology," "Earth Science," and "Computer Science." Most chapters have glossaries, brief biographies of important people in that discipline, and bibliographies for further reading. Much of the book is made up of tables and lists, for example, decimal and percent equivalents of common fractions, elements that make up the human body, botanical names of plants, forthcoming solar and lunar eclipses, and decimal and binary equivalents. Black-and-white drawings are provided for symbols, such as those used for rock types and in electrical engineering. More than 100 graphics include drawings of plant and animal cells, areas of taste on the tongue, and weather fronts. The book concludes with useful directories of science museums, planetariums, zoos, national parks and wildlife refuges, and scientific organizations.

Barrett, Wayne (2016) [A reprint, with new introduction; originally published in 1992.]. Trump: The Deals and the Downfall. New York, Regan Arts.
Barrett unravels the myth and reveals the truth behind Donald Trump's wheelings and dealings. After decades covering him, few reporters know Trump as Barrett does. Instead of the canny businessman that Trump claims in his own books, Barrett explores how Trump exploited his father's banking and political connections to finance and grease his first major deals. Barrett's investigative biography takes us from the days of Trump's lonely youth to his brash entry into the real estate market, and to the back room deals behind his New York, Atlantic City and Florida projects.

Barrett, William (1990). Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. New York, Anchor Books.
Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Barrett discusses the views of 19th and 20th century existentialists Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre and interprets the impact of their thinking on literature, art, and philosophy.

Barry, Lynda (2000). The Greatest of Marlys. Montreal, Drawn and Quarterly.
Barry is one of American literature's great chroniclers of childhood. Her comic strips, drawn in disarmingly and deceptively childlike lines, distill the essence of fried bologna sandwiches and stray dogs, mysterious teenage bedrooms, and kickball at dusk.

Barry, Lynda (2017). One! Hundred! Demons!. Montreal, Drawn and Quarterly.
Inspired by a sixteenth-century Zen monk’s painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry confronts various demons from her life in seventeen full-color vignettes. In Barry’s hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you, and stay with you: your worst boyfriend; kickball games on a warm summer night; watching your baby brother dance; the smell of various houses in the neighborhood you grew up in; or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you are officially a teenager.

Barry, Lynda (2008). What It Is. Montreal, Drawn and Quarterly.
How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? These types of questions permeate the pages of 'What it is', with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. Each page is a feast for the eyes with beautiful full-page collages of photographs, watercolors, ink drawings, and text, resulting in a gorgeous volume that explores and encourages writing in a combination of ways. The author challenges readers with philosophical questions to ponder, such as What is an image? Where are they found? Can we remember something we can't imagine? The volume also acts as a workbook that successfully encourages teens to explore their own creativity through writing. In addition, autobiographical glimpses of Barry's journey from childhood to adulthood appear throughout the book. The struggles and obstacles she faces while following her path of becoming an artist and writer allow readers to believe in the possibility of writing themselves. This stunning book will appeal to those teens who are interested in delving into their creativity through words and art. The questions posed and valuable exercises that exist within its pages, along with the illustrations, could also make this book a valuable tool for English and art teachers in the classroom.

Barson, Michael and Steven Heller (2001). Red Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Pop Culture. San Francisco, Chronicle Books.
In detailing the United States' obsession with the Red Menace, Barson and Heller deliver an enticing visual treat of movie poster art, images from comic books and bubble-gum cards (featuring pictures of Mao and Stalin to collect and trade), as well as graphics from political pamphlets, national news magazines, pulp paperbacks and "serious" nonfiction (like J. Edgar Hoover's Masters of Deceit). But the collection's raison d'ˆtre lies in the myriad iconographic examples of how popular culture was used as a national propaganda tool, while simultaneously reflecting mainstream political and social trends. Ranging from the humorous (a J. Edgar Hoover comic book) to the frightening (a copy of Red Channels, the pamphlet that started the television blacklist) and the ironic (an article entitled "Women: Russia's Second Class Citizens"), these cultural artifacts are stark reminders of how political ideology is promoted and produced in everyday life.

Barstow, Frank (1984). Beat the Casino. New York, Simon & Schuster.
Well-written, understandable guide to casino games.

Barth, John (1991). The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. Boston, Little, Brown.
Simon Behler--or Baylor, as he refers to himself in his countless best-selling books of New Journalism--falls overboard during a cruise retracing the legendary voyages of Sindbad the Sailor and is pulled from the water by contemporaries of the real Sinbad. Trapped in the distant past but never at a loss for words, Behler--or Bey el-Loor, as he is now known--amuses his new friends with his exotic tales: boyhood on Maryland's Eastern Shore, first love, early literary success, marriage, and divorce. Intricately, almost obsessively structured, Barth's latest novel is written in the mature, relaxed, stubbornly long-winded style of The Tidewater Tales.

Barth, John and John Barth (1988). The Floating Opera and the End of the Road. New York, Anchor Press.
The Floating Opera and The End of the Road are John Barth's first two novels. Their relationship to each other is evident not only in their ribald subject matter but in the eccentric characters and bitterly humorous tone of the narratives. Both concern strange, consuming love triangles and the destructive effect of an overactive intellect on the emotions. Separately they give two very different views of a universal human drama.

Barthes, Roland (1972). Mythologies. New York, Hill and Wang.
"Mythologies illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life.

Barthes, Roland (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York, Hill and Wang.
This personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volume-- the last book Barthes published--finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography. To this end, several black-and-white photos (by the likes of Avedon, Clifford, Hine, Mapplethorpe, Nadar, Van Der Zee, and so forth) are reprinted throughout the text.

Barthes, Roland and Honore de Balzac (1974). S/Z. New York, Hill and Wang.
"Language was a luxury and a discipline for Barthes. He pursued a subject through language until he cornered it, until its disguise fell away and it was revealed in a kind of epiphany." -Anatole Broyard

Barthes, Roland and Stephen Heath (1977). Image-Music-Text. New York, Hill and Wang.
"The dominant perspective of the thirteen essays collected in Image-Music-Text is semiology. Barthes extends the 'empire of signs' over film and photography, music criticism and writing and reading as historically situated activities. Several essays are frankly didactic. They review and expand the domain of a certain terminology: interpretive codes, narrational systems, functions and indices, denotation and connotation. Yet those impatient with special terms will not mind too much, for where else do they get, under the same cover, Beethoven and 'Goldfinger,' the Bible and Double Bang à Bangkok? Barthes is technical without being heavy, and a professional without ceasing to be an amateur." - Geoffrey Hartman, The New York Times Book Review

Barthes, Roland and Susan Sontag (1982). A Barthes Reader. New York, Hill and Wang.
A Barthes Reader gives one the image of Barthes as one of the great public teachers of our time, someone who thought out, argued for, and made available several steps in a penetrating reflection on language sign systems, texts- and what they have to tell us about the concept of being human. Susan Sontag's prefatory essay is one of her finest acts of criticism. - Peter Brooks, Yale University.

Barzini, Luigi (2002). From Caesar to the Mafia: Persons, Places, and Problems in Italian Life, 2nd Edition. New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers.
Described by Melvin Lasky as "one of the great journalists of our time," Luigi Barzini was also one of the great cultural historians of modern Italy. From Caesar to the Mafia brings together his finest essays, roughly half of them never before published in the English language. Whether discussing the deep Italian roots of Julius Caesar, Casanova's contribution to the art of living big, or Camillo Cavour's contribution to a democratic as well as integrated nation, Barzini makes Italian culture come alive. Whether he is dealing with heroes or villains, he never loses sight of how Italy became a distinct nation.

Barzini, Luigi (1968). The Italians. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books.
Barzini is startlingly frank as he examines “the two Italies”: the one that created and nurtured such luminaries as Dante Alighieri, St. Thomas of Aquino, and Leonardo da Vinci; the other, feeble and prone to catastrophe, backward in political action if not in thought, “invaded, ravaged, sacked, and humiliated in every century.” Deeply ambivalent, Barzini approaches his task with a combination of love, hate, disillusion, and affectionate paternalism, resulting in a completely original, thoughtful, and probing picture of his countrymen.

Barzman, Norma (2003). The Red and the Blacklist: Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate. New York, Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books.
Barzman arrived in Hollywood from Radcliffe in 1941, a good-looking 21-year-old who wanted to be a writer or director, not an actress. She met Ben Barzman at a party for Hollywood "progressives;" before long, they were in the Communist Party together. Ben stayed focused on his career of script writing. Norma, especially after they married, made do with anything, mainly writing for Hearst's Examiner. By 1944, they knew they were both under surveillance; by 1949, they realized they had to leave the country or face HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) and jail for refusing to inform. They settled in Paris, their base for nearly 20 years. Even though Ben subscribed to leftist ideals about equality, his wife's career made him uncomfortable, so from 1955 on, Norma made babies, had affairs and researched movie ideas for Ben. From her stories--dealing with the likes of Picasso, Sophia Loren, Peter Sellers, Anthony Quinn and Ingrid Bergman--it seems the life of a Cold War expatriate was more attractive than anything America was offering. Still, blacklisted men like Ben and his sometime collaborator Joseph Losey "hugged their bitterness," while the women just adapted. Visiting the Soviet Union and watching the Communist betrayal of May 1968 in France were profoundly disillusioning, but Norma found new hope stateside in the '70s amid women's liberation and the push to restore the reputations of the blacklisted Hollywood artists. Her unique, absorbing and richly detailed memoir is a contribution to both, restoring women to the history of this period and documenting the bravery with which some people stood by their ideals.

Barzun, Jacques (1984). A Stroll with William James. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
With this book, Jacques Barzun pays what he describes as an "intellectual debt" to William James--psychologist, philosopher, and, for Barzun, guide and mentor. Commenting on James's life, thought, and legacy, Barzun leaves us with a wise and civilized distillation of the great thinker's work.

Barzun, Jacques (2000). From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present. New York, HarperCollins.
Barzun, the renowned cultural critic, historian and former Columbia provost and professor, offers much more than a summation of his life's work in this profound, eloquent, witty historical survey. A book of enormous riches, it's sprinkled with provocations. Barzun contradicts Max Weber, arguing that the Protestant Reformation did not galvanize the capitalist spirit. With feminist ardor, he depicts the 16th century as molded and directed by women "as brilliant as the men, and sometimes more powerful" (e.g., Queens Elizabeth and Isabella). His eclectic synthesis is organized around a dozen or so themes--including emancipation, abstraction and individualism--that in his judgment define the modern era. Barzun keeps up the momentum with scores of snappy profiles, including of Luther, Erasmus, Cromwell, Mozart, Rousseau and Byron, as well as of numerous unsung figures such as German educator Friedrich Froebel, inventor of kindergarten, and turn-of-the-century American pioneer ecologist George Marsh. Other devices help make this tome user-friendly. The margins are chock-full of quotes, while vignettes of Venice in 1650, Weimar in 1790 and Chicago in 1895 give a taste of the zeitgeist.

Basbanes, Nicholas A. (1999). A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. New York, H. Holt.
Anecdotes and insights on book collecting and appreciation make for a fine collection of stories on collecting. Authors, book authorities, builders of special collections, and biographical sketches of bibliophiles contribute to an excellent discourse on book passions and literary loves.

Basbanes, Nicholas A. (2003). A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World. New York, HarperCollins.
Basbanes offers a consideration of the many pressing issues that surround the role of books in contemporary society, such as the willful destruction of books and libraries in Sarajevo, Tibet, and Cambodia, and the spirited efforts to restore them. The matter of "discards" at various libraries takes on an entirely new dimension as well, with fully researched stories about the kind of attitudes that may lead to the loss of "last copies" of important works. In detail, Basbanes examines the materials used over the centuries to record information -- among them clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, slabs of stone, palm leaves, animal skins, and hammered sheets of gold and copper. Also discussed are the various debates that continue to rage about preservation.

Bataille, Georges (1985). Literature and Evil. New York, M. Boyars.

Batchelor, Dean, Chris Poole, et al. (1988). The Great Book of Sports Cars: Over 200 of the World's Greatest Automobiles. New York, Publications International Ltd

Batelli-Kneale, Tania and Anna Di Stefano (2008). Take Off in Italian. New York, Oxford University Press.
This complete language learning kit contains everything you need to speak, read, write and understand Italian.

Bates, Milton J. (Compiler), Lawrence Lichty (Compiler), Paul Miles (Compiler), Ronald H. Spector (Compiler), Marilyn Young (Compiler) (1998). Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1969 (Part One). New York, Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the USA by Penguin Putnam.
Drawn from original newspaper and magazine reports and contemporary books, Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975 brings together the work of over eighty remarkable writers to create an unprecedented mosaic view of America's longest war and its impact on an increasingly fractured American society. The first volume traces the deepening American involvement in South Vietnam from the first deaths of American advisers in 1959 through the controversial battle of "Hamburger Hill" in 1969. Malcolm Browne, Neil Sheehan, and David Halberstam report on the guerrilla warfare of the early 1960s; Jack P. Smith, Ward Just, and Peter Arnett experience the terrors of close-range combat in the Central Highlands; Marguerite Higgins and Frances FitzGerald observe South Vietnamese politics; Jonathen Schell records the destructive effects of American firepower in Quang Ngai; Tom Wolfe captures the cool courage of navy pilots over North Vietnam. At home, Meg Greenfield describes a teach-in, Norman Mailer the Pentagon March, and Jeffrey Blankfort the impact of the war on a small town in Ohio. Thomas Johnson and Wallace Terry examine the changing attitudes of African-American soldiers fighting America's first fully integrated war. Included in full is Daniel Lang's Casualties of War, the haunting story of a five-man reconnaissance patrol choosing between good and evil.

Bates, Milton J. (Compiler), Lawrence Lichty (Compiler), Paul Miles (Compiler), Ronald H. Spector (Compiler), Marilyn Young (Compiler) (1998). Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969-1975 (Part Two). New York, Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the USA by Penguin Putnam.
This second volume traces events from the revelation of the My Lai massacre in 1969 through the fall of Saigon in 1975. Here are Peter Kann on the ambiguities of pacification; Gloria Emerson on the South Vietnamese debacle in Laos; Donald Kirk on declining American morale; Sydney Schanberg on the fall of Phnom Penh and the victory of the Khmer Rouge; Philip Caputo, Keyes Beech, Peter Arnett, and Malcolm Browne on the last days of South Vietnam. At home, Michael Kinsley recounts a confrontation between Henry Kissinger and his Harvard colleagues; James Michener reconstructs the Kent State shootings; and Doris Kearns listens to Lyndon Johnson's anguished recollections. Included in full is Dispatches, journalist Michael Herr's acclaimed impressionistic memoir of his immersion in the exhilaration, dread, and sorrow of the Vietnam War.

Baudelaire, Charles and Francis Scarfe, tr. (2012). Baudelaire: Paris Blues (Le Spleen De Paris). London, Anvil Press Poetry.
Baudelaire’s prose poems were written over many years and published in magazines between 1855 and his death in 1867. Francis Scarfe’s translations reflect a lifetime’s passion for Baudelaire’s work and a deep understanding of it. "The appeal of this beautiful book," he says in his introduction, "lies in its wide range of subjects, its variations of tone and mood, its great variety of presentation and above all in its psychological subtleties. It shows the poet at the height of his powers, totally uninhibited in his expression of wonder, tenderness and compassion." Francis Scarfe has appended an early prose extravaganza, the delightful short novel La Fanfarlo (1847), which has much in common with the poems.

Baudelaire, Charles and Francis Scarfe, tr. (1986). Baudelaire: The Complete Verse. London, Anvil Press Poetry.
Les Fleurs du mal (1861) was the first great modern work of poetry and one of the few books of poems to become an international bestseller. This edition contains all of Baudelaire's poetry in verse with Francis Scarfe's scrupulous and inventive prose translations at the foot of the pages. Together with his detailed and authoritative introduction, this presentation makes an ideal edition both for the student and for the general reader who wishes to tackle the French original with a reliable prose guide at hand.

Baudelaire, Charles and Christopher Mattison, tr. (1955). Flowers of Evil: A Selection. New York, New Directions.
Flowers of Evil: A Selection contains 53 poems which the editors feel best represent the total work and which. in their opinion, have been most successfully rendered into English. The French texts as established by Yves Gérard Le Dantec for the Pléiade edition are printed en face. Included are Baudelaire's Three Drafts of a Preface and brief notes on the nineteen translators whose work is represented.

Baudelaire, Charles (1983). Intimate Journals. San Francisco, City Lights Books.
This is the document of a poet consecrating himself to memory. His attempt to maintain perspective; his aesthetic self objectification that is repeatedly shattered when he looks into society; his Catholocism, his ennui, his mistress, his mother, all these cast a definitely "intimate" hue to the pages that are essential for any reader wishing to come to terms with Baudelaire's psyche: to see why his self-destruction was inseparable from his creations. For they were both necessary symptoms of his sensibility - an immaculately modern sensibility. The fragmented nature of the writings prevents the work from actually being a "work" - it is more like an authentic gesture, an unpremeditated act of self revelation. A fascinating and ultimately harrowing document.

Baudelaire, Charles and Richard Howard (1982). Les Fleurs Du Mal: The Complete Text of the Flowers of Evil. Boston, D.R. Godine.
Richard Howard's translations of these poems are rich, sensual, potent, lurid renderings. His verse forgoes the shoehorn of obeying the foreign rhymes (a decision shared by Dante's best translators) and pursues instead a laden, incantatory English that is utterly full and alive--really alive and vital, almost writhing in his versions of Baudelaire's most charnel poems (like Carrion," Against Her Levity," and the grim crescendo of To the Reader), and with a nearly pungent eros in the coutless mistress poems.

Baudelaire, Charles and Louise Varèse (1970). Paris Spleen 1869. New York, New Directions Pub. Corp.
Le spleen de Paris, also known as Paris Spleen, is a collection of 51 short prose poems by Charles Baudelaire published in 1869, posthumously by his sister. Baudelaire mentions he had read Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit at least twenty times before starting this work. Though inspired by Bertrand, Baudelaire's prose poems were based on Paris contemporary life instead of the Medieval background which Bertrand employed. He told about his work: "These are the flowers of evil again, but with more freedom, much more details, and much more mockery." Written twenty years after the fratricidal June Days that ended the ideal or "brotherly" revolution of 1848, Baudelaire makes no attempts at trying to reform society he has grown up in but realizes the horrors of the progressing modernizing of Paris. In poems such as The Eyes of the Poor where he writes (after witnessing a impoverished family looking in on a new cafe) "Not only was i moved by that family of eyes, but i felt a little ashamed of our glasses and decanters, larger than our thirst," showing his acknowledgement of the poor conditions in his city, and also showing the feelings of despair that accompanies the acknowledgement.

Baudrillard, Jean, Dietmar Kamper, et al. (1989). Looking Back at the End of the World. New York, Semiotext(e).
First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history." Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the "end of the world." The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required in a society without traditional subjects and institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and any nostalgia for "starting" from the familiar in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively, the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of "ends." And other things besides.

Bauer, Wolfgang (1976). China and the Search for Happiness: Recurring Themes in Four Thousand Years of Chinese Cultural History. New York, Seabury Press.
In this enormous work, in essence a compendium of sources with prolonged commentary, Bauer pictures the Chinese visions of escape into happiness from a large number of sources: the key ones are Taoist, especially the second century AD Lieh-tzu, though he also examines the middle periods of China's history, considers the Westernized syntheses of the early twentieth century, and ends with Mao Tse-tung and his critics.

Baum, L. Frank (2000). The Annotated Wizard of Oz: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York, Norton.
A beloved classic comes to life with this beautifully illustrated annotated edition on the 100th anniversary of Oz. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the quintessential American fairy tale, but also one of the most controversial children's books ever published. Michael Patrick Hearn, the world's leading Oz scholar, provides this annotated edition that illuminates all of Oz's numerous contemporary references, provides fascinating character sources, and explains the actual meaning of the word "Oz." A facsimile of the rare 1900 first edition appears with the original drawings by W. W. Denslow--scrupulously reproduced to mimic their correct colors, using a different color for each region of Oz--as well as twenty-five previously unpublished illustrations. In addition, Hearn provides an extensive bibliography, compiling Baum's published work, every notable Oz edition, and the stage and motion-picture productions from 1939's The Wizard of Oz to the 1974 Broadway smash The Wiz. 90 black-and-white, 56 color, and two-color illustrations throughout.

Beaglehole, J. C. (1974). The Life of Captain James Cook. Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press.
The culmination of the life work of the most distinguished historian of Pacific exploration, this lavishly illustrated biography places Cook in the context of his times and affirms his eminence in the history of maritime discovery.

Bean, Elise J. (2018). Financial Exposure: Carl Levin's Senate Investigations into Finance and Tax Abuse. New York, NY, Palgrave Macmillan.
Offers readers a rare, insider’s portrait of the world of U.S. Congressional oversight. It examines specific oversight investigations into multiple financial and offshore tax scandals over fifteen years, from 1999 to 2014, when Senator Levin served in a leadership role on the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), the Senate’s premier investigative body.

Beaton, Kate (2022). Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. Montreal, Drawn & Quarterly.
Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people. Beaton encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed.

Beatty, Jack (2007). Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America 1865-1900. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.

"Having redeemed democracy in the Civil War," laments Jack Beatty, "America betrayed it in the Gilded Age." In ambitious and politically charged work that spans far more terrain than its subtitle suggests. The redemption is the demise of American slavery. The betrayal is the rise of rapacious industrial corporations in the decades immediately following the war. The ascent of such business interests was enabled by corrupt governments, a pliant judiciary and a malleable populace that, with the exception of the Populist movement, remained too traumatized and divided by the war to put up much of a fight. A senior editor with the Atlantic Monthly, Beatty is skilled at connecting unlikely dots and revealing unintended consequences. One of his most compelling narratives shows how the 14th Amendment to the Constitution -- extending equal protection and due process to all persons -- eventually led to the notion of a corporation as a legal "person." This produced an "Inverted Constitution," with economic rights trumping civil ones. "The 'person' whose 'life, liberty, or property' the Fourteenth Amendment secured," Beatty writes, "was not the freedman but the corporation."

Beauvoir, Simone de (1985). A Very Easy Death. New York, Pantheon.
A poignant account of her mother's death from cancer.

Beauvoir, Simone de (1993). All Said and Done. New York, Paragon House.
In this fourth and last volume of her autobiography, feminist and writer Simone de Beavoir chronicles her personal and public life from 1962 to 1972. Now in her sixties and at the pinnacle of her fame, she laments the illnesses and deaths of friends, enjoys the esteem of younger feminists, and reevaluates incidents in her past for new meaning."

Beauvoir, Simone de (1999). America Day by Day. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) spent four months in the United States in 1947. Traveling by car, train, and bus, she lectured from coast to coast at the most prestigious colleges and universities, immersing herself in the wonders and woes of American culture. Writing from notes, letters, and memories, de Beauvoir details with vivid insight aspects of American life and culture including the New York Bowery, slaughterhouses and burlesques in Chicago, African American church services, racism, politics, films, jazz, Muzak, marijuana, and cocktail parties. She provides sharp sociological perspective on American women, adolescents, college students, public and private higher education, and the inertia of the late 1940s. Impressive, compelling, thought-provoking, and highly recommended. -- Jeris Cassel

Beauvoir, Simone de, Quintin Hoare, et al. (1992). Letters to Sartre. New York, Arcade Pub.
Found in a cupboard and published last year in France, these "lost" love letters follow upon Deirdre Bair's Simone de Beauvoir (1990) with revelations about the author of The Second Sex and the exact nature of her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. This correspondence (finely translated by Hoare) begins in 1930, when Beauvoir is 21. The bulk is written almost daily from Paris during WW II, when Sartre is in the army and then a prisoner. Beauvoir presents herself to Sartre as a devoted lover, desperate for his letters, calling him ''my life's own self.'' Along with quotidian facts of money, classes, and cafes, of reading Dead Souls or watching a James Cagney movie, come wonderful observations--''There are tiny memories which tear at my heart, whereas I'm left quite unmoved by the big, serious things''; or, ''belief and desire are really one and the same.'' What is bound to stir debate is Beauvoir's breathtaking honesty with Sartre about her ''contingent'' relationships and the fact that, to the end of her life, she gave to the public but a partial and polished view of these affairs. In particular, Beauvoir describes her ongoing emotional and physical involvement--every intrigue and skirmish- -with three former students who were also lovers of Sartre.

Beauvoir, Simone de (1956). The Mandarins, a Novel. Cleveland; and New York, World Pub. Co.
In her most famous novel, Simone de Bouvoir takes an unflinching look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of WWII. In fictionally depicting the lives of her circle - Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler - and her passionate love affair with Nelson Algren, de Beavoir dissects the emotional and philisophical currents of her time. At once engrossing drama and an intriguing political tale, The Mandarins is the emotional odyssey of a woman torn between her inner desires and her public life.

Beauvoir, Simone de (1959). Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Cleveland, World Pub. Co.
A fascinating look into the first years of an intellectual and woman of genius. By reading this book you will be taken on a tour of young Simone's wishes, hopes, illusions, disappontments, strength and weaknesses. You also get a living portrait of French society in the first part of the 20th century.

Beauvoir, Simone de; Constance Borde, Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, tr. (2010). The Second Sex. Knopf, Alfred A. Knopf.
Simone de Beauvoir's masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of 'woman,' and a revolutionary exploration of inequality and otherness. Unabridged in English for the first time, this long-awaited edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir's pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as when it was first published, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.

Beauvoir, Simone de; H. M. Parshley, tr. (1993). The Second Sex. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir posed questions many men, and women, had yet to ponder when the book was released in 1953. "One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should," she says. She weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to show women's place in the world and to postulate on the power of sexuality. This is a powerful piece of writing in a time before "feminism" was even a phrase, much less a movement.

Beauvoir, Simone de and Jean Paul Sartre (1984). Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. New York, Pantheon Books.
Simone de Beauvoir's first-person account of the last ten years of Sartre's life. This two-part memoir is remarkable for its poignant intimacy, first as an historical record from 1970-1980, and then as a transcription of de Beauvoir's own interviews with Sartre during that same period of time.

Beck, Julian (1986). The Life of the Theatre: The Relation of the Artist to the Struggle of the People. New York, Limelight Editions: Distributed by Harper & Row.

Beckett, Lucy (1981). Richard Wagner, Parsifal. Cambridge [Eng.]; New York, Cambridge University Press.
A comprehensive account of Parsifal including the literary sources of the work, its links with Wagner's life and thought, the libretto, music and stage history.

Beckett, Samuel (1957). Murphy. New York, Grove Press.
Murphy (1938) shows Beckett exercising more control over this Irish baroque style. The opening sentence suggests the new sense of economy that characterizes his prose style: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." Packed into this sentence are a parody of Ecclesiastes (1. v), a subscription to fatalism, and a statement of a major theme in the book - the absence of real change in human life. Beckett is trying to break through the illusion of order, of correspondence between signifier and signified, that words produce. Murphy offers a vision of Creation as a huge verbal joke. Its hero, Murphy, not only reverses all commonly accepted social conventions (preferring rest to work, contemplation to sexual love, the insane to the sane); he simultaneously inverts traditional uses of language."In the beginning was the pun," he intones. Beckett employs puns, paradox, allusion, repetition, inversion, all in an attempt to disrupt the predictable semantic effects of language. Much of the resulting dialogue is highly mannered, showing more interest in creating mutually negating patterns of words than in mimetically reproducing plausible verbal exchanges.

Beckett, Samuel (1958). Endgame, a Play in One Act, Followed by Act without Words, a Mime for One Player. New York, Grove Press.
The setting for Endgame is a bare, partially underground room, serving as shelter for the four characters: Hamm the master, Clov his servant, and Hamm's father and mother, Nagg and Nell (who live in garbage cans). Hamm is in a wheelchair and makes Clov move him around the room, fetch objects, and look out the window for signs of life. Outside all seems dead and nothing happens. Inside, the characters pass the time mortifying each other and toying with fears and illusions of a possible change, all along sensing the inevitability of their end.

Beckett, Samuel (1960). Krapp's Last Tape, and Other Dramatic Pieces. New York, Grove Press.
This collection of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett's dramatic pieces includes a short stage play, two radio plays, and two pantomimes. The stage play, Krapp's Last Tape, evolves a shattering drama out of a monologue of a man who, at age sixty-nine, plays back the autobiographical tape he recorded on his thirty-ninth birthday. The two radio plays were commmissioned by the BBC: All That Fall and Embers. In the two pantomimes, Beckett takes drama to the point of pure absstraction with his portrayals of, in Act Without Words I, frustrated desire, and in Act Without Words II, corresponding motions of living juxtaposed in the slow despair of one man and the senselessly busy motion of another.

Beckett, Samuel (1961). Happy Days; a Play in Two Acts. New York, Grove Press.
Winnie, a middle-aged matron, is immobile: buried to the waist in a mound of earth in the first act, buried to her neck in the second. The play's only other character, her husband, Willie, unseen and almost silent for most of the play, appears and replies intermittently until he makes an abortive attempt at action at play's end. Happy Days belongs to Winnie who delivers what is, in effect, a long ruminative monologue that is almost devoid of narrative content. We are given nothing that socially particularizes character or scene. Winnie prays, goes through daily rituals, inventories the possessions she carries in a bag beside her -- a toothbrush, toothpaste, a small mirror, a handkerchief, a music box, as well as a revolver -- invokes some names that are never identified (Brownie, Mildred, Bibby), has some sporadic philosophic observations about the conditions of her life, opens a parasol which is consumed by flames -- all within the context of an optimistic litany that insists that every day is a happy day, indeed a "heavenly day." In this optimism, Winnie is the antithesis of the typical Beckettian dyspeptic complainer about life's dispossessions, characters we know as Malone, Vladimir, Hamm, and Krapp. Winnie with her material obsessions and Willy with his newspaper and dirty postcards represent the easy target of a boring, conventional marriage in which a henpecked husband submits to a strong but sentimental wife who prays, preens, and prattles endlessly. But Beckett will not stoop to simple satiric irony. No, even Winnie has moments of acuity: "Don't squander all your words for the day," she tells herself, "stop talking and do something for a change, will you?" Even epiphany: "How often I have said, in evil hours, Sing now, Winnie, sing your song, there is nothing else for it." But she realizes she never did. Beckett does it for her in a great play which is Winnie's song, a play that gets greater as you and it age.

Beckett, Samuel (1964). How It Is. New York, Grove Press.
What is novel is" the absolute sureness of design, built phrase by phrase into a beautifully and tightly wrought structure - a few dozen expressions permuted with deliberate redundancy accumulate meaning even as they are emptied of it, and offer themselves as points of radiation in a strange web of utter illusion."

Beckett, Samuel (1965). Three Novels: Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable. New York, Grove Press.
The trilogy has always been considered the central work of Samuel Beckett's fiction, just as Waiting for Godot, written in the same period of concentrated creativity between 1947 and 1949, is central to Beckett's drama. After Proust's great many-volumed novel, Joyce's Ulysses and the masterworks of Kafka, it dominates twentieth-century literature, and much as Beckett's pre-war fiction and the late minimalist novellas are admired, it is on the trilogy that the author's reputation will chiefly depend.

Molloy was a new departure for Samuel Beckett. Written in the first person, it consists of two monologues, that of bedridden Molloy on his odyssey towards his mother, lost in town and country and finally emerging from the forest, and that of Moran, a private detective who is sent to find him. The two narrowly miss each other, but the contrast between their characters, and the similarity of their decline give the reader much ground to speculate and much humour towards understanding both the grimness and the comedy of the human situation.

Malone Dies pictures the decrepit Malone, also bedridden, waiting to die and filling his mind and his remaining time with memories, stories and bitter comment, while waiting for 'the throes'. The novel disintegrates as the protagonist dies.

The Unnamable seems to contain and encompass its predecessors and the characters of earlier Beckett novels. Its power of language and breadth of imagination make it a tour de force that recalls Dante as it moves into an ever greater void of despair and panic, a metaphysical work that must take its place among the very greatest works of literature.

Beckett, Samuel (1970). More Pricks Than Kicks. New York, Grove Press.
Ten short stories originally published in 1934. The stories trace the career of the first of Beckett's antiheroes, Belacqua Shuah. Belacqua is a student, a philanderer, and a failure, and Beckett portrays the various aspects of his troubled existence: He studies Dante, attempts an ill-fated courtship, witnesses grotesque incidents in the streets of Dublin, attends vapid parties, endures his marriage, and meets his accidental death. These early stories point to the qualities of precision, restraint, satire, and poetry found in Beckett's mature works, and reveal the beginning stages of Beckett's underlying theme of bewilderment in the face of suffering.

Beckett, Samuel (1972). The Lost Ones. London, Calder and Boyars.
In remarkably dense prose, Beckett describes a small world consisting of a flattened cylinder, fifteen meters round and eighteen high, and its pitiable inhabitants.

Beckett, Samuel (1984). Collected Shorter Plays. New York, Grove Press.
'Beckett reduces life, perception, and writing to barest minimums: a few dimly seen, struggling torsos; a hopeless intelligence compulsively seeking to come to terms, in rudimentary yet endlessly varied language, with the human condition they represent. Within these extraordinary limitations, Beckett's verbal ability nonetheless generates great intensity.' - Library Journal

Beckett, Samuel (1990). In Transition: A Paris Anthology. Writing and Art from Transition Magazine 1927-30. New York, Doubleday.
This collection brings together many of the finest contributions to Transition, a magazine of art and literature published in Paris between 1927 and 1932 by the poet Eugene Jolas and critic Elliot Paul. For its time, Transition was a mouthpiece of high modernism unmatched by any other journal in Europe and most of the great avant-garde writers, and many artists, of that era are represented here: Kafka, Rilke, Joyce and Gide, for example. Yet, what is of particular interest are not the pieces by acknowledged masters but the contributions by their then largely unknown disciples--most of them, like Jolas and Paul, American expatriates. By comparison, many of these American writers, such as Malcolm Cowley, Laura Riding and Harry Crosby, appear repetitive and reductive in their style, adhering more to modernism's rhetoric than to its spirit. In this light, it is clear how Hemingway became a popular modernist icon for Americans and why Hart Crane remains underappreciated by the public.

Beckett, Samuel (1996). Company. New York, Riverrun Press.
Company is a haunting tale of one man about whom nothing is known, who spends his final hours alone in a pitch black room. His sanity is questionable at best in this sensory-deprived state, and he tells himself stories and even makes up imaginary friends with whom he converses to pass the time.

Behan, Brendan (1982). Borstal Boy. Boston, D.R. Godine.
Autobiographical work by Brendan Behan, published in 1958. The book portrays the author's early rebelliousness, his involvement with the Irish Republican cause, and his subsequent incarceration for two years in an English Borstal, or reformatory, at age 16. Interspersed with tales of brutality are anecdotes about dramatic and musical pastimes and Behan's gardening and handicraft activities.

Behan, Brendan and Alan Simpson (1978). The Complete Plays. New York, Grove Press: distributed by Random House.
This volume contains everything Brendan Behan wrote in dramatic form in English. The three famous full-length plays: The Quare Fellow, set in an Irish prison; The Hostage, set in a Dublin lodging-house of doubtful repute; and Richard's Cork Leg, set in a graveyard. Also, three one-act plays, originally written for radio and all intensely autobiographical, Moving Out, A Garden Party and The Big House.

Bell, Baxter and Nina Zolotow (2017). Yoga for Healthy Aging: A Guide to Lifelong Well-Being. Boulder, Shambhala.
The definitive resource on how to use yoga to foster your physical, mental, and emotional health for a lifetime. Everyone would like to age as heathfully as possible and now numerous studies confirm what many yoga preactitioners have known for a long time: yoga practice has a remarkable impact on physical and mental health--and spiritual well-being--as you grow older. Yoga for Healthy Aging is the most accessible and usable guide available on to how yoga can address concerns realted to strength, flexibility, balance, agility, cardiovascular health, brain health, and stress management, among other issues. The authors--both popular and respected yoga teachers (one of whom is a family physician) provide readers with a yoga toolbox for healthy aging that includes poses, breathing practices, meditation, and yoga philosophy. They then offer you a safe, real-world yoga program to suit your particular needs. These short yoga practices were developed in consultation with scientific and medical experts on aging, and allow you to focus on maintaining overall physical health and/or addressing target problem areas, such as digestion, cardiovascular health, or anxiety. The authors conclude with instructions for practicing several different forms of conscious relaxation and meditation, all of which will set you up for a lifetime of emotional and spiritual well-being. This book includes over 200 instructional photos.

Bellamy, Edward (1996). Looking Backward. New York, Dover Publications.
Edward Bellamy's utopian novel about a nineteenth-century Bostonian who awakes after a sleep of more than one hundred years to find himself in the year 2000 in a world of near-perfect cooperation, harmony, and prosperity. The novel had an enormous impact at the time of its publication, setting in motion a wave of reform activity and creating a vogue for utopian novels that continued over the next three decades.

Belli, Gioconda and Kristina Cordero (2002). The Country under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
An electrifying memoir from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer and central figure in the Sandinista Revolution. Until her early twenties, Gioconda Belli inhabited an upper-class cocoon: sheltered from the poverty in Managua in a world of country clubs and debutante balls; educated abroad; early marriage and motherhood. But in 1970, everything changed. Her growing dissatisfaction with domestic life, and a blossoming awareness of the social inequities in Nicaragua, led her to join the Sandinistas, then a burgeoning but still hidden organization. She would be involved with them over the next twenty years at the highest, and often most dangerous, levels. Her memoir is both a revelatory insider's account of the Revolution and a vivid, intensely felt story about coming of age under extraordinary circumstances.

Bellow, Saul (1988). Dangling Man. New York, NY, Penguin Books.
Expecting to be inducted into the army, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Dangling Man is his journal, a wonderful account of his restless wanderings through Chicago's streets, his musings on the past, his psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him, and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.

Bellow, Saul (1996). Henderson, the Rain King. New York, Pengiun Books.
Seriocomic novel, published in 1959. Examines the midlife crisis of Eugene Henderson, an unhappy millionaire. The story concerns Henderson's search for meaning. A larger-than-life 55-year-old who has accumulated money, position, and a large family, he nonetheless feels unfulfilled. He makes a spiritual journey to Africa, where he draws emotional sustenance from experiences with African tribes. Deciding that his true destiny is as a healer, Henderson returns home, planning to enter medical school.

Bellow, Saul (1996). Humboldt's Gift. New York, Penguin Books.
The novel, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, is a self-described "comic book about death," whose title character is modeled on the self-destructive lyric poet Delmore Schwartz. Charlie Citrine, an intellectual, middle-aged author of award-winning biographies and plays, contemplates two significant figures and philosophies in his life: Von Humboldt Fleisher, a dead poet who had been his mentor, and Rinaldo Cantabile, a very-much-alive minor mafioso who has been the bane of Humboldt's existence. Humboldt had taught Charlie that art is powerful and that one should be true to one's creative spirit. Rinaldo, Charlie's self-appointed financial adviser, has always urged Charlie to use his art to turn a profit. At the novel's end, Charlie has managed to set his own course.

Bellow, Saul (2000). Ravelstein. New York, Viking.
The 84-year-old writer's new novel is a grab-bag stuffed with truculent observations; the comedic mix of admiration and rivalry that subtends the friendships of intellectual men; the impossible and possible wives. Abe Ravelstein, a professor at a well-known Midwestern college, is obviously modeled on the late Allan Bloom. To clinch the identification, Bellow's narrator, Chick, a writer 20 years older than Ravelstein, uses phrases to describe Ravelstein that are almost identical to phrases Bellow used about Bloom in his published eulogy. Like Bloom, Ravelstein operates his phone like a "command post," getting information from his former students in high positions in various governments. Like Bloom, Ravelstein writes a bestseller using his special brand of political philosophy to comment on American failings. And like Bloom, Ravelstein throws money around as if "from the rear end of an express train." In fact, Chick is so obsessed with the price of Ravelstein's possessions that at times the work reads like a garage sale of his student's effects. Ravelstein also spends lavishly on his boyfriend, Nikki, a princely young Singaporean. Chick's wife, at the beginning of the memoir, is Vela, an East European physicist. Ravelstein dislikes her, and suspects that her Balkan friends are anti-Semites. Eventually, Vela kicks Chick out of his house and divorces him (fans will not be surprised that Bellow, as seems to be his habit, makes this a thinly veiled attack on his ex-wife). Chick ends up marrying one of Ravelstein's students, Rosamund. When Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS, Chick mulls over his obligation to write a memoir of his friend, but he is blocked until he himself suffers a threatening illness. Chick's alternate naivete and subconscious rivalry with Ravelstein is the subtext here. Amply rewarding, this late work from the Nobel laureate flourishes his inimitable linguistic virtuosity, combining intimations of mortality with gossipy tattle in a biting and enlightening narrative.

Bellow, Saul (2003). Herzog. New York, Penguin Books.
Herzog became a classic almost as soon as it was published in 1964. In it Saul Bellow tells the tale of Moses E. Herzog, a tragically confused intellectual who suffers from the breakup of his second marriage, the general failure of his life and the specter of growing up Jewish in the middle part of the 20th century. He responds to his personal crisis by sending out a series of letters to all kinds of people. The letters in total constitute a thoughtful examination of his own life and that which has occurred around him.

Bellow, Saul (2003). Novels 1944-1953. New York, Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the U.S. by Penguin Putnam.
The Library of America begins its Bellow edition with a collection of his first three novels. Dangling Man (1944), an incisive character study cast in the form of a diary, depicts the anguish and uncertainty of a man known only as Joseph. Expecting to be deployed to the war overseas, Joseph quits his job and finds himself increasingly on edge when his draft board defers his enlistment. The first of his many books to take place in Chicago, Dangling Man is a spare, haunting novel in which Bellow lays bare Joseph's dilemma with rigorous precision and subtlety.

The Victim (1947), which Bellow described as "a novel whose theme is guilt," is an unsettling moral parable. Left alone in New York City while his wife is visiting her family, Asa Leventhal is confronted by a former co-worker whom he can barely remember. What seems like a chance encounter evolves into an uncanny bond that threatens to ruin Leventhal's life. As their relationship grows ever more volatile, Bellow stages a searching exploration of our obligations toward others.

In the comic tour-de-force The Adventures of Augie March (1953), March comes of age in a Chicago bustling with characters as large and vital as the city itself, and his travels abroad lead him through love's byways and the disappointments of vanishing youth. Martin Amis calls it "the Great American Novel" for its "fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity.

Bellow, Saul and Cynthia Ozick (1996). Seize the Day. New York, Penguin Books.
Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day is both inspired and burdened by the American myth of success. At the age of twenty, he changes his name from Wilky Adler to Tommy Wilhelm, a name signifying the person he dreams of becoming. He thereby recalls James Gatz, who by calling himself Jay Gatsby thinks he can conjure up the man Daisy Buchanan will find irresistible. Unlike Gatsby, however, Wilhelm has not fled his past; he confronts it daily through his father, who still calls him Wilky. Wilhelm's financial troubles have more than practical implications. He feels that "everyone was supposed to have money" (p. 30), and his conversations with Dr. Tamkin strengthen his belief that with just a modest amount of will and talent, he could rid himself of financial worry. Tamkin assures Wilhelm that it will be "easy" for him to make much more in the market than the fifteen thousand he needs. Just as Wilhelm believes that he will one day become the person his name represents, so he clings to the hope that easy money awaits him. He assumes that his father would accept him if he had more money. Like Willy Loman, Wilhelm links his self-worth to his financial situation. If it really is easy to have more money than one needs, then financial failure must result from some character flaw.

Benchley, Robert (1983). The Benchley Roundup. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Robert C. Benchley's sketches and articles, published in periodicals like Life, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, earned him a reputation as one of the sharpest humorists of his time; his influence - on contemporaries such as E. B. White, James Thurber, and S. J. Perelman, or followers like Woody Allen, Steve Martin, and Richard Pryor - has left an indelible mark on the American comic tradition. The Benchley Roundup collects those pieces, selected by Benchley's son Nathaniel, "which seem to stand up best over the years"-a compendium of the most endearing and enduring work from one of America's funniest and most penetrating wits.

Bendis, Brian Michael and Alex Maleev (2019). Absolute Scarlet. Burbank, DC Comics.
A young woman is pushed to the edge by a world filled by police brutality, government corruption and unspeakable crimes. It's all here in Brian Michael Bendis's iconic series Scarlet, now available in an oversize slipcase hardcover edition, complete with scripts, behind the scenes material, sketches and design concepts from both Bendis and illustrator Alex Maleev.

Benjamin, Walter (1973). Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London, NLB.
Benjamin defines the nineteenth century as an era when "the shock experience has become the norm", and concludes that Baudelaire placed that experience "at the very centre of his artistic work ". Benjamin affirms Baudelaire, as lyric poet, prose-writer and art critic, as a new type of modern-day hero, thanks to the strategies developed in his writing for resisting and surviving the disorienting pressures of modern life.

Benjamin, Walter (1986). Illuminations. New York, Schocken Books.
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 an informed introduction that presents Benjamin's personality and intellectual development, as well as his work and his life in dark times.

Benjamin, Walter (2003). The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London; New York, Verso.
The Origin of German Tragic Drama is generally acknowledged as Benjamin's most sustained and original work and as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century. It begins with a general theoretical introductions on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Later, Benjamin discusses the engravings of Durer, and the theatre of Shakespeare and Calderón. Baroque tragedy, he argues was distinguished from classical tragedy, by its shift from myth into history.

Benjamin, Walter and Peter Demetz (1986). Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing. New York, Schocken Books.
A companion volume to Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, recounts Berlin in the '20s, recalls conversations with Brecht, provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.

Benjamin, Walter, Gershom Gerhard Scholem, et al. (1994). The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Published here in English for the first time, these letters offer an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived. Written in a day when letters were an important vehicle for the presentation and development of intellectual matters, Benjamin's correspondence is rich in insight into the circumstances behind his often difficult work. Writing at length to Scholem and Theodor Adorno, and exchanging letters with Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Horkheimer, Max Brod, Bertolt Brecht, and Kafka's friend Felix Weltsch, Benjamin elaborates his ideas about metaphor and language. He reflects on literary figures from Kafka to Karl Kraus, the "Jewish Question" and anti-Semitism, Marxism and Zionism. And he expounds his personal attitudes toward such subjects as the role of quotations in criticism, history, and tradition, the meaning of being a "collector, " French culture and the national character.

Benjamin, Walter and Rolf Tiedemann (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press.
In 1927, Benjamin began taking notes for a book that would critique the cultural, public, artistic and commercial life of Paris, a city Benjamin thought of as the "capital of the nineteenth century." The arcades of the title are the city's glass-covered shopping malls dating from that era. This edition is comprised of the fastidious notes he made for this never-completed study. Essentially, Benjamin was planning to write a prehistory of the 20th century. The lively arcades--colorful scenes of public mixing, modern shopping and quotidian activities of all sorts--figure as a focusing device. His ambition was to integrate a picture including advertising, architecture, department store shopping, fashion, prostitution, city planning, literature, bourgeois luxuries, slums, public transit, photography and much more. His perspective is largely Marxist, but not in any conventional or dogmatic sense. Benjamin's chief virtue is an uncanny originality of vision and insight that transcends the constraints of ideology.

Bennis, Phyllis (2003). Before & After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the War on Terrorism. New York, Olive Branch Press.
Americans were uniformly shocked by the lethal ferocity of the September 11 attacks. Around the world, people and governments were appalled at the human carnage and extended unstinting sympathy-but many made it clear that their sympathy for the victims did not equal support for Washington's response to the terror attacks. Before & After examines the role of US foreign policy in the terrorism/anti-terrorism crisis that began-publicly-with the attack on the World Trade Center, but which in fact has roots that began long before that September day. It dissects not only the specific Middle East policies long identified with public opposition in the region (for example: support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, economic sanctions responsible for widespread deaths of Iraqi civilians, and support for repressive monarchies and dictatorships throughout the Arab world), but also provides context to these issues and the legacy of US unilateralism. Washington's contempt for international law as well as its disdain for the United Nations, are seen internationally as evidence of the US upholding a law of empire from which the rest of the world is excluded. Paramount is the creation of a US-forced "coalition" to wage a brutal war against an already impoverished and disempowered people, instead of a truly international cooperative effort to find and bring to justice the perpetrators of this crime against humanity.

Bennis, Phyllis (2005). Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy U.S. Power. Northampton, Mass., Olive Branch Press.
When millions around the world marched to protest the Iraq war and the U.S. drive towards empire, The New York Times dubbed global public opinion "the second super-power." What empowered those protests was their alliance -- if only for a brief moment -- with governments unexpectedly willing to stand up to U.S. pressure, and with the United Nations itself, when it followed its Charter's command to stop "the scourge of war." Bennis tracks the rise of U.S. unilateralism and the doctrine of preemptive war, looking particularly at Iraq and Israel/Palestine, and examines both the potential and the challenges ahead in reclaiming the UN as part of the global peace movement.

Benson, Michael (2009). Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle. New York, NY, Abrams.
Journalist, filmmaker and photographer Benson follows his book Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes with an even more stellar array of astronomical photographs that offer views of space, moving successively from close to home to the outermost regions of the universe, moving simultaneously farther from Earth and farther back in time. The 228 color photos are spectacular and enhanced with three eight-page gatefolds.

Benz, Christine, Peter Di Teresa, et al. (2005). Morningstar Guide to Mutual Funds: Five-Star Strategies for Success. Hoboken, N.J., J. Wiley & Sons.
Regardless of your investment experience or expertise, Morningstar Guide to Mutual Funds will show you how to look beyond flashy advertising and often equally flashy (and unsustainable) performance figures to find the funds to fit your needs today and well into the future.

Berberian, Viken (2002). The Cyclist: A Novel. New York, Simon & Schuster.
The Cyclist is a stunningly original novel about food and political violence. It's a psychological ride into the tropics of terror, to the edges of our national and existential borders: the ones set at birth, the ones we are born into. The enigmatic narrator is a young trainee of the Academy, a terrorist group in the present-day Middle East. This unnamed, transnational pawn has a single mission: to deliver a bomb by bicycle to a hotel, where it will explode, killing hundreds of civilians. But his story is anything but simple. Combining surrealism, tragedy and humor, The Cyclist is a journey into the unsettling workings of the terrorist mind. Even as the narrator ponders his mission, only his musings about food and love reveal clues to his nationality and his agenda. But can such a zestful connoisseur also be a true agent of political violence?

Berendt, Joachim Ernst (1974). The Jazz Book; from New Orleans to Rock and Free Jazz. New York, L. Hill; [distributed by Independent Publishers Group.

Bergala, Alain and Magnum Photos inc. (1994). Magnum Cinema: Des Histoires De Cinema Par Les Photographes De Magnum. Paris, Cahiers du cinema: Paris audiovisuel: Diffusion, Seuil.
The photographers from Magnum have worked with movie-makers since the agency was founded half a century ago. Robert Capa, a founder of what has become the world's most prestigious picture agency, was a close friend of John Huston and, with him, began to combine the talents of great photographers with those of great directors and actors. These partnerships are properly celebrated in a book that is filled with powerful images of such legends as Clint Eastwood, Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, James Dean, Clark Gable and many others. The roll-call of over fifty leading photographers includes Eve Arnold, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Raymond Depardon, Philippe Halsman, Elliott Erwitt, David 'Chim' Seymour and Dennis Stock.

Bergan, Ronald (1998). Francis Ford Coppola. New York; Berkeley, CA, Thunder's Mouth Press.
Behind-the-scenes account of how Francis Ford Coppola makes movies.

Bergen, Peter L. (2001). Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden. New York, Free Press.
There's a lot of new information in this well-written examination by CNN's terrorism expert on the man believed to be behind the events of September 11. Bergen has long tracked the Islamic world. The book opens with an account of his 1997 interview with bin Laden, the terrorist's first TV interview. The information on what is known about September 11, added hurriedly after the original manuscript was completed, as Bergen admits, gives the book a slightly jagged feel. But those looking for a balanced, comprehensive look at bin Laden and his crew as well as an answer to the now preeminent question "why do they hate us so much?" will do well to start here.

Berger, Dan (2006). Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. Oakland, CA, AK Press.
Outlaws of America is culled from dozens of in-depth interviews with former Weather Underground members, as well as with civil rights activists, Black Panthers, Young Lords, and others-many of whom speak about their experiences publicly here. The book also features an extensive appendix including Weather Underground communiques, a chronology of actions, a collection of rare photographs, and current biographical sketches of many ex-Weather Underground members.

Bergman, Ingmar (1982). Fanny and Alexander. New York, Pantheon Books.
Screenplay.

Bergman, Ingmar (1988). The Marriage Scenarios. New York, Pantheon Books.
Screenplay.

Bergman, Ingmar (1989). Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman. New York, Simon and Schuster.
English translations of the screenplays for Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), and The Magician (1958).

Bergson, Henri (1998). Creative Evolution. Mineola, N.Y., Dover.
The fullest expression of the distinguished French philosopher's ideas about the meaning of life appear in this extended essay, his most famous and influential work. In propounding his distinctive theory of evolution, Bergson considers nature and intelligence, examines mechanisms of thought and illusion, and presents a criticism of philosophical systems from those of the ancients to those of his 19th-century contemporaries.

Berkoff, Steven (1990). I Am Hamlet. New York, Grove Weidenfeld.
Performance journal.

Berley, Peter and Zoe Singer (2007). The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers, and Everyone in Between. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
It's the rare cookbook that encourages the reader not just to cook differently but to think differently about food. In this stylish collection of recipes, Berley (The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen) introduces a practical approach to flexitarian - or part-time vegetarian - eating. Given the confusion most of us face when it comes to our diets, flexitarianism, with its healthful emphasis on grains, lean proteins and beans, is an appealing one. He has developed a series of "convertible" recipes, main courses that work equally well meatless or meat-full. There's delicate choice of Baked Fish or Ricotta Dumplings, either of which is served over French Lentils; a hearty Gratin of Cherry Tomatoes and White Beans can be served with sardines. Throw in two or three side dishes like a salad of Mche, Pea Shoots with Baby Beets, or Soba with Garlicky Spinach and Sesame Oil, and it becomes a satisfying meal in which no one feels shortchanged. Organized by season, the menus are cross-cultural and appealing. The recipes, while sophisticated, require only moderate experience in the kitchen. Berley's savvy tips on technique and flavor-pairing make this an affable and informative guide for any chef - regardless of diet affiliation.

Berlin, Brent (1992). Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.
A founder of and leading thinker in the field of modern ethnobiology looks at the widespread regularities in the classification and naming of plants and animals among peoples of traditional, nonliterate societies--regularities that persist across local environments, cultures, societies, and languages. Brent Berlin maintains that these patterns can best be explained by the similarity of human beings' largely unconscious appreciation of the natural affinities among groupings of plants and animals: people recognize and name a grouping of organisms quite independently of its actual or potential usefulness or symbolic significance in human society. Berlin's claims challenge those anthropologists who see reality as a "set of culturally constructed, often unique and idiosyncratic images, little constrained by the parameters of an outside world." Part One of this wide-ranging work focuses primarily on the structure of ethnobiological classification inferred from an analysis of descriptions of individual systems. Part Two focuses on the underlying processes involved in the functioning and evolution of ethnobiological systems in general.

Berlin, Isaiah, Henry Hardy, et al. (1979). Russian Thinkers. New York, Penguin Books.
Among the seven essays collected in Russian Thinkers is perhaps Isaiah Berlin's most famous work, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," which begins with an ancient Greek proverb ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing") before taking on Leo Tolstoy's philosophy of history, showing how Tolstoy "was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog." The other half dozen pieces examine other Russian writers and philosophers, including Alexander Herzen, Ivan Turgenev, and Mikhail Bakunin--although the latter, Berlin says, "is not a serious thinker. There are no coherent ideas to be extracted from his writings of any period, only fire and imagination, violence and poetry, and an ungovernable desire for strong sensations." Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptibly about Russian thought and culture as the Latvian-born Berlin, and the history covered in Russian Thinkers is a unique elaboration of Berlin's theses concerning the impact of ideas upon culture.

Berlioz, Hector and David Cairns (2002). The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz. New York, A.A. Knopf.
Like his massive compositions, Berlioz (1803-69) was colorful, eloquent, larger than life. His book is both an account of his important place in the rise of the Romantic movement and a personal testament. He tells the story of his liaison with Harriet Smithson, and his even more passionate affairs of the mind with Shakespeare, Scott, and Byron. Familiar with all the great figures of the age, Berlioz paints brilliant portraits of Liszt, Wagner, Balzac, Weber, and Rossini, among others. And through Berlioz's intimate and detailed self-revelation, there emerges a profoundly sympathetic and attractive man, driven, finally, by his overwhelming creative urges to a position of lonely eminence.

Bernanos, Georges and Pamela Morris (1937). The Diary of a Country Priest. London, Boriswood.
An idealistic young Catholic priest in an isolated French village keeps a diary describing the unheroic suffering and the petty internal conflicts of his parish. This may sound like a thin plot for a novel, but Diary of a Country Priest, by George Bernanos, remains one of the 20th century's most vivid evocations of saintly life. First published in 1937, Bernanos's Diary describes a faithful man's experience of failure. In his diary, the priest records feelings of inferiority and sadness that he cannot express to his parishioners. And as he approaches death, from cancer, the priest's saintliness remains unclear to him, but becomes undeniable to the reader.

Bernanos, Georges and J. C. Whitehouse (2006). Mouchette. New York, New York Review Books.
One of the great mavericks of French literature, Georges Bernanos combined raw realism with a spiritual focus of visionary intensity. Mouchette stands with his celebrated Diary of a Country Priest as the perfection of his singular art.

"Nothing but a little savage" is how the village school-teacher describes fourteen-year-old Mouchette, and that view is echoed by every right-thinking local citizen. Mouchette herself doesn't bother to contradict it; ragged, foulmouthed, dirt-poor, a born liar and loser, she knows herself to be, in the words of the story, "alone, completely alone, against everyone." Hers is a tale of "tragic solitude" in which despair and salvation appear to be inextricably intertwined.

Bernard, Bruce (1999). Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope. London, Phaidon.
With a photo in nearly every one of this volumes 1,000 pages, this must undoubtedly be the most comprehensive visual account yet of the past century. It is hard not to get lost wandering through this massive volume. On the verge of the century, in 1899, we see Lillian Langtry, former mistress of the Prince of Wales, reclining languorously and we see New Women approaching the coming century with high spirits. We see children roller skating in Berlin in 1912, and in the same year, Greek Boy Scouts having to learn rescue techniqiues during the Balkan Wars. We see Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial, in 1925, and we see Albert Einstein conversing with New York reporters in 1934.

Berrigan, Daniel and John Dear (2009). Essential Writings. Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books.
Through this selection from his many books, journals, poems, and homilies, a chronicle of Fr. Berrigan's life and work unfolds from the early steps in his vocation, to his decision to cross the line and go to prison, his ongoing witness for peace, and his extraordinary commentaries on scripture and the life of radical discipleship.

Berry, Wendell and Norman Wirzba (2002). The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Washington, D.C., Shoemaker & Hoard.
Writer and farmer Berry has long been an inspiration to the contemporary agrarian movement and a guiding light to people who care deeply about the health of their land and their communities. In his numerous books of essays, he has thoughtfully and articulately shown how the current consumer-based, profit-driven industrial society not only destroys our natural world but also increasingly harms our social and personal well-being. The 21 essays in this collection, written over the past two decades, provide both a splendid introduction to Berry's work and a stimulating compendium for those already familiar with it. These are beautifully crafted essays, replete with social criticism, righteous anger, moral guidance, and lyrical wording.

Besancenot, Olivier and Michael Löwy (2009). Guevara: His Revolutionary Legacy. New York, NY, Monthly Review Press.
Besancenot and Löwy explore and situate Guevara’s ethical, revolutionary, and humanist legacy. They explicate Guevara’s emphasis on the import of the individual coming to understand and accept socialism at a personal level. For Guevara, Besancenot and Löwy show, the revolutionary project demands more than a transformation of the mode of production; it demands a profound transformation of the individual, the birth of what Guevara termed the 'new man.' Besancenot and Löwy also explore Guevara's pragmatic approach to the question of state power and unique theoretical contributions to the question of the transition to socialism..

Betti, Claudia and Teel Sale (1997). Drawing: A Contemporary Approach. Fort Worth, Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
The number one, best-selling drawing text in the market, Drawing: A Contemporary Approach goes beyond conventional approaches, emphasizing the emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and social significance of art. The authors trace the development of today's art from that of the past, showing drawing's meaning and continuity. The text succeeds by offering a combination of effective pedagogy, good exercises, and high-quality, contemporary drawings as models, while focusing on contemporary artists who draw in a multicultural world.

Bhardwaj, Surinder Mohan (1973). Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India; a Study in Cultural Geography. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Combining historical analysis with his own fieldwork, Dr. Bhardwaj not only established the importance of the institution of pilgrimage in Indian history and the persistence of similar distribution patterns of sacred places over long periods, but also furnished the normative background for contemporary practices. He examines both the historical and the contemporary patterns of pilgrimage at various levels - pan-Hindu, supra-egional, sub-regional and local.

Bierce, Ambrose and Brian St. Pierre (1987). The Devil's Advocate: An Ambrose Bierce Reader. San Francisco, Chronicle Books.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) was the author of supernatural stories that have secured his place in both the weird tradition and in American letters at large. Apart from a few well-anthologized ghost stories (notably, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"), Bierce is best remembered for his cynical but humorous Devil's Dictionary.

Bierce was born in Ohio on June 24, 1842. He served as an officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865. He is noted for his tales of the Civil War, which drew on his own experience as a Union cartographer and officer. His first job in journalism was as editor for the San Francisco News-Letter and California Advertiser. His true love was satire in any form -- whether ghost story or fable, newspaper column or lyrical lambaste, fantasy or pseudo-lexicography. His works added a Western setting to Gothic fiction and, more importantly, developed the psychological aspects of horror first recognized by Poe.

In time, Bierce established himself a kind of literary dictator of the West Coast and was so respected and feared as a critic that his judgment could "make or break" an aspiring author's reputation. Between the years 1887 and 1906, Bierce wrote his famous column, "The Prattler ". He collected his sardonic aphorisms and epigrams as The Cynic's Word Book in 1906. When he edited his twelve volume Collected Works, the title was changed to The Devil's Dictionary. (1911)

In 1913, at the age of seventy-one, Bierce disappeared into revolution-torn Mexico. His end is mysterious, though he probably perished in the battle of Ojinaga on January 11, 1914.

Bilal, Enki (1999). The Nikopol Trilogy. Los Angeles, CA, Humanoids.
The Nikopol Trilogy brings together three previously published volumes Carnival of Mortals, Woman Trap and Cold Equator all impressive works of imagination meticulously written, drawn and colored by European comics artist Bilal. It's the year 2023 and Alcide Nikopol has been revived from a state of suspended animation after 30 years orbiting Earth. In the meantime, the planet has suffered two nuclear wars, and France is ruled by the ruthless dictator J.F. Choublanc. The immortal gods of Egyptian antiquity have also reawakened to revive their rule over humanity, and they now hover above the crumbling technopolis of Paris in a massive stone pyramid/airship. Horus, the renegade falcon god, takes possession of Nikopol's body, rendering him immortal, and concocts a conspiracy to overthrow the Choublanc regime. When Nikopol cracks under the pressure of Horus's possession, he is reduced to muttering the poetry of Baudelaire while he wanders the halls of a mental hospital.Woman Trap picks up two years later in a war-torn London. Blue-haired news correspondent Jill Bioskop dispatches stories 30 years into the past using a device called a scriptwriter, while she takes pills to eradicate the bloody memories of men she has murdered. In Cold Equator the story is further complicated as Nikopol's son boards a train bound for Equator City, an African metropolis afflicted with a freezing micro-climate of minus-six degrees, but surrounded by desert and surrealistically populated by sub-Saharan wildlife. Intricate plot twists and stunning color artwork mark this work as both an extraordinary comics literary achievement and a crackling good story.

Billiard Congress of America. (1992). Billiards: The Official Rules & Records Book. New York, NY, Lyons & Burford.
Covers the official rules for all forms of billards and pool - everything from Basic Pocket Billiards to Cut Throat, as well as tournament games such as Nine Ball and Rotation. Also included is a chapter for beginners, with professional tips on basic strategies and techniques.

Billington, James H. (1970). The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York, Vintage Books.
A rich and readable introduction to the whole sweep of Russian cultural and intellectual history from Kievan times to the post-Khruschev era.

Binion, Rudolph (1968). Frau Lou; Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.

Bishop, Elizabeth (1983). The Complete Poems 1927-1979. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux.
Highly regarded throughout her prestigious literary career, and today seen as an undeniable master of her art, Elizabeth Bishop remains one of America's most influential and widely acclaimed poets. This is the definitive collection of her work. The Complete Poems includes the books North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III, as well as previously uncollected poems, translations, and juvenilia.

Bittner, Mark (2005). The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: A Love Story. With Wings. New York, Three Rivers Press.
Bittner moved to San Francisco in search of himself. Like many in the early '70s, he tried many pathways - Taoism, the Beats - and lived hand to mouth working odd jobs. A period of homelessness came to an end when he was hired to help an elderly woman. With the job came an apartment, a garden, and parrots. Cherry-headed and blue-headed conures (small South American parrots) formed a wild flock of some 20 birds that lived in the neighborhood. As Bittner became more and more fascinated with the parrots, he began to feed them, and this growing intimacy led to naming the birds and following their relationships. The birds eventually learned to trust him, and his involvement with them led to minor fame in the neighborhood. When a documentary filmmaker arrived to do a story on the Birdman of Telegraph Hill, romance bloomed. This lovely book on finding one's way through interacting with parrots will be very popular among animal-loving readers.

Black, Bob (1994). Beneath the Underground. Portland, OR, Feral House.
Beneath the Underground is the first in-depth exploration, from within, of the rapidly growing cultural phenomenon which received its name from author Bob Black: the "marginals milieu." You could also call it the do-it-yourself subculture. It consists of the perhaps 20,000 self-publishers of microcirculation "zines" and other self-produced art, music, pamphlets, and posters.

Black, Maggie (2004). No Nonsense Guide to Water. London, Verso.
Water sustains life: without it, humans cannot survive for more than a few days. And yet this precious fluid is becoming increasingly politicized as the debates about control and ownership of water itself, and of the many organizations which govern its use, gain force. Maggie Black explores the many roles water plays in human life and, as the defense of water rights looks set to become an explosive issue, provides a clear overview on the vital issues of distribution, technology, irrigation, land use and commodification.

Blackburn, Paul (1975). The Journals. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press.
The Journals, comprising most of Paul Blackburn's final poems, is a milestone in the history of literary innovation, beyond the open field poetry of the Black Mountain School and, earlier vers libre of Imagism. Blackburn wanted to create open-ended occasions out of ordinary, everyday experiences, and thereby to shape a form appearing to be, paradoxically, formless. He rejected traditional poetry's point of view that saw certain historical events as grand or monumental and others as inconsequential and that, accordingly, insisted on poetry that followed rhetorical principles of argument first established in classical times and later reaffirmed in the Renaissance. He replaced syllogism with juxtaposition or contingency, logical deduction and inference with the "logic" of experience, such as what a person sees or hears; and he relied on nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs, on metonyms, not metaphors or symbols. Likewise, Blackburn avoided standard meters and employed irregular spacing of words, characteristic of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson and others. His demonstration that words could be used for their visual effects, often in conjunction with graphics, influenced later visual poetry such as Armand Schwerner's The Tablets. -Burt Kimmelman

Blackburn, Robin (2003). Banking on Death, or, Investing in Life: The History and Future of Pensions. London; New York, Verso.
Blackburn's dry and detailed book traces the development of pensions from early modern Europe to the present day and expands the discussion to cover a wide variety of government public assistance programs, annuity products sold by insurance companies, and mutual assistance organizations. The author's examination of funding pensions leads to his extensive treatment of topics such as corporate governance, tax policy and executive compensation. The main focus argues Blackburn's position that the workers and citizens should, collectively, take over capitalist institutions, with the goal of the suppression of the fundamental mechanisms of capitalist competition. This is to be accomplished, he says, not through violent revolution, but through tax incentives to worker-controlled not-for-profit pension funds, which would invest in sustainable, progressive and responsible economic projects. However, he does not discuss the discrepancy between the mild means and dramatic ends. Still a visionary, Blackburn later shifts his attention to study the disappearance of the financial services industry and the shift of union pension funds from corruption and inefficiency to a supernaturally wise custodianship.

Blake, Victoria, editor (2013). Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Evolution and Revolution. Portland, OR, Underland Press.
An excellent collection of past and present writers whose stories cover a wide range of themes and ideas within cyberpunk. Stories by legendary cyberpunk authors like Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, as well as stories by new cyberpunk voices like Cory Doctorow and Jonathan Lethem. Stories about society gone wrong and society saved, about soulless humans and soulful machines, about futures worth fighting for and futures that do nothing but kill.

Blake, William, David V. Erdman, et al. (1982). The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Garden City, N.Y., Anchor Books.
Since its first publication in 1965, this edition has been widely hailed as the best available text of Blake's poetry and prose. Now revised, if includes up-to-date work on variants, chronology of poems and critical commentary by Harold Bloom.

Block, Herbert (2009). Herblock: The Life and Work of the Great Political Cartoonist. Washington, D.C.; New York; Herb Block Foundation; Library of Congress; In association with W.W. Norton & Co.
Designed to accompany an exhibit at the Library of Congress, the book briefly outlines the artist's career and its historical context, starting with Herbert Block's early career during FDR's term. The bulk of the book showcases highlights of the artist's seven-decade career. Politically independent but largely progressive, Herblock is prescient on issues including McCarthyism (a term he coined), civil rights and environmentalism. Herblock's best cartoons do more than provide color commentary on political skirmishes. They manifest characters vividly: his viciously ineffectual Eisenhower brandishes a feather opposite an ax-wielding McCarthy, for instance. The book is accompanied by a DVD containing 18,000 cartoons, a nearly complete collection of Herblock's indispensable oeuvre.

Block, Ned Joel (1980). Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
In this introduction to the philosophical problems underlying the modern study of mind and behavior, Ned Block has collected the most important papers by the major figures in the field. He provides the only central reference work now available for scholars and students in this growing area of inquiry. Volume I covers general approaches to the study of the mind: behaviorism, reductionism, and functionalism.

Bloom, Harold (2000). How to Read and Why. New York, Scribner.
For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threaten to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom. Probing discussions of the works of beloved writers such as William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, and William Faulkner highlight the varied challenges and delights found in short stories, poems, novels, and plays. Bloom not only provides illuminating guidance on how to read a text but also illustrates what such reading can bring -- aesthetic pleasure, increased individuality and selfknowledge, and the lifetime companionship of the most engaging and complex literary characters.

Bloom, Stephen G. (2000). Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America. New York, Harcourt.
Postville, Iowa (population 1,478), seems an unlikely place to find a sizable Jewish population, let alone an ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher population. It is, after all, in the heart of pork country, and the world headquarters of the Lubavitchers is far away in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. But when the Hygrade meat processing plant, just outside Postville, went belly-up, threatening the town with decline, Sholom Rubashkin bought it and turned it into a glatt kosher processing plant, complete with shochtim and a rabbinical inspectorate. By the late 1980s, "Postville had more rabbis per capita than any other city in the United States, perhaps the world."

The enterprise was a huge international success, with its kosher meats exported even to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Jewish population grew to 150, and they were rich. The town was saved, and the people were grateful. All's well that ends well? Not quite. The Hasidim kept to themselves, did things their own way, and basically had no interest in integrating into Postville. And why would they? Their laws are strict, their mission clear, their community defined by race and religion. They are not interested in watermelon socials or coffee klatches at the diner. Their little boys do not swim with their little girls, are not educated together, and do not go on play dates with goyim. Small-town Iowans, on the other hand, are very friendly. They know each other's news, they support each other's businesses, they wish each other Merry Christmas, they want you to feel at home. They don't like that the new townspeople stomp up the street hunched over, talking in a foreign language and looking straight through them when greeted. They really don't like it when one of the newcomers drives around town with a 10-foot candelabra strapped to his car playing music at full volume for eight consecutive winter nights. They don't actually know about menorahs or Hanukkah.

Into this comes secular Jew Stephen Bloom, a professor at the University of Iowa. By the time he arrived in Postville, the town was riven along religious lines. One of the townspeople was running for mayor on the sole platform of annexation of the land on which the plant stood. Rubashkin was threatening that he'd shut the plant and leave if that came to pass. Bloom closely considers both sides, and the result is a wonderful book. It is a fascinating tale of culture clash in the American heartland: the John Deere cap meets the black fur hat. It is a book about identity and community and what it means to be American. It covers all the things you aren't supposed to talk about at the dinner table--religion, politics, and even sex. It is full of suspense: Will the plant be annexed? Will the Jews leave? And it is also Bloom's exploration of his own sense of belonging.

Blum, William (1986). The CIA, a Forgotten History: US Global Interventions Since World War II. London; Atlantic Highlands, N.J., Zed Books.
This is the only well-documented book on CIA history that is arranged country by country, year by year. It describes and analyzes the known significant interventions throughout the world since 1945 that have been carried out through the CIA and other branches of U.S. government. Hundreds of distinct operations were launched in more than 50 countries using various techniques: the use of armed aggression by U.S. and/or indigenous forces working with the U.S.; operations, successful or not, to overthrow a government; attempts to suppress a popular rebellion or movement; attempts to assassinate political leaders; gross interference in elections or other flagrant manipulations of a country's political system; the manufacture of "news "; serious manipulation of trade unions, etc. While most CIA histories get sidetracked with anecdotal personality discussions, this one deals exclusively with the big sorry picture. One might conclude that the same interventionist patterns appear with every post-war administration, suggesting that it never was a matter of personalties at all, but rather something more enduring, more structural, and much more threatening

Blum, William (1995). Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II. Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press.
From China in the 1940s to Guatemala today, William Blum provides a comprehensive study of the ongoing American holocaust. Covering U.S. intervention in more than 50 countries, Killing Hope describes the grim role played by the U.S. in overthrowing governments, perverting elections, assassinating leaders, suppressing revolutions, manipulating trade unions and manufacturing "news."

Blum, William (2000). Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower. Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press.
From incarcerating Nelson Mandela to dropping cluster bombs (which later turn to landmines) on Yugoslavia, from supporting Pol Pot to praising Noriega, the U.S. has been barbaric enough to do it. William Blum shows us how, even though Clinton calls America the worlds greatest force for peace, our Rogue State really needs to be leashed.

Blumi, Isa (2018). Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us About the World. Oakland, California, University of California Press.
Since March 2015, a Saudi-led international coalition of forces--supported by Britain and the United States--has waged devastating war in Yemen. Largely ignored by the world's media, the resulting humanitarian disaster and full-scale famine threatens millions. Destroying Yemen offers the first in-depth historical account of the transnational origins of this war, placing it in the illuminating context of Yemen's relationship with major powers since the Cold War. Bringing new sources and a deep understanding to bear on Yemen's profound, unwitting imbrication in international affairs, this explosive book ultimately tells an even larger shock-doctrine story of today's political economy of global capitalism, development, and the war on terror as disparate actors intersect in Arabia.

Blutch (2016). Peplum. New York, New York Review Comics.
The man known as Blutch is one of the giants of contemporary comics, and Peplum may be his masterpiece: a grand, strange dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name and with the frozen maiden still in tow, makes his way toward Rome--seeking power, or maybe just survival, as the world unravels. Thrilling and hallucinatory, vast in scope yet unnervingly intimate, Peplum weaves together threads from Shakespeare and The Satyricon along with Blutch's own distinctive vision. His hypnotic storytelling and stark, gorgeous art pull us into one of the great works of graphic literature, translated into English for the first time.

Blutch (2013). So Long, Silver Screen. Brooklyn, PictureBox.
What are the movies? What effect do they have on us? Why do we love them so much? The influential, award-winning French cartoonist Blutch (born 1967) addresses these questions in a series of interlocking short comics that combine scholarly history with ribald romanticism, and feature a motley cast of actors and characters, including Claudia Cardinale, Jean-Luc Godard, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Michel Piccoli, Tarzan and Luchino Visconti. Blutch has published over a dozen books since debuting in 1988 in the legendary avant-garde magazine Fluide Glacial. Among his books are Mitchum, Peplum and Le Petit Christian, and his illustrations regularly appear in Les Inrockuptibles, Libération and The New Yorker. As much visual essay as graphic novel, a daydream and fantastic meditation on the other art of telling stories with images, So Long, Silver Screen is the finest work yet from an uncontested master of contemporary cartooning, as well as his first full-length work to be published in English. It is designed by famed cartoonist David Mazzucchelli.

Bly, Robert (1975). Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations. Boston, Beacon Press.
"In ancient times, in the 'time of inspiration,' the poet flew from one world to another, 'riding on dragons.' They dragged behind them long tails of dragonsmoke. This dragonsmoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the center of a work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known."

Robert Bly gives us his wonderful idea about 'leaping,' surreal poetry and pays homage to the modern masters of this method, largely Spanish poets such as Neruda, Lorca and Vallejo. Involved in this idea are the concepts of 'Wild Association' and the presence of three brains involved in a complex relationship within the human mind.

Bly, Robert (1975). The Morning Glory: Prose Poems. New York, Harper & Row.
In The Morning Glory, Bly borrows Frances Ponge's idea of the 'object poem' for his descriptions of such minute particulars as a caterpillar, a starfish, a bird's nest. Bly's intention in his prose poems is to restore dignity to objects-not to exploit them as symbols-and to draw our attention to their hidden will; it is also to celebrate the body and its myriad transformations. When Bly uses the term 'body,' he does not mean to distinguish flesh from spirit, for to him they are both aspects of the same cellular intelligence that informs the flesh and that inheres in 'life' itself. He accepts neither the Platonic nor the Christian view of flesh and spirit as being diametrically opposed. He celebrates the body, as Whitman did, as a Dionysian vessel which contains all the organs, only one of which is the mind, the organ through which consciousness is filtered. And because the body is in a constant state of change, Bly sees it as the perfect metaphor for transformation, yet he refuses to idealize it: "no sentimentality, only the ruthless body performing its magic, transforming each of our conversations into energy."

Bly, Robert (1981). The Man in the Black Coat Turns: Poems. New York, N.Y., Dial Press.
Unfolds the relationship between the father and the son, a relationship which Bly believes has been virtually erased since the Industrial Revolution, and one which must be restored.

Bly, Robert (1985). The Light Around the Body. New York, Harper & Row.
The Light Around the Body (1967), Robert Bly's second book of poems, could not be thematically more different from the "deep image" lyrics of his first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962). An outspoken attack on the American involvement in the Vietnam War, Light names names and graphically describes and details man's inhumanity to man in war. The book shocked many readers. Surprisingly - but perhaps because it was clear that it would force people to think about political positions and actions - it won the National Book Award. Characteristically, Bly publicly donated his prize money to the draft resistance movement.

Bly, Robert (1986). Selected Poems. New York, Perennial Library.
One of the outstanding poets, translators, and critics of our time, Bly has an insured place as a major figure in American poetry. A special vision unfolds in Selected Poems as Bly introduces the reader to his work through brief essays charting the poems chronologically from The Lute of Three Loudnesses, his attempt to "learn the melodic line English poets developed" while keeping "out despair he couldn't quite bring into the house," to his recent Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, poems that still ask for every "bit of musicianship we have." Through the essays and poems Bly's public voice unfolds -- anti-Vietnam War, modern mythmaker, Jungian. He also explains his approaches to meter and metaphor.

Bly, Robert and William C. Booth (1988). A Little Book on the Human Shadow. San Francisco, Harper & Row.
Robert Bly, renowned poet and author of the ground-breaking bestseller Iron John, mingles essay and verse to explore the 'Shadow' -- the dark side of the human personality -- and the importance of confronting it.

Bly, Robert, John Knoepfle, et al. (1993). Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems. Boston, Beacon Press.
"Chilean Pablo Neruda is Latin America's greatest poet and one of the finest ever to have written in the Spanish language. The Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, part Indian and born in a mining village, ranks not far below Neruda. Robert Bly is one of America's foremost poets, and a translator of uncommon brilliance. The combination makes for a priceless volume."

Bly, Robert, Harry Martinson, et al. (1975). Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets, Harry Martinson, Gunnar Ekelof, and Tomas Transtromer. Boston, Beacon Press.
Poems in English and Swedish; commentary in English. Chosen and translated by Robert Bly.

Boal, Augusto (2001). Hamlet and the Baker's Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics. London; New York, Routledge.
Augusto Boal, by any measure, has had an extraordinary life. Hamlet and the Baker's Son is Boal's remarkable story of how a small, observant boy from Rio became one the most vocal and political figures of 20th-century theater. His autobiography gives voice to his unique gift of using the stage to empower the disempowered.

Boardman, John (1996). Greek Art. New York, N.Y., Thames and Hudson.
Boardman's Greek Art was first published in 1964. It was an excellent introduction to the field and a popular text for many college classes. After 30 years and a couple of revisions, the new edition is even better than its predecessors. Rather than rehash old research, the author includes new discoveries and revises his conclusions about many aspects of the field. Particularly interesting and enlightening is his ability to remove "Greek art, from the traditional art book and gallery" and focus on what the works meant to their makers and viewers and, consequently, to later artists.

Boccaccio, Giovanni and G. H. McWilliam (1995). The Decameron. New York, Penguin Books.
The Decameron consists of one hundred tales--ten tales told over ten days by ten storytellers, three noblemen and seven ladies. The structure of the work is distinctly medieval by virtue of its allegorical numerology and elaborate architecture, which finds its counterpart in the Gothic cathedral; its scathing and hilarious depictions of a corrupt clergy; and its idealization of women. However, Boccaccio's attitude towards love--the right true end being pleasurable and guiltless consummation--is much closer to the Renaissance viewpoint. In addition to the stories is a lengthy introduction in which Boccaccio describes the "brief unpleasantness" necessitating the geographical wanderings and narrative adventures of the ten storytellers, the outbreak of bubonic plague in Florence in 1348.

Bodmer, W. F. and Robin McKie (1995). The Book of Man: The Human Genome Project and the Quest to Discover Our Genetic Heritage. New York, Scribner.
Rather than focusing on the politics and intrigue behind the Human Genome Project (HGP), this primer emphasizes the scientific breakthroughs and remaining hurdles facing the international cooperative effort to map the three million genes that comprise human DNA. Bodmer, a British geneticist and former president of the Human Genome Organization (which fosters global collaboration in genome mapping), and Observer science correspondent McKie believe the HGP will provide information vital to the treatment of diseases, understanding of individual differences in behavior and human evolution and the development of new pharmaceutical drugs. Inherited illnesses, such as cystic fibrosis and Huntington's chorea, are beginning to yield to molecular genetics, and the authors also show how ongoing research is raising the prospects for effective treatment of cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease. They conclude with a levelheaded look at the ethical issues surrounding genetic testing and gene theory, in which missing genes are inserted into people afflicted by inherited ailments.

Boethius and V. E. Watts (1999). The Consolation of Philosophy. London; New York, Penguin Books.
Boethius (c. a.d. 475-525) was consul in 510 and a trusted political adviser to Theodoric, the Ostrogoth. He was later imprisoned and executed at Ravenna.

Bogad, L.M. (2016). Tactical Performance: The Theory and Practice of Serious Play. New York, Routledge.
Tactical Performance explores creative protest in depth, looking at the possibilities for direct action and theatrical confrontation with some of the most powerful institutions in the world. It effectively combines theory and practice, illustrating the basic principles of artful activism in an absorbing, accessible manner.

L.M. Bogad draws on his own experience as a writer, performer, and strategist working with groups such as the Yes Men, the Clown Army, Reclaim the Streets, and La Pocha Nostra, to share the most effective nonviolent tactics and theatrics.

Bogard, Travis and Eugene O'Neill (1988). Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. New York, Oxford University Press.
Eugene O'Neill, one of America's most gifted and prolific playwrights, wrote more than 60 plays between 1914 and 1941, a level of creativity paralleled in modern times only by Bernard Shaw. The progress of his art from crude, one-act plays to the monumental tragedies of his later years is a story as dramatic and compelling as that of his tortured personal history. Combining the two, Professor Bogard traces the contours of O'Neill's life in his art. By discussing, in their approximate order of composition, the published and unpublished works, Bogard illuminates not only the plays, but also the literary, aesthetic, and historical influences on the playwright's development. For this revised edition of this insightful, meticulously written work, the author has added new and unpublished material on A Tale of Possessors, Self-dispossessed, a cycle of nine plays written by O'Neill during the 1930s and '40s, only one of which he readied for the stage. Among the plays in this cycle that have been posthumously produced are More Stately Mansions (New York, 1967) and A Touch of the Poet (New York, 1958).

Bogdanor, Vernon (1987). The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Institutions. New York, Routledge.

Bogdanov, Vladimir, Chris Woodstra, et al. (2002). All Music Guide to Jazz: The Definitive Guide to Jazz Music. San Francisco, CA.
The AMG jazz encyclopedia is the resource of choice for anything you care to know about jazz musicians, jazz history, and jazz recordings. The print is small and there's not a lot of space wasted on photos and filler--in fact, the only non-text additions are 51 music maps, smartly illustrating which performers played in which categories of a range of topics, from accordion and big bands to vocal groups and significant fusion players. There are short essays on topics like ragtime, cool, acid jazz, jazz history, and jazz in film, plus indexes for jazz books venues, videos, producers, writers, and labels, and a much-appreciated comprehensive index. The bulk of this extraordinary reference, however, consists of musician profiles (more than 1,700) and reviews of their recordings (more than 18,000), arranged alphabetically from Greg Abate to John Zorn, providing biographical details of well-known figures such as Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, as well as his son T.S. Monk and more obscure artists such as Don Byas, Richard Tabnik, Oscar Pettiford, Hot Lips Page, and Chubby Jackson.

Boghosian, Heidi (2013). Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance. San Francisco, City Lights Publishers.
Personal information contained in your emails, phone calls, GPS movements, and social media is a hot commodity, and corporations are cashing in by mining and selling the data they collect about our private lives. Spying on Democracy reveals how the government acquires and uses such information to target those individuals and/or groups it deems threatening. Journalists, attorneys, political dissidents, religious groups, even children, are subject to ever new forms of surveillance in the name of convenience, marketing, and security. Boghosian combines an activist's commitment and first-person experiences--along with an extensive knowledge of court decisions, government reports, whistleblower revelations, and media accounts--to tell her compelling story.

Bogosian, Eric (1994). The Essential Bogosian: Talk Radio, Drinking in America, Funhouse & Men Inside. New York, Theatre Communications Group.
Brings together Talk Radio and all of Bogosian's monologues up through Drinking in America, providing the fullest view yet of this mercurial talent.

Bolívar, Simón, Frederick H. Fornoff, et al. (2003). El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
General Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), called El Liberator, and sometimes the "George Washington" of Latin America, was the leading hero of the Latin American independence movement. His victories over Spain won independence for Bolivia, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. Bolivar became Columbia's first president in 1819. In 1822, he became dictator of Peru. Upper Peru became a separate state, which was named Bolivia in Bolivar's honor, in 1825. The constitution, which he drew up for Bolivia, is one of his most important political pronouncements. Today he is remembered throughout South America, and in Venezuela and Bolivia his birthday is a national holiday. Although Bolivar never prepared a systematic treatise, his essays, proclamations, and letters constitute some of the most eloquent writing not of the independence period alone, but of any period in Latin American history. His analysis of the region's fundamental problems, ideas on political organization and proposals for Latin American integration are relevant and widely read today, even among Latin Americans of all countries and of all political persuasions. The Cartagena Letter," the Jamaica Letter," and the Angostura Address," are widely cited and reprinted.

Boll, Heinrich (1994). Billiards at Half-Past Nine. New York, Penguin Classics.
In its searing examination of the moral crises of postwar Germany, the novel resembles Boll's other fiction; its interior monologues and flashbacks, however, make it his most complex work. The novel examines the lives of three generations of architects and their responses to the Nazi regime and its aftermath. The present-day action takes place on the 80th birthday of patriarch Heinrich Fahmel, who built St. Anthony's Abbey. At the end of World War II, his son Robert destroyed the abbey to protest the church's complicity with the Nazis; Robert's son, Joseph, is serving his apprenticeship by helping to restore St. Anthony's. All three characters confront their relationship to building and destruction, as well as their personal and historical past.

Boll, Heinrich (1973). Group Portrait with Lady. New York, Penguin Classics.
A sweeping portrayal of German life from World War I until the early 1970s, the novel was cited by the Nobel Prize committee when it awarded Boll the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. The story's anonymous narrator gradually reveals the life--past and present--of Leni Pfeiffer, a war widow who, with her neighbors, is fighting the demolition of the Cologne apartment building in which they reside. Leni and her illegitimate son Lev become the nexus of Cologne's counterculture; they spurn the prevailing work ethic and assail the dehumanization of life under capitalism. In a larger sense, the work attempts both a reconciliation with the past and a condemnation of the pursuit of affluence in present-day Germany.

Bollier, David (2014). Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada, New Society Publishers.
"It probably surprises you to know that the wealth we own together as a commons is far more valuable than the wealth that we and corporations own separately. Corporations know this and have commercialized or taken control of what we the people own - such as the public airwaves, the public lands, our genes and trillions of dollars of knowledge (eg. research and development) paid for by taxpayers - for starters. For this and more you must read Bollier's brilliant distillation of the huge variety of commons and how we can take control of what we own in order to transform our economy for us, our posterity and the planet. Once you pick it up, you'll tremble with the excitement of what we all own in the form of the commons that somehow escaped our notice in our years of formal education." -Ralph Nader

Bond, Edward (1975). Bingo & the Sea: Two Plays. New York, Hill and Wang.
Bingo is 1973 play by English Marxist playwright Edward Bond. It depicts an ageing William Shakespeare at his Warwickshire home in 1615 and 1616, suffering pangs of conscience in part because he signed a contract which protected his landholdings, on the condition that he would not interfere with an enclosure of common lands that would hurt the local peasant farmers. Although the play is fictional, this contract has a factual basis. Bingo is a political drama heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Epic theatre. The subdued Edwardian-set comedy The Sea (1973) shows a seaside community on England's East Coast a few years before World War I, dominated by a dictatorial lady and overwhelmed by the drowning of one of its young citizens. Nurtured by his experience as a child evacuee to the seaside.

Bondanella, Peter E. (2017). A History of Italian Cinema. New York, Bloomsbury Academic.
A History of Italian Cinema is a major new study from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema - which has been published in three landmark editions and celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2008. Building upon his decades of research, Peter Bondanella has now written the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day. He has rethought, reorganized, and completely rewritten his previous work, which focused on postwar cinema, and has broadened his coverage of the spaghetti western and comedy genres. Bondanella also now covers a huge range of work that was not previously considered, particularly both popular and 'B' genres, including: the sword and sandal epic or "peplum" film of the 1950s; the Italian horror film, the so-called spaghetti nightmare films (including the subcategories of horror, the Italian zombie and cannibal films), that began in the 1950s and continue through the present; the giallo or Italian mystery thriller; and the poliziesco or Italian crime film from the 1970s to the present. This new book also examines the emergence of a "third wave" of new auteurs born in the 1950s as well as an even younger group of important directors born in the 1960s who have already made their mark on the direction of the Italian cinema in the third millennium.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1972). Letters and Papers from Prison. New York, Macmillan.
Letters and Papers from Prison is a collection of notes and correspondence covering the period from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's arrest in 1943 to his execution by the Gestapo in 1945. The book is probably most famous, and most important, for its idea of "religionless Christianity "--an idea Bonhoeffer did not live long enough fully to develop, but whose timeliness only increases as the lines between secular and ecclesial life blur. Bonhoeffer's first mention of "religionless Christianity" came in a letter in 1944:

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as "religious" do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by "religious."

Bonnefoy, Yves and Wendy Doniger (1991). Mythologies. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
A collection of 395 essays on aspects of mythologies written by a group of brilliant and philosophically complex French scholars.

Boon, Marcus (2002). The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
From the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this far-reaching work. Drawing on history, science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography, Marcus Boon shows that the concept of drugs is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and reveals how different sets of connections between disciplines configure each drug's unique history.

Boot, Chris and Magnum Photos inc. (2004). Magnum Stories. London; New York, Phaidon.
Sixty-one widely published photographers from around the world candidly discuss their careers and beliefs while showing you key images from their portfolios. From Iran-born Abbas (whose career began with a series about the Vietcong in the 1970s) to Patrick Zachmann (who has documented the lives of Malian immigrants in his native France), each photographer is given ample space to talk about his or her work. Editor Chris Boot accompanies the interviews with a brief explanation of the cultural or political background of each suite of images. The one thing the interviewees have in common is past or current membership in Magnum, a photographers' cooperative founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour as a means of breaking free from the editorial tyranny of Life and other photo-based magazines. With nearly 800 illustrations, this distinctive, square-format book offers a kaleidoscopic survey of the many faces of documentary photography.

Booth, Wayne C. (1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms - such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator " - have become part of the standard critical lexicon.

Borde, Raymond, Etienne Chaumeton, et al. (2002). A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953. San Francisco, City Lights Books.
This clairvoyant study of Hollywood film noir is a benchmark for all later work on the topic. A Panorama of American Film Noir addresses the essential amorality of its subject from a decidedly Surrealist angle, focusing on noir's dreamlike, unwonted, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel atmosphere, and setting it in the social context of mid-century America.

Borges, Jorge Luis (1993). Ficciones. New York, A.A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
Reading Jorge Luis Borges is an experience akin to having the top of one's head removed for repairs. First comes the unfamiliar breeze tickling your cerebral cortex; then disorientation, even mild discomfort; and finally, the sense that the world has been irrevocably altered--and in this case, rendered infinitely more complex. First published in 1945, his Ficciones compressed several centuries' worth of philosophy and poetry into 17 tiny, unclassifiable pieces of prose. He offered up diabolical tigers, imaginary encyclopedias, ontological detective stories, and scholarly commentaries on nonexistent books, and in the process exploded all previous notions of genre. Would any of David Foster Wallace's famous footnotes be possible without Borges? Or, for that matter, the syntactical games of Perec, the metafictional pastiche of Calvino? For good or for ill, the blind Argentinian paved the way for a generation's worth of postmodern monkey business--and fiction will never be simply "fiction" again.

Borges, Jorge Luis and Alexander Coleman (1999). Selected Poems. New York, Viking.
During his life, Jorge Luis Borges wore many hats. He was a poet, an essayist, a short-story writer, a librarian, and, for a short time, a poultry inspector. Born in Argentina in 1899, he lived for several years in Europe before eventually returning home to Buenos Aires in the early 1920s. It was here that Borges started his career as a writer. At the age of 24, he published his first volume of poetry, and though he would go on to garner considerable acclaim as an essayist and crafter of fiction, he always considered himself first and foremost a poet. This bilingual edition of Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman, gathers together 200 poems from different periods of Borges's life, including some that will be appearing in English for the first time.

Borges, Jorge Luis and Andrew Hurley (1998). Collected Fictions. New York, N.Y., U.S.A., Viking.
Undeniably one of the most influential writers to emerge in this century from Latin America or anywhere else, Borges is best known for his short stories, all of which appear here for the first time in one volume, translated and annotated by University of Puerto Rico professor Hurley. Many of the stories return to the same set of images and themes that mark Borges's best known work: the code of ethics embraced by gauchos, knifefighters and outlaws; labyrinths; confrontations with one's doppelganger; and discoveries of artifacts from other worlds (an encyclopedia of a mysterious region in Iraq; a strange disc that has only one side and that gives a king his power; a menacing book that infinitely multiplies its own pages; fragmentary manuscripts that narrate otherworldly accounts of lands of the immortals). Less familiar are episodes that narrate the violent, sordid careers of pirates and outlaws like Billy the Kid (particularly in the early collection A Universal History of Iniquity) or attempts to dramatize the consciousness of Shakespeare or Homer.

Borges, Jorge Luis and Eliot Weinberger (1999). Selected Non-Fictions. New York, Viking.
Jorge Luis Borges was our century's greatest miniaturist, perpetually cramming entire universes onto the head of a pin. Yet his splendid economy, along the wafer-thin proportions of such classic volumes as Ficciones and Labyrinths, has given readers the impression that Borges was miserly with his prose. In fact, he was something of a verbal spendthrift. His collected stories alone run to nearly 1,000 pages. And his nonfiction output was even more staggering: the young Borges cranked out hundreds of essays, book notes, cultural polemics, and movie reviews, and even after he lost his sight in 1955, he continued to dictate short pieces by the dozens. Eliot Weinberger has assembled just a fraction of this outpouring in Selected Non-Fictions, and the result is a 559-page Borgesian blowout, in which the Argentinean fabulist takes on being and nothingness, James Joyce and Lana Turner, and (surprisingly) racial hatred and the rise of Nazism.

Borroff, Marie (1979). Language and the Poet: Verbal Artistry in Frost, Stevens, and Moore. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Poetry of Frost, Stevens, and Moore.

Boswell, James (1992). The Life of Samuel Johnson. New York, Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
James Boswell is for some the ideal scribe, for others a sycophantic toady. Edmund Wilson, for example, memorably labeled him "a vain and pushing diarist." Boswell can even be seen as someone unconsciously intent on undermining his idol in sonorous, balanced sentences. Early on in his massive Life, he puts all manner of ideas into our heads with his attempts to clear the youthful Johnson of potential impropriety: "His juvenile attachments to the fair sex were, however, very transient; and it is certain that he formed no criminal connection whatsoever." And while it's often tempting to ignore Boswell's more personal intrusions and delight solely in the melancholic master's words and deeds, there are such delightful admissions as, "I was at this time so occupied, shall I call it? or so dissipated, by the amusements of London that our next meeting was not till Saturday, June 25." Many of the quotes Boswell includes are a sort of greatest hits: Johnson's definitions of oats and lexicographer, his love for his cat Hodge, as well as thousands of bon, and mal, mots. ("Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel "; "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all.") But there are also many unfamiliar pleasures--Boswell's accounts of Johnson's literary industry, including the Dictionary, The Rambler, and Lives of the Poets; Johnson's singular loathing for Scotland and France; and the surprising hints of revelry. Awakened at 3 AM by friends, he greets them with, "What, is it you, you dogs! I'll have a frisk with you." This at age 42. Johnson's final years were marked by pain and loneliness but certainly no loss of wit.

Botsford, Gardner (2003). A Life of Privilege, Mostly. New York, St. Martin's Press.
Botsford, a former New Yorker editor, pulls off a difficult balancing act in this graceful memoir. He covers brutal WWII experiences in highly charged, reportorial detail, then switches effortlessly to his wealthy, Noel Coward-flavored background. Beginning with his soldier days, he backtracks to his years at Yale and colorfully portrays his mother, Neysa McMein, a celebrated beauty and international heartbreaker who attracted such friends as Alexander Woolcott and George Abbott. Botsford's writing ability first surfaced with a humor column he wrote in college, and he began at the New Yorker as an underpaid contributor. The book, always compelling, becomes impossible to put down when he focuses on the legendary William Shawn. He describes the editor as "a hermetically sealed intellectual" and points out why the two formed a friendly but consistently uneasy alliance: Shawn "tiptoed through life as though through a minefield. I was forever getting into fights, arguing with cab drivers. I was wildly irrational." Despite Botsford's ambivalent feelings about his colleague, he tells the story of Tom Wolfe's scathing Shawn exposes‚ in the New York Herald Tribune with unbiased clarity, making readers feel Shawn's despair at being publicly unmasked. The last section, in which Shawn fights against appointing a successor until Si Newhouse fires him, is a chilling demonstration of how desperately people cling to power.

Bottomore, T. B. (1991). A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass., Blackwell Reference.
This book, part dictionary and part encyclopedia, has become the standard reference work on the concepts of Marxism and the individuals and schools of thought that have subsequently contributed to the body of Marxist ideas. The Dictionary has been fully revised and updated, with over fifty new entries on major texts, on topics that have become relevant since the first edition appeared, and in areas where the state of knowledge and understanding has moved significantly.

Bourdain, Anthony and Laurie Woolever (2016). Appetites. New York, NY, Ecco.
Appetites, his first cookbook in more than ten years, boils down thirty-plus years of professional cooking and globe-trotting to a tight repertoire of personal favorites—dishes that everyone should (at least in Mr. Bourdain’s opinion) know how to cook. The result is a home-cooking, home-entertaining cookbook like no other, with personal favorites from his own kitchen and from his travels, translated into an effective battle plan that will help you terrify your guests with your breathtaking efficiency.

Bourdain, Anthony (2001). A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines. New York, Bloomsbury.
The written record of Anthony Bourdain's travels around the world in his search for the perfect meal. The idea of 'perfect meal' in this context is to be taken to mean not necessarily the most upscale, chi-chi, three-star dining experience, but the ideal combination of food, atmosphere, and company. This would take in fishing villages in Vietnam, bars in Cambodia, and Tuareg camps in Morocco (roasted sheep's testicle, as it happens); it would stretch to smoked fish and sauna in the frozen Russian countryside and the French Laundry in California's Napa Valley. It would mean exquisitely refined kaiseki rituals in Japan after yakitori with drunken salarymen. Deep-fried Mars Bars in Glasgow and Gordon Ramsay in London.

Bourdain, Anthony, Joel Rose, et al. (2018). Hungry Ghosts. Milwaukie, OR, Berger Books.
On a dark, haunted night, a Russian Oligarch dares a circle of international chefs to play the samurai game of 100 Candles--where each storyteller tells a terrifying tale of ghosts, demons and unspeakable beings--and prays to survive the challenge.

Inspired by the Japanese Edo period game of Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, Hungry Ghosts reimagines the classic stories of yokai, yorei, and obake, all tainted with the common thread of food.

Including stellar artists Sebastian Cabrol, Vanesa Del Rey, Francesco Francavilla, Irene Koh, Leo Manco, Alberto Ponticelli, Paul Pope, and Mateus Santolouco as well as amazing color by Jose Villarrubia, a drop-dead cover by Paul Pope.

A gorgeous, haunting, at times gruesome saga that draws from the Japanese mythologies yokai, yorei, and obake, and mixes terrifying suspense with fascinating culinary intrigue, Hungry Ghosts cements an underrated literary legacy of Bourdain.

Bourdain, Anthony (2007). Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. New York, Harper Perennial.
From Bourdain's first oyster in the Gironde, to his lowly position as dishwasher in a honky tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he witnesses for the first time the real delights of being a chef); from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, to drug dealers in the east village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable.

Bourdain, Anthony (2006). The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones. New York, Bloomsbury.
In The Nasty Bits, Bourdain serves up a well-seasoned hellbroth of candid, often outrageous stories from his worldwide misadventures. Whether scrounging for eel in the backstreets of Hanoi, revealing what you didn't want to know about the more unglamorous aspects of making television, calling for the head of raw food activist Woody Harrelson, or confessing to lobster-killing guilt, Bourdain is as entertaining as ever. Bringing together the best of his previously uncollected nonfiction--and including new, never-before-published material--The Nasty Bits is a rude, funny, brutal and passionate stew for fans and the uninitiated alike.

Bourdain, Anthony (2007). No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach. New York, Bloomsbury.
More than just a companion to the hugely popular Travel Channel show, No Reservations is Bourdain's fully illustrated journal of his far-flung travels. The book traces his trips from New Zealand to New Jersey and everywhere in between, mixing beautiful, never-before-seen photos and mementos with Bourdain's outrageous commentary on what really happens when you give a bad-boy chef an open ticket to the world. Want to know where to get good fatty crab in Rangoon? How to order your reindeer medium rare? How to tell a Frenchman that his baguette is invading your personal space?

Boutelle, Sara Holmes (1988). Julia Morgan, Architect. New York, Abbeville Press.
Morgan (1872-1957) was William Randolph Hearst's favorite architect, and the theatrical Hearst Castle perched on a hilltop in San Simeon, Calif., might be considered a monument to her client's pretensions and her own pliabiity. Fortunately, this reclusive woman, who shunned publicity, left behind 700 other buildings in a medley of styles. In cottages, schools, churches, houses and civic projects, she swung eclectically between Arts and Crafts, California Mission, Bavarian, medieval and Mediterranean styles. Her work became unfashionable as modernism took hold, yet today it has attracted renewed interest. Her experimental use of color and decoration, her concern for indoor/outdoor living and for the relationship of structure to site all these make her buildings relevant to contemporary designers. In this biographical-critical study, Boutelle, an architectural historian, considers each building on its own terms. One-third of the 368 illustrations are in color; plans, sketches and photographs help us to appreciate many original touches.

Bowden, Mark (1999). Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press.
Bowden (Bringing the Heat) has used his journalistic skills to find and interview key participants on both sides of the October 1993 raid into the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia, a raid that quickly became the most intensive close combat Americans have engaged in since the Vietnam War. But Bowden's gripping narrative of the fighting is only a framework for an examination of the internal dynamics of America's elite forces and a critique of the philosophy of sending such high-tech units into combat with minimal support. He sees the Mogadishu engagement as a portent of a disturbing future. The soldiers' mission was to seize two lieutenants of a powerful Somali warlord. Despite all their preparation and training, the mission unraveled and they found themselves fighting ad hoc battles in ad hoc groups. Eschewing the post facto rationalization that characterizes so much military journalism, Bowden presents snapshots of the chaos at the heart of combat. On page after page, in vignette after vignette, he reminds us that war is about breaking things and killing people. In Mogadishu that day, there was no room for elaborate rules of engagement. In the end, it was a task force of unglamorous "straight-leg" infantry that saved the trapped raiders. Did the U.S. err by creating elite forces that are too small to sustain the attrition of modern combat? That's one of the key questions Bowden raises in a gripping account of combat that merits thoughtful reading by anyone concerned with the future course of the country's military strategy and its relationship to foreign policy. - Publishers Weekly

Bowles, Paul (2002). Collected Stories & Later Writings. New York, Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the U.S. by Penguin Putnam.
Though mostly associated with Tangiers, Bowles was born in Queens, NY, so his works qualify for inclusion in the Library of America. The publisher claims these are the first annotated editions of Bowles's works available. Along with the novels volume, Stories includes The Delicate Prey, A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard, The Time of Friendship, Things Gone and Things Still Here, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, among many others.

Boyd, Malcolm and John Butt (1999). J.S. Bach. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
Illustrated with twenty-four black-and-white plates, this volume boasts over a thousand alphabetically arranged entries that cover Bach's music, his life and times, scholarship on Bach, and the performance of his music. Readers will find entries on the various genres that Bach worked in (including chorales, fantasia, sonata, concerto, missa), his many individual works (such as St. John's Passion, The Goldberg Variations, Brandenburg Concertos, Passacaglia, Well-Tempered Clavier, The Christmas Oratorio, and The Art of Fugue), places important to his career (such as Muhlhausen, Weimar, and Leipzig), and important contemporaries (Handel, Rameau, Vivaldi, Telemann, among others). There are also entries on instruments (harpsichord, organ, clavier, and so on), Bach performance practice, stylistic influences on his work, and other biographical details. The book concludes with a family tree, a chronology of Bach's life, a list of his works, and a glossary of terms.

Boyd, William (2003). Any Human Heart: A Novel. New York, A.A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
This rich, sophisticated, often hilarious and disarming novel is the autobiography of a typical Englishman as told through his lifelong journal. Born to British parents in Uruguay in 1906, Logan Mountstuart attends an English prep school where he makes two friends who will be his touchstones for the next eight decades. The early entries in his journal, which record his sexual explorations and his budding ambitions, provide a clear picture of the snobbery and genteel brutality of the British social system. Logan is a decent chap, filled with a moral idealism that he will never lose, although his burning sense of justice will prove inconvenient in later years. He goes down from Oxford with a shameful Third, finds early success as a novelist, marries a rich woman he doesn't love, escapes to Spain to fight in the civil war and is about to embark on a happy existence with his second wife when WWII disrupts his and his generation's equilibrium. He's sent on a naive spying mission by British Naval Intelligence and imprisoned for two years. On his release, he finds that tragedy has struck his family. Logan's creativity is stunted, and he slides into alcoholism, chronic infidelity and loneliness."I believe my generation was cursed by the war," Logan says, and this becomes the burden of the narrative. He resorts to journalism to earn a living, specializing in pieces about the emerging stars of the art world, whom he encounters-somewhat like Zelig-in social situations. Logan's picaresque journey through the 20th century never seems forced, however. His meetings with Picasso, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Hemingway and Ian Fleming are adroitly and credibly interposed into the junctures of his life. This flawed yet immensely appealing protagonist is one of Boyd's most distinctive creations, and his voice-articulate, introspective, urbane, stoically philosophical in the face of countless disappointments-engages the reader's empathy. Logan is a man who sees his bright future dissipate and his great love destroyed, and yet can look back with "a strange sense of pride" that he's "managed to live in every decade of this long benighted century." His unfulfilled life, with his valiant efforts to be morally responsible, to create and, finally, just to get by, is a universal story, told by a master of narrative.

Boyd, William and William Boyd (1997). The Destiny of Nathalie X and Other Stories. New York, Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
The author of The Blue Afternoon and Brazzaville Beach confirms his mastery of story with this wide-ranging collection. Traveling from Lisbon and London to contemporary Hollywood, from World War I to the present, these stories are singular and eclectic, each wholly distinct from the other. Their range of reference is also sweeping and varied, from Ludwig Wittgenstein to David Hockney, burgeoning fascism to burgeoning capitalism, foreign languages to Hollywood-speak, an imaginary Brazil to cinema verite. Their tone covers the spectrum from despair to high comedy. The true constants are Boyd's sharp eye and multifaceted prose.

Boyer, Carl B. and Uta C. Merzbach (1989). A History of Mathematics. New York, Wiley.
Presupposes a knowledge of college level mathematics but is accessible to the average reader through its consistent treatment of mathematical structure with a strict adherence to historical perspective and detail. The material is arranged chronologically beginning with archaic origins and covers Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Chinese, Indian, Arabic and European contributions done to the nineteenth century and present day. There are revised references and bibliographies and revised and expanded chapters on the nineteeth and twentieth centuries.

Boykoff, Jules (2016). Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics. New York, Penguin Random House.
A great irony is that the modern Olympics, first envisioned as an alternative to war, have themselves become a form of low-intensity warfare. As Jules Boykoff chronicles in this pathbreaking history, host cities have used the Games to leverage urban renewal, neighborhood demolition, and mass population displacement. The preparations for the Rio Olympics have gone one step further and become a literal urban counterinsurgency, as elite police units occupy and ‘cleanse' one favela after another. -- Mike Davis

Bradbury, Malcolm (1998). The Atlas of Literature. New York, NY, Stewart, Tabori & Chang.
Drawing on the critical talents of fellow writers and academics, Bradbury looks at places in literature and how they affect and are affected by writers. The book is arranged in eight sections detailing various literary periods from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to contemporary times. Each of these sections is divided into chapters that deal with locations such as France during the Enlightenment, London in the 1890s, or the world after the Wall. The chapter on Thomas Hardy's Wessex, for example, examines the area of southwest England in which the author set the majority of his novels, noting the corresponding real places and their significance to Hardy. The chapter on divided Ireland, on the other hand, discusses the influence of "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland on the writings of Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, and others. The text is illustrated with 450 black-and-white photographs, drawings, and maps. The volume concludes with brief biographical notes about authors discussed, a list of sites around the world associated with famous authors that can be visited, a bibliography by country, and an index.

Bradbury, Ray (1990). The Martian Chronicles. New York, Doubleday.
From Rocket Summer to The Million-Year Picnic," Ray Bradbury's stories of the colonization of Mars form an eerie mesh of past and future. Written in the 1940s, the Chronicles drip with nostalgic atmosphere--shady porches with tinkling pitchers of lemonade, grandfather clocks, chintz-covered sofas. But longing for this comfortable past proves dangerous in every way to Bradbury's characters--the golden-eyed Martians as well as the humans. Starting in the far-flung future of 1999, expedition after expedition leaves Earth to investigate Mars. The Martians guard their mysteries well, but they are decimated by the diseases that arrive with the rockets. Colonists appear, most with ideas no more lofty than starting a hot-dog stand, and with no respect for the culture they've displaced.

Branch, Taylor (1989). Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63. New York, Simon and Schuster.
Epic in scope, often startling in its judgments and revelations, this gripping narrative mingles biography and history as it moves from the founding in 1867 of the First Baptist Church in Alabama, where King's movement took hold, to John Kennedy's assassination. Branch, journalist and coauthor of Second Wind, provides disturbing glimpses of John Kennedy wavering over integration while manipulating King, and of Robert Kennedy, who authorized FBI wiretaps on King's home and offices. Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin and other leaders are also here, though King holds center-stage for most of the narrative.

The first book of a formidable three-volume social history, Parting the Waters profiles the key players and events that helped shape the American social landscape following World War II but before the civil-rights movement of the 1960s reached its climax.

Branch, Taylor (1998). Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65. New York, NY, Simon & Schuster.
In Pillar of Fire, the second volume of his America in the King Years trilogy, Taylor Branch portrays the civil rights era at its zenith. The first volume, Parting the Waters, won the Pulitzer Prize for History. It is a monumental chronicle of a movement that stirred from Southern black churches to challenge the national conscience during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years.

Pillar of Fire covers the far-flung upheavals of the years 1963 to 1965 -- Dallas, St. Augustine, Mississippi Freedom Summer, LBJ's Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Vietnam, Selma. It provides a frank, revealing portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- haunted by blackmail, factionalism, and hatred while he tried to hold the nonviolent movement together as a dramatic force in history. Allies, rivals, and opponents addressed racial issues that went deeper than fair treatment at bus stops or lunch counters. Participants on all sides stretched themselves and their country to the breaking point over the meaning of simple words: dignity, equal votes, equal souls.

Branch, Taylor (2006). At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68. New York, Simon & Schuster.
Beginning with Parting the Waters in 1988, followed 10 years later by Pillar of Fire, and closing now with At Canaan's Gate, Branch has given the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent revolution he led the epic treatment they deserve. The three books of Branch's America in the King Years trilogy are lyrical and dramatic, social history as much as biography, woven from the ever more complex strands of King's movement, with portraits of figures like Lyndon Johnson, Bob Moses, J. Edgar Hoover, and Diane Nash as compelling as that of his central character.

Brand, Stewart (2009). Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear ... and Geoeng Ineering Are Necessary. New York, Viking.
Brand, co-author of the seminal 1969 Whole Earth Catalog, compiles reflections and lessons learned from more than 40 years as an environmentalist in this clumsy yet compelling attempt to inspire practicable solutions to climate change. Brand haphazardly organizes his manifesto into chapters that address environmental stewardship opportunities, exhorting environmentalists to become fearless about following science; his iconoclastic proposals include transitioning to nuclear energy and ecosystem engineering. Brand believes environmentalists must embrace nuclear energy expansion and other inevitable technological advances, and refreshingly suggests a shift in the environmentalists' dogmatic approach to combating climate change. Rejecting the inflexible message so common in the Green movement, he describes a process of reasonable debate and experimentation. Brand's fresh perspective, approachable writing style and manifest wisdom ultimately convince the reader that the future is not an abyss to be feared but an opportunity for innovative problem solvers to embrace enthusiastically.

Brands, H.W. (2010). American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900. New York, Doubleday.
From bestselling historian H. W. Brands, a sweeping chronicle of how a few wealthy businessmen reshaped America from a land of small farmers and small businessmen into an industrial giant. Brands’s spellbinding narrative beautifully depicts the oil gushers of western Pennsylvania, the rise, in Chicago, of the first skyscraper, the exploration of the Colorado River, the cattle drives of the West, and the early passionate sparks of union life. By 1900 the America he portrays is wealthier than ever, yet prosperity is precarious, inequality rampant, and democracy stretched thin. American Colossus is an unforgettable portrait of the years when the contest between capitalism and democracy was at its sharpest, and capitalism triumphed.

Braudel, Fernand (1992). Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Civilization traces the social and economic history of the world from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, although his primary focus is Europe. Braudel skims over politics, wars, etc., in favor of examining life at the grass roots: food, drink, clothing, housing, town markets, money, credit, technology, the growth of towns and cities, and more. The history is fascinating and made even more interesting by period prints and drawings.

Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen (2004). Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York, Oxford University Press.
Extensively revised and updated, the fifth edition of this most widely used and cited anthology of film theory and criticism includes both classic texts and cutting edge essays. It features 23 articles new to this edition and new introductions for the individual sections.

Brautigan, Richard (1971). Revenge of the Lawn; Stories 1962-1970. New York, Simon and Schuster.
His best work, an effortless and lovely cloud of confetti about the decline of the sweet, the good and the pure, was called Trout Fishing in America. The main character was Trout Fishing itself - among the cleanest and most refreshing combinations of words in English. Unfortunately, this personification of a peerless gerund suffered a surrealistic metamorphosis that included its becoming a pen point, a legless alcoholic and a dinner companion of Maria Callas. At the end, Trout Fishing wound up in a junkyard as a used stream, for sale by the foot.

Revenge of the Lawn, Brautigan explains, contains two chapters that were meant for Trout Fishing but somehow got misplaced just before the book was published. The first is Rembrandt Creek," which "looked like a painting hanging in the world's largest museum with a roof that went to the stars and galleries that knew the whisk of comets." The second, Carthage Sink," is about "a Goddamn bombastic river" that suddenly dried up in mid-boast.

It is unlikely that readers of Trout Fishing noticed their absence. The two chapters are just as much at home in this collection of 62 stories as they would have been in their intended novel. In fact, it is not even necessary to separate Brautigan's prose into short stories or novels. All of his images, longings and humor eventually float free of their structural moorings and are kept aloft by the only thing in Brautigan that really counts - his special voice.

Brautigan, Richard (1989). Richard Brautigan: Trout Fishing in America; the Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster; and, in Watermelon Sugar. Boston, Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence.
A Brautigan omnibus, reissued in paperback in celebration of its twentieth anniversary, this one-volume edition includes three contemporary classics that embody the spirit of the 1960s.

Brautigan, Richard (1991). Richard Brautigan: A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and the Hawkline Monster: Three Books in the Manner of Their Original Editions. Boston, Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence.
Richard Brautigan was the author of ten novels, including a contemporary classic, Trout Fishing in America, nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of stories. Here are three Brautigan novels - A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon and The Hawkline Monster -reissues in a one-volume omnibus edition.

Braverman, Harry (1975). Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Labor and Monopoly Power, by Harry Braverman, brings basic Marxist labor theory up to date for the modern age. Though written 25 years ago, Braverman's work is the ideal guideline to understanding the age of information technology. Braverman expertly explodes the smug myths of "knowledge age" boosters by drawing the parallels to earlier industrial technology. The major misapprehension exploded is the one that says workplace automation demands higher skills and upgrades jobs. Braverman, through developing and applying the ideas not only of Marx, but of management proponents such as Babbage, Taylor and Bright, makes a convincing case for the opposite. Computers, like other technology before them, are being applied in ways that expose two objectives: (1) the reduction of the absolute numbers of workers, and (2) the reduction of skills among the remaining workers. Braverman's 1974 book was prophetic in that it described longstanding capitalist relationships that, applied vigorously since that time, have led to increasing income inequality in America.

Bravin, Jess (2013). The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.
While much has been written about Guantanamo and brutal detention practices following 9/11, Bravin is the first to go inside the Pentagon's prosecution team to expose the real-world legal consequences of those policies. Bravin describes cases undermined by inadmissible evidence obtained through torture, clashes between military lawyers and administration appointees, and political interference in criminal prosecutions that would be shocking within the traditional civilian and military justice systems.

Bray, Glenn (2014). The Blighted Eye: Original Comic Art from the Glenn Bray Collection. Seattle, Fantagraphics Books.
The Blighted Eye is the most copious, the most diverse, and the most lavish compilation of original comic art ever published ― all from the mind-boggling collection of Glenn Bray. Bray has, over the last nearly 50 years, amassed the most eclectic collection of original comic art in private hands. The book features work by a pantheon of cartooning masters, including Charles Addams, Carl Barks, Charles Burns, Al Capp, Dan Clowes, Jack Cole, R. Crumb, Jack Davis, Kim Deitch, Will Elder, Al Feldstein, Virgil Finlay, Drew Friedman, Chester Gould, Justin Green, Rick Griffin, Bill Griffith, Matt Groening, George Grosz, V.T. Hamlin, Jaime Hernandez, George Herriman, Al Hirshfeld, Graham Ingels, Bernard Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Gary Panter, Virgil Partch, Savage Pencil, Peter Pontiac, Charles Rodrigues, Spain Rodriguez, Charles Schulz, Gilbert Shelton, Joost Swarte, Stanislav Szukalski, Irving Tripp, Chris Ware, S. Clay Wilson, Basil Wolverton, Wallace Wood, Jim Woodring, Art Young, and -- it should go without saying -- many more.

Bray, Glenn and Frank M. Young (2017). To Laugh That We May Not Weep: The Life and Times of Art Young. Seattle, Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Art Young was one of the most renowned and incendiary political cartoonists in the first half of the 20th century. And far more -- an illustrator for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers, a magazine publisher, a New York State Senatorial candidate on the Socialist ticket, and perhaps the only cartoonist to be tried under the Espionage Act for sedition. He made his reputation appearing in The Masses on a regular basis using lyrical, vibrant graphics and a deep appreciation of mankind’s inherent folly to create powerful political cartoons. To Laugh That We May Not Weep is a sweeping career retrospective, reprinting -- often for the first time in 60 or 70 years -- over 800 of Young’s timeless, charming, and devastating cartoons and illustrations, many reproduced from original artwork, to create a fresh new portrait of this towering figure in the worlds of cartooning and politics. With essays by Art Spiegelman, Justin Green, Art Young biographer Marc Moorash, Anthony Mourek, and Glenn Bray, with a biographical overview of Young’s life and work by Frank M. Young, To Laugh That We May Weep is a long-awaited tribute to one of the great lost cartoonists whose work is as relevant in the 21st century as it was in its own time.

Brechin, Gray A. (1999). Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Challenging San Francisco's popular image as a tolerant, carefree, gracious city, Brechin unearths 150 years of deeply unsettling history. San Francisco's founding aristocracy were Southerners drawn to California as a mecca newly opened up for enterpriseAparticularly for plantation culture. After the 1849 gold rush, San Francisco was built on what Brechin terms a "Pyramid of Mining", a pre-capitalist financial structure employed from Roman times through the Renaissance, uniting miners, financiers, the military and land speculators in a power elite whose only concern was limitless economic growth. While press lord William Randolph Hearst converted a mining fortune into a media conglomerate preaching the superiority of "the American race" and calling for the annexation of Mexico, other San Franciscan power brokers, according to Brechin, channeled mining profits into gas works, currency speculation, political and judicial bribery and the exploitation of forests. From Nevada to Northern California, they wrecked towns, deforested the pristine Lake Tahoe region, buried acres of farmland under mining debris and contaminated the soil, lakes and rivers. A historical geographer and coauthor of Farewell, Promised Land, Brechin concludes with a look at the University of California's pioneering nuclear research program laid the groundwork for the Manhattan Project. Enlivened with period engravings, photos, political cartoons, magazine art, posters and maps, this stirring, environmentally conscious history ranks with Kevin Starr's Americans and the California Dream, powerfully establishing the city on the bay as a true emblem of the atomic age.

Brecht, Bertolt (1989). The Mother. New York, Grove Press.
Bertolt Brecht's play The Mother is freely adapted from Gorky's world-famous novel of the same name. Brecht tells the story of a working class mother who is drawn into the struggle for a Bolshevik revolution; in the character of Pelagea Vlassova, the mother of the title, Brecht draws a richly human figure who emerges as the single entirely positive major hero in all of Brecht's dramatic works.

Brecht, Bertolt (1991). Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years' War. New York, Grove Weidenfeld.
Composed of 12 scenes, the work is a chronicle play of the Thirty Years' War and is based on the picaresque novel Simplicissimus (1669) by Hans Jakob Grimmelshausen. In 1949 Brecht staged Mother Courage, with music by Paul Dessau, in the Soviet sector of Berlin. The plot revolves around a woman who depends on war for her personal survival and who is nicknamed Mother Courage for her coolness in safeguarding her merchandise under enemy fire. One by one her three children die, yet she continues her profiteering.

Brecht, Bertolt (1992). The Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays. New York, Grove Weidenfeld.
These six plays represent the best and most humorous of Brecht's shorter works. The Jewish Wife is from the 'Fear and Misery in the Third Reich' cycle of one-act plays, whcih, along with In Search of Justice and The Informer, chronicles the hardships of life in Nazi Germany. The Exception and the Rule, one of Brecht's most popular short works, grimly depicts the consequences of the mutually dependent - yet inevitably inequitable - relationship between the privileged and the poor; it is included here with The Measures Taken and The Elephant Calf. Though all of these "tales of horror," as Eric Bentley calls them, have tragic undertones, they are also infused with the farcical absurdity and comic irony so characteristic of Brecht's work.

Brecht, Bertolt and Eric Bentley (1991). Galileo. New York, Grove Weidenfeld.
Along with Mother Courage, the character of Galileo is one of Brecht's greatest creations, immensely live, human and complex. Unable to resist his appetite for scientific investigation, Galileo's heretical discoveries about the solar system bring him to the attention of the Inquisition. He is scared into publicly abjuring his theories but, despite his self-contempt, goes on working in private, eventually helping to smuggle his writings out of the country. As an examination of the problems that face not only the scientist but also the whole spirit of free inquiry when brought into conflict with the requirements of government or official ideology, Galileo has few equals.

Brecht, Bertolt and Eric Bentley (1999). The Good Woman of Setzuan. Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota Press.
Three gods come to earth in search of one good person. They find her in Shen Te, a prostitute. With money from the gods she tries to lead a decent life, but in order to survive she must impersonate her nasty male cousin. An enchanting parable with music, by one of the giants of the modern theater, the author of The Threepenny Opera.

Brecht, Bertolt and Ralph Manheim (1998). Saint Joan of the Stockyards. New York, Arcade.
Saint Joan of the Stockyards was Bertolt Brecht's first major political drama for the commercial theater, but it was never staged during his lifetime. A masterpiece of parody and pastiche, the play was a response to the worldwide economic crises of 1929-32 and updates the story of Joan of Arc to the stockyards of a mythical Chicago. In Brecht's telling, Joan Dark is a virtuous lieutenant in a Christian army of salvation. She battles Pierpont Mauler, meat king and philanthropist, for the heart of business and the soul of labor. As Joan becomes Mauler's unwitting mouthpiece, it quickly becomes hard to tell who is using whom in this scathing examination of capitalism and idealism.

Brecht, Bertolt, Ralph Manheim, et al. (1971). Collected Plays. New York, Vintage Books.

Brecht, Bertolt, Ralph Manheim, et al. (2001). The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. New York, Arcade Pub.
When an economic slump provides prime conditions for the rise of a small-time thug (strikingly similar to Al Capone) to take over the vegetable trade in 1930's Chicago, a parallel is set up for the story of another thug who is rising to power on the world stage in 1941, Adolf Hitler. UI is a viciously funny "parable play," written but rarely performed in the United States.

Brecht, Bertolt, Gerhard Nellhaus, et al. (2000). Man Equals Man and the Elephant Calf. New York, Arcade Pub.
The complete transformation of a human personality, that of George Garga, was one element of Brecht's In the Swamp. In A Man's a Man (1924 - 26), the transformation of personality becomes the central theme. Set in an India vaguely modeled on the stories of Rudyard Kipling and as unlike the real India as the Chicago of In the Swamp was unlike the real Chicago, A Man's a Man is one of Brecht' broadest and funniest plays. Yet its ultimate meaning is a matter of dispute.

Brecht, Bertolt, Hugh Rorrison, et al. (1993). Bertolt Brecht Journals. New York, Routledge.
Bertolt Brecht's work journals trace his years of exile (the period from 1934 to 1955) in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and America, as well as his return via Switzerland, to East Berlin. These journals include his perceptive and at times polemical critiques of other writers and intellectuals, but the accounts of his own writing practice provide the greatest insights into the creation of his dramatic work as well as the development of his politics and theories about epic theatre.

There are memorable and revealing passages: about D'Annunzio and Ezra Pound, about the bombing of Germany, about the Greek epigrams, about the Battle of Britain, about the death of Margarete Steffin, about Mrs. Wriggles the family dog, and about the precariousness of life in Los Angeles.

Brecht, Bertolt and John Willett (1964). Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic. New York, Hill and Wang.
This volume offers a major selection of Bertolt Brecht's groundbreaking critical writing. Here, arranged in chronological order, are essays from 1918 to 1956, in which Brecht explores his definition of the Epic Theatre and his theory of alienation-effects in directing, acting, and writing, and discusses, among other works, The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, Mother Courage, Puntila, and Galileo. Also included is A Short Organum for the Theatre," Brecht's most complete exposition of his revolutionary philosophy of drama.

Brecht, Bertolt, John Willett, et al. (1994). The Caucasian Chalk Circle. New York.
A play consisting of a prologue and five scenes by Bertolt Brecht, first produced in English in 1948 and in German as Der kaukasische Kreidekreis in 1949. The work is based on the German writer Klabund's play Der Kreidekreis (1924), itself a translation and adaptation of a Chinese play from the Yuan dynasty (1206-1368). Brecht's play is set within the context of a dispute over land claimed by two communes in the Soviet Union after World War II. The main action of the play consists of a parable that is performed to celebrate the decision in the dispute. The parable, set during a feudal insurrection in the 13th century, concerns the struggle of two women over the custody of a child. The dispute between the governor's wife, who abandoned the child, and the young servant who saved the child and cared for him is settled by an eccentric judge who places the child in a chalk circle and declares that whichever woman can pull him from the circle will be granted custody. When the servant, not wanting to harm the child, lets the governor's wife have him, she is awarded the child, having demonstrated greater love than the natural mother.

Brecht, Bertolt, John Willett, et al. (1996). The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny; and, the Seven Deadly Sins of the Petty Bourgeoisie. New York. Little Brown.
Somewhere in the heart of an imaginary America, three criminals, Leokadja Begbick, Trinity Moses, and Fatty, are on the run from the law. Turning their backs on society, the three found Mahagonny, the City of Nets, where one is allowed to do anything as long as he has money. Drinking, gambling, prizefighting, and sex are the occupations of the inhabitants. Soon a ragtag citzenry has made a home in Mahagonny, including Jenny Smith, a prostitute, and Jim MacIntyre, a lumberjack. When a hurricane approaches Mahagonny, it appears that the city is doomed. The panicked citizens react with distress, terror, and even half-remembered prayers -- but the storm simply bypasses the city. Freed from the fear of the storm (and the implied divine disapproval of their lives), the people of Mahagonny resume their hedonistic lives and sink to new depths of depravity. Meanwhile, Jenny and Jim have fallen in love and plan to leave the city. Their escape is thwarted when Jim is arrested for an unpaid bar bill. In a court where murderers easily buy freedom through open bribery the penniless Jim is condemned to death. Debt, he learns, is the only unforgivable crime in Mahagonny. Jim dies on the gallows, and the opera ends with discontent destroying the city, which burns as the inhabitants, carrying protest placards, march aimless away . . . where? To what?

The music uses a number of styles, including rag-time, jazz and formal counterpoint, notably in the Alabama Song (covered by The Doors and later David Bowie). The lyrics for the Alabama Song and another song, the Benares Song are in English (albeit specifically idiosyncratic English) and are performed in that language even when the opera is performed in its original (German) language.

The Seven Deadly Sins ('Die Sieben Todsunden') follows the heroine Anna, who leaves Louisiana to try and make enough money to save her family home. She is represented by Anna I, the hardheaded singer, and Anna II, the softhearted dancer. In each city she visits, Anna II commits one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but is kept on track by the single-minded Anna I. From Brecht's Marxist viewpoint, these are only sins for the middle classes, and Anna is perfectly justified in her career. For him, the true evil in the story is the American capitalist system. Brecht's ideological commitment allowed him to keep this view all through his years of exile in California. Weill, on the other hand, became an American citizen, contributed to the American war effort, and was highly successful writing musicals for Broadway.

Brecht, Bertolt, John Willett, et al. (1987). Poems 1913-1956. London; New York, Methuen.
"This impressive selection of Bertolt Brecht's poetry, roughly 500 poems, shows convincingly that his ouevre is one of the major poetic achievements of the present century. The editing, with excellent notes, excerpts from Brecht's own views about poetry and Mr. Willett's concise introduction is exemplary. Most important, the translations by 35 poets, among them H.R. Hayes, Peter Levi, Christopher Middleton, and Naomi Replansky, maintain a high standard of accuracy and often convey a very clear idea of the texture and feeling of the German." - Stephen Spender, The New York Times Book Review

Brennan, Richard P. (1992). Dictionary of Scientific Literacy. New York, Wiley.
A dictionary of essential vocabulary and core knowledge in science and technology for the nonscientist.

Brenner, Aaron, Robert Brenner, et al. (2010)). Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s. London; Brooklyn, Verso.
Often considered irredeemably conservative, the U.S. working class actually has a rich history of revolt. Rebel Rank and File uncovers the hidden story of insurgency from below against employers and union bureaucrats in the late 1960s and 1970s.

From the mid-1960s to 1981, rank-and-file workers in the United States engaged in a level of sustained militancy not seen since the Great Depression and World War II. Millions participated in one of the largest strike waves in U.S. history. There were 5,716 stoppages in 1970 alone, involving more than 3 million workers. Contract rejections, collective insubordination, sabotage, organized slowdowns, and wildcat strikes were the order of the day.

Brenner, Robert (2002). The Boom and the Bubble: The U.S. In the World Economy. London; Brooklyn, Verso.
In this crisp and forensic book, Robert Brenner demonstrates that the boom was always a fragile phenomenon-buoyed up by absurd levels of debt and stock-market overvaluation-which never broke free from the fundamental malady of overcapacity and overproduction which continues to afflict the global economy.

Breslin, Jimmy (1975). How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes from an Impeachment Summer. New York, Viking Press.
Not long after burglars were caught raiding the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, Congressman Tip O’Neill noticed that Democratic fundraising efforts for the 1972 election had stalled. Major contributors were under IRS investigation, and Republican lackeys were threatening further trouble if those donors didn’t close their checkbooks. O’Neill sensed a conspiracy coming from the Nixon administration, but it wasn’t until the scandal broke that he connected the threatened donors with the Watergate burglary. In the boldest move of his career, he did something that would shock the nation: O’Neill decided to impeach the President. To his fellow members of the House of Representatives, this was an ugly idea. But as evidence mounted against Nixon and his cronies, O’Neill led the charge against the President. This blow-by-blow, conviction-by-conviction account is a gripping reminder of how O’Neill and his colleagues brought justice to those who abused their power, and revived America after the greatest political scandal in its history.

Breton, Andre and Andre Parinaud (1993). Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism. New York, Paragon House.
The bulk (177 pages) of this useful document is devoted to Breton's carefully scripted radio "interviews" with Parinaud from 1914, when the magus of Surrealism was breaking away from the spell of Paul Valery, through Surrealism's apotheosis in the Twenties, its fragmentation in the Thirties and eclipse by late Symbolism, to 1952, when Breton wanted to bring Surrealism (then obscured by the more overt engagement of Existentialism) back into the public eye. The final set of interviews concludes with two conducted in 1961 and 1962, affirming to the end the need of Surrealists to express themselves, more than please their public.

Breton, André (1994). Nadja. New York, Grove Press.
Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in the city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it.

Breton, Andre, Jean Pierre Cauvin, et al. (2006). Poems of Andre Breton: A Bilingual Anthology. Boston, Mass., Black Widow Press.
Bilingual French-English edition presenting 73 poems representing all styles and stages of the Breton's career.

Breton, Andre (1969). Selected Poems of Andre Breton. London, Cape.

Brewer, Anthony and Karl Marx (1984). A Guide to Marx's Capital. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York, Cambridge University Press.
Reader's guide to Karl Marx's Capital.

Brian, Denis (1996). Einstein: A Life. New York, N.Y., J. Wiley.
This biography attempts a balanced assessment of the most famous scientist of modern times. Brian draws on material released from Einstein's archives, much of it concerning less than flattering aspects of his private life. The reader learns of rumors of a daughter, Liserl, who may have been given up for adoption; of his mentally ill son Eduard, who died in a Swiss psychiatric hospital; of a long string of affairs; of the recent allegations that his first wife, Mileva, was an unacknowledged collaborator in the discovery of the Relativity Theory. Brian does not try to make too much of this material, most of which is at best peripheral to Einstein's life and achievement. The allegations concerning Mileva, which have been trumpeted by feminist critics, he dismisses as unfounded. Nor does he much alter our perception of the key issues of Einstein's scientific work--relativity and the search for a Unified Field Theory, which dominated the last three decades of his career. Einstein's flight from Nazi persecution, the letter to FDR that spurred the creation of the Manhattan Project, and his tireless work on behalf of the founding of Israel are given full and illuminating treatment. Likewise, we get a clear picture of his humble, almost bohemian, daily life; of his playful sense of humor and his love of music; and of the awe he inspired in many of those close to him. Sometimes slow-moving, but a comprehensive and evenhanded treatment of Einstein in the wake of recent charges against his character. - Kirkus Reviews

Brickell, Christopher, Judith D. Zuk, et al. (1997). The American Horticultural Society A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants. New York, N.Y., DK Pub.
Collecting contributions from 100 distinguished horticulturists, the handsome and lavishly illustrated American Horticultural Society A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants is a truly definitive gardening reference. Hardy and tender plants, heirloom varieties and the latest hybrids--they're all accounted for here, with growing tips and background information about native habitats and ornamental features. You'll also find a fascinating section about botany, as well as information about basic gardening techniques such as mulching, staking, pruning, propagating, and protecting plants for winter. But the encyclopedia's main attraction is the individual plant entries--more than 15,000 of them, embellished with 6,000 full-color photographs and illustrations.

Bricmont, Jean (2006). Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world's leading economic and military powers-above all, the United States-in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks. The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq. Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, large parts of the left were often complicit in this ideology of intervention. Jean Bricmont's Humanitarian Imperialism is both a historical account of this development and a powerful political and moral critique. It seeks to restore the critique of imperialism to its rightful place in the defense of human rights. It describes the leading role of the United States in initiating military and other interventions, but also on the obvious support given to it by European powers and NATO. It outlines an alternative approach to the question of human rights, based on the genuine recognition of the equal rights of people in poor and wealthy countries.

Brill, Janet Bond (2013). Blood Pressure Down: The 10-Step Plan to Lower Your Blood Pressure in 4 Weeks--without Prescription Drugs. New York, Three Rivers Press.
Brill’s 10 steps aren’t earthshaking ('lose five pounds,' 'eat bananas,' 'eat yogurt,' 'exercise'). But they’re doable. Helpful charts show “power foods,” including magnesium-rich cocoa powder, and 50 recipes include useful nutritional information. Overall, anyone who wants to try nondrug approaches to lowering blood pressure can find much useful, potentially lifesaving information in this guide book. —Karen Springen.

Brin, David (2002). Kiln People. New York, Tor.
In a perilous future where disposable duplicate bodies fulfill every legal and illicit whim of their decadent masters, life is cheap. No one knows that better than Albert Morris, a brash investigator with a knack for trouble, who has sent his own duplicates into deadly peril more times than he cares to remember. But when Morris takes on a ring of bootleggers making illegal copies of a famous actress, he stumbles upon a secret so explosive it has incited open warfare on the streets of Dittotown.

Dr. Yosil Maharal, a brilliant researcher in artificial intelligence, has suddenly vanished, just as he is on the verge of a revolutionary scientific breakthrough. Maharal's daughter, Ritu, believes he has been kidnapped-or worse. Aeneas Polom, a reclusive trillionaire who appears in public only through his high-priced platinum duplicates, offers Morris unlimited resources to locate Maharal before his awesome discovery falls into the wrong hands.

To uncover the truth, Morris must enter a shadowy, nightmare world of ghosts and golems where nothing -and no one-is what they seem, memory itself is suspect, and the line between life and death may no longer exist.

Brisard, Jean-Charles and Guillaume Dasquie (2002). Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden. New York City, Thunder's Mouth Press.
An international bestseller, banned in Switzerland by the bin Laden family, Forbidden Truth: U.S. -Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie shows how U.S. national security in Afghanistan was disastrously compromised by corporate oil interests and Saudi Arabia.

The result of three years of investigation by a leading French intelligence expert and investigative journalist, Forbidden Truth is the story of the Clinton and Bush administration's attempts to stabilize Afghanistan so that U.S. energy companies could build a pipeline. In particular, it details the secret and hazardous diplomacy between the Bush administration and the Taliban between February and August 2001 - a story still untold in the U.S. media - talks that ultimately led the US to make threats via Pakistani intermediaries to the Taliban in July 2001 that they were going to bomb Afghanistan if the Taliban didn't comply.

Brittain, James J. (2010). Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia: The Origin and Direction of the FARC-EP. London, New York; Pluto Press.
Based on extensive first-hand research in guerrilla-controlled regions, Brittain chronicles the origins, development and achievements of Colombia's FARC-EP while dispelling many of the myths surrounding the rebel group. A valuable study of the causes, meaning and significance of the armed insurgency in Colombia. It presents a welcome break from the hegemony of the apolitical discourses that have dominated the scholarship on Colombia's conflict.

Broch, Hermann and Jean Starr Untermeyer (1995). The Death of Virgil. New York, Vintage Books.
It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch fashioned one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism, a book that embraces an entire world and renders it with an immediacy that is at once sensual and profound. Begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, The Death of Virgil is part historical novel and part prose poem -- and always an intensely musical and immensely evocative meditation on the relation between life and death, the ancient and the modern.

Brodie, Fawn McKay (1959). Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South. New York, W. W. Norton & Company.
In this biography of the chief architect of Reconstruction after the Civil War, Fawn Brodie seeks to explain the basis for his actions, the nature of his economic radicalism, and the emotional forces that resulted in his becoming one of the most controversial figures in American history. She describes his roles as father of the Fourteenth Amendment and prosecutor in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, his relations with Lincoln, and his battles for black suffrage and schooling.

Bron, Marke (2015). Travel the World Without Worries: An Inspirational Guide to Budget Travel, 2nd Edition. Seattle, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Planning a big trip abroad can be an overwhelming task, but this book makes it easy with in-depth advice that helps you properly plan, pack and prepare -- so that you can travel anywhere with confidence. You’ll learn the pros and cons of different travel styles and destinations, how to fund your travels and save on expenses, and how to avoid common pitfalls in your planning phase. The book also prepares you for any social, cultural or personal challenges you might face on the road.

Brontë, Charlotte, Emily Brontë, et al. (2010). The Brontë Sisters: Three Novels -- Jane Eyre / Wuthering Heights / Agnes Grey. New York, Penguin Books.
The Brontë family was a literary phenomenon unequalled before or since. Both Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights have won lofty places in the pantheon and stirred the romantic sensibilities of generations of readers. For the first time ever, Penguin Classics unites these two enduring favorites with the lesser known but no less powerful work by their youngest sister, Anne. Drawn from Anne's own experiences as a governess, Agnes Grey offers a compelling view of Victorian chauvinism and materialism. Its inclusion makes The Brontë Sisters a must-have volume for anyone fascinated by this singularly talented family.

Brooks, Rodney Allen (2002). Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. New York, Pantheon Books.
Flesh and Machines explores the startlingly reciprocal connection between humans and their technological brethren, and explains how this relationship is being redefined as humans develop increasingly complex machines. The impetus to build machines that exhibit lifelike behaviors stretches back centuries, but for the last fifteen years much of this work has been done in Rodney Brooks's laboratory at MIT. His goal is not simply to build machines that are like humans but to alter our perception of the potential capabilities of robots. Our current attitude toward intelligent robots, he asserts, is simply a reflection of our own view of ourselves.

Brosh, Allie (2013). Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened. New York, Simon & Schuster.
Collects autobiographical, illustrated essays and cartoons from the author's popular blog and related new material that humorously and candidly deals with her own idiosyncrasies and battles with depression.

Brown, Box (2018). Is This Guy for Real? The Unbelievable Andy Kaufman. New York, NY, First Second.
Comedian and performer Andy Kaufman’s resume was impressive―a popular role on the beloved sitcom Taxi, a high-profile stand-up career, and a surprisingly successful stint in professional wrestling. Although he was by all accounts a sensitive and thoughtful person, he’s ironically best remembered for his various contemptible personas, which were so committed and so convincing that all but his closest family and friends were completely taken in.

Why would someone so gentle-natured and sensitive build an entire career seeking the hatred of his audience? What drives a performer to solicit that reaction? With the same nuance and sympathy with which he approached Andre the Giant in his 2014 biography, graphic novelist Box Brown's Is This Guy For Real? takes on the complex and often hilarious life of Andy Kaufman.

Brown, Chester (2004). Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography. Montréal, Drawn and Quarterly.
Legendary cartoonist Chester Brown reveals in the dusty closet of Canadian history there are some skeletons that won't stop rattling. To some Louis Riel was one of the founding fathers of a nation but to others he was a murderer who nearly tore a country apart. A man so charismatic he was elected to government twice while in exile with a prize on his head--but so impassioned his dramatic behavior cast serious doubts on his sanity. Riel took on the army, the government, the Queen, and even the Church in the name of freedom. Will Riel's visionary democracy ever be enough to defend him from the verdict of history?

Brown, Elaine (1993). A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story. New York, Anchor.
Elaine Brown assumed her role as the first and only female leader of the Black Panther Party with these words: "I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?" It was August 1974. From a small Oakland-based cell, the Panthers had grown to become a revolutionary national organization, mobilizing black communities and white supporters across the country--but relentlessly targeted by the police and the FBI, and increasingly riven by violence and strife within. How Brown came to a position of power over this paramilitary, male-dominated organization, and what she did with that power, is a riveting, unsparing account of self-discovery.

Brown, Ellen (1989). The Gourmet Gazelle Cookbook. New York, Bantam Books.
"This book is the result of one woman's lifelong battle with her hips." Brown's "five to six meals a day" as food editor of USA Today eventually caused her to fight back--she became "a walking calorie calculator" and furious foe of salt who was nevertheless hard put to content her "rather jaded palate" with dull and dispiriting "health" chow. So, in 1987, she founded the Gourmet Gazelle, a carry-out food shop on Manhattan's Upper East Side, to wage war on a larger scale. Her low-calorie, -fat, -cholesterol, -sodium dishes, though not presented with dieting readers in mind, will aid and abet them, while her grandmotherly kitchen hints and international range should please most tastes.

Brown, Ellen Hodgson (2013). The Public Bank Solution: From Austerity to Prosperity. Baton Rouge, LA, Third Millennium Press.
Shock waves from one Wall Street scandal after another have completely disillusioned us with our banking system; yet we cannot do without banks. The main flaw in the current model is that private profiteers have acquired control of the credit spigots. They can cut off the flow, direct it to their cronies, and manipulate it for personal gain at the expense of the producing economy. The benefits of bank credit can be maintained while eliminating these flaws, through a system of banks operated as public utilities, serving the public interest and returning their profits to the public. This book looks at the public bank alternative, and shows with examples from around the world and through history that it works admirably well, providing the key to sustained high performance for the economy and well-being for the people.

Brown, Ellen Hodgson (2012). Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free. Baton Rouge, LA, Third Millennium Press.
It's difficult to find a good book that will help a person become literate about our modern money supply. Most that are accurate are hopelessly dense and written for graduate students in economics. Ellen Brown has translated a dense subject into a readable and fascinating story. Web of Debt by Ellen Brown not only demystifies money, but provides some thought-provoking and realistic solutions to our nation's dangerous dependence on a for-profit banking system that is sucking the financial lifeblood out of our nation.

Brown, John Russell (1995). The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
Reaching back in time and across the world, The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, an authoritative and lavishly illustrated new history, celebrates the stage's greatest achievements over 4,500 years, from festival performances in ancient Egypt to international, multicultural drama in the late twentieth century, and from Sophocles and Aristophanes to George Gershwin and Harold Pinter. Here are the playwrights, plays, actors, directors, producers, songwriters, famous playhouses, dramatic movements, and more, accessibly and attractively arranged so that everyone with a passion for the stage can follow the glorious procession of this triumphant art throughout history and across cultures.

Spectacular color and black-and-white illustrations throughout bring the very visual nature of theatre to life, serving as dramatic accompaniment to the text.

Browne, E. J. (1995). Charles Darwin: A Biography. New York, Knopf.
The centerpiece of this vivid portrait of Darwin, the first volume of a two-volume biography, is an account of his five-year expedition on the Beagle (1831-36), which transformed a seasick, Cambridge-educated science apprentice into a keen observer of nature and amateur geologist. Drawing on a wealth of new material from family archives, Brown masterfully recreates the personal, cultural and intellectual matrix out of which Darwin's evolutionary theory took shape. We glimpse many facets of Darwin: the failed medical student; the laid-back undergraduate; the impassioned abolitionist; the explorer roping cattle with gauchos on the Argentine pampas; the chronically ill country squire, the patriarchal husband and reluctant atheist whose devout Anglican wife, Emma, disapproved of his theory of human origins. Browne, an English historian of science and associate editor of Darwin's Correspondence, captures the spirit of a quietly revolutionary scientist whose ingrained Victorian prejudices were at odds with his radical ideas. Photos.

Browne, Simone (2015). Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
Simone Browne paints a devastating portrait of the compounding work of racial surveillance -- a process in which profiling serves as both the justification for information gathering and a defense of the heightened, disproportionate scrutiny this information is said to warrant. From the branding of flesh as stigmata of captivity to biometric markers as gatekeepers, Dark Matters transports you across space and time, illuminating how the sorting, counting, and surveilling of human beings was as central to the dawn of industrialization as it is to the information society. Browne's incisive, wide-ranging, and multidisciplinary meditation shows you the scale and persistence of surveillance culture, and especially its urgent stakes for communities of color.

Browning, Robert (1956). The Poems of Robert Browning. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company.
Robert Browning (May 7, 1812 - Dec 12,1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.

Brownlow, Kevin (1968). The Parade's Gone By Berkeley, University of California Press.
The magic of the silent screen, illuminated by the recollections of those who created it. Brownlow wrote this book while many of the stars, technicians and others who had a part in the making of silent movies were still alive, and this book is filled with information he gathered in his interviews. Brownlow provides a sampling of every aspect of film making from the star system, to the cinematographers, to the stunt men and more.

Brubaker, Ed, Sean Phillips, et al. (2016). The Fade out [Deluxe Edition] Berkeley, CA, Image Comics.
An epic graphic novel of Hollywood in the early days of the Blacklist, The Fade Out tracks the murder of an up-and-coming starlet from studio backlots to the gutters of downtown Los Angeles, as shell-shocked front man Charlie Parish is caught between his own dying sense of morality and his best friend's righteous sense of justice.

A picture-perfect recreation of a lost era, The Fade Out is an instant classic from one of comics most acclaimed teams.

This beautiful oversized hardback edition collects the entirety of Brubaker and Phillips serialized graphic novel, as well as many behind-the-scenes art and stories, sketches and layouts, illustrations, and several historical essays.

Collects issues 1 - 12 of The Fade Out.

Brubaker, Ed, Sean Phillips, et al. (2014). Fatale, Volume 1 [Deluxe Edition] Berkeley, CA, Image Comics.
Josephine is cursed, and in a series that darkly blends American crime noir with unnamed Lovecraftian horrors, we follow her from 1950s San Francisco, where crooked cops hide deeper evils, to mid-'70s L.A., where burnt-out actors and ex-cult groupies are caught in a web around a satanic snuff film... and in the middle of it all is Josephine, with a power to die or kill for.

This beautiful, oversized edition contains all the extras that Brubaker and Phillips fans have come to expect from their deluxe hardbacks, including behind-the-scenes art and stories, sketches and layouts, back-page illustrations, and several of Jess Nevins' historical essays, as well.

Brubaker, Ed, Sean Phillips, et al. (2015). Fatale, Volume 2 [Deluxe Edition] Berkeley, CA, Image Comics.
Josephine is cursed, and in a series that darkly blends American crime noir with unnamed Lovecraftian horrors, we follow her from 1950s San Francisco, where crooked cops hide deeper evils, to mid-'70s L.A., where burnt-out actors and ex-cult groupies are caught in a web around a satanic snuff film... and in the middle of it all is Josephine, with a power to die or kill for.

The second volume of Fatale's Deluxe Edition finishes the epic noir-horror series, from comic masters Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, with colorists Dave Stewart and Elizabeth Breitweiser. Collects Fatale #11 - 24

This beautiful, oversized edition contains all the extras that Brubaker and Phillips fans have come to expect from their deluxe hardbacks, including behind-the-scenes art and stories, sketches and layouts, back-page illustrations, and several of Jess Nevins' historical essays, as well.

Brubaker, Ed, Sean Phillips, et al. (2018). My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies Portland, Oregon, Image Comics.
Teenage Ellie has always had romantic ideas about drug addicts, those tragic artistic souls drawn to needles and pills have been an obsession since the death of her junkie mother ten years ago. But when Ellie lands in an upscale rehab clinic where nothing is what it appears to be... she'll find another more dangerous romance, and find out how easily drugs and murder go hand-in-hand.

Brubaker, Ed, Sean Phillips and Jacob Phillips. (2020). Reckless, Volume 1: Reckless Portland, Oregon, Image Comics.
Meet Ethan Reckless. Your trouble is his business, for the right price. But when a fugitive from his student radical days reaches out for help, Ethan must face the only thing he fears... his own past.

Brubaker, Ed, Sean Phillips and Jacob Phillips. (2021). Reckless, Volume 2: Friend of the Devil Portland, Oregon, Image Comics.
It's 1985 and things in Ethan's life are going pretty well... until a missing woman shows up in the background of an old B-movie, and Ethan is drawn into Hollywood's secret occult underbelly as he hunts for her among the wreckage of the wild days of the '70s.

Brubaker, Ed, Sean Phillips and Jacob Phillips. (2021). Reckless, Volume 3: Destroy All Monsters Portland, Oregon, Image Comics.
It's 1988 and Ethan has been hired for his strangest case yet: finding the secrets of a Los Angeles real estate mogul. How hard could that be, right? Only what starts as a deep dive into the life of a stranger will soon take a deadly turn, and find Ethan risking everything that still matters to him.

Brubaker, Ed, Sean Phillips and Jacob Phillips. (2020). Reckless, Volume 4: The Ghost In You Portland, Oregon, Image Comics.
It's the winter of 1989 and Ethan is out of town, so Anna must tackle this job on her own. When a movie scream queen asks her to prove the mansion she's renovating isn't haunted, Anna will stumble into the decades-long mystery of one of Hollywood's most-infamous murder houses... a place with many dark secrets, some of which might just kill her.

Brubaker, Ed, Sean Phillips, Colin Wilson, Jim Lee. (2022). Sleeper Omnibus New York City, DC Black Label.
The critically acclaimed graphic novel series written by Eisner Award-winner Ed Brubaker (Criminal, Deadenders, Captain America) and stylishly rendered by legendary artist Sean Phillips (Marvel Zombies, Criminal, Incognito). Agent Holden Carver is forced to live one day at a time in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse he plays with the leader of the secret criminal organization he has infiltrated while trying to elude detection.

Bruno, Giuliana (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York, Verso.
A hugely ambitious mapping of the complex intertwinings of film, architecture, and the body. We think of film as a predominantly visual medium, but Bruno insists that it is as much about the positioning and movement of the body in space. With forays into the fields of geography, art, architecture, design, cartography, and film, Giuliana Bruno's Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavour to map a cultural history of the visual arts. She insists throughout on the inseparability of seeing and travelling. In so doing, she touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Annette Messager; the filmmaking of Peter Greenaway and Michelangelo Antonioni; the architecture of cinema and its precursors. Visually luscious and daring in conception, the voyage opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.

Bryson, Bill (2004). A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York, Broadway Books.
In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In a Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining..

Bryson, Bill (2006). A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. New York, Anchor.
After living abroad, Bryson decides to reacquaint himself with America by walking the famed Appalachian Trail, which traverses 14 states and stretches 2,100 miles. He recruits his ne'er-do-well chum Stephen Katz, his traveling companion in Neither Here nor There (1991). They hadn't gotten along on that European trip, and this time Katz shows up extremely overweight, toting 75 pounds of Snickers bars. He is hardly a good choice for a hiking partner, but Bryson is happy just to have someone along to share the often difficult experience (and Katz does prove to be a very funny man). They set out from Amicalola Falls State Park (Georgia) carrying the official Appalachian Trail guides consisting of 11 books and 59 maps, which proved "monumentally useless." Although they fail to walk the entire trail (indeed, Katz falls behind almost immediately), Bryson's book is a marvelous description and history of the trail and the mountains, providing an informal record of the trail's founding and many of its hikers.

Bryson, Bill (2011). At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York, Anchor.
In these pages, the beloved Bill Bryson gives us a fascinating history of the modern home, taking us on a room-by-room tour through his own house and using each room to explore the vast history of the domestic artifacts we take for granted. As he takes us through the history of our modern comforts, Bryson demonstrates that whatever happens in the world eventually ends up in our home, in the paint, the pipes, the pillows, and every item of furniture. Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and his sheer prose fluency makes At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life..

Bryson, Bill (2019). The Body: A Guide for Occupants. New York, Doubleday.
"Mr. Bryson's latest book is a Baedeker of the human body, a fact-studded survey of our physiques, inside and out. Many authors have produced such guides in recent years, and some of them are very good. But none have done it quite so well as Mr. Bryson, who writes better, is more amusing and has greater mastery of his material than anyone else. He is a master explainer, with a gift for the pithy simile and all-encompassing metaphor. His love of language is often on display, and he can’t resist occasional indulgences on the origins of terms medical and anatomical. Mr. Bryson's account is enlivened by his excellent command of the history of medicine. Brisk, provocative and entertaining throughout." —The Wall Street Journal

Bryson, Bill (2001). In a Sunburned Country. New York, Broadway Books.
Bryson's previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods. In a Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as a continent, and a place with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather, and the most peculiar and lethal wildlife to be found on the planet. The result is a deliciously funny, fact-filled, and adventurous performance by a writer who combines humor, wonder, and unflagging curiousity..

Buchner, Georg and Michael Hamburger (1972). Leonce and Lena; Lenz; Woyzeck.. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Georg Buchner died in 1837 at a tragically early age, and his three works for the stage remained virtually unknown for half a century. Today all three, especially Danton's Death, his great play about the French Revolution are performed regularly.

Buck, Marilyn; David Gilbert; Laura Whitehorn (2001). Enemies of the State. Toronto/Montreal, Abraham Guillen Press/Arm the Spirit.
An extended interview with three political prisoners: Marilyn Buck, David Gilbert, and Laura Whitehorn. A frank discussion of past political movements, victories and errors, and the current political climate for revolutionary struggle within the USA.

Buck, William (1993). Mahabharata. New York, N.Y., U.S.A., Meridian.
Few works in world literature have inspired so vast an audience, in nations with radically different languages and cultures, as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, two Sanskrit verse epics written some 2,000 years ago.

In Ramayana (written by a poet known to us as Valmiki), William Buck has retold the story of Prince Rama--with all its nobility of spirit, courtly intrigue, heroic renunciation, fierce battles, and triumph of good over evil--in a length and manner that will make the great Indian epics accessible to the contemporary reader.

The same is true for the Mahabharata--in its original Sanskrit, probably the longest Indian epic ever composed. It is the story of a dynastic struggle, between the Kurus and Pandavas, for land. In his introduction, Sanskritist B. A. van Nooten notes, "Apart from William Buck's rendition [no other English version has] been able to capture the blend of religion and martial spirit that pervades the original epic."

Buck, William and Valmiki (1976). Ramayana: [King Rama's Way]. Berkeley, University of California Press.
In Ramayana (written by a poet known to us as Valmiki), William Buck has retold the story of Prince Rama--with all its nobility of spirit, courtly intrigue, heroic renunciation, fierce battles, and triumph of good over evil--in a length and manner that will make the great Indian epics accessible to the contemporary reader.

Budgen, Frank (1989). James Joyce and the Making Of "Ulysses" and Other Writings. Oxford [England]; New York, Oxford University Press.
In Zurich in 1918 and 1919, the English painter Frank Budgen and the Irish writer James Joyce met almost daily to walk, talk, and drink wine; their talk, among other things, was of the complex novel Joyce was then writing. This captivating study is the record of these conversations, and of a continuing friendship, as well as an acute critical commentary on the work itself. The only first-hand account available of the growth of Ulysses, the book is here reissued in its original form, together with Budgen's essays of 1939-41 on Finnegan's Wake, his deeply felt obituary of Joyce, and his Further Recollections of 1955. An introduction by Joyce scholar Clive Hart draws on much unpublished material to trace the history of the book, and pay a personal tribute to Frank Budgen, his friend, who died in 1971 at the age of eighty-nine.

Bugliosi, Vincent (2001). The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President. New York, Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books.
On December 12th, 2000, in a 5-4 decision, the U. S. Supreme Court put an end to the recounting of presidential votes in Florida, thus assuring that George W. Bush would win the election. This action by the Court's majority, argues trial lawyer Bugliosi, was a judicial coup d'etat that stole the election from U.S. citizens and simply handed the presidency over to the Court's guy, a conservative Republican like themselves. It was also treasonous, asserts Bugliosi, if not by statute -- it does not fit the legal definition of treason -- at least in spirit. The five justices are "criminals in the very truest sense of the word," he says. The Florida recount, claimed the Court, was invalid because it violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment; as different counties used different methods for determining voter intent, voters were being treated unequally. Bugliosi argues that this justification does not stand up; that it is an incorrect and unprecedented use of the equal protection clause, feebly applied.

Buhle, Mari Jo, Paul Buhle, et al. (1998). Encyclopedia of the American Left. New York, Oxford University Press.
The first comprehensive reference book on radicalism in the United States from the Civil War to the present, this work fills serious gaps in basic reference materials on American politics, labor, and culture by focusing on radicals rather than reformers. Merging previously unutilized sources such as oral history with the wealth of insight available from feminist, ethnic, racial studies and popular culture analysis as well as traditional scholarly approaches, their efforts retrieved a hitherto inaccessible history.

Buhle, Paul and Edmund B. Sullivan (1998). Images of American Radicalism. Hanover, Mass., Christopher Pub. House.
Historians Buhle and Sullivan document here the history of American radicalism. The more than 1500 illustrations provided, 72 in color, are paintings, drawings, cartoons, photographs, lithographs, posters, and other graphics depicting religious visionaries, Shakers, abolitionists, suffragists, anarchists, socialists, Communists, feminists, trade unionists, Civil Rights workers, gay and lesbian activists, environmentalists, and others in their quest for a cooperative society overcoming a competitive capitalism.

Buhle, Paul and David Wagner (2001). A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1951, Polonsky was called a "very dangerous citizen" by Illinois congressman Harold Velde. Blacklisted in Hollywood for refusing to inform on his political associates, this brilliant screenwriter lived a life that offers a unique window on the Cold War in Hollywood. Buhle and Wagner carefully detail Polonsky's actual leftist political activities (as opposed to the innuendo and misinformation that circulated in the HUAC) and map out the permutations of Polonsky's artistic career from working with Gertrude Berg on The Goldbergs to later work such as the 1969 Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner (2003). Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television 1950-2002. New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
This encyclopedic, riveting study of the Hollywood blacklist's impact follows the careers of targeted individuals to explore the blacklist's effects on the arts in America and Europe in the last half-century. As Buhle and Wagner demonstrate, expulsion from the mainstream took these artists and their crafts in new directions. Directors like Joseph Losey and screenwriters like Norma and Ben Barzman fled to Europe to work, where aesthetics like neorealism and the subversion of traditional genres (e.g., the western into the 'spaghetti western') opened new modes of expression. Many blacklisted artists who didn't emigrate started working in New York's television industry, which was eager for quick, low-priced talent. Thus, as Hollywood restricted itself to 'safe' topics, TV started exploring themes of 'the outsider' (Maverick, The Fugitive), multiculturalism (The Dick Van Dyke Show) and social justice (The Defenders). By the late 1970s, the subtle articulation of politics as ethical sentiment was now the very oxygen of liberal television. Besides sitcoms and kids' shows, leftists went into B movies, particularly science fiction and horror genres, where themes of human mutation, nuclear holocaust and alien invasion served as (sometimes clunky) vehicles for political messages. The authors conclude with in-depth looks at several blacklistees, including Carl Foreman, Jules Dassin, Dalton Trumbo and Lillian Hellman.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner (2002). Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies. New York, New Press.
This account of leftist influence in Hollywood from the 1920s to the '50s is an absorbing examination of how politics and art can make startling and often strange bedfellows. Buhle and Wagner mix exhaustive research and political acumen to produce a detailed analysis of progressive politics in the work of writers, producers, directors and actors. From the anticapitalist themes of gangster films such as 1931's Public Enemy and the explicit and, for its time, shocking antilynching message that screenwriter Hugo Butler inserted in Mickey Rooney's 1938 Huckleberry Finn to the underlying class-struggle implications of film noir and the proletarian subtext of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Buhle and Wagner examine not only the political beliefs of the artists but the ever-shifting political contexts in which they functioned. This is one of the few complete and cohesive histories of the history of progressives in Hollywood and is an important contribution to the literature of film and politics.

Buhle, Paul and Nicole Schulman (2005). Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. London; New York, NY, Verso.
The stories of the hard-rock miners' shooting wars, young Elizabeth Gurly Flynn (the Rebel Girl of contemporary sheet music), the first sit-down strikes and Free Speech fights, Emma Goldman and the struggle for birth control access, the Pageant for Paterson orchestrated in Madison Square Garden, bohemian radicals John Reed and Louise Bryant, field-hand revolts and lumber workers' strikes, wartime witch hunts, government prosecutions and mob lynching, Mexican-American uprisings in Baja, and Mexican peasant revolts led by Wobblies, hilarious and sentimental songs created and later revived—all are here, and much, much more. Contributors include Carlos Cortez (former editor of the Industrial Worker), Harvey Pekar (author of American Splendor), Peter Kuper (Mad's Magazine's Spy vs. Spy), Sue Coe, Seth Tobocman, Chris Cardinale, Ryan Inzana, Spain Rodriques, Trina Robbins, Sharon Rudahl, and the circle of artists for World War 3 Illustrated.

Buhner, Stephen Harrod (2002). The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth. White River Junction, Vt., Chelsea Green Pub.
Well-known author, teacher, lecturer, and herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner has produced a book that is certain to generate controversy. It consists of three parts: A critique of technological medicine, and especially the dangers to the environment posed by pharmaceuticals and other synthetic substances that people use in connection with health care and personal body care. A new look at Gaia Theory, including an explanation that plants are the original chemistries of Gaia and those phytochemistries are the fundamental communications network for the Earth's ecosystems. Extensive documentation of how plants communicate their healing qualities to humans and other animals. Western culture has obliterated most people's capacity to perceive these messages, but this book also contains valuable information on how we can restore our faculties of perception.

Bukowski, Charles (1974). Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press.

Bukowski, Charles and R. Crumb (1998). The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship. Santa Rosa, Black Sparrow Press.
A delightful, posthumous gathering of excerpts from Bukowski notebooks, loaded with ruminations about writing, death, money, humanity, and how the author located meaning and value in his daily life and work. Richly illustrated with gritty drawings by Robert Crumb.

Bukowski, Charles (1969). The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press.
This collection of poetry is perhaps Bukowski's finest. It marks a significant transitional period in his work, from the earlier imagist poems--more clearly "poetic" in form and content--to the later style for which he is best known and loved--the raucous, colloquial, hard-boiled pieces that rendered the distinction between prose and poetry seemingly null. The book's opening piece exemplifies this new style and Bukowski's new poetic persona.What a Man I Was tells the story of a wild western outlaw who terrorizes a small town and is then hung from the gallows. He is misunderstood, vulgar, and reviled. When the outlaw swings from the gallows, he doesn't express fear, hatred, sorrow, self-pity, regret or uncertainty. He is a staunch materialist who looks at a woman's breasts, mouth watering. The best poems in this collection are those written for Jane Cooney, who died prematurely from a life of serious drinking. These poems betray an affection and tenderness that is typically absent from Bukowski's work and which is often obscured by the hard-boiled exterior of his persona.

Bukowski, Charles (1975). Factotum. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press.
In this, the 2nd of bukowskis autobiographical novels we follow Henry Chinaski through his late teens and early 20's. Upon leaving his family home on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Bukowski installs himself on skid row looking "for a place to drink and hide. " What follows is a gritty account of Bukowskis no-holds barred existence, his early encounters with women, and pointless dead end jobs.

Bukowski, Charles (1982). Ham on Rye: A Novel. Santa Barbara, Black Sparrow.
An autobiographical novel covering Bukowski's life from age two to twenty-one.

Bukowski, Charles (1983). Hot Water Music. Santa Barbara, CA, Black Sparrow Press.
Gripping stories and poems from a man forged by the tragedies of life.

Bukowski, Charles (1992). The Last Night of the Earth Poems. Santa Rosa, Black Sparrow Press.
Now in his seventh decade, Bukowski is preoccupied with death, but in such a way that he spices his usual flat monotone with bits of welcome humor. While continuing his focus on life in bars and at the racetrack, these poems enlarge the meditative tone begun in You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense (1987). Bukowski remembers the first time he read great authors or heard classical composers; he reflects on old friends, co-workers, and lovers, but with a new gentleness, as in Darkling," a wonderfully lyric love poem to his wife.

Bukowski, Charles (1977). Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems 1974-1977. Santa Barbara, Calif., Black Sparrow Press.
Poems rising from and returning to Bukowski's personal experiences reflect people, objects, places, and events of the external world, and reflects on them, on their way out and back.

Bukowski, Charles (1972). Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press.
These poems were written in the early seventies; Bukowski had just quit the post office and was gaining wider acceptance as a poet.

Bukowski, Charles (1973). Notes of a Dirty Old Man. San Francisco, City Lights Books.
"Bukowski writes like a latter-day Celine, a wise fool talking straight from the gut about futility and beauty of life." - Publishers Weekly

Bukowski, Charles (1971). Post Office; a Novel. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press.
Charles Bukowski's novel Post Office is the first-person account of Henry Chinaski, a hard-drinking gambler and womanizer who goes to work for the United States Postal Service in Los Angeles. The story follows his experiences at the post office, weaving them together with his accounts of romantic affairs, sexual encounters, drinking, and gambling. Chinaski's life is full of encounters with various unsavory, tragic, or ridiculous characters.

Post Office is the ultimate "I hate this job" story. It's also an intriguing, and highly unflattering look at a quintessential American institution. Bukowski's prose style is crude, rude, and raw; often very funny, sometimes shocking, and sometimes poignant. But always highly readable. Bukowski effectively evokes a vision of a mind-numbing, soul-killing workplace that is ruled by a petty bureaucracy.

Bull, Hedley (2012). The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. New York, Columbia University Press.
More than three decades after its publication, Bull's classic work continues to define and direct research in international relations. The Anarchical Society identifies and confronts the unwritten rules supporting the international order across history, despite sweeping changes in laws and institutions. Bull looked for evidence of neomedievalism in his day. He proposed five criteria to test for its existence: the technological unification of the world, the regional integration of states, the rise of transnational organizations, the disintegration of states, and the restoration of private international violence. He considered and rejected the idea that the states system was giving way to an alternative world government or some method of neo-medieval rule or that the states system has ceased to be viable or compatible with objectives such as peace, economic justice, and ecological control. Bull also reviews and comments upon a variety of proposals for states system reform. In this edition, the text has been updated and includes new interpretive forewords by two leading experts on Bull and his contributions to the theory, structures, and practices of world politics.

Buñuel, Luis (2003). My Last Sigh. Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press.
Luis Buñuel lived many lives-surrealist, Spanish Civil War propagandist, hedonist, friend of artists and poets, and filmmaker. With surprising candor and wit, Buñuel offers his sometimes scathing opinions on the literati and avant-garde members of his sweeping social circle, including Pablo Picasso, Jorge Luis Borges, Salvador Dalí, and Federico García Lorca. These colorful stories of his nomadic life reveal a man of stunning imagination and influence.

Buñuel, Luis and Garrett White (2000). An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Buñuel (1900-1983) is familiar to English speakers as a pathbreaking Spanish filmmaker heavily influenced by surrealism and Marxism; his work also, of course, helped to define these movements. Less well-known are his numerous writings; most of the pieces in this assemblage have not appeared in English until now. In this collection, Buñuel eloquently proves to be an intellectual, an ideologue, and a jokester. Written between 1922 and 1980 (though the majority date from the '20s), the entries--short plays, scripts, stories and poems as well as theoretical pieces--all share Buñuel's distinctively odd yet keenly perceptive interest in surrealism, class, theater, cinema and autobiography.

Burchett, Wilfred; George Burchett, Nick Shimmin, editors. (2005). Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett. Sydney, NSW, Australia, University of New South Wales Press.
Wilfred Burchett (1911-1983) was one of Australia's most important -- and controversial -- journalists and war correspondents. His biography, first published in 1980 and now issued in an unexpurgated version co-edited by his son, leads the reader into key moments of twentieth-century history from Hiroshima to Vietnam, guided by an eyewitness who is a writer of passion and insight. Burchett experienced some of the horrors of Nazi Germany at first hand before becoming a war correspondent. He covered the first use of bacteriological warfare (by the Japanese in Central China in 1942) and traveled across India, Burma, and the Pacific. He was the first Westerner to witness and report to the world on the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. He covered the struggles of early Cold War Europe and reported on the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Criticized ferociously by anti-communist groups and intelligence organizations in Australia and the U.S., he was exiled from his own country when a passport would not be reissued.

Burchett, Wilfred G.; George Burchett, Nick Shimmin, editors; John Pilger, foreward (2007). Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett.. Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press.
An anthology of the writing of Wilfred Burchett, perhaps the greatest journalist and war correspondent Australia has ever produced. He was also one of the most controversial figures of the Cold War, both in Australia and overseas. Burchett published more than 30 books, and this volume brings together extracts from most of these, spanning the entire breadth of his career, from before World War 2, through Hiroshima, Eastern Europe, Korea, Russia, Laos, Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Angola, Rhodesia and other areas from which Burchett reported. The book presents these fields of reportage chronologically, and thus serves not only as a significant historical overview of the period, but also as a reader in Cold War journalism.

Burdick, Eugene (1956). The Ninth Wave. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
Burdick, an assistant professor of political science who died in 1965, is most famous for his two other books, Fail Safe and The Ugly American. But The Ninth Wave may be his most intriguing, especially for Californians. It mixes the early days of surfing with California politics. A political novel which opens with protagonist surfing and waiting to catch a Big One, a "9th wave" generally the largest in a wave sequence, and if possible , a NINTH ninth wave, etc. This concept of the gathering propitious moment becomes a conscious often reflected-upon metaphor throughout the story, which concerns high school surfing buddies in Southern California beginning in 1939. The friends, Hank and Mike, go off to Stanford. Hank becomes a doctor, Mike a lawyer and political behind-the-scenes man. The book's got everything: class and race issues at Stanford, surfing, Hollywood, Coachella Valley, Fresno, Highway 99, Malibu, communists, the wine country, South of Market winos, North Beach, World War II, big time politics, California land grabs, sex. The first half is epic in its complexity: Hank's early years in his grandparent's boardinghouse in North Dakota; his ending up in high school in Southern California; Mike's unhappy socialist father; Mike's affair with his high school English teacher, and later, Mike's convincing a drunk to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Burgess, Anthony (1963). A Clockwork Orange. New York, W. W. Norton.
Novel by Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. Set in a dismal dystopia, it is the first-person account of a juvenile delinquent who undergoes state-sponsored psychological rehabilitation for his aberrant behavior. The novel satirizes extreme political systems that are based on opposing models of the perfectibility or incorrigibility of humanity. Written in a futuristic slang vocabulary invented by Burgess, in part by adaptation of Russian words, it was his most original and best-known work. Alex, the protagonist, has a passion for classical music and is a member of a vicious teenage gang that commits random acts of brutality. Captured and imprisoned, he is transformed through behavioral conditioning into a model citizen, but his taming also leaves him defenseless. He ultimately reverts to his former behavior. The final chapter of the original British edition, in which Alex renounces his amoral past, was removed when the novel was first published in the United States.

Burian, Jarka (1971). The Scenography of Josef Svoboda. Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press.
Svoboda, who died in 2002, was one of the most innovative and influential stage designers of the 20th century. He designed more than 700 theatrical productions in his lifetime and founded the Czech school of theatrical performance known as Laterna Magica or Magic Lantern. Svoboda came to Western attention at the Brussels Expo of 1958, with Laterna Magika," a production with director Alfred Radok that combined film, sound, light, mime and dance. His designs made extensive use of light to heighten dramatic effect. He was quoted as saying, "Light is a material I love. You cannot create stage space without light."

Svoboda's scenography was sought for opera performances in New York's Metropolitan Opera, London's Covent Garden and La Scala in Milan. He continued working until his death, and revolutionizing stage lighting techniques with a combination of slide and film projections, laser beams and holograms.

Burlingame, Michael (2008). Abraham Lincoln: A Life. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Burlingame has devoted the last quarter century to editing 11 books on the Lincoln primary sources, including the writings of the president's secretaries John Hay, John Nicolay and William Stoddard. Now Burlingame has produced the most meticulously researched Lincoln biography ever written. He's resurrected Lincoln's lost early journalism, when the young prairie politician-little more than an immature, unscrupulous hack-wrote more than 200 anonymous op-eds. Burlingame scoured thousands of 19th-century newspapers and discovered hitherto unknown stories. He read hundreds of oral histories, unpublished letters, and journals from Lincoln's contemporaries. He re-examined the vast manuscript collections at the Library of Congress and National Archives. Burlingame's Lincoln comes alive as the author unfolds vast amounts of new research while breathing new life into familiar stories.

Burn, Stephen (2003). David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide. New York, Continuum.
A guide to 'Infinite Jest'. It features a biography of the author, a full-length analysis of the novel, and a great deal more.

Burnett, John S. (2002). Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas. New York, N.Y., Dutton.
While sailing alone one night in the shipping lanes across one of the busiest waterways in the world, John Burnett was attacked by pirates. Through sheer ingenuity and a little bit of luck, he survived, and his shocking firsthand experience became the inspiration for this book. Dangerous Waters charts the resurgence of piracy in recent years and reveals why it poses a significant threat to our safety and security.

Burns, Bob and Mike Burns (2004). Wilderness Navigation: Finding Your Way Using Map, Compass, Altimeter & GPS. Seattle, WA, Mountaineers Books.
Proceed with confidence when heading off-road or off-trail with the second edition of Wilderness Navigation. Whether you are climbing a glacier, orienteering in the backcountry, or on an easy day hike, Mike and Bob Burns cover all the latest technology and time-tested methods to help you learn to navigate-from how to read a map to compasses and geomagnetism.

Burns, Charles (2005). Black Hole. New York, Pantheon Books.
Published now as a novel, with a fantastic cover designed by the author, Black Hole has been an ongoing comic book serial since 1995. The story takes place in Seattle in the 1970s, where Burns spent his own teenage years, and our sympathies to him if the tale he delivers here is autobiographical. This is not Cameron Crowe's Seattle of peppy coffee houses and space needles but the Pacific Northwest of David Lynch's Twin Peaks and the sonic gloom found in the music of Eliot Smith or the Screaming Trees. Black Hole covers the high school years of a group of kids who find themselves catching a venereal disease known as "the teen plague." After sex with an infected partner, they deform and mutate. The infected person might develop a tail, like Eliza, who encourages lovers to grab it during sex. Or there's Rob, who develops a second mouth on his lower neck. Some can hide it, but others turn into freakish social pariahs and join a teen leper colony in the woods."It was like a horrible game of tag," writes Burns."Once you were tagged, you were 'it' forever."

Burroughs, William S. (1979). Exterminator! A Novel. New York, Penguin Books.
Conspirators plot to explode a train carrying nerve gas. A perfect servant suddenly reveals himself to be the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Science-fantasy wars, racism, corporate capitalism, drug addiction, and various medical and psychiatric horros all play their parts in this mosaic-like, experimental novel.

Burroughs, William S. (1981). Cities of the Red Night. New York, N.Y., Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Cities of the Red Night is the most complete and most devastatingly sardonic statement of William Burroughs's apocalyptic vision. Through his mordant satire of cultural aspirations, homosexual eroticism and political power, he focuses our gaze into the abyss. His cold, surgical language creates beauty through a terror that we are just able to bear . . . A modern Inferno." - Newsday

Burroughs, William S. (1984). The Place of Dead Roads. New York, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
"It's a comedy . . . a nightmare . . . Bosch-like visions, extraordinarily precise vivid visualizations . . . outrageous ideas like mind bombs." - Allen Ginsberg

Burroughs, William S. (1992). Naked Lunch. New York, Grove Weidenfeld.
Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.

Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself.

Burroughs, William S. (1992). Nova Express. New York, Grove Press.
Nova Express is a postmodern science fiction novel written by William S. Burroughs. It was published in 1964. It is third in a trilogy of science fiction novels: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. This sequel to the Soft Machine continues to aim at shooting holes in the phoney fabrications of our indoctrinated minds. Before pulling the trigger it chats away with us at random like the friendly policeman, but his sentences don't make sense in the normal way, they're like shreds of human tissue that fall on us like snow: somewhere there must have been an explosion. Before our fearfully closed eyes we see flashes of the fight between the invader and the protectors. But is what is defended worth to behold? The severed phrases turn slowly and with intervals into trancelike asymmetric symphonies of mindturning poetry. An abstract message is communicated. The gun that was pointing at you slips into your hand. A terrible truth.

Burroughs, William S. and Oliver Harris (2003). Junky. New York, Penguin Books.
Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junk, his first book, a candid, eyewitness account of times and places that are now long gone. This book brings them vividly to life again; it is an unvarnished field report from the American postwar underground. For this definitive 50th-anniversary edition, eminent Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has painstakingly re-created the author's original text, word by word, from archival typescripts. Here for the first time are Burroughs's own unpublished Introduction and an entire omitted chapter, along with many "lost" passages and auxiliary texts by Allen Ginsberg and others. Harris's comprehensive Introduction reveals the composition history of Junky's text and places its contents against a lively historical background.

Burroughs, William S. and Oliver C. G. Harris (1993). The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959. New York, Viking.
The first of a projected two volumes, these letters cover the activities of Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac in the years that gave birth to the Beat Generation. Written mostly to Ginsberg or Kerouac, the letters provide a rare glimpse into Burroughs's psyche, revealing his struggle with drug addiction, his confusion over his sexual identity, and his search for a form fluid enough to mirror his mind and art. Although much of this correspondence first appeared in Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953-1957 (1982) and in The Yage Letters (1963), this new collection is highly recommended both for the additional letters it contains and for its detailed explanatory notes.

Burrows, Gideon (2002). The No-Nonsense Guide to the Arms Trade. Oxford.
The ending of the Cold War was supposed to increase global security and divert expenditure previously earmarked for arms purchases to more constructive ends. Instead, the arms trade has flourished. Not only conventional arms, but also police and surveillance equipment, have been provided by Western countries seeking to make a profit from conflict in unstable parts of the world. Foreign debt has remained high, development has been held back, and human rights have been systematically abused, all with the connivance of an arms trade prepared to turn a blind eye to the uses to which increasingly sophisticated weaponry is put, so long as hefty profits can be reaped.

This disturbing book names the players in the arms trade and charts the impact that it has had on war, human rights, and development. The financial and trade mechanisms that permit the arms trade to continue are revealed, amid sordid tales of bribery and corruption.

Buxton, Nick and Ben Hayes, editors (2015). The Secure and the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations Are Shaping a Climate-Changed World. London, Pluto Press.
Among the books that attempt to model the coming century, this one stands out for its sense of plausibility and danger. It examines several current trends in our responses to climate change, which if combined would result in a bad result, a kind of oligarchic police state, imposed in the hope of avoiding chaos by extending capitalist hegemony. This will not work, and yet powerful forces are advocating for it rather than imagining and working for a more just, resilient, and democratic way forward. All the processes analyzed here are already happening now, making this book a crucial contribution to our cognitive mapping and our ability to form a better plan. --Kim Stanley Robinson

Buzan, Barry (2014). An Introduction to the English School of International Relations: The Societal Approach. Cambridge, UK, Polity.
Barry Buzan guides readers through the English School’s formative ideas, intellectual and historical roots, current controversies and future avenues of development.

Part One sets out the English School's origins and development, explaining its central concepts and methodological tools, and placing it within the broader canon of IR theory. Part Two offers a detailed account of the historical, regional and social structural strands of the English School, explaining the important link between the school's historical projects and its interest in a societal approach to international relations. Part Three explores the school's responses to the enduring problems of order and justice, and highlights the changing balance between pluralist and solidarist institutions in the evolution of international society over the past five centuries. The book concludes with a discussion of the English School's ongoing controversies and debates, and identifies opportunities for further research.

Byatt, Andrew, Alastair Fothergill, et al. (2001). The Blue Planet: A Natural History of the Oceans. New York, NY, DK.
This book reveals the secrets of our water planet. When viewed from space, Earth, 70% of which is covered with water, appears blue. Only 1 percent of these vast oceans has been studied, and these mysteries and discoveries are discussed in seven chapters. The first chapters explain the mechanics of the water planet, including the chemistry of water; the interactions of atmosphere and ocean; and how water moves in waves, currents, and tides. The remaining sections discuss the different realms of the oceans: the seas of the tropics, temperate regions, and the poles; the open oceans far from land; and the deep-sea regions. The plant and animal life adapted to each environment are depicted in beautiful photographs, and more information appears in sidebars. The informative text is conversational and highly readable and extensively illustrated with maps, illustrations, charts, and photographs, many of which show rarely seen creatures.

Bynum, Victoria E. (2001). The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press.
The Free State of Jones is clearly a story that needs to be told, and Bynum has done impressive research to bring it to a modern audience. She uses a wide range of social history sources to trace the long history not only of Newt Knight and his gang but also of their ancestors. She is interested in social structure, economic patterns, migration, religious revivals, family formation, and community relations -- in short, a genealogy of the entire Jones County community before they became famous during and after the Civil War. -- Altina L. Waller

Bynum, Victoria E. (2010). The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press.
Bynum, an historian at Texas State University, offers an analysis of home front schisms in three Confederate regions: Big Thicket in eastern Texas, Piedmont North Carolina's Quaker Belt, and the counties in Mississippi's Piney Woods known as the 'Free State of Jones'. Geographically and culturally isolated, they were largely populated by nonslaveholding subsistence farmers whose relationships with slaves and free blacks often generated a lively interracial subculture and even interracial family networks. Conscription policies favoring planters and manufacturers, together with food requisitions and taxes collected in kind by force, contributed to a sense of rich man's war, poor man's fight that made civilian-supported desertion and draft-evasion endemic. Defiance escalated to insurgency. The collapse of Reconstruction left these dissenters marginalized by a race-based legal system and a lost cause mythology. Bynum highlights the solid South as a construction and even more successfully presents the importance of kinship, community, and place in sustaining resistance to oppression.

Byrne, Robert (1982). Byrne's Treasury of Trick Shots in Pool and Billiards. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
More than three hundred secrets and showstoppers, explained and diagrammed by a master player. Diagrams, photographs, and line drawings.

Byrne, Robert (1990). Byrne's Advanced Technique in Pool and Billiards. San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
The complement to Byrne's Standard Book of Pool and Billiards, this volume contains clear explanations and helpful diagrams for experienced players who wish to perfect their game. Illustrations.

Byrne, Robert (1995). Byrne's Book of Great Pool Stories. San Diego, Harcourt Brace & Co.
Starting with an 1829 short story by James Hall, Byrne covers 163 years of pool and billiards literature. There are tragic stories, comic tales, and even a Damon Runyanesque pastiche in an SF setting (Bill Pronzini's The Hungarian Cinch). As in most anthologies, the quality of the writing is variable. There are minor works by major literary figures (Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin) and famous works by lesser talents (Walter Tevis's classic The Hustler). Wallace Stegner's portrait of a dysfunctional father/son relationship (The Blue-Winged Teal) and an Andrew Vachss tale of a hustler's revenge on his gambler boss (Exit) are particularly outstanding.

Byrne, Robert and Robert Byrne (1998). Byrne's New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards. New York, Harcourt Brace & Co.
Now updated throughout and expanded with new material on strategy in eight- and nine-ball, trick shots, and billiard memorabilia, this comprehensive guide to cue games remains "the definitive work on pool and billiards" (National Billiard News). Index; diagrams and photographs.

Byron, George Gordon Byron and Frederick Page (1970). Byron: Poetical Works. London, New York, Oxford U.P.
A legend in his lifetime, Lord Byron was the dominant influence on the Romantic movement. The text of this edition, which contains nearly all of Byron's published poems together with the poet's own Notes, was first published in The Oxford Poets in 1896, and has been reprinted numerous times. Fredrick Page's text has been revised by John Jump, who has made a number of substantive corrections, and added to Don Juan the fragment of a seventeenth canto that was previously unavailable.

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