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Aalto, Alvar and Göran Schildt (1998). Alvar Aalto in His Own Words. New York, Rizzoli.
The year 1998 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, and this book of his writings is one of many publications and exhibitions designed to commemorate it. Editor Goran Schildt is Aalto's official biographer. He has compiled a lifetime of Aalto's thoughts, and provided all the connective tissue a reader needs to place those thoughts in context. The architect, he says, "shunned the role of prophet and was averse to the abstract hair-splitting practised by art critics today." Instead, he was "a social creature," whose "gift of doubt" sets him apart from pontificators of all eras.

Aalto's writings are filled with theories--many profoundly idealistic--that are part of a less cynical age, when humanists believed that social change through culture was an imminent likelihood. Priceless passages abound, not all of them about architecture. Aalto writes with high spirits about setting toilet-paper bonfires with his two brothers in childhood, for instance, or drunken parties with poets, artists, and other architects (notably his teacher, Eliel Saarinen). Aalto's famously lithe and accomplished pencil drawings, which prove the artist in the architect, illustrate the book, along with photographs of his buildings.

Aaron, Craig (2002). Appeal to Reason: 25 Years in These Times. New York, Seven Stories Press.
For 25 years, this national biweekly independent magazine of news and opinion has provided groundbreaking coverage of the labor movement, environment, feminism, grassroots politics, minority communities, and the media. Features articles from contributors such as David Brower, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Juan Gonzalez, Chris Lehmann, John Nichols, Alice Walker, and Fred Weir.

Abbey, Edward (1990). Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York, Simon & Schuster.
Edward Abbey lived for three seasons in the desert at Moab, Utah, and what he discovered about the land before him, the world around him, and the heart that beat within, is a fascinating, sometimes raucous, always personal account of a place that has already disappeared, but is worth remembering and living through again and again.

Abu-Jamal, Mumia (1997). Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience. Farmington, PA, USA, Plough Pub. House.
When Mumia Abu-Jamal's first book, Live from Death Row, appeared in 1995, its searing indictment of racism and political bias in our judicial system fueled nationwide controversy. Now in this new collection of short vignettes and reflections, he examines the deeper dimensions of existence. The result is a powerful testament to the invincibility of the human spirit.

AbuKhalil, Asad (2003). Battle for Saudi Arabia, The: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power. New York, New York, Seven Stories Press.
Examines Saudi society, its history, religion, and ethnic tribalism, and the shared interests, tensions, and contradictions inherent in U.S.-Saudi relations.

Achcar, Gilbert (2002). The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder. New York, NY, Monthly Review Press.
The shift in the U.S. global role precipitated by the events of September 11, 2001—although the events were unexpected—was a long time in the making. In this challenging work, Gilbert Achcar analyzes how this shift came about and examines its fateful consequences.

Achcar's Clash of Barbarisms traces the rise of militant and anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism to its roots in U.S. policies aimed at control of the oil reserves of the Middle East, and above all, Saudi Arabia—the "Muslim Texas." Achcar examines the political premises of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and show how these led to the massive miscalculation of the September 11 attacks, with results both politically counterproductive and morally reprehensible.

The major result of this miscalculation has been to complete a shift from the vision of a world order based on international law and respecting the rights of strong and weak nations alike, announced by George Bush, Sr., in 1991, to the world order being created by the administration of George W. Bush today, in which the United States asserts its own power and pursues its interests without regard for law or rights. In this context, we are living through a "clash of barbarisms" indeed.

This important and timely work is already scheduled for publication in French, English, German, Turkish, and Korean. It draws on first-hand knowledge of the Middle East, but looks beyond immediate events to clarify their geopolitical bases.

Achcar, Gilbert (2004). Eastern Cauldron: Islam, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq in a Marxist Mirror. New York, Monthly Review Press.
The route to any coherent understanding of our time runs through the issues addressed in this collection of essays: the political meaning of Islam, the relation of the West to the Islamic world, the new form of imperialism signaled by the Soviet and U.S. occupations of Afghanistan, the intractable conflict over Palestine. In confronting these inescapable issues, global power is being reshaped and the ends for which it will be used are being decided.

This volume brings together Gilbert Achcar's major writings on these issues over the past decades. The essays collected in Eastern Cauldron describe and explain the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, the fate of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and its aftermath, and above all the Palestinian conflict—in which the regional stakes are so dramatically embodied and contested. Achcar analyzes the social bases, strategies and tactics of PLO, Hezbollah, Israel and the United States from the establishment of the state of Israel to the second Intifada. He pinpoints the contradictions of the Israeli state—seeking at the same time to be Jewish and yet democratic—and the impact of these contradictions on all parties to the conflict.

Eastern Cauldron is primarily aimed at producing a better understanding of the conflicts of the region. Achcar's work is informed by strong moral and political commitments but is never limited to polemic. His work demonstrates the immense capacities of Marxism to illuminate economic, political, and ideological developments without losing sight of their concrete singularity and their complex interconnection. His analyses are supple and inventive, and consistently informed by reflection on rival traditions of political thought and a deep knowledge of the region.

Achtemeier, Paul J., Harper & Row Publishers., et al. (1985). Harper's Bible Dictionary. San Francisco, Harper & Row.
General editor Achtemeier commissioned more than 3500 original articles from 179 Christian and Jewish scholars (all members of the Society of Biblical Literature, and hailing from seven countries) for this nonsectarian reference source which can be used with any Bible translation. Written by experts in the fields covered, the alphabetically arranged entries deal with all important persons and places in the Bible; theological terms; all books of the Bible, including the Apocrypha; all major archaeological sites; and difficult word usages. In addition, there are major, definitive articles on Moses, Jesus, Paul, the history of biblical translations, etc., and general articles on non-Judeo-Christian cultures and other relevant topics (such as economics of biblical times). Clearly and copiously illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs, maps, and drawings, this splendid volume presents a balanced summary of current biblical scholarship accessible to the general reader, and belongs in every reference collection.

Ackroyd, Peter (1996). Blake. New York, Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
Published to rave reviews in England, Ackroyd's moving and luminous biography of William Blake (1757-1827) serves as an ideal point of entry into the poet and artist's visionary world. Withdrawn, secretive, detached from ordinary affairs, Blake, a London hosier's son, began having mystical visions around age eight and came to see his life as a revelation of eternity. While eking out a living as an engraver, he stripped away levels of conventional perception to create a universe of mythical figures, muses and angels, or prophets and bards who stand alone against the world. For Ackroyd, biographer of Dickens and T.S. Eliot, Blake's tragedy was that he had the capacity to become a great public and religious poet but instead turned in upon himself, gaining neither reputation nor influence in his lifetime. Combining meticulous scholarship with uncanny psychological insight, this marvelously illustrated biography (with color and B&W plates of Blake's paintings, drawings and engravings) presents him as a prescient social critic who, long before Freud, saw warfare as a form of repressed sexuality, and whose prophetic epic poems offer a cogent vision of humanity's spiritual renewal. - Publishers Weekly

Adamic, Louis (2008). Dynamite: A Century of Class Violence in America, 1830-1930. Oakland, CA, AK Press.
Labor disputes have produced more violence over a longer period of time in the United States than in any other industrialized country in the world. From the 1890s to the 1930s, hardly a year passed without a serious—and often deadly—clash between workers and management. Written in the 1930s, and with a new introduction by Mike Davis, Dynamite recounts a fascinating and largely forgotten history of class and labor struggle in America’s industrial beginnings.

It is the story of brutal exploitation, massacres, and judicial murders of the workers. It is also the story of their response: when peaceful strikes yielded no results, workers fought back by any means necessary.

Louis Adamic has written the classic story of labor conflict in America, detailing many episodes of labor violence, including the Molly Maguires, the Homestead Strike, Pullman Strike, Colorado Labor Wars, the Los Angeles Times bombing, as well as the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Adams, Douglas (2005). The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide : Five Complete Novels and One Story. New York, Gramercy Books.
Very simply, the book is one of the funniest SF spoofs ever written, with hyperbolic ideas folding in on themselves. As parody, it's marvelous: It contains just about every science fiction cliche you can think of. As humor, it's, well, hysterical.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe Facing annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a curious time to crave tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his comrades as they hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to eat.
Life, the Universe and Everything The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky? so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals can avert Armageddon: mild-mannered Arthur Dent and his stalwart crew.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish Back on Earth, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription conspires to thrust him back to reality. So to speak.
Mostly Harmless Just when Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life, all hell breaks loose. Can he save the Earth from total obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter from herself?

Adams, Henry (1983). Novels Mont Saint Michel, the Education. New York, N.Y., Literary Classics of the United States: Distributed by the Viking Press.
Ernest and Jayne N. Samuels, editors.The major works of Henry Adams, one of the most powerful writers of the late 19th century, collected in one volume for the first time. Contains The Education of Henry Adams and Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, his remarkable works of nonfiction combining philosophical and historical speculation with autobiographical musings on his famous heritage. Also includes his two novels of American politics and religion, Democracy and Esther."One sees the full range of Henry Adams...a significant collection of the man's most significant writings."

Adams, Henry and Earl N. Harbert (1986). History of the United States of America During the Administrations of James Madison. New York, N.Y., Literary Classics of the United States: Distributed by the Viking Press.
Earl N. Harbert, editor. 1436 pages. This monumental work, complete in two volumes, culminated Henry Adams' lifelong fascination with the American past. This second volume chronicles the War of 1812. The President and Congress procrastinate while the United States is bullied and insulted by both England and France, then they plunge the country into the war without troops, monies, or fleets to wage it. Written in a strong, lively style pointed with Adams' wit, the History describes the consolidation of American character, and poses questions about the future course of democracy.

Adams, Henry and Earl N. Harbert (1986). History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson. New York, N.Y., Literary Classics of the United States: Distributed by Viking Press.
Judged one of the greatest histories in English, this monumental work culminated Adams' lifelong fascination with the intertwined pasts of his family and his country. The original 9-volume edition, long out of print, is complete in these two volumes. In Adams' ironic narrative, personalities like Napoleon Bonaparte, Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson act their glittering parts against a background of inexorable historical forces that transform the United States from a pre-industrial backwater into an emergent world power."A master of English proseýa history yet to be replaced."

Adams, John, Thomas Jefferson, et al. (1988). The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. Chapel Hill, Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia by the University of North Carolina Press.
An intellectual dialogue of the highest plane achieved in America, the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson spanned half a century and embraced government, philosophy, religion, quotidiana, and family griefs and joys. First meeting as delegates to the Continental Congress in 1775, they initiated correspondence in 1777, negotiated jointly as ministers in Europe in the 1780s, and served the early Republic--each, ultimately, in its highest office. At Jefferson's defeat of Adams for the presidency in 1800, they became estranged, and the correspondence lapses from 1801 to 1812, then is renewed until the death of both in 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence.

Lester J. Cappon's edition, first published in 1959 in two volumes, provides the complete correspondence between these two men and includes the correspondence between Abigail Adams and Jefferson. Many of these letters have been published in no other modern edition, nor does any other edition devote itself exclusively to the exchange between Jefferson and the Adamses. Introduction, headnotes, and footnotes inform the reader without interrupting the speakers. This reissue of The Adams-Jefferson Letters in a one-volume unabridged edition brings to a broader audience one of the monuments of American scholarship and, to quote C. Vann Woodward, 'a major treasure of national literature.'

Adams, James Ring and Douglas Frantz (1992). A Full Service Bank: How BCCI Stole Billions Around the World. New York, Pocket Books.
Posing as a Third World people's bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, founded by Pakistanis and financed by Arabs, swallowed the money of depositors in 73 countries while engaging in money laundering, fraud and insider lending for arms merchants, dictators, the CIA, drug traffickers, terrorists and other lawbreakers, among them Abu Nidal and Manuel Noriega. BCCI was shut down globally in July 1991. Adams (The Big Fix: Inside the S&L Scandal) and Frantz, a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, unreel an incredible tale of intrigue, deception and scandal in this unflinching, first-rate probe. They track the shell game BCCI played with regulators and scrutinize the involvement of Bert Lance and former defense secretary Clark Clifford. They also underscore the vulnerability of international banking regulations and predict that a future scandal of comparable scope is quite possible.

Adams, John, Abigail Adams, Joseph J. Ellis, Margaret A. Hogan, et al. (2007). My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams is an extraordinary set of 289 of their personal letters... There are many books on these two that provide context and background; this one, in which John and Abigail's voices soar unencumbered over the pages, is a lovely addition to the Adams shelf. You can't help but feel a little guilty reading these rich exchanges, since they were borne of long separations, with mail delivery that was slow at best, and during wartime, unreliable. Even the act of writing could be difficult: in one letter, Abigail talks about a winter so cold, the ink freezes in her pen... While they are apart, they endure the deaths of parents, friends, and, most heartbreaking, an infant daughter. Their elegiac letters carry an almost unbearable beauty.

Adorno, Theodor W. (1976). Introduction to the Sociology of Music. New York, Seabury Press.
Twentieth century German philosopher Theodor Adorno described seven types of listeners in his book Introduction to the Sociology of Music. At the top of the list were expert listeners who are able to comprehend many sounds and "crystallize music into a meaningful context," and at the bottom resided entertainment listeners who regard music as a simple "comfortable distraction." Adorno condemned such entertainment listeners and popular music as a whole, believing it to be "regressive," forcing people to "turn away from more important music and confirms their neurotic stupidity."

Adorno, Theodor W. (1981). Prisms. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
Co-director of the Frankfurt School in pre-war Germany, Adorno (1903-1969) is one of those pivotal intellectual figures - along with Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse - from whom much leftist cultural criticism is directly derived.... The titular description, 'prisms,' suits Adorno - a major thinker of facets and angles and revolutions - and the collection itself is an ideal introduction to his work.

Adorno, Theodor W., Henri Lonitz, et al. (1999). The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
"The extraordinary and unique qualities of this correspondence stem from the confrontation, in stages, between two of the most intense and energetic minds of the century." --Fredric R. Jameson, Duke University The correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, which appears here for the first time in its entirety in English translation, must rank among the most significant to have come down to us from that notable age of barbarism, the twentieth century. Benjamin and Adorno formed a uniquely powerful pair. Benjamin, riddle-like in his personality and given to tactical evasion, and Adorno, full of his own importance, alternately support and compete with each other throughout the correspondence, until its imminent tragic end becomes apparent to both writers. Each had met his match, and happily, in the other. This book is the story of an elective affinity. Adorno was the only person who managed to sustain an intimate intellectual relationship with Benjamin for nearly twenty years. No one else, not even Gershom Scholem, coaxed so much out of Benjamin. The more than one hundred letters in this book will allow readers to trace the developing character of Benjamin's and Adorno's attitudes toward each other and toward their many friends. When this book appeared in German, it caused a sensation because it includes passages previously excised from other German editions of the letters--passages in which the two friends celebrate their own intimacy with frank remarks about other people. Ideas presented elliptically in the theoretical writings are set forth here with much greater clarity. Not least, the letters provide material crucial for understanding the genesis of Benjamin's Arcades Project.

Adorno, Theodor W. and Brian O'Connor (2000). The Adorno Reader. Oxford, UK; Malden, Mass., Blackwell.
This volume is the essential collection of readings from the multidisciplinary work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most influential and admired German thinkers of the twentieth century. In order to allow a ready appreciation of a specific area of Adorno's thought, organizes the most important of his writings into five sections: the task of philosophy, the concepts of philosophy, sociological writings, culture, and aesthetic criticism. In addition to a general introduction, the editor has provided individual introductions to all of the material in the book. By explicating some of the more obscure terminology and arguments these introductions clearly situate each piece within the larger context of Adorno's writings and his philosophical tradition. The Adorno Reader

Agee, James and Walker Evans (2001). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. New York, New York, Mariner Books.
Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the proper way to listen to Beethoven; snippets of dialogue, both real and imagined; a lengthy response to a survey from the Partisan Review; exhaustive catalogs of furniture, clothing, objects, and smells. And then there are Walker Evans's famously stark portraits of depression-era sharecroppers--photographs that both stand apart from and reinforce James Agee's words.

Assigned to do a story for Fortune magazine about sharecroppers in the Deep South, Agee and Evans spent four weeks living with a poor white tenant family, winning the Burroughs's trust and immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Given a first draft of the resulting article, the editors at Fortune quite understandably threw up their hands--as did several other editors who subsequently worked with a later book-length manuscript. The writing was contrary. It refused to accommodate itself to the reader, and at times it positively bristled with hostility. (What other book could take Marx as the epigraph and then announce: "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them "?) Response to the book was puzzled or unfriendly, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sputtered out of print only a few short years after its publication. It took the 1960s, and a vogue for social justice, to bring Agee's masterwork the audience it deserved.

Yet the book is far more interesting--aesthetically and morally--than the sort of guilty-liberal tract for which it is often mistaken. On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery.

Ahmed, Ali Jimale (1995). The Invention of Somalia. Lawrenceville, NJ, Red Sea Press.
The Somali civil war had caught many people by surprise. How was it possible that a nation that had so much in common - or so it seemed - could suddenly "snap" and easily descend into such a fratricidal binge and mayhem? What had become of the Somali "national character" that was enshrined in the national lore and propagated in books by both Somali and non-Somali scholars: How did "homogeneity," stubbornly and unbeknonst to anyone, degenerate into the worst forms of mosaic fiefdoms: This book is the first real attempt by scholars on Somalia to identify and analyze the basic assumptions which had informed the construction of the now debunked Somali myth. The authors do not only suggest alternative ways of seeing and interpreting existing data, but also initiate and propose new ways of reading Somali past and present. This new way of reading is not born on the heels of the disintegration of the Somali state. Rather the seminal thesis of the book - that Somalia had indeed come to a sticking place both in terms of ideas and of state power - has its origins in a paper read at the University of Southern California in 1983 by one of the book's authors.

Albee, Edward (1981). The Plays. New York, Coward, McCann & Geoghehan.
Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and recipient of three Tony Awards, Edward Albee was awarded the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980, and in 1996 he received both the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts. Ben Brantley of The New York Times has described him as "one of the few genuinely great living American writers." Now, The Overlook Press announces publication of the first volume of a three-volume collection of all of this master's plays, some of which have been out of print for years.

Volume I contains the eight plays written by Albee during his first decade as a playwright, from 1958 through 1965. These range from the four brilliant one-act plays with which he exploded on the New York theater scene in 1958-59 (The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, and The American Dream) to his early masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961-62). They also include two adaptations from notable American novels (The Ballad of the Sad Café and Malcolm) and Albee's mysteriously fascinating Tiny Alice. The volume includes a new introduction by Mr. Albee.

Albers, Donald J., Gerald L. Alexanderson, et al. (1994). More Mathematical People: Contemporary Conversations. San Diego, Academic Press.
A collection of profiles and interviews with prominent mathematicians.

Albright, Thomas (1985). Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History. Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press.
Each chapter represents a lecture presented by Thomas Albright, including: in depth studies of Clyfford Still and the Explosion of Abstract Expressionism, Before the Storm: The Modernist Foundation, The Watershed: Funk, Pop, and Formalism, Back to Nature: The Bay Area Figurative School, Conceptualism, Photorealism, and more.

Aleksandrov, A. D., A. N. Kolmogorov, et al. (1999). Mathematics, Its Content, Methods, and Meaning. Mineola, N.Y., Dover Publications.
Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as ". . . nothing less than a major contribution to the scientific culture of this world," this major survey features the work of 18 outstanding mathematicians. Primary subjects include analytic geometry, algebra, ordinary and partial differential equations, the calculus of variations, functions of a complex variable, prime numbers, and theories of probability and functions. Other topics include linear and non-Euclidean geometry, topology, functional analysis, more.

Alexander, Michelle (2010). The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, New Press.
Contrary to the rosy picture of race embodied in Barack Obama's political success and Oprah Winfrey's financial success, legal scholar Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that [w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as a system of social control. More African Americans are under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850. Alexander reviews American racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its transformation into the war on drugs. She offers an acute analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our vision of injustice: most Americans know and don't know the truth about mass incarceration—but her carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable book should change that.

Algren, Nelson (1990). A Walk on the Wild Side. New York, Thunder's Mouth Press.
With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called 'Walking the Wild Side of Life.' I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since."

Perhaps the author's own words describe this classic work best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

Algren, Nelson (1996). Never Come Morning. New York, Seven Stories Press.
A reissue of a classic American novel, with an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut, Nelson Algren's second novel, originally published in 1942, tells the story of Bruno Bicek, a tough from Chicago's Northwest Side, and Steffi, the woman who shares his dream while living his nightmare.

Algren, Nelson (1999). The Man with the Golden Arm. New York.
Recounts one man's self-destruction in Chicago's Polish ghetto. The novel's protagonist, Frankie Machine, remains a tragic American hero half a century after Algren created this gritty and relentlessly dark tale of modern urban society.

Ali, Ahmed (2001). Al-Qur'an: A Contemporary Translation by Ahmed Ali. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.
In one of the most popular English versions of the Qur'an, Ahmed Ali has succeeded in bringing all of the subtlety, depth, and spiritual power of Islam into his translation of this peerless scripture. Without distorting the English, Ali, a highly regarded author in his own right, renders the poetry of the original Arabic into lines of elegance and rhythm. And not wanting to leave the reader with a false belief in the ability of one language to fully capture another, Ali retains the Arabic side by side with the English, exhorts the reader to refer to it, and offers explanatory notes where necessary. For the curious, the convert, or the devout, Ahmed Ali's Al-Qur'an will bring all readers closer to the glory of God. --Brian Bruya

Alinsky, Saul David (1989). Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York, Vintage Books.
From Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, pp. 126-140:

Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have. Tactics are those conscious deliberate acts by which human beings live with each other and deal with the world around them. In the world of give and take, tactics is the art of how to take and how to give. Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.

For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose. First the eyes; if you have organized a vast, mass-based people's organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power. Second the ears; if your organization is small in numbers, then...conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does. Third, the nose; if your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics:

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
The seventh rule is: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment...
The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative...
The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. you cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying "You're right--we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."
The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and "frozen." By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck....
It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target....
One of the criteria in picking your target is the target's vulnerability--where do you have the power to start? Furthermore, the target can always say, "Why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?" When you "freeze the target," you disregard these arguments and, for the moment, all others to blame.
Then, as you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack, all of the "others" come out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support of the target.
The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract such as a community's segregated practices or a major corporation or City Hall. It is not possible to develop the necessary hostility against, say, City Hall, which after all is a concrete, physical, inanimate structure, or against a corporation, which has no soul or identity, or a public school administration, which again is an inanimate system.
[He says your target should be a person in the organization you are opposing; a face within the opposition for you to focus on; it must be someone with power within the organization, like the CEO, school superintendent, governor, or something like that.]
Alter, Robert and Frank Kermode (1987). The Literary Guide to the Bible. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. An international team of renowned scholars, assembled by two leading literary critics, offers a book-by-book guide through the Old and New Testaments as well as general essays on the Bible as a whole, providing an enticing reintroduction to a work that has shaped our language and thought for thousands of years.
Alvarez, Julia (2000). In the Name of Salomé: A Novel. Chapel Hill, N.C., Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. "The story of my life starts with the story of my country... ." Thus begins Julia Alvarez's epic fictional account of the real-life Salomé Ureña-the "Emily Dickinson of the Dominican Republic." Born in the 1850s, in a time of intense political repression and turmoil, Salomé's fervent patriotic poems turned her-at seventeen-into a national icon. In the Name of Salomé is equally the story of Salomé's daughter, Camila, who grows up in exile, in the shadow of her mother's legend. Shy and self-effacing, Camila's life is in stark contrast to Salomé's. While her mother dedicated her brief life to educating Dominican girls to serve their struggling new nation, Camila spent her career explaining the Spanish pluperfect to upper-class American girls. But when, at age sixty-six, Camila makes a decision to leave her comfortable life behind and join Castro's revolution in Cuba, she begins a journey to make peace with her past-and bring the lives of two remarkable women full circle. Spanning more than a century, In the Name of Salomé proves Alvarez equally adept at capturing the sweep of history and the most intimate details of women's lives and hearts. It is Alvarez's richest and most inspiring novel to date.
Amar, Akhil Reed (1998). The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction. New Haven, Yale University Press. The author reminds us of the impact, flexibility, and timeliness of the Bill of Rights, the constitution within the Constitution that guarantees personal rights and shields individual freedoms from authoritarian encroachment. Amar's historical analysis enables the reader to appreciate the countermajoritarian nature of the document over time. The author's hypothesis seems to be that the Bill of Rights stands as an eternal bulwark against governmental oppression, especially the tyranny of the legislative majority. In this context, the demands of the Anti-Federalists at the 1787 Constitutional Convention for the security of individual rights and the protection of state governments dovetail with the post-Civil War legislation of the Reconstruction Congress intended to stamp out antebellum laws and discriminatory Black Codes. Amar goes to great pains to show how the 14th Amendment forced the states to apply fairly and evenly the freedoms and protections they had so ardently demanded during the post-Revolutionary era. He places legal milestones in an understandable perspective, thus making the reading accessible to a general academic audience.
Amar, Akhil Reed (2005). America's Constitution: A Biography. New York, Random House. Amar, a Yale Law School professor, approaches the Constitution with a perspective that is both accessible and unconventional. He gets into the formative process of our most revered doctrine of governance by placing it in the context of law, history, and political science. Yet he broadens his focus beyond the Philadelphia constitutional convention to include popular conversation and competing values. Amar views America's foundation as a corporate merger, reflecting 13 colonies with different legal charters and interests. He raises central questions: Was the constitutional process democratic? Was it pro-slavery? He explores the context of the subsequent amendments, initially the Bill of Rights, then those associated with the Reconstruction era through the civil rights era. Amar dares to incorporate contemporary concerns around the amendments that have often prodded us toward achieving our otherwise unrealized ideals. There is a fluidity to Amar's analysis that contrasts with those strict constructionists and those with vested interests in the original intent of our Constitution, as if such ground were sacred.
Amis, Martin (1995). The Information. New York, Harmony Books. Richard Tull, a fortyish book reviewer and failed novelist, is driven to distraction by the effortless and unmerited success of fellow Oxonian Gwyn Barry. While Barry's simpleminded novels become overnight best sellers, Tull's dense experimental manuscripts send a succession of literary agents to the hospital with migraine. Tull finally decides it's payback time, and this novel chronicles his slapstick attempts to annihilate his friend. Amis pads the narrative with irrelevant and sometimes erroneous scientific data, presumably to justify the book's title. (In one astronomical digression, he gives the speed of light as 186,000 miles per hour.) In general, however, this is a wonderfully cantankerous send-up of the British literary scene, similar to David Lodge's satire on academia, Small World (1984).
Andel, Jaroslav, Henry Art Gallery., et al. (1990). Art into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914-1932. Seattle. Russian constructivism aspired to bring "art into everyday life" and to de-fetishize the art object. Although Stalinism shattered these dreams in the late 1920s, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, Lyubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky and their cohorts imbued their art with a vision of a dawning revolutionary society intoxicated with the promise of technology. Featuring essays by Soviet, European and U.S. scholars, this intriguing monograph accompanies an exhibition organized by the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery, the Soviet Ministry of Culture and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. It profiles familiar and less well known constructivist artists and includes hitherto untranslated or unpublished manifestos alive with the fervor of the movement. The constructivist impulse is traced through Russian paintings, sculpture, graphics, collages, posters, clothing and building designs, to latter-day echoes in minimalism and the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, David Smith and Anthony Caro.
Andersen, Hans Christian (2008). The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen. New York, W.W. Norton. Andersen, creator of The Princess and the Pea and The Ugly Duckling, receives treasury treatment in this latest entry in Norton's series of annotated classics, replete with margin notes attentive to historical contexts, critical interpretations and folkloric influences. Tatar, Harvard's dean for humanities (The Annotated Brothers Grimm), relates that when she taught Andersen's tales, undergraduates often reported their magical childhood experiences with the fairy tales and protested her analyses of Andersen's frequently brutal scenarios. Tatar avers that her research did help her re-evaluate the affective qualities of Andersen's work. While it remains important to acknowledge the sadism of renowned tales like The Snow Queen and The Little Match Girl, and to investigate Andersen's bitter efforts to join fashionable Danish society (noted in a biographical appendix), this collection of 12 Tales for Children and a dozen more Tales for Adults focuses on the stories' fairy tale references and aesthetic appeal. Gorgeous turn-of-the-century illustrations by Kay Nielsen, William Heath Robinson and others and a section with comments from Dickens, van Gogh and Ursula Le Guin, among others testify to Andersen's wide influence. Translating with Julie K. Allen, Tatar conveys the indisputable magnetism and uncanny, threatening beauty of Andersen's visions. 146 color and b&w illus.
Anderson, Jon Lee (1997). Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. New York, Grove Press. Mr. Anderson, a freelance journalist and the author of an earlier book on guerillas, spent five years on this volume--the first major biography of Che--and in it he portrays Che as a complex, volatile, ultimately tragic figure who was critical to insuring the victory of the Cuban revolution yet unable to live with the results. This book brings to light a rich collection of diaries and letters--many previously unexamined--and is especially interesting for being written from a largely Cuban perspective. Nearly three of Mr. Anderson's five years were spent in Havana, where he was able to gain access to important Cuban archives as well as to Che's famously reclusive widow, Aleida. He also conducted interviews throughout Europe and South America and on three occasions traveled to Russia, where he talked to figures who were crucial in establishing the Kremlin's policies toward Cuba and the United States.
Anderson, Jon Lee (2004). The Fall of Baghdad. New York, Penguin Press. New Yorker writer Anderson's eyewitness account of the invasion of Baghdad is a thoughtful document of war, written with stunning precision. Anderson arrived in Baghdad during the eerie calm before air strikes began in March 2003. While questioning ordinary Iraqis about their country's future, he also traveled to Iran, where he interviewed war-weary Shiite Iraqi refugees. Back in Iraq, Anderson sought out members of Saddam's Baath Party and probed the ambiguous nature of their relationship with their dictator: Ala Bashir, a plastic surgeon and artist who was close to Saddam, provides Anderson with a character study rich in contradiction. Equally compelling is a poet named Farouk, whose accounts of cocktail parties under Saddam have, in Anderson's recounting, a tension and irony reminiscent of Cold War Hitchcock thrillers. Anderson also makes his openly anti-Saddam driver, Sabeh, a key character and a link to Iraqi quotidian culture. In a voice refreshingly free of machismo, Anderson proffers an inside view of war reporters' scramble to cover events and of life at the Rasheed and Palestine hotels, where most journalists stayed. In this original narrative (not a collection of his New Yorker pieces), Anderson's unobtrusive voice mediates the voices of others faithfully and with humanizing integrity, resisting any impulse to convert what he observes into political argument. Instead, he collects grimly cinematic snapshots of Iraqi casualties that will haunt readers even after the invasion has receded into history. - Publishers Weekly
Anderson, Kirk (2008). Banana Republic: Adventures in Amnesia. St. Paul, MN, Molotov Comix Press. Banana Republic follows the mischievous death squads and hilarious junta hijinks of Amnesia, a zany Third World dictatorship. Generalissimo Wally engages in roughhousing practices we would consider, ah - well, unconstitutional in our own country, such as torture, warrentless surveillance, and imprisonment without charge! Why, even secret prisons are not unheard of! Unlike the advanced American system, the Amnesian regime only serves the wealthy elite, not the peasant classes; in fact, politicians openly take money from wealthy businessmen with diect financial stakes in pending legislation! From the Amnesians' crippling foreign debt to their state propaganda, from their privately contracted paramilitaries to their millions without basic health care, you'll be chuckling, Thank God we don't live in a banana republic!
Anderson, Roger and Carol Shively Anderson (2000). A Ranger's Guide to Yellowstone Day Hikes. Helena, MT, Farcountry Press. Features 29 day hikes of different lengths and levels of difficulty. Each hike in the book has a GPS-compatible map, color photograph, narrative about natural and human history, botany, geology, and other highlights along the trail.
Anderson, S. E. and Tony Medina (1996). In Defense of Mumia. New York, Writers and Readers Pub. On December 9, 1982, Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black journalist moonlighting as a cab driver in Philadelphia, came upon a violent confrontation between his brother and a police officer. Mumia rushed to the aid of his brother, and in the gunplay that ensued, Mumia was wounded and the officer was shot and killed. What happened that night has been debated: the murder weapon did not match the gun in Mumia's possession, a man was seen fleeing the scene by some witnesses, and the star witness for the prosecution was a woman of questionable character and motive. At any rate, Mumia was convicted and sentenced to death, and his strange career has become a cause celebre. Editors Anderson and Medina have brought together a formidable group of artists, politicians, and activists--including Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Cornel West, John Edgar Wideman, Standing Deer, and more--in defense of Mumia in this collection of prose, poetry, and art. The book does an excellent job of defining this issue in U.S. history. - Bonnie Smothers
Andreas, Joel (2002). Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism. Oakland, CA, AK Press. Addicted to War takes on the most active, powerful, and destructive military in the world. Hard-hitting, carefully documented, and heavily illustrated, it reveals why the United States has been involved in more wars in recent years than any other country. Read Addicted to War to find out who benefits from these military adventures, who pays and who dies.
Angulo, Jaime de and Bob Callahan (1979). A Jaime De Angulo Reader. Berkeley, Turtle Island. In addition to writing fiction, Jaime De Angulo (1888-1950) was an anthropologist, a linguist specializing in Native American and Mexican languages, a translator, Chinatown drag queen, madman, and cowboy. Friend of famous Californian recluses Robinson Jeffers, Harry Partch, and Henry Miller, De Angulo reads like no one else-- submerging much of every narrative as Hemingway did, while creating a sort of indigenous American Magical Realism with the worldview of the Pit River tribe as his springboard. His ear for dialogue, unpretentious style, and ability to convey the distant, ominous rumble of Western life make these selections a real find. This Turtle Island edition includes a biographical Forward by Bob Callahan, the novels Don Bartolomeo and The Lariat, Pit River remembrance Indians in Overalls, poems from Coyote's Bones, a timeline of De Angulo's fascinating, bizarre life, and more.
Appiah, Anthony (1992). In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York, Oxford university Press. The beating of Rodney King and the resulting riots in South Central Los Angeles. The violent clash between Hasidim and African-Americans in Crown Heights. The boats of Haitian refugees being turned away from the Land of Opportunity. These are among the many racially-charged images that have burst across our television screens in the last year alone, images that show that for all our complacent beliefs in a melting-pot society, race is as much of a problem as ever in America.
In this vastly important, widely-acclaimed volume, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanaian philosopher who now teaches at Harvard, explores, in his words, "the possibilities and pitfalls of an African identity in the late twentieth century." In the process he sheds new light on what it means to be an African-American, on the many preconceptions that have muddled discussions of race, Africa, and Afrocentrism since the end of the nineteenth century, and, in the end, to move beyond the idea of race.
In My Father's House is especially wide-ranging, covering everything from Pan Africanism, to the works of early African-American intellectuals such as Alexander Crummell and W.E.B. Du Bois, to the ways in which African identity influences African literature. In his discussion of the latter subject, Appiah demonstrates how attempts to construct a uniquely African literature have ignored not only the inescapable influences that centuries of contact with the West have imposed, but also the multicultural nature of Africa itself. Emphasizing this last point is Appiah's eloquent title essay which offers a fitting finale to the volume. In a moving first-person account of his father's death and funeral in Ghana, Appiah offers a brilliant metaphor for the tension between Africa's aspirations to modernity and its desire to draw on its ancient cultural roots.
Appelbaum, Stanley (1980). The Chicago World's Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record, Photos from the Collections of the Avery Library of Columbia University and the Chicago Historical Society. New York, Dover Publications. Colossal spectacle preserved in 128 rare, vintage photographs with concise, fact-filled text: 200 buildings — 79 of foreign governments, 38 of U.S. states — the original ferris wheel, first midway, Edison's kinetoscope, much more. 128 black-and-white photographs. Captions. Map. Index.
Apuleius and Robert Graves (1951). The Transformations of Lucius; Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass. New York, Farrar. In all of literature, there are few books with the vitality of The Golden Ass. The story follows Lucius, a young man of good birth, as he disports himself in the cities and along the roads of Thessaly. This is a wonderful tale abounding in lusty incident, curious adventure and bawdy wit.
Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (2010). The Book of Symbols: Reflections On Archetypal Image. Köln, Germany, Taschen. The Book of Symbols combines original and incisive essays about particular symbols with representative images from all parts of the world and all eras of history. The Book of Symbols combines original and incisive essays about particular symbols with representative images from all parts of the world and all eras of history. The highly readable texts and almost 800 beautiful full-color images come together in a unique way to convey hidden dimensions of meaning. Each of the c. 350 essays examines a given symbol's psychic background, and how it evokes psychic processes and dynamics. Etymological roots, the play of opposites, paradox and shadow, the ways in which diverse cultures have engaged a symbolic image—all these factors are taken into consideration. Authored by writers from the fields of psychology, religion, art, literature and comparative myth, the essays flow into each other in ways that mirror the psyche's unexpected convergences. There are no pat definitions of the kind that tend to collapse a symbol; a still vital symbol remains partially unknown, compels our attention and unfolds in new meanings and manifestations over time. Rather than merely categorize, The Book of Symbols illuminates how to move from the visual experience of a symbolic image in art, religion, life, or dreams, to directly experiencing its personal and psychological resonance.
Aristotle and J. L. Ackrill (1987). A New Aristotle Reader. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press. Modern, accurate translations of the texts necessary for a careful study of most aspects of Aristotle's philosophy.
Armstrong, Charles K. (2003). The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950. Ithaca, Cornell University Press. North Korea, despite a shattered economy and a populace suffering from widespread hunger, has outlived repeated forecasts of its imminent demise. Charles K. Armstrong contends that a major source of North Korea’s strength and resiliency, as well as of its flaws and shortcomings, lies in the poorly understood origins of its system of government. He examines the genesis of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) both as an important yet rarely studied example of a communist state and as part of modern Korean history.
North Korea is one of the last redoubts of "unreformed" Marxism-Leninism in the world. Yet it is not a Soviet satellite in the East European manner, nor is its government the result of a local revolution, as in Cuba and Vietnam. Instead, the DPRK represents a unique "indigenization" of Soviet Stalinism, Armstrong finds. The system that formed under the umbrella of the Soviet occupation quickly developed into a nationalist regime as programs initiated from above merged with distinctive local conditions.
Armstrong’s account is based on long-classified documents captured by U.S. forces during the Korean War. This enormous archive of over 1.6 million pages provides unprecedented insight into the making of the Pyongyang regime and fuels the author’s argument that the North Korean state is likely to remain viable for some years to come.
Armstrong, Karen (2004). A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. New York, Gramercy Books. This searching, profound comparative history of the three major monotheistic faiths fearlessly illuminates the sociopolitical ground in which religious ideas take root, blossom and mutate. Armstrong, a British broadcaster, commentator on religious affairs and former Roman Catholic nun, argues that Judaism, Christianity and Islam each developed the idea of a personal God, which has helped believers to mature as full human beings. Yet Armstrong also acknowledges that the idea of a personal God can be dangerous, encouraging us to judge, condemn and marginalize others. Recognizing this, each of the three monotheisms, in their different ways, developed a mystical tradition grounded in a realization that our human idea of God is merely a symbol of an ineffable reality. To Armstrong, modern, aggressively righteous fundamentalists of all three faiths represent "a retreat from God." She views as inevitable a move away from the idea of a personal God who behaves like a larger version of ourselves, and welcomes the grouping of believers toward a notion of God that "works for us in the empirical age."
Arnold, Guy (2005). Africa: A Modern History. New York, Atlantic Books Ltd. The end of the Second World War heralded the rapid end of European African empires. In 1945, only four African countries were independent; by 1963, thirty African states created the Organization of African Unity. Despite numerous problems, the 1960s were a time of optimism as Africans enjoyed their new independence. By the 1990s, however, the high hopes of the 1960s had been dashed. Dictatorships by strongmen, corruption, civil wars, genocide, widespread poverty, and the interventions and manipulations of the major world powers had all relegated Africa to the position of a Third World "basket case," the poorest and least-developed continent on the planet. In Africa: A Modern History, Guy Arnold brings a lifetime of thought and experience to his examination of the continent during these momentous years. He argues that imperialism has cast a long shadow and differentiates between external pressures to control Africa and the internal failures of its leadership. Additionally, he asks whether twenty-first-century Africa can promote its own recovery and renaissance. At one thousand pages, and with more than fifty maps and fifty illustrations, Africa: A Modern History will become the definitive reference work on Africa in the twentieth century.
Arnove, Anthony (2003). Russia: From Workers' State to State Capitalism. Chicago, Haymarket Books. In the Russian Revolution of 1917, workers took control of a major country for the first time in history. To millions throughout the world, the Russian workers' state offered new hope. People everywhere turned from the grim alternatives of a declining capitalism -- unemployment, poverty, the threat of new wars--to place their hopes in the government that the soviets, councils of working people, put into power in Russia. And for a short time, their hopes were realized. Never before had such sweeping changes in society been carried out in so short a time.
But only a few years later, ideologues were holding up Russia as another example of how revolution only leads to dictatorship. The essays in this book describe the triumph and defeat of the Russian Revolution. They show that Stalin's dictatorship was not the inevitable outcome of the revolution, but a reversal of everything the revolution stood for.
Arnove, Anthony and Ali Abunimah (2002). Iraq under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War. Cambridge, Mass., South End Press. In this critically acclaimed col-lection, leading voices against the sanctions document the human, environmental, and social toll of the United States-led war against Iraq. Carefully documented, thoroughly researched, and written in clear language, Iraq Under Siege is invaluable for anyone wanting to understand the roots of US policy in Iraq and the Middle East.
"Here is a brilliantly collated body of unrelenting, undeniable evidence of the horrors that the U.S government sanctions are visiting upon the people, in particular the children, of Iraq." -- Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things
Aronowitz, Stanley (1973). False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. New York, McGraw-Hill. False Promises is a classic of its type, and well-known to specialist in labor studies. It is a highly original and bold perspective on American labor, still widely cited in the current literature and still a source of inspiration to many students.'
Aronson, Ronald (1980). Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World. London, NLB. As a junior lecturer at the Lycée du Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Nausée (Nausea) which serves in some ways as a manifesto of existentialism and remains one of his most famous books. Taking a page from the German phenomenological movement, he believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-life situations, and that novels and plays describing such fundamental experiences have as much value as do discursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories. With this mandate, the novel concerns a dejected researcher (Roquentin) in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes starkly conscious of the fact that inanimate objects and situations remain absolutely indifferent to his existence. As such, they show themselves to be resistant to whatever significance human consciousness might perceive in them. This indifference of "things in themselves" (closely linked with the later notion of "being-in-itself" in his Being and Nothingness) has the effect of highlighting all the more the freedom Roquentin has to perceive and act in the world; everywhere he looks, he finds situations imbued with meanings which bear the stamp of his existence. Hence the "nausea" referred to in the title of the book; all that he encounters in his everyday life is suffused with a pervasive, even horrible, taste -- specifically, his freedom. No matter how much he longs for something other or something different, he cannot get away from this harrowing evidence of his engagement with the world.
The stories in Le Mur (The Wall) emphasize the arbitrary aspects of the situations people find themselves in and the absurdity of their attempts to deal rationally with them. A whole school of absurd literature subsequently developed.
Arrabal, Fernando (1969). The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria. New York, Grove Press. Few people would disagree that Fernando Arrabal's 1965 "The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria," a brutal theatrical parable warning against the perils of absolute power, is a confounding play. An absurdist inversion of Shakespeare's "The Tempest," with no sympathy for Prospero figures of any kind, it pits two men – the titular "savage" desert-island inhabitant and faux "civilized" ruler who falls from the sky – against each other in a treacherous, yet oddly tender, game of co-dependent role playing. Storyline: The sole survivor of a plane crash washes up on a desert island where there is only one occupant. They teach each other enough to communicate but the teaching involves game playing and the games get out of hand.
Arrabal, Fernando (1969). Guernica, and Other Plays. New York, Grove Press. Arrabal portrays the inherent sadness in all human beings through these five plays. This is given a lightness of touch however, by the characters contained within, with their childlike wonderment at the absurdity of modern society, especially war. 'Guernica' stands out, by gaining depth with reference to the Picasso painting, paving the way for a more poetic theatre which encompasses all artforms.
Arrabal, Fernando (1974). Garden of Delights: A Play. New York, Grove Press: distributed by Random House. The Garden of Delights depicts the fascinating story of a famous actress and her schizophrenic journey to self discovery. Through fantastical interactions with animals she keeps locked in cages and memories of people from her childhood, The Garden of Delights explores the lesbian tendencies of strong adolescent attachments and the sadomasochistic experience of adult love.
Arrabal, Fernando (1987). The Compass Stone. New York, Grove Press. Cast as an accidentally discovered memoir written by a nameless young woman, the Spanish dramatist's newly translated work is more fable and parable than conventional novel. Its 18-year-old narrator/heroine, a kind of beautiful, seductive queen bee, shares a crumbling mansion with her aged father, the "Maimed One," and two women called "The Sisters." She has two principal activities: one is speculation on hierarchies in nature and societya persistent inquiry into the relation of human and insect behavior; the other is the dexterous use of a barber's straight razor, slashing the throats of casual acquaintances just as they reach the throes of sexual rapture. Her few friendsan adoring suma wrestler, a painter with bizarre tastesreveal their own oddities. To pass the time, they plan an orgy featuring paranoics, "depraved couples," sado-masochists and even the notorious Marquis de Sade. The reader never doubts that the speaking voice and questioning mind belong not to the beguiling and terrifying girl but to Arrabal himself. Voice and mind are quirkily interesting, but they are too much given to abstruse, obsessive analogies that inevitably slacken, confuse and, ultimately, vitiate dramatic effect and narrative momentum.
Arrighi, Giovanni (1994). The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London; New York, Verso. Winner of the American Sociological Association PEWS Award for Distinguished Scholarship: a comprehensive analysis of the development of world capitalism over the millennium. The Long Twentieth Century traces the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Arrighi argues that capitalism has unfolded as a succession of “long centuries,” each of which produced a new world power that secured control over an expanding world-economic space. Examining the changing fortunes of Florentine, Venetian, Genoese, Dutch, English and finally American capitalism, Arrighi concludes with an examination of the forces that have shaped and are now poised to undermine America’s world dominance. A masterpiece of historical sociology, The Long Twentieth Century rivals in scope and ambition contemporary classics by Perry Anderson, Charles Tilly and Michael Mann.
Artaud, Antonin (1970). The Cenci: A Play. New York, Grove Press. "Repent! Why? Repentance is in God's hands. It is up to him to rue my actions. Why did he make me the father of a being whom I desire so utterly? Before anyone condemns my crime, let them accuse fate. Are we free? Who can maintain we are free when the heavens are ready to fall on us? I have opened the floodgates so as not to be engulfed. There is a devil within me destined to avenge the world's sins. No fate can prevent me carrying out my dreams now." - Les Cenci
Artaud, Antonin (1976). Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A revolutionary figure in the literary avant-garde of his time, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is now seen to be central to the development of post- modernism. His writings comprise verse, prose poems, film scenarios, a historical novel, plays, essays on film, theater, art, and literature, and many letters. Susan Sontag's selection conveys the genius of this singular writer.
Asbury, Herbert (2002). The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld. New York, Thunder's Mouth Press. The history of the Barbary Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. If the precious yellow metal hadn't been discovered ... the development of San Francisco's underworld in all likelihood would have been indistinguishable from that of any other large American city. Instead, owing almost entirely to the influx of gold-seekers and the horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians, and other felonious parasites who battened upon them, there arose a unique criminal district that for almost seventy years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour, than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent." The Barbary Coast is Herbert Asbury's classic chronicle of the birth of San Francisco—a violent explosion from which the infant city emerged full-grown and raging wild. From all over the world practitioners of every vice stampeded for the blood and money of the gold fields. Gambling dens ran all day including Sundays. From noon to noon houses of prostitution offered girls of every age and race. (In the 1850s, San Francisco was home to only one woman for every thirty men. It was not until 1910 that the sexes achieved anything close to parity in their populations.) This is the story of the banditry, opium bouts, tong wars, and corruption, from the eureka at Sutter's Mill until the last bagnio closed its doors seventy years later.
Ashton, Dore (1979). The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning. Harmondsworth, Eng.; New York, Penguin Books. With the emergence of Abstract Expressionism after World War II, the attention of the international art world turned from Paris to New York. Dore Ashton captures the vitality of the cultural milieu in which the New York School artists worked and argued and critiqued each other's work from the 1930s to the 1950s. Working from unsifted archives, from contemporary newspapers and books, and from extensive conversations with the men and women who participated in the rise of the New York School, Ashton provides a rich cultural and intellectual history of this period. In examining the complex sources of this important movement--from the WPA program of the 1930s and the influx of European ideas to the recognition in the 1950s of American painting on an international scale--she conveys the concerns of an extraordinary group of artists including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, and many others. Rare documentary photographs illustrate Ashton's classic appraisal of the New York School scene.
Asimov, Isaac (1954). The Caves of Steel. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday. A millennium into the future two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. Isaac Asimov's Robot novels chronicle the unlikely partnership between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work together. Like most people left behind on an over-populated Earth, New York City police detective Elijah Baley had little love for either the arrogant Spacers or their robotic companions. But when a prominent Spacer is murdered under mysterious circumstances, Baley is ordered to the Outer Worlds to help track down the killer. The relationship between Life and his Spacer superiors, who distrusted all Earthmen, was strained from the start. Then he learned that they had assigned him a partner: R. Daneel Olivaw. Worst of all was that the "R" stood for robot--and his positronic partner was made in the image and likeness of the murder victim!
Asimov, Isaac (1957). The Naked Sun. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday. A millennium into the future, two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the Galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. On the beautiful Outer World planet of Solaria, a handful of human colonists lead a hermit-like existence, their every need attended to by their faithful robot servants. To this strange and provocative planet comes Detective Elijah Baley, sent from the streets of New York with his positronic partner, the robot R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve an incredible murder that has rocked Solaria to its foundations. The victim had been so reclusive that he appeared to his associates only through holographic projection. Yet someone had gotten close enough to bludgeon him to death while robots looked on. Now Baley and Olivaw are faced with two clear impossibilities: Either the Solarian was killed by one of his robots--unthinkable under the laws of Robotics--or he was killed by the woman who loved him so much that she never came into his presence!
Asimov, Isaac (1983). The Robots of Dawn. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday. A puzzling case of roboticide sends New York Detective Elijah Baley on an intense search for a murderer. Armed with his own instincts, his quirky logic, and the immutable Three Laws of Robotics, Baley is determined to solve the case. But can anything prepare a simple Earthman for the psychological complexities of a world where a beautiful woman can easily have fallen in love with an all-too-human robot...?
Asimov, Isaac (2004). Foundation. New York, Bantam Books. Foundation marks the first of a series of tales set so far in the future that Earth is all but forgotten by humans who live throughout the galaxy. Yet all is not well with the Galactic Empire. Its vast size is crippling to it. In particular, the administrative planet, honeycombed and tunneled with offices and staff, is vulnerable to attack or breakdown. The only person willing to confront this imminent catastrophe is Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian and mathematician. Seldon can scientifically predict the future, and it doesn't look pretty: a new Dark Age is scheduled to send humanity into barbarism in 500 years. He concocts a scheme to save the knowledge of the race in an Encyclopedia Galactica. But this project will take generations to complete, and who will take up the torch after him? The first Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) won a Hugo Award in 1965 for "Best All-Time Series." It's science fiction on the grand scale; one of the classics of the field. --Brooks Peck
Asimov, Isaac (2004). Foundation and Empire. New York, Bantam Books. The Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov are one of the great masterworks of science fiction. Unsurpassed for their unique blend of nonstop action, daring ideas, and extensive world-building, they chronicle the struggle of a courageous group of men and women to preserve humanity's light against an inexorable tide of darkness and violence.
Led by its founding father, the great psychohistorian Hari Seldon, and taking advantage of its superior science and technology, the Foundation has survived the greed and barbarism of its neighboring warrior-planets. Yet now it must face the Empire—still the mightiest force in the Galaxy even in its death throes. When an ambitious general determined to restore the Empire's glory turns the vast Imperial fleet toward the Foundation, the only hope for the small planet of scholars and scientists lies in the prophecies of Hari Seldon.
But not even Hari Seldon could have predicted the birth of the extraordinary creature called The Mule—a mutant intelligence with a power greater than a dozen battle fleets…a power that can turn the strongest-willed human into an obedient slave.
Asimov, Isaac (2004). Second Foundation. New York, Bantam Books. Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels are one of the great masterworks of science fiction. As unsurpassed blend of nonstop action, daring ideas, and extensive world-building, they chronicle the struggle of a courageous group of men and women dedicated to preserving humanity's light in a galaxy plunged into a nightmare of ignorance and violence thirty thousand years long.
After years of struggle, the Foundation lies in ruins—destroyed by the mutant mind power of the Mule. But it is rumored that there is a Second Foundation hidden somewhere at the end of the Galaxy, established to preserve the knowledge of mankind through the long centuries of barbarism. The Mule failed to find it the first time—but now he is certain he knows where it lies.
The fate of the Foundation rests on young Arcadia Darell, only fourteen years old and burdened with a terrible secret. As its scientists gird for a final showdown with the Mule, the survivors of the First Foundation begin their desperate search. They too want the Second Foundation destroyed…before it destroys them.
Atkins, Robert (1990). Artspeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords. New York, Abbeville Press Publishers. Lexicon of artistic genres, movements, and the vocabulary surrounding the world of contemporary art from 1945 until the present.
Atwood, Margaret Eleanor (1986). The Handmaid's Tale. New York, Houghton Mifflin. In a startling departure from her previous novels (Lady Oracle, Surfacing), respected Canadian poet and novelist Atwood presents here a fable of the near future. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right Schlafly/Falwell-type ideals have been carried to extremes in the monotheocratic government. The resulting society is a feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the "morally fit" Wives. The tale is told by Offred (read: "of Fred"), a Handmaid who recalls the past and tells how the chilling society came to be.
Auden, W. H. (2002). Collected Longer Poems. New York, Random House. One of the modern masters of the extended poem, W. H. Auden has selected for this volume the longer poems he originally published between 1930 and 1947, which are among his most enduring achievements, both for their technical virtuosity and for the emotional and intellectual precision with which he dissects the spiritual illnesses of our times. Collected Longer Poems includes Paid on Both Sides, Letter to Lord Byron, For the Time Being, The Sea and the Mirror, and The Age of Anxiety.
Auden, W. H. and Edward Mendelson (1991). Collected Poems. New York, Vintage International, Vintage Books. Between 1927 and his death in 1973, W. H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face. Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken.
This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times.
Auerbach, Erich (2003). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics.
A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours.
For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, Mimesis is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written.
Auerbach, Paul S. (2009). Medicine for the Outdoors: The Essential Guide to First Aid and Medical Emergencies. Philadelphia, Mosby/Elsevier. Designed to be taken along on outdoor excursions, this authoritative and informative book is nevertheless an excellent reference source for medical conditions, procedures, definitions, and treatments. Along with a section on general medical information, the first part of the book has excellent suggestions as to how to prepare for outdoor living and travel. Next comes a section on Major Medical Problems, complete with clear illustrations and concise but thorough instructions as to what must be done. Some of the topics covered include poisoning, fractures, chest injuries, bleeding, amputations, childbirth, burns, and infectious diseases. Minor Medical Problems includes treatment for conditions that more commonly occur during outdoor excursions, such as fever, chills, dizziness, foreign bodies in the eyes or ears, nosebleeds, toothaches, and diarrhea. Another section includes illustrated, step-by-step instructions on how to stitch a wound. Shark bites, jellyfish stings, and various other aquatic injuries are addressed, as are insect and animal bites, lightning strikes, and even psychologically related disorders such as a panic attack.
Augustine, tr. by Marcus Dods (1993). The City of God. New York, Modern Library. One of the great cornerstones in the history of Christian philosophy, The City of God provides an insightful interpretation of the development of modern Western society and the origin of most Western thought. Contrasting earthly and heavenly cities--representing the omnipresent struggle between good and evil--Augustine explores human history in its relation to all eternity. In Thomas Merton's words, "The City of God is the autobiography of the Church written by the most Catholic of her great saints."
This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition is a complete and unabridged version of the Marcus Dods translation.
Aung San Suu, Kyi (1997). Letters from Burma. London; New York, Penguin Books. A collection of fifty-two pieces by Burmese human rights and democracy leader Aung San Sui Kyi taken from her weekly Japanese newspaper column. Illustrated by Burmese artists, the pieces describe the political, cultural and social scene in Burma today and include overt political pieces on the repression in the country.
Aust, Stefan and Anthea Bell (2009). Baader-Meinhof: The inside Story of the R.A.F. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press. The Baader-Meinhof Group -later known as the Red Army Faction (RAF) - was a violent urban guerilla group which terrorized Germany in the 1970s and '80s, killing 47 people, wounding 93, taking 162 hostages, and robbing 35 banks--all in an attempt to bring revolution to the Federal Republic. Stefan Aust's masterful history of the Group presents the definitive account, capturing a highly complex story both accurately and colorfully. Much new information has surfaced since the mass suicide of the Group's leaders in the 1980s. Some RAF members have come forward to testify in new investigations and formerly classified Stasi documents have been made public since the fall of the Berlin Wall, all contributing to a fuller picture of the RAF and the events surrounding their demise. Aust presents the complete history of the RAF, from the creation in 1970 to the breakup in 1998, incorporating all of the new information. For instance, there is growing evidence that the German secret service eavesdropped on Baader, Meinhof, and the other RAF members imprisoned in Stammheim and that they knew that the terrorists planned a mass suicide, but did nothing to prevent it. Also, there is new information about the role of the RAF lawyers (among them Otto Schily who later was Minister of the Interior in Gerhard Schroder's cabinet), and the roles of the different RAF members and the rivalry between them. The volume will also contain numerous photos. Terrorism today is never far from most people's thoughts. Baader-Meinhof offers a gripping account of one of the most violent terrorist groups of the late twentieth century, in a compelling look at what they did, why they did it, and how they were brought to justice.
Auster, Paul (2002). The Book of Illusions: A Novel. New York, Henry Holt and Co. Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost silent film by comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer's interest is piqued, and he soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to research a book on this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929 and has been presumed dead for sixty years.
When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmer's mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexico-supposedly written by Hector's wife."Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?" Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever.
This stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. With The Book of Illusions, one of America's most powerful and original writers has written his richest, most emotionally charged work yet.
Avedon, Richard (1978). Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004. Copenhagen, DK, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. In August of 2007, Denmark's renowned Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presented Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004, the first major retrospective devoted to Avedon's work since his death in 2004. (With stops in Milan, Paris, Berlin and, Amsterdam, the highly-anticipated exhibition concluded at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art in October of 2009.) This beautifully produced catalogue, designed by the renowned Danish graphic designer Michael Jensen, features deluxe tritone printing and varnish on premium paper, and includes 125 reproductions of Avedon's greatest work from across the entire range of his oeuvre--including fashion photographs, reportage and portraits, and spanning from his early Italian subjects of the 1940s to his 2004 portrait of the Icelandic pop star, Bjork. It also contains a small number of color images--including one of the most famous photographic portraits of the twentieth century, Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent (1981). Texts by Jeffrey Fraenkel, Judith Thurman, Geoff Dyer, Christoph Ribbat, Rune Gade and curator Helle Crenzien offer the most sophisticated and thorough composite view of Avedon's work to date. All color separations by Robert Hennessey.
Ayto, John (1993). The Diner's Dictionary: Food and Drink from A to Z. Oxford; New York, Routledge. Provides clear and engaging treatment of selected English food vocabulary. Contains etymological discussion (without technical linguistic terminology), history, and description of some 1,200 terms.
Ayto, John (1998). The Oxford Dictionary of Slang. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press. Slang is language with its sleeves rolled up, colorful, pointed, brash, bristling with humor and sometimes with hostility. Here, John Ayto has brought together over 10,000 slang words and phrases common to 20th-century English, to provide a comprehensive and highly engaging guide to the most outspoken corner of our language. Unlike most such dictionaries, this volume is organized thematically, with slang words gathered under such headings as "the body and its functions" or "sustenance and intoxication." Within each section, the words are listed chronologically, starting with the century's earliest words and phrases and progressing right through to the present day, thus illuminating the development of slang and colloquial language over the last hundred years. Word origins and other interesting features of usage are given wherever possible, as are illustrative quotations from a wide range of authors. A comprehensive A-Z index lists all words included in the dictionary, so you can find a particular word quickly. From "five-finger discount" to "forty-rod whiskey," this is an authoritative and up-to-date record of slang throughout the English-speaking world.

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