KWSnet

Also:   Books    |    Movies    |    Music                                          

Recommended Books Index: A (author sort)

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

Aalto, Alvar and Goran Schildt (1998). Alvar Aalto in His Own Words. New York, Rizzoli.
"Alvar Aalto 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 and Noelle Hanrahan, editor (2001). All Things Censored. New York, Seven Stories Press.
In this collection of forceful prison essays and radio talks written over the last decade (a sequel to Live from Death Row and Death Blossoms), former Black Panther Abu-Jamal maintains that he was targeted by the state because of his political beliefs and associations. He cites a recent Amnesty International report that calls for a new trial on the grounds that his 1982 trial was riddled with procedural errors and quite possibly contaminated by racism. Hanrahan, director of Prison Radio (which aired several of these commentaries after Abu-Jamal was pulled off the air by NPR's All Things Considered), describes Abu-Jamal's life in solitary confinement as a living hell and accuses prison authorities of constant harassment and censorship. Whatever one thinks of Abu-Jamal's guilt or innocence, his attack on capital punishment as a discriminatory, racist practice is compelling, as is his critique of our bloated prison system, which, according to an American Bar Association report cited here, is self-defeating because dehumanizing conditions produce more criminals.

Abu-Jamal, Mumia (2009). Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. The U.S.A.. San Francisco, City Lights Books.
"More than a book about prisoners defending prisoners in what the author justly calls 'the Prisonhouse of Nations,' Mumia Abu-Jamal's Jailhouse Lawyers has the potential to jump-start the prison reform movement in the US. In addition to telling the individual stories of the best (and worst) jailhouse lawyers defending themselves and their fellow prisoners in the face of official hostility and, in many instances personal danger, and presenting a lively history of jailhouse lawyering in modern America, Abu-Jamal clearly exposes the political and racial bias of the US criminal justice system and explores the role of jailhouse lawyers in the jungle of American law." --Richard Vogel

Abu-Jamal, Mumia and Johanna Fernández, editor (2015). Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal. San Francisco, City Lights Publishers.
From the first slave writings to contemporary hip hop, the canon of African American literature offers a powerful counter-narrative to dominant notions of American culture, history, and politics. Resonant with voices of prophecy and resistance, the African American literary tradition runs deep with emancipatory currents that have had an indelible impact on the United States and the world. Mumia Abu-Jamal has been one of our most important contributors to this canon for decades, writing from the confines of the US prison system to give voice to those most silenced by chronic racism, impoverishment, and injustice. Writing on the Wall is a selection of one hundred previously unpublished essays that crystalize Mumia Abu-Jamal's essential perspectives on community, politics, power, social change, and US history. From discussions of Rosa Parks and Trayvon Martin to John Walker Lindh and Edward Snowden, Abu-Jamal articulates lucid, humorous, and often prescient insight into the past, present, and future of American politics and society. Written as radio commentaries from his prison cell in death row, where he was held in solitary confinement for close to thirty years, Mumia's revolutionary perspective brims with hope, encouragement, and profound faith in the possibility of social change and redemption.

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.

Abunimah, Ali (2014). The Battle for Justice in Palestine. Chicago, IL, Haymarket Books.
Efforts to achieve a 'two-state solution' have collapsed; the struggle for justice in Palestine is at a crossroads. As Israel and its advocates lurch toward greater extremism, many ask where the struggle is headed. This book offers a clear analysis of this crossroads moment and looks forward with urgency down the path to a more hopeful future.

Achebe, Chinua (2017). The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart; Arrow of God; No Longer at Ease. New York, Penguin Classics.
Chinua Achebe is considered the father of modern African literature, the writer who "opened the magic casements of African fiction." The African Trilogy -- comprised of Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease -- is his magnum opus. In these masterly novels, Achebe brilliantly imagines the lives of three generations of an African community as their world is upended by the forces of colonialism from the first arrival of the British to the waning days of empire. The trilogy opens with the groundbreaking Things Fall Apart, the tale of Okonkwo, a hero in his village, whose clashes with missionaries -- coupled with his own tragic pride -- lead to his fall from grace. Arrow of God takes up the ongoing conflict between continuity and change as Ezeulu, the headstrong chief priest, finds his authority is under threat from rivals and colonial functionaries. But he believes himself to be untouchable and is determined to lead his people, even if it is towards their own destruction. Finally, in No Longer at Ease, Okonkwo's grandson, educated in England, returns to a civil-service job in Lagos, only to see his morality erode as he clings to his membership in the ruling elite. Drawing on the traditional Igbo tales of Achebe's youth, The African Trilogy is a literary landmark, a mythic and universal tale of modern Africa. As Toni Morrison wrote, "African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe. For passion, intellect and crystalline prose, he is unsurpassed."

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.

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.

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).

Ackerman, Kenneth D. (2016). Trotsky in New York, 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution. Berkeley, Calif., Counterpoint.
Trotsky in New York, 1917 focuses on a remarkable period in the life of one of the most significant political figures in modern history. The reader cannot help but be amazed by the fact that a man who was living in the Bronx and riding the New York subways between January and March of 1917 would, before the end of the year, lead millions of workers in the greatest revolution in world history.

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.

Acorn, John Harrison and Ian Sheldon (2002). Bugs of Northern California. Edmonton, Lone Pine Publishing.
Author John Acorn has written an entertaining text that brings each bug's character to life, while Ian Sheldon's detailed illustrations will help you become a visual expert on bugs. Over 120 insects and arachnids are featured in this colorful and fascinating field guide.

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.

Adams, Douglas (2005). The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide : Five Complete Novels and One Story. New York, Gramercy Books.
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 Adamsand 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Adamsis 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.

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. 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.

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.

al-Ali, Naji (2009). A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji Al-Ali. London; New York, Verso Books.
Naji al-Ali grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh in the south Lebanese city of Sidon, where his gift for drawing was discovered by the Palestinian poet Ghassan Kanafani in the late 1950s. Early the following decade he left for Kuwait, embarking on a thirty-year career that would see his cartoons published daily in newspapers from Cairo to Beirut, London to Paris. Independent and unaligned to any political party, Naji al-Ali strove to speak to and for the ordinary Arab people. The pointed satire of his stark, symbolic cartoons brought him widespread renown. For the first time in book form, A Child in Palestine presents the work of Naji al-Ali. Through his most celebrated creation, the witness-child Handala (Hanthala), al-Ali chronicles the Israeli occupation, the corruption of the regimes in the region, and the plight of the Palestinian people.

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." 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 Cafeand Malcolm) and Albee's mysteriously fascinating Tiny Alice.

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.
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.

Aletti, Vince, Adam Harrison Levy, et al. (2012). Saul Leiter. Heidelberg, Germany, Kehrer Verlag.
Saul Leiter (b. 1923 in Pittsburgh) has only in recent years received his due as one of the great pioneers of color photography. This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Leiter saw himself for a long time mainly as a painter.

After coming to New York in 1946, he exhibited alongside abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning before beginning in the late 1940s to take photographs. Like Robert Frank or Helen Levitt, he found his motifs on the streets of New York, but at the same time was visibly interested in abstraction. Edward Steichen was one of the first to discover Leiter's photography, showing it in the 1950s in two important exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Back then color photography was regarded as 'low art,' fit only for advertising. Leiter accordingly worked primarily as a fashion photographer, for magazines such as Esquire and Harper's Bazaar. Nearly forty years would go by before his extraordinary artistic color photography was rediscovered.

This book, published to mark the first major retrospective of Leiter's work anywhere in the world, features for the first time, in addition to his early black and white and color images, his fashion photography, the overpainted nudes, as well as his paintings and sketchbooks.

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.

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 Sidehas 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.

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.

Alinsky, Saul David (1989). Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York, Vintage Books.
The late work of community organizer Saul D. Alinsky, and his last book, published in 1971 shortly before his death.

Alkyer, Frank (2009). Downbeat: The Great Jazz Interviews – a 75th Anniversary Anthology. New York, Hal Leonard.
In honor of its 75th anniversary, DownBeat's editors have brought together in this one volume the best interviews, insights, and photographs from the illustrious history of the world's top jazz magazine, DownBeat.

Alleg, Henri (2012). The Algerian Memoirs: Days of Hope and Combat. London, Seagull Books.
The personal history of journalist Henri Alleg is tied inextricably to the history of the French-Algerian War. Best known for his book The Question, a first-hand account of his torture by French troops during the Algerian war for independence, Alleg is famous both for having brought the issue of French torture to the public eye and for his passionate work as a writer, a newspaperman, and a communist activist.

Beginning with his arrival in Algiers in 1939, when he fell immediately in love with the vibrant city, to his departure in 1965, after Boumediene seized power, this is a critical work of history made devastatingly personal. Algerian Memoirs recounts his experience under the Vichy regime and such watershed moments in colonial history as the infamous Battle of Algiers. In these pages, he relives the violence and the summary executions, the communist struggle, and his party's strained relations with the National Liberation Front. And, of course, he revisits in stark detail his arrest and torture by the French, his years in prison, and eventual escape to Czechoslovakia.

Alleg, Henri (2006). The Question. Lincoln, Bison Books.
Originally published in 1958, The Question is the book that opened the torture debate in France during Algeria's war of independence and was the first book since the eighteenth century to be banned by the French government for political reasons.

At the time of his arrest by French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers in June of 1957, Henri Alleg was a French journalist who supported Algerian independence. He was interrogated for one month. During this imprisonment, Alleg was questioned under torture, with unbelievable brutality and sadism. The Question is Alleg's profoundly moving account of that month and of his triumph over his torturers. Jean-Paul Sartre's preface remains a relevant commentary on the moral and political effects of torture on both the victim and perpetrator.

Allen, Frederick Lewis (2014). The Lords of Creation. New York, Open Road Media.
Frederick Lewis Allen's insightful financial history of the United States-from the late 1800s through the stock market collapse of 1929-remains a seminal work on what brought on America's worst economic disaster: the Great Depression.

Alperovitz, Gar (1995). The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. New York, Knopf.
Historian Alperovitz argues that America's use of the atomic bomb on Japan was motivated by politics rather than by military necessity. Alperovitz's research found that Adm. Lewis Strauss, special assistant to WW II Navy Secretary James Forrestal, wrote to the naval historian Robert Albion Dec. 19, 1960 "from the Navy's point of view, there are statements by Admiral King, Admiral Halsey, Admiral Radford, Admiral Nimitz and others who expressed themselves to the effect that neither the atomic bomb nor the proposed invasion of the Japanese mainland were necessary to produce the surrender." Answers to questions about the need of the atomic bombings were given early on, but some were kept secret. "The US Strategic Bombing Survey published its conclusion that Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without atomic bombing, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion," Alperovitz reports in The Decision. The historian spent 30 years studying the issue and has revealed that a 1946 study by the Intelligence Group of the War Department's Military Intelligence Division -- discovered in 1989 -- "concluded the atomic bomb had not been needed to end the war" and "judged that it was 'almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.'"

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 Salome: 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 Salome Ureña, the "Emily Dickinson of the Dominican Republic." Born in the 1850s, in a time of intense political repression and turmoil, Salome's fervent patriotic poems turned her - at seventeen - into a national icon. Spanning more than a century, In the Name of Salome proves Alvarez equally adept at capturing the sweep of history and the most intimate details of women's lives and hearts.

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, Akhil Reed (2005). America's Constitution: A Biography. New York, Random House.
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.

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.

Anderson, Fred (2001). Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York, Vintage Books.
From 1756 to 1763, the Ohio Valley was the site of a historic contest between the French and the English, both of whom wanted to add this fertile soil to their colonial holdings. In this elegant account of the Seven Years' War, University of Colorado historian Anderson demonstrates that the conflict was more than just a peripheral squabble that anticipated the American Revolution. Not only did the war decisively alter relations among the French, the English and the Native American allies of the two powers, who for decades had played the English and French off one another to their own advantage, but just as critical, argues Anderson, the war also changed the character of British imperialism, with the mother country trying to reshape the terms of empire and the colonists' place in it.

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.

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'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. Mumia was convicted and sentenced to death. 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.

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.

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.

Ansell, David A. (2011). County: Life, Death, and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital. Chicago, Ill., Chicago Review Press.
County is the amazing tale of one of America’s oldest and most unusual urban public hospitals. From its inception as a 'poor house' dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago’s Cook County Hospital has been both a renowned teaching hospital and the health care provider of last resort for the city’s uninsured. County covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the “final rounds” in 2002, when hundreds of former trainees and personnel, many of whom shared Ansell's vision of resurrecting a hospital in critical condition, gathered to bid the iconic Victorian hospital building an emotional farewell before it was closed to make way for a new facility.County is about people--from Ansell’s mentors, including the legendary Quentin Young, to the multitude of patients whom he and County’s medical staff labored to diagnose and heal. It is a story about politics; from contentious union strikes, to battles against 'patient dumping.' Most importantly, it chronicles the battles for instigating new programs that would help to prevent, rather than just treat, serious illnesses, including the opening of County’s HIV/AIDS clinic (the first in the city), as well as an early-detection breast cancer screening program. Finally, it is about an idealistic young man's medical education in urban America, a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of race, segregation, and poverty.

Ansell, David A. (2017). The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
When detailing the many things that the poor have not, we often overlook the most critical--their health. The poor die sooner. Blacks die sooner. And poor urban blacks die sooner than almost all other Americans. In nearly four decades as a doctor at hospitals serving some of the poorest communities in Chicago, David Ansell has witnessed firsthand the lives behind these devastating statistics. In The Death Gap, he gives a grim survey of these realities, drawn from observations and stories of his patients. As Ansell shows, there is a thirty-five-year difference in life expectancy between the healthiest and wealthiest and the poorest and sickest American neighborhoods. If you are poor, where you live in America can dictate when you die. It doesn’t need to be this way; such divisions are not inevitable. Ansell calls out the social and cultural arguments that have been raised as ways of explaining or excusing these gaps, and he lays bare the structural violence--the racism, economic exploitation, and discrimination--that is really to blame. Inequality is a disease, Ansell argues, and we need to treat and eradicate it as we would any major illness. To do so, he outlines a vision that will provide the foundation for a healthier nation--for all.

Ansell-Pearson, Keith (2006). A Companion to Nietzsche. Oxford, Blackwell.
Provides a comprehensive guide to all the main aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy, profiling the most recent research and trends in scholarship. Brings together an international roster of both rising stars and established scholars, including many of the leading commentators and interpreters of Nietzsche. Showcases the latest trends in Nietzsche scholarship, such as the renewed focus on Nietzsche's philosophy of time, of nature, and of life. Includes clearly organized sections on Art, Nature, Individuation; Nietzsche's New Philosophy of the Future; Eternal Recurrence, the Overhuman, and Nihilism; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy and Genealogy; Ethics; Politics; Aesthetics; Evolution and Life. Features fresh treatments of Nietzsche's core and enigmatic doctrines.

Antonopoulos, Andreas M. (2016). The Internet of Money, Volume 1: Talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos. New York, Merkle Bloom LLC.
While many books explain the how of bitcoin, The Internet of Money delves into the why of bitcoin. Acclaimed information-security expert and author of Mastering Bitcoin, Andreas M. Antonopoulos examines and contextualizes the significance of bitcoin through a series of essays spanning the exhilarating maturation of this technology.

Antonopoulos, Andreas M. (2017). The Internet of Money, Volume 2: Talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos. New York, Merkle Bloom LLC.
A sequel to the cult classic and best seller The Internet of Money, Volume 1 by Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Volume 2 contains eleven of his most inspiring and thought-provoking talks.

Appiah, Anthony (1992). In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York, Oxford university Press.
In this 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.

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.

Arandojo, Diego and Facundo Percio, Andrea Rosenberg, tr. (2021). Beatnik Buenos Aires. Seattle, Fantagraphics.
With the improvisational pacing of a jazz performance, Beatnik Buenos Aires follows the lives of writers, painters, musicians, sculptors, and performers as they wend their way through these hubs of creative life, seeking out inspiration and grappling with their craft. Set in 1963, this graphic novel celebrates a time in Argentine history when its art scene blossomed.

Apuleius and Robert Graves (1951). The Transformations of Lucius; Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass. New York, Farrar.
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. Koln, 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.Highly readable texts and almost 800 beautiful full-color images come together in a unique way to convey hidden dimensions of meaning. 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.

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.

Armstrong, Karen (2004). A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. New York, Gramercy Books.
This comparative history of the three major monotheistic faiths illuminates the sociopolitical ground in which religious ideas take root, blossom and mutate.

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 relegated Africa to the position of a Third World "basket case." 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.

Arnold, Thurman Wesley (2010). The Folklore of Capitalism.. Abingdon-on-Thames, Routledge.
By "the folklore of capitalism" the author means those ideas about our social and political system that are not generally regarded as folklore but popularly and usually erroneously accepted as fundamental principles of law and economics. Through his searching scrutiny of this "folklore" about capitalism, Arnold presents a broad scale analysis of the ways in which America thinks and acts.

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. 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 collection, 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

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 Lycee du Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Nausee (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.

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.

Arria, Michael (2014). Medium Blue: The Politics of MSNBC. Petrolia, CA, Counterpunch.
MSNBC has shilled for Obama's wars, defended the administration's illegal spying programs and failed to hold our broken political system accountable. Medium Blue serves as a primer to help navigate the ultimate futility of our distinguished liberal media.

Arrighi, Giovanni (1994). The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London; New York, Verso.
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.

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.

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. Ashton covers 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.

Asimov, Isaac (1957). The Naked Sun. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday.
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).

Asimov, Isaac (2004). Foundation and Empire. New York, Bantam Books.
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.
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.

Assange, Julian (2014). When Google Met Wikileaks. New York, OR Books.
In June 2011, Julian Assange received an unusual visitor: the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, arrived from America at Ellingham Hall, the country residence in Norfolk, England where Assange was living under house arrest. For several hours the besieged leader of the world’s most famous insurgent publishing organization and the billionaire head of the world’s largest information empire locked horns. The two men debated the political problems faced by society, and the technological solutions engendered by the global network–from the Arab Spring to Bitcoin. They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with US foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to American companies and markets. These differences embodied a tug-of-war over the Internet’s future that has only gathered force subsequently. When Google Met WikiLeaks presents the story of Assange and Schmidt’s encounter. Both fascinating and alarming, it contains an edited transcript of their conversation and extensive, new material, written by Assange specifically for this book.

Assange, Julian (2015). The Wikileaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire. Brooklyn, NY, Verso.
When WikiLeaks first came to prominence in 2010 by releasing 2,325,961 top-secret State Department cables, the world saw for the first time what the U.S. really thought about national leaders, friendly dictators and supposed allies. It also discovered the dark truths of national policies, human rights violations, covert operations and cover-ups. The WikiLeaks Files is the first volume that uses experts to collate the most important cables and shows their historic importance.

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 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.

Atwood, Paul L. (2010). War and Empire: The American Way of Life. London, Pluto Press.
In his long teaching career, Atwood has found that most students know virtually nothing about America's involvement in the wars of the 20th century, let alone those prior to World War I. War and Empire aims to correct this, clearly and persuasively explaining U.S. actions in every major war since the declaration of independence. The book shows that, far from being dragged reluctantly into foreign entanglements, America's leaders have always picked its battles in order to increase their influence and power, with little regard for the American soldiers and 'enemy' civilians killed or made to suffer in the process.

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 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.

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.

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 informative book is nevertheless an excellent reference source for medical conditions, procedures, definitions, and treatments. 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."

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.

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.

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. 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.

KWSnet is an Internet subject directory of U.S. national and international news, the arts, computing, culture, environment, law, literature, media, politics, science and technology. Based in San Francisco, California, KWSnet contains over 190,000 annotated links to resources worldwide. Use Google Custom Search, located at the top of each page, to search within this site. Use Ctrl-F (Windows) or ⌘-F (Mac) to search within individual pages.

My Zotero Library provides news articles, primary and secondary sources, and bibliographic information for your research.    More information on Zotero – a powerful, easy-to-use research tool – can be found at its site. Also recommended, subscribe to My Zotero Library RSS content for the latest updates.  

KWSnet provides news, arts/culture, environment, media, nature, politics, sci-tech, society, comics, b-days, obits, lists, and other floating wreckage and jettisoned cargo posts at:  

KWSnet is completely noncommercial: no advertising, no tracking, no marketing. It has no commercial objective or emphasis. Instead, it is intended for educational purposes, research, and personal use. It is updated regularly.

KWSnet is IPv6 enabled, HTTPS deployed, and fully HTML5 compliant.

KWSnet may be contacted via email with any comments, suggestions or link submissions. However, KWSnet does not accomodate guest posts, advertising, nor offers of link exchanges, and it will ignore requests for same. It does welcome requests to add links of quality sites, but chooses which sites to add to its directory based on perceived merit, interest, distinction, usefulness, or educational value. Particularly welcomed are comments correcting broken links, suggesting improvements, and recommendations for worthy additions to the site.

KWSnet is designed and maintained, in its entirety, by Kirk W. Smith.  

This webpage last updated on Friday, March 3, 2023 5:15 PM.
© 2001-2024 by Kirk W. Smith.