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Henry Miller
Henry Miller by Stephen Alcorn, 1983.


Recommended Books: D (author sort)

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D'Amato, Paul (2006). The Meaning of Marxism. Chicago, IL, Haymarket Books.
Paul d'Amato has done a great service to Marxists and radicals everywhere by giving a concise, thorough, and up to date exposition of the thought of Marx and Engels, and their followers to the present day. The book makes short work of Marxist political economy, which is a rare accomplishment in and of itself, and also provides an engaging case for why Marx's thought is still relevant today. In the Marxist spirit, it does not stop at explaining a theory in mid-air; it never fails to make the ideas practical and concrete.

Damon, S. Foster (1979). A Blake Dictionary, the Ideas and Symbols of William Blake
. Boulder, CO, Shambhala Publications.
An indispensable guide to Blake's ideas and symbols.

Dane, Barbara (2022). This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song
. Berkeley, Calif., Heyday Books
Barbara Dane has led an epic, trailblazing life in music and activism, and This Bell Still Rings tells her story in her own adventurous voice. Dane’s memoir charts her trajectory from singing in union halls and at factory gates in World War II–era Detroit, to her rise as a respected blues and jazz singer, to her prominence as a folk musician frequently performing at and participating in civil rights and peace demonstrations across the US and abroad—from post-revolutionary Cuba to wartime Vietnam. This Bell Still Rings illuminates "one of the true unsung heroes of American music" (Boston Globe), and it offers a wealth of inspiration for artists, activists, and anyone seeking a life defined by courage and integrity.

Dante, Alighieri and John Ciardi (1977). The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso
. New York, Norton.
Long narrative poem originally titled Commedia (about 1555 printed as La divina commedia) written about 1310-14 by Dante. The work is divided into three major sections--Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso--which trace the journey of a man from darkness and error to the revelation of the divine light, culminating in the beatific vision of God. Its plot is simple: a man is miraculously enabled to visit the souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. He has two guides: Virgil, who leads him through the Inferno and Purgatorio, and Beatrice, who introduces him to Paradiso. Through these fictional encounters taking place from Good Friday evening in 1300 through Easter Sunday and slightly beyond, Dante the character learns of the exile that is awaiting him (an actual exile that had already occurred at the time of writing). This device allowed Dante not only to create a story out of his exile but also to explain how he came to cope with personal calamity and to offer suggestions for the resolution of Italy's troubles as well. Thus, Dante's story is historically specific as well as paradigmatic; his exile serves as a microcosm of the problems of a country, and it also becomes representative of the Fall of Man. The basic structural component of The Divine Comedy is the canto. The poem consists of 100 cantos, which are grouped into the three major sections, or canticles. Technically there are 33 cantos in each canticle and one additional canto, contained in the Inferno, that serves as an introduction to the entire poem. For the most part the cantos range from 136 to 151 lines. The poem's rhyme scheme is the terza rima (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.) Thus, the divine number three is present in every part of the work. Dante adopts the classical convention of a visit to the land of the dead, but he adapts it to a Christian worldview by beginning his journey there. The Inferno represents a false start during which Dante, the character, must be disabused of harmful values that somehow prevent him from rising above his fallen world. Despite the regressive nature of the Inferno, Dante's meetings with the damned are among the most memorable moments of the poem: the Neutrals, the virtuous pagans, Francesca da Rimini, Filipo Argenti, Farinata degli Uberti, Piero delle Vigne, Brunetto Latini, the simoniacal popes, Ulysses, and Ugolino impose themselves upon the reader's imagination with tremendous force. Nonetheless, the journey through the Inferno primarily signifies a process of separation and thus is only the initial step in a fuller development. In the Purgatorio the protagonist's spiritual rehabilitation commences. There Dante subdues his own personality so that he will be able to ascend. He comes to accept the essential Christian image of life as a pilgrimage, and he joins the other penitents on the road of life. At the summit of Purgatory, where repentant sinners are purged of their sins, Virgil departs, having led Dante as far as human knowledge is able--to the threshold of Paradise. Beatrice, who embodies the knowledge of divine mysteries bestowed by Grace, continues Dante's tour. In the Paradiso true heroic fulfillment is achieved. Dante's poem gives expression to those figures from the past who seem to defy death and who inspire in their followers a feeling of exaltation and a desire for identification. The Paradiso is consequently a poem of fulfillment and of completion.

Darío, Rubén (1965). Selected Poems of Rubén Darío
. Austin, University of Texas Press.
Toward the close of the last century, the poetry of the Spanish-speaking world was pallid, feeble, almost a corpse. It needed new life and a new direction. The exotic, erratic, revolutionary poet who changed the course of Spanish poetry and brought it into the mainstream of twentieth-century Modernism was Félix Rubén García Sarmiento (1867-1916) of Nicaragua, who called himself Rubén Darío.

Since its original publication in 1965, this edition of Darío's poetry has made English-speaking readers better acquainted with the poet who, as Enrique Anderson Imbert said, "divides literary history into 'before' and 'after.'" The selection of poems is intended to represent the whole range of Darío's verse, from the stinging little poems of Thistles to the dark, brooding lines of Songs of the Argentine and Other Poems. Also included, in the epilogue, is a transcript of a radio dialogue between two other major poets, Federico García Lorca of Spain and Pablo Neruda of Chile, who celebrate the rich legacy of Rubén Darío..

Darrow, Clarence and Arthur Weinberg (1989). Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom
. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
"Clarence Darrow [was] perhaps the most effective courtroom opponent of cant, bigotry, and special privilege that our country has produced. All of Darrow's most celebrated pleas are here--in defense of Leopold and Loeb (1924), of Lieutenant Massie (1932), of Big Bill Haywood (1907), of Thomas Scopes (1925), and of himself for attempted bribery."--The New Yorker

Darton, Eric (1999). Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center
. New York, Basic Books.
When the World Trade Towers in New York City were erected at the Hudson's edge, they led the way to a real estate boom that was truly astonishing. Divided We Stand reveals the coming together and eruption of four volatile elements: super-tall buildings, financial speculation, globalization, and terrorism. The Trade Center serves as a potent symbol of the disastrous consequences of undemocratic planning and development.

This book is a history of that skyscraping ambition and the impact it had on New York and international life. It is a portrait of a building complex that lives at the convergence point of social and economic realities central not only to New York City but to all industrial cities and suburbs. A meticulously researched historical account based on primary documents, Divided We Stand is a contemporary indictment of the prevailing urban order in the spirit of Jane Jacobs's mid-century classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Darwin, Charles (2005). On the Origin of Species
. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
This work is rightly regarded as one of the most important books ever published, and a knowledge of it should be part of the intellectual equipment of every educated person. The book remains surprisingly modern in its assertions and is also remarkably accessible to the layman, much more so than recent treatises necessarily encumbered with technical language and professional jargon.

This first edition had a freshness and uncompromising directness that were considerably weakened in later editions, and yet nearly all available reprints of the work are based on the greatly modified sixth edition of 1872. In the only other modern reprinting of the first edition, the pagination was changed, so that it is impossible to give page references to significant passages in the original. Clearly, this facsimile reprint of the momentous first edition fills a need for scholars and general readers alike.

Dashew, Linda and Steve Dashew (1997). Offshore Cruising Encyclopedia
. Tucson, Ariz., Beowulf.
The Offshore Cruising Encyclopedia has inspired a generation of cruisers to untie their dock lines and go! Packed with data on every facet of sailing, from design and systems to the cruising lifestyle, it has provided sailors around the world with the knowledge necessary to buy, equip, and prepare themselves in the most efficient manner possible.

Davenport, Guy (1981). The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays
. San Francisco, North Point Press.
While the backbone of this collection is its defense and decoding of the great modernists (Joyce, Pound) and early postmodernists (Zukofsky, Olson), the book also forays into all sorts of other areas: Dogon myth, Wittgenstein, Shaker aesthetics, hobbitry, the invention of the buttonhole, Stan Brakhage, and Indian arrowheads, to name but a few. Davenport's true genius is his ability to synthesize: he arranges these disparate subjects into a single staggering design so complete that the book seems to contain no digressions, only elaborations. A thrilling collection; highly recommended.

Davenport, Guy (1993). Eclogues: Eight Stories
. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mixtures of myth and fable, these tales have their origins in Plutarch, Montaigne, The Acts of the Apostles, Theokritos, and the daily newspaper. Eclogues is a delight, and Guy Davenport proves a companionable and witty guide.

Davenport, Guy (1997). Da Vinci's Bicycle: Ten Stories
. New York, New Directions.
This title collects ten short stories "full of allusion and linguistic dazzle." The stories take famous people, e.g., Richard Nixon, Leonardo Da Vinci, and James Joyce, and speculates on how they "relate to contemporary life."

Davidowitz, Steven (1995). Betting Thoroughbreds: A Professional's Guide for the Horseplayer
. New York, Dutton.

Davids, Kenneth (2001). Coffee: A Guide to Buying, Brewing, and Enjoying
. St. Martin's Griffin.
Now in its fourth revised edition, Kenneth Davids's comprehensive and entertaining Coffee: A Guide to Buying Brewing, and Enjoying remains an invaluable resource for anyone who truly enjoys a good cup of coffee. It features updated information and definitions, a history of coffee culture, tips on storing and brewing, and other essential advice designed to improve the coffee experience. Coffee lovers everywhere will welcome this lively, complete guide to the fascinating world of America's national beverage.

Davies, Norman (1998). Europe: A History
. New York, HaperCollins Publishers.
Historian Davies (Heart of Europe, 1984) is perfect for this ambitious project, a panoramic history of Europe from prehistoric times to the present. He reminds readers that East and West have much in common, beginning with a long, conjoined history of events, personalities, movements, and concepts. Narrative chapters alternate with tableaux of specific events; there are numerous digressive inserts. The prose is elegant throughout; Davies's comments are always insightful and frequently witty. (Of the Western historians' dismissal of the Magyars as "not a creative factor in Western history," he comments: "All this means is that the Magyars did not reach Cambridge.") The author muses on "the extreme contrast between the material advancement of European civilization and the terrible regression in political and intellectual values." At last, a truly pan-European history that rests firmly on solid scholarship and exhibits wisdom and literary elegance; highly recommended. - David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus

Davies, R.W. (1998). Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev
. Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press.
Provides a comprehensive survey of Soviet economic development from 1917 to 1965 in the context of the pre-revolutionary economy. In these years the Soviet Union was transformed from a predominantly agrarian country into a major industrial power. These developments resulted in great economic achievements at great human cost. Professor Davies discusses the inherent faults and strengths of the Soviet system, paying particular attention to the major controversies, and presents the results of recent Russian and Western research.

Davis, Angela Y. (1988). Angela Davis: An Autobiography
. New York, International Publishers.
From a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, to one of the most significant political trials of the century, Angela Davis describes in full the story of her life: from Carrie A. Tuggle Elementary School to the U.S. Communist Party; from her political activity in a New York high school to the Soledad Brothers; from the faculty of the Philosophy Department at UCLA to the FBI's list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.

Davis, Angela Y.; Gerry Beegan & Donna Gustafson, eds. (2020). Angela Davis: Seize the Time
. Munich, Hirmer Publishers.
Inspired by a private archive and featuring contemporary work by artists who acknowledge the continued relevance of Angela Davis’s experience and politics, the essays, interviews, and images in this book provide a compelling and layered narrative of her journey through the junctures of race, gender, economic, and political policy. Beginning in 1970 with her arrest in connection with a courtroom shootout, then moving through her trial and acquittal, the book traces Davis’s life and work during the subsequent decades and her influential career as a public intellectual. Profusely illustrated with materials found in the archive, including press coverage, photographs, court sketches, videos, music, writings, correspondence, and Davis’s political writings, the book also features interviews with Angela Davis and Lisbet Tellefsen, the archivist who collected those materials, as well as essays that touch on visibility and invisibility, history, memory, and the iconography of black radical feminism.

Davis, Angela Y. and Joy James, editor (1998). The Angela Y. Davis Reader
. Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing.
The Angela Y. Davis Reader presents eighteen essays from her writings and interviews which have appeared in If They Come in the Morning, Women, Race, and Class, Women, Culture, and Politics, and Black Women and the Blues as well as articles published in women's, ethnic/black studies and communist journals, and cultural studies anthologies. In four parts, "Prisons, Repression, and Resistance", "Marxism, Anti-Racism, and Feminism", "Aesthetics and Culture", and recent interviews, Davis examines revolutionary politics and intellectualism.

Davis's discourse chronicles progressive political movements and social philosophy. It is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary political philosophy, critical race theory, social theory, ethnic studies, American studies, African American studies, cultural theory, feminist philosophy, gender studies.

Davis, Angela Y. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete?
New York, Seven Stories Press.
"In this thoroughly researched book, Angela Davis swings a wrecking ball into the racist and sexist underpinnings of the American prison system. Her arguments are well wrought and restrained, leveling an unflinching critique of how and why more than 2 million Americans are presently behind bars, and the corporations who profit from their suffering. Davis explores the biases that criminalize communities of color, politically disenfranchising huge chunks of minority voters in the process. Uncompromising in her vision, Davis calls not merely for prison reform, but for nothing short of 'new terrains of justice.' Another invaluable work in the Open Media Series by one of America's last truly fearless public intellectuals." -Cynthia McKinney

Davis, Angela Y. (2016). Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
. Chicago, Haymarket Books.
Angela Davis again offers us an incisive, urgent, and comprehensive understanding of systematic racism, the grounds for intersectional analysis and solidarity, and the importance of working together as equals to unmask and depose systems of injustice. This wide-ranging and brilliant set of essays includes a trenchant analysis of police violence against people of color, of the systematic incarceration of black people in America, the grounds of Palestinian solidarity for the Left, the affirmation of transgender inclusion, and the necessity of opposing the G4S corporation and its high-profit empire dedicated to the institutionalization of racism in the name of security. These essays take us back in history to the founders of revolutionary and anti-racist struggle, but they also take us toward the possibility of ongoing intersectional solidarity and struggle. Angela Davis gathers in her lucid words our luminous history and the most promising future of freedom.

Davis, Angela Y. (2012). The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues
. San Francisco, CA, City Lights Books.
This book is a collection of Davis' lectures from 1994 through 2009, interweaving themes of freedom and bias based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. Davis is at her best linking these perceptively separate segments into a broader concept of freedom across all the lines that separate us.

Davis, Jack & Harvey Kurtzman (2018). Death Stand and Other Stories
. Seattle, Fantagraphics.
The cartoonist with one of the most recognizable styles in the 20th century pairs with one of the most innovative to take on war comics. Death Stand and Other Stories collects more than thirty stories — all the combat tales Davis and Kurtzman did together for EC’s Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. It also includes Davis’s adaptation of an excerpt from James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans.

Davis, Jack & Al Feldstein (2016). Living Mummy and Other Stories, The
. Seattle, Fantagraphics.
When Jack Davis took up his pen for EC Comics, he made his innocent victims more eye-poppingly terrified, his ax-murderers more gleefully gruesome, and his vampires and werewolves more bloodthirsty and feral than any other artist. These horror and suspense tales — from the pages of Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, Crime SuspenStories, and Shock SuspenStories — offer everything a horror fan could ask for: re-animated bodies and body parts, a ghoul who stores bodies like a squirrel stores nuts, a vampire who moonlights at (where else?) a blood bank, greedy business partners, corrupt politicians, jealous lovers, revenge from beyond the grave, and a healthy complement of vampires, werewolves, and assorted grotesqueries. All leavened with the cackling, pun-laced humor of scripter Al Feldstein and illuminated as only the virtuoso brushwork of Jack Davis can present them.

Davis, Mike (1990). City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
. London; New York, Verso.
"An eye-opening account of the economic, political, intellectual and architectural development of 20th-century Los Angeles, City of Quartz is a deeply troubling look at a city beset by environmental time bombs vast inequities of wealth and chronic, increasingly brutal racial violence...The city that takes shape in this elegantly argued book seems to be swiftly heading toward some Armageddon. Few books shed as much light on their subjects as this opionated and original excavation of Los Angeles from the mythical debris of its past and future."--Sara Frankel, The San Francisco Examiner

Davis, Mike (2006). Planet of Slums
. London; New York, Verso.
Urban theorist Davis takes a global approach to documenting the astonishing depth of squalid poverty that dominates the lives of the planet's increasingly urban population, detailing poor urban communities from Cape Town and Caracas to Casablanca and Khartoum. Davis argues health, justice and social issues associated with gargantuan slums (the largest, in Mexico City, has an estimated population of 4 million) get overlooked in world politics: "The demonizing rhetorics of the various international 'wars' on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around gecekondus, favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion." Though Davis focuses on individual communities, he presents statistics showing the skyrocketing population and number of "megaslums" (informally, "stinking mountains of shit" or, formally, "when shanty-towns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery") since the 1960s. Layered over the hard numbers are a fascinating grid of specific area studies and sub-topics ranging from how the Olympics has spurred the forceful relocation of thousands (and, sometimes, hundreds of thousands) of the urban poor, to the conversion of formerly second world countries to third world status. Davis paints a bleak picture of the upward trend in urbanization and maintains a stark outlook for slum-dwellers' futures.

Davis, Mike (2007). Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
. London, Verso.
In this provocative history, Mike Davis traces the its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies--particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan--in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with "rings of steel" against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.

Davis, Miles and Quincy Troupe (1989). Miles: The Autobiography
. New York, Simon and Schuster.
Miles: The Autobiography, like Miles himself, holds nothing back. He speaks frankly and openly about his drug problem and how he overcame it. He condemns the racism he encountered in the music business and in American society generally. And he discusses the women in his life. But above all, Miles talks about music and musicians, including the legends he has played with over the years: Bird, Dizzy, Monk, Trane, Mingus, and many others.

Davis, Wade (1988). Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie
. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press.
Haitian zombification, a subject that has provoked a great deal of sensational reporting in the popular press and skepticism in anthropological circles, is analyzed in this fascinating work. The author delves into its physiological, social, and psychological impact, the result of two years of on-site study of the structure and function of the Bizango secret societies. He presents an extensive analysis of the chemical composition of various poisons reputed to induce a physiological state that could simulate death. To transform a person so affected into a zombie through antidotes is part of the pharmacopoeia of the Bizango societies. Of interest both to social scientists and the medical profession.

Davis, Wade (1996). One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest
. New York, Simon & Schuster.
Wade Davis is an ethnobotanist interested in the native uses of plants, especially psychotropics. He finds many such plants in the travels he recounts in, especially coca and curare. (The first, famously, is a curse in the First World but is a necessity in the Andes, where it promotes the digestion of many kinds of food plants.) Framing Davis's narrative is an account of the dangerous World War II-era Amazonian expeditions undertaken by his mentor, Harvard biologist Richard Evans Schultes. Davis describes a few hair-raising encounters of his own, making this a fine book of scientific adventure.

Davis, Wade (2001). Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures
. Washington, D.C., National Geographic Society.
Ethnobotanist and anthropologist Davis, author of One River (1996) and Shadows in the Sun (1998), has traveled the world for 25 years, pen and camera in hand, to study the myriad ways indigenous people live in physical and spiritual intimacy with the natural world. Driven by curiosity and a profound respect for the "ethnosphere," humanity's diverse "thoughts, beliefs, myths, and intuitions," Davis has dwelled among the people of the Arctic, the Amazon, Haiti, Kenya, Borneo, Australia, and Tibet, learning their modes of being, cosmologies, and botanical expertise. His quest has rendered him acutely sensitive to the connection between biodiversity and cultural diversity, and as he portrays in pellucid language and magnificent photographs healers, shamans, hunters, and men, women, and children adept at survival in the most demanding of wildernesses, he decries the rampant environmental destruction and globalization that are decimating indigenous cultures, thus depriving future generations of their knowledge, wisdom, and unique perspectives. Aesthetically powerful in both word and image, this essential volume opens readers' eyes and imaginations to the wonders of the earth and humanity's varied "insights into the very nature of existence," a bounty and legacy we simply cannot do without.

Dawidoff, Nicholas (2002). Baseball: A Literary Anthology
. New York, Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the U.S. by Penguin Putnam Inc.
Baseball: A Literary Anthology offers a lively mix of stories, memoirs, poems, news reports, and insider accounts about all aspects of the great American game, from its pastoral nineteenth-century beginnings to its apotheosis as the undisputed national pastime. Here are the major leaguers and the bush leaguers, the umpires and broadcasters, the wives and girlfriends and would-be girlfriends, fans meticulously observant and lovingly, fanatically obsessed. Here too are the teams of storied greatness - the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Red Sox - and the luminaries who made them legendary. Unforgettable portraits of icons such as Christy Matthewson, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and Jackie Robinson are joined by glimpses of lesser-known characters such as the erudite Moe Berg, the catcher who could speak a dozen languages "but couldn't hit in any of them."

Drawing from the work of novelists from Ring Lardner to Don DeLillo, sportswriters from Damon Runyon to Red Smith, and poets from William Carlos Williams to Yusef Komunyakaa, and gathering essays and player profiles from John Updike, Gay Talese, Roger Angell, and David Remnick, Baseball: A Literary Anthology is a varied and exuberant display of what baseball has meant to American writers. Among the highlights: Philip Roth considers the terrible thrill of the adolescent centerfielder; Richard Ford listens to minor league baseball on the radio while driving cross-country; Amiri Baraka remembers the joy of watching the Newark Eagles play Negro League ball; Stephen King follows his son's team on their riveting journey toward a Little League championship. Bringing together tales of ambition and heartbreak, childlike wonder and implacable disappointment, raw strength and even rawer emotion, Baseball: A Literary Anthology tells a rich and vital story about the sport that has always! been more than just a game in the hearts of Americans.

Dawkins, Richard (2003). A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co.
The first collection of essays from renowned scientist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins is an enthusiastic declaration, a testament to the power of rigorous scientific examination to reveal the wonders of the world. In these essays Dawkins revisits the meme, the unit of cultural information that he named and wrote about in his groundbreaking work The Selfish Gene. Here also are moving tributes to friends and colleagues, including a eulogy for novelist Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; correspondence with the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; and visits with the famed paleoanthropologists Richard and Maeve Leakey at their African wildlife preserve. The collection ends with a vivid note to Dawkins's ten-year-old daughter, reminding her to remain curious, to ask questions, and to live the examined life.

Dawkins, Richard (2006). The God Delusion
. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co.
Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, tells of his exasperation with colleagues who try to play both sides of the street: looking to science for justification of their religious convictions while evading the most difficult implications - the existence of a prime mover sophisticated enough to create and run the universe, "to say nothing of mind reading millions of humans simultaneously." Such an entity, he argues, would have to be extremely complex, raising the question of how it came into existence, how it communicates - through spiritons! - and where it resides. Dawkins is frequently dismissed as a bully, but he is only putting theological doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that any scientific theory must withstand. No one who has witnessed the merciless dissection of a new paper in physics would describe the atmosphere as overly polite.

Dawson, Fielding (1982). Krazy Kat & 76 More: Collected Stories, 1950-1976
. Santa Barbara, Black Sparrow Press.
Fielding Dawson (August 2, 1930 - January 5, 2002) was a beat-era author of short stories and novels, a student of the Black Mountain College. He was also a painter and collagist whose works were seen in several books of poetry & many literary magazines.

Day, Dorothy and Robert Ellsberg (2005). Dorothy Day, Selected Writings: By Little and by Little
. Maryknoll, N.Y., Orbis Books.
This edition of Dorothy Day: Selected Writings marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of death of one of the most challenging and inspiring figures of recent history. Dorthy Day (1897-1980) was co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and currently a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church. In her lifelong option for the poor and her unstinting devotion to active nonviolence, Day fashioned a new face for the gospel in our time. Dorothy Day: Selected Writings is widely recognized as the essential and authoritative guide to her life and work. The writings collected here reflect her spirit: meditative, ironical, combative, filled with love for the Catholic Worker family, and suffused with her special sense of the 'holy sublimity of the everyday.'

Day, Richard B. and Daniel F. Gaido, editors and translators (2011). Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record
. Chicago, IL, Haymarket Books.
The theory of permanent revolution has long been associated with Leon Trotsky. Though he was the most brilliant of its proponents, these newly translated documents, most of them translated into English for the first time, demonstrate that Trotsky was only one of several leading figures of international Marxism engaged in a debate, sparked by the first Russian Revolution in 1905, about the form workers' struggle would take in less developed countries. Among the figures included in these discussions were Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Parvus, and David Ryazanov. Sometimes reading debates between figures on the left, involving historical references readers may not be familiar with, can be a daunting or even demoralising experience. But the brilliant and precise annotating of this collection, along with a short introduction to each piece, makes every article accessible to a wide range of readers. Witnesses to Permanent Revolution is a fascinating and thoughtprovoking book and one that genuinely sheds new light on past debates about socialism that can help to inform the future.

de Chirico, Giorgio (1968). Hebdomeros: A Novel
. London, Owen.
Written in 1929, this is the great metaphysical painter's only novel. Though it is a rare example of surrealistic prose, De Chirico had, by the time he wrote it, rejected surrealism in painting and embraced a metaphysical classicism. The result is an original blending of styles, a series of vignettes and visions, surprisingly fresh after six decades, written with complete disdain for time and space. The eponymous Hebdomeros remembers, imagines and experiences images and events: he describes gods and innkeepers; is horrified of gastronomes ("he considered strawberries and figs the most immoral fruits"); attacks fashionable artists ("the living and walking symbol of human stupidity"); and invents scenarios that are often more like those of Lewis Carroll than of Huysmans or Homer. With subjects ranging from the thrill of everyday objects and sensations to the story of the prodigal son, de Chirico leaps wildly from non sequitur "Hebdomeros had never thought of associating the idea of hangovers with that of fish" to bizarre conceptions of "eternal noon." Replete with hallmark melancholy, foreboding and Freudian imagery - close, in fact, to a prose translation of De Chirico's early work on canvas - Hebdomeros is a fascinating look into a creative mind.

de Coppet, Laura and Alan Jones (1987). The Art Dealers: The Powers Behind the Scene Tell How the Art World Really Works
. New York, Three Rivers Press.
This book, a collection of reminiscences with fifty-five fine art dealers, works to correct misconceptions and shed light on the dealer's intricate, fascinating, and difficult profession.

De Forest, Robert and Bruce Nixon, et al. (2016). Roy De Forest
. Davis, Calif., John Natsoulas Publishing.
This publication includes an essay by Bruce Nixon as well as an essay by Vanessa Bolden and chronology by Andrew Rogers. This catalog also includes 56 beautiful color plates of the artists work. If all of Roy De Forest’s work could be assembled in one place, the output of an entire lifetime, in consecutive order: and each consigned, in order, to a single frame on a reel of film, thousands of frames, a home movie epic: projected then, like a movie, onto a darkened screen. What would be revealed? Something like this, perhaps: a protoplasmic blip squiggles suddenly and divides in the moist mud of paint, moves, divides again, divides, divides, crawls, flounders, crawls again, and then leaving behind the residue of its winding path, it emerges from its amniotic pool, rises up, looks around, crawls, stands tentatively, reaches out, grows, assumes shape, probes the landscape around it, develops legs, tails, ears, snout, eyes, red tab of tongue, reproduces, transforms, reproduces and transforms again, subdivides, sends forth new forms, travels.

de Jongh, Aimée. (2022). Days of Sand
. London, SelfMadeHero.
United States, 1937. In the middle of the Great Depression, 22-year-old photographer John Clark is brought in by the Farm Security Administration to document the calamitous conditions of the Dust Bowl in the central and southern states, in order to bring the farmers’ plight to the public eye. When he starts working through his shooting script, however, he finds his subjects to be unreceptive. What good are a couple of photos against relentless and deadly dust storms? The more he shoots, the more John discovers the awful extent of their struggles, coming to question his own role and responsibilities in this tragedy sweeping through the centre of the country.

De Quincey, Thomas and Barry Milligan (2003). Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings
. London; New York, Penguin Books.
In this remarkable autobiography, Thomas De Quincey hauntingly describes the surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings he took through London-and the nightmares, despair, and paranoia to which he became prey-under the influence of the then-legal painkiller laudanum. Forging a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, Confessions seamlessly weaves the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory, and imagination. First published in 1821, it paved the way for later generations of literary drug users, from Baudelaire to Burroughs, and anticipated psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious.

de Waroquier, Julie (2012). Rêvalités [Dreamalities]
. Ecuelles, France, KnowWare Editions.
Between dreams and rivalries, Julie de Waroquier creates pictures that look like they escaped from imagination, which disturb the categories of the material world. She explores the poetic value of the unconscious: each picture to be seen as the rapture of a dream come true and caught by the camera. She questions the world, showing what our society denies, everything that belongs to fiction, poetry and dreams, but that is part of our reality. With her pictures, she shows the limits of the post-modern pessimism, while reminding us of the value and the depth of the human being. That is why, through symbolism, she explores the invisible world residing in human minds and hearts. Fears, desires, and passions. Her approach is poetic. It raises questions about the world and we who inhabit it. She looks for meaning where our society wants us to see only nonsense or a vacuum.

Dear, Ian and M. R. D. Foot (2001). The Oxford Companion to World War II
. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
This work has more than 1,700 alphabetically arranged entries. More than 160 scholars contributed to the volume, most from universities in Britain. Entries range from 50 words to almost 30 pages on major countries. Almost every aspect of the war is covered, including its effect on civilians. The many biographical entries include both political and military persons. By far the most exhaustive essays are reserved for countries, all of which have standard subsections such as "Domestic Life, Economy, and War Effort" and "Government." The entry for the U.S. includes 27 pages of text and eight statistical tables. Briefer entries treat countries that were neutral during the war, for example, Sweden and Turkey.

In addition to statistics within entries, there are special tables accompanying articles. Unfortunately there is no index or table of contents for these tables. Cross-references within entries are noted by asterisks; there are limited see also references at the ends of articles. Like other Oxford companions, there is no index.

More than 100 line-drawn maps provide battle information as well as sites of death and concentration camps and the Manhattan Project. A separate section of color maps shows territorial changes between 1939 and 1945, the British and French empires, and other themes. A chronology begins in 1931 with Japanese troops occupying Manchuria and lists events under five geographic regions to the formal surrender of the Japanese on September 2, 1945. A list of place-name changes shows current and wartime names (e.g., Gdansk and Danzig).

Debord, Guy (2003). Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents
. Oakland, CA, AK Press.
Guy Debord (1931-1994) was the most influential member of the Situationist International, the avant-garde group that triggered the May 1968 revolt in France. His book The Society of the Spectacle is considered the most important theoretical work of the 20th century.

But while Debord's written work is some of the most notorious in the world of political and cultural radicality, deemed "the cornerstone cliche of postmodernism," his films have until now remained tantalizingly inaccessible.

After being withdrawn from circulation for nearly two decades (by Debord himself, to call attention to the 1984 assassination of the producer of the films, Gerard Lebovici), all six films were featured in a special "Guy Debord -Retrospective" at the 2001 Venice Film Festival and re--released in France in 2002.

The most famous of the films is Debord's cinematic adaptation of his own book, The Society of the Spectacle. As passages from the book are read in voiceover, the text is illuminated via direct illustration or various types of ironic contrast, by clips from Russian and Hollywood features (Battleship Potemkin, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Johnny Guitar, etc.), TV commercials, softcore porn, newsreels and documentary footage.

Some of the other films evoke Debord's adventures in the bohemian underworld of Paris during the 1950s, and in others Debord attacks the film medium itself, directly challenging the viewer by critiquing the traditional separation of spectacle and spectator.

Ken Knabb's translation of Debord's Complete Cinematic Works accompanies the long-awaited English versions of these films, which will be coming to the United States in 2003. The scripts are illustrated with 62 stills, and Debord's own annotations help elucidate the subtleties of these astonishing works, which are like nothing else in cinema history.

Debs, Eugene V. (2009). Writings of Eugene V. Debs: A Collection of Essays
. St Petersburg, Fla., Red and Black Publishers.
A collection of speeches, pamphlets and writings from Eugene V. Debs, from 1888 to 1925. Beginning his career as an organizer for the American Railway Union, Debs ran for President on the Socialist Party ticket 5 times, polling up to 6 percent of the total vote in 1912. Jailed in 1919 for an antiwar speech in Ohio, Debs ran for President from his jail cell in 1920, polling almost a million votes -- 3.4 percent of the total votes cast. Debs' skills were legendary, and with good reason. As you examine these writings the power of his language is evident. The speeches are well crafted, full of familiar ideas and images, and most of all, clearly spell out what Debs was trying to do.

Defoe, Daniel (2002). Moll Flanders
. New York, Modern Library.
Written in a time when criminal biographies enjoyed great success, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders details the life of the irresistible Moll and her struggles through poverty and sin in search of property and power. Born in Newgate Prison to a picatresque mother, Moll propels herself through marriages, periods of success and destitution, and a trip to the New World and back, only to return to the place of her birth as a popular prostitute and brilliant thief. The story of Moll Flanders vividly illustrates Defoe's themes of social mobilitity and predestination, sin, redemption and reward.

Defoe, Daniel and John J. Richetti (2001). Robinson Crusoe
. London, Penguin.
Daniel Defoe's most famous novel was published in 1719 with the full title, The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. It is based, in fact, upon the experiences of Alexander Selkirk who had run away to sea in 1704 and requested to be left on an uninhabited island to be rescued five years later. Defoe himself was in his late fifties when he wrote the book, which is often considered to be the first English novel. Crusoe ends up on a desert island in the manner of Selkirk.With only a few supplies from the ship he builds a house, a boat and a new life. His island is not wholly uninhabited, though, and there is the exciting but ominous presence of cannibals who Crusoe occasionally encounters and saves a native from. The latter becomes his servant, Man Friday. The crew of a mutinying ship finally rescue our hero, but it is his adventure on the island that interests us.

DeGroff, Dale and George Erml (2002). The Craft of the Cocktail: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Master Bartender, with 500 Recipes
. New York, Clarkson Potter/Publishers.
The Craft of the Cocktail, by Dale DeGroff, surpasses ordinary bar guides by not only providing directions for nearly every imaginable mixed drink but also serving as a trove of cocktail lore. After presenting a brief history of the bartender's art, DeGroff gives a history of each of the major liquors. He discusses drink-mixing techniques, including a thoughtful, dispassionate resolution of bartending's enduring dispute: shaking versus stirring. The inventory of mixed drinks is suitably comprehensive, and a concluding glossary aids readers with definitions of otherwise unfamiliar terminology.

Deitch, Kim and Simon Deitch (2002). The Boulevard of Broken Dreams
. New York, Pantheon Books.
One of the godfathers of American underground comics, Deitch grew up among animators, and this graphic novel is his twisted allegorical history of the rise and fall of American animation. Spanning from 1927 (when theatrical cartoons began to hit their stride) to 1993, it's crammed with intrigue, mysteries and Deitch's trademark exploding page layout. The story concerns a close-knit group of employees of a minor animation studio, Fontaine Talking Fables, but it's driven by a malevolent talking cat named Waldo who's just real enough to drive some of the cartoonists who created him into alcoholism and madness. (Waldo's been appearing in one form or another in Deitch's work for 35 years.) It helps to know a bit about animation history to catch some of the jokes (animator Winsor Newton and his creation "Milton the Mastodon", for instance, are clearly inspired by Winsor McCay and Gertie the Dinosaur). But even without this knowledge, the culture of the studios comes across clearly and the story's complicated chronology is remarkably engaging, albeit weirdly paced. Deitch has an odd, idiosyncratic visual style: his real-world characters are crudely two-dimensional, but they're drawn into distinctly un-cartoony tableaux of squalor and shadow. His funny animal characters, meanwhile, have all the squishable malleability of their silver-screen counterparts with an additional tinge of dark Surrealism.

Delany, Samuel R. (2001). Dhalgren
. New York, Vintage Books.
In Dhalgren, perhaps one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel "to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s" (Jonathan Lethem).

Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there. The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man - poet, lover, and adventurer - known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.

Delany, Samuel R. (2002). Nova
. New York, Vintage Books.
Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost sixteen light years from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of transportation is the most important factor of the 32nd century. And since Illyrion is the element most needed for space travel, Lorq von Ray is plenty willing to fly through the core of a recently imploded sun in order to obtain seven tons of it. The potential for profit is so great that Lorq has little difficulty cobbling together an alluring crew that includes a gypsy musician and a moon-obsessed scholar interested in the ancient art of writing a novel. What the crew doesn't know, though, is that Lorq's quest is actually fueled by a private revenge so consuming that he'll stop at nothing to achieve it. In the grandest manner of speculative fiction, Nova is a wise and witty classic that casts a fascinating new light on some of humanity's oldest truths and enduring myths.

Deleuze, Gilles (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990
. New York, Columbia University Press.
Deleuze (What Is Philosophy?) is not only one of the most influential of recent French philosophers but one of the most wide-ranging as well. The present volume, which consists mostly of interviews but also includes a few essays, describes his recent concerns. Deleuze gained attention with Anti-Oedipus, a radical criticism of psychoanalysis, written together with Felix Guattari. After an account of this work, Deleuze discusses his long collaboration with Guattari. Deleuze then shifts gears, and his analysis of the cinema, based on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, occupies center-stage. Deleuze's discussion of Michel Foucault (1926-84), a close friend, comes next; and the book concludes with a discussion of power in society, a main theme of Foucault's work. However diverse his interests, Deleuze has always remained a philosopher in the strict sense. The section of Deleuze's latest work that covers the history of philosophy, focusing on Leibniz, brings out this aspect of his thought.

Deleuze, Gilles (2006). Nietzsche and Philosophy
. New York, Columbia University Press.
Nietzsche and Philosophy has long been recognized as one of the most important accounts of Nietzsche's philosophy, acclaimed for its rare combination of scholarly rigour and imaginative interpretation. Yet this is more than a major work on Nietzsche: the book opened a whole new avenue in post-war thought. Here Deleuze shows how Nietzsche began a new way of thinking which breaks with the dialectic as a method and escapes the confines of philosophy itself.

DeLillo, Don (1972). End Zone
. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
Don DeLillo's second novel, a sort of Dr. Strangelove meets North Dallas Forty, solidified his place in the American literary landscape in the early 1970s. The story of an angst-ridden, war-obsessed running back for Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is a heady and hilarious conflation of Cold War existentialism and the parodied parallelism of battlefield/sports rhetoric. When not arguing nuclear endgame strategy with his professor, Major Staley, narrator Gary Harkness joins a brilliant and unlikely bunch of overmuscled gladiators on the field and in the dormitory. In characteristic fashion, DeLillo deliberately undermines the football-is-combat cliche by having one of his characters explain: "I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing." What remains is an insightful examination of language in an alien, postmodern world, where a football player's ultimate triumph is his need to play the game.

DeLillo, Don (1979). Running Dog
. New York, Vintage Books.
DeLillo's Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York city journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to "star" Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.

DeLillo, Don (1980). Ratner's Star
. New York, Vintage Books.
One of DeLillo's first novels, Ratner's Star follows Billy, the genius adolescent, who is recruited to live in obscurity, underground, as he tries to help a panel of estranged, demented, and yet lovable scientists communicate with beings from outer space. It is a mix of quirky humor, science, mathematical theories, as well as the complex emotional distance and sadness people feel. Ratner's Star demonstrates both the thematic and prosaic muscularity that typifies DeLillo's later and more recent works, like The Names (which is also available in Vintage Contemporaries).

DeLillo, Don (1989). Americana
. New York, N.Y., U.S.A., Penguin Books.
In search of his roots, a successful but unhappy TV executive takes off for the heartland of America."This first novel is peopled with characters alienated not only from one another, but from themselves. It has the smell of staleness and despair. It is also, with its deadly accurate observations, its veracious dialogue, and its consistency of view, brilliantly written," maintained Publishers Weekly.

DeLillo, Don (1989). Libra
. Boston, Mass., G.K. Hall.
DeLillo's ninth novel takes its title from Lee Harvey Oswald's zodiac sign, the sign of "balance." And, as in all his fiction (Running Dog, The Names, White Noise), DeLillo's perfectly realized aim is to balance plot, theme and structure so that the novel he builds around Oswald (an unlikely and disturbingly sympathetic protagonist) provokes the reader with its clever use of history, its dramatic pacing and its immaculate and detailed construction. The plot of the novel is history itselfand history, here, is a system of plots and conspiracies: the U.S. government has plotted to invade Cuba, and there are CIA agents who want retribution against President Kennedy for his halfhearted support of the Bay of Pigs operation; there are Cubans plotting revenge on JFK for the same reason and for, they fear, his plot to forge a rapprochement with Castro; there is a lone gunman, Oswald, who is conspired upon by history and circumstance, and who himself plots against the status quo. The novel bears dissection on many levels, but is, taken whole, a seamless, brilliant work of compelling fiction. What makes Libra so unsettling is DeLillo's ability to integrate literary criticism into the narrative, commenting throughout on the nature and conventions of fiction itself without disturbing the flow of his story. The characters are storytellers: CIA agents and Cuban immigrants retell old plots in their minds and write fantasy plots to keep themselves alive; Nicholas Branch, also of the CIA, has spent 15 years writing an in-house history of the assassination that will never uncover its deepest secrets and that in any case no one will read; Oswald, defecting to the Soviet Union, hopes to write short stories of contemporary American lifedyslexic, he is aware of words as pictures of themselves not simply as name tags for the material world. DeLillo interweaves fact and fiction as he draws us inexorably toward Dallas, November 22. The real people (Jack Ruby, Oswald, his mother and Russian wife) are retrieved from history and made human, their stories involving and absorbing; the imagined characters are placed into history as DeLillo imagines it to have come to pass. By subtly juxtaposing the blinding intensity of DeLillo's own crystal-clear, composite version of events against the blurred reality of the Zapruder film and other artifacts of the actual assassination, Libra ultimately becomes a comment on the entire body of DeLillo's work: Why do we understand fiction to reflect truth? Why do we trust a novelist to tell us the whole story? And what is the truth that fiction reveals?

DeLillo, Don (1991). Mao II
. New York, N.Y., U.S.A., Viking.
In MAO II, Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist. At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence when he gets the chance to aid a hostage trapped in a basement in war-torn Beirut, a nightscape of Semtex explosives. Gray's dangerous departure leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover - and Bill's. MAO II is a series of set-pieces built around the theme of searching for meaning in a post-modern world.

DeLillo, Don (2003). Cosmopolis: A Novel
. New York, Scribner.
It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end -- those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments. Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town. His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors -- his experts on security, technology, currency, finance and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to.

Dellinger, David (1996). From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter
. Yonkers, NY, Rose Hill Books.
A thorough, thoughtful memoir of a lifetime of service to the principles of nonviolence. Born into a wealthy Republican family, his father a respected Boston attorney, Dellinger became a rebel while still young by rejecting the comfortable path to success mapped out for him. From his first forays into hobo jungles and the hard life of the homeless--undertaken during the Depression while an undergraduate at Yale--he accepted any and all risks. With the onset of WW II, his experiences in Nazi Germany and the knowledge that the U.S. had supported Hitler's military buildup kept him from registering for the draft--an act of defiance that landed him in federal prison on two occasions during the war. Although subsequent antiwar activities included a now-famous role as one of the defendants in the Chicago Seven trial (stemming from protests during the 1968 Democratic Convention), Dellinger was also deeply involved in the civil-rights movement, and acted as editor/publisher of Liberation, for many years the primary outlet for dissenting American voices. His close contact with other activists--from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bayard Rustin to Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden--permits Dellinger to offer a frank review of their actions and motives, but his memoir is most remarkable for its depiction of the trials and tribulations of one man's life of conscience. At times more rambling than riveting; still, overall, an open, inspiring chronicle, a personal history of more than half a century of dissent in America.

Dellinger, David (1970). Revolutionary Nonviolence
. New York, Doubleday Anchor.
This collection of short essays from 1943-1969, many of which originally appeared in Liberation magazine, bear witness to a quarter century of pacifist and civil rights activity. An abiding humanism is central to Dellinger's tactics and tenets.

Denis, Nelson A. (2015). War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colonyl
. New York, NY, Nation Books.
A powerful, tragic, and untold history of U.S. intervention into the politics of Puerto Rico. From the U.S. invasion in 1898 to the modern day struggle for self-determination, Nelson Denis provides a panoramic history of an island once referred to by the New York Times as a significant "commercial value, it would be much better for Puerto Rico to come at once under the beneficent sway of these United States than to engage in doubtful experiments at self-government."

Based on oral histories, personal interviews, eyewitness accounts, congressional testimony, and recently de-classified FBI files, War Against All Puerto Ricans tells the story of a revolution integral to Puerto Rican history, but virtually unknown to the American public: the Puerto Rican independence revolt of 1950. After over fifty years of military occupation and colonial rule, the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico staged an unsuccessful armed insurrection against the United States. Violence swept through Puerto Rico: assassins were sent to kill President Harry Truman, gunfights roared in eight towns, police stations and post offices were burned down. In order to suppress the uprising, the U.S. Army deployed thousands of troops and bombarded two towns, marking the first time in history that the U.S. bombed its own citizens.

In telling this story, Nelson Denis traces the lives of the key figures that shaped, directed and destroyed the revolution, including Pedro Albizu Campos, president of the Nationalist Party and leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement, who was eventually imprisoned and died under mysterious circumstances. It is an unflinching account of the gunfights, prison riots, political intrigue, FBI and CIA covert activity, and mass hysteria that accompanied this tumultuous period in Puerto Rican history.

Dennett, Daniel Clement (1995). Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
. New York, Simon & Schuster.
Dennett, the author of Consciousness Explained (Little, Brown, 1991) and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, challenges us to examine Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection with renewed, emphatic vigor. Current controversies associated with the origin of life, sociobiology, punctuated equilibrium, the evolution of culture and language, and evolutionary ethics are investigated rigorously within the context of Darwinian science and philosophy. Dennett challenges the ideas of several imminent scientists, including Roger Penrose and Stephen Jay Gould, who, Dennett asserts, tend to limit the power or implications of Darwin's dangerous ideas. Gould's influential publications have contributed to a seriously distorted perception of evolutionary biology, according to Dennett. As he explores issues of morality and consciousness, Dennett essentially extends the theories of natural selection far beyond the biological disciplines. - Donald G. Frank, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta

Denning, Michael (1998). The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
. London; New York, Verso.
The American Thirties was a period of fertile political coalitions that drew largely from grass-roots labor and Civil Rights activism to give New Deal liberalism its left-wing content and orientation. Denning (American studies, Yale) is ostensibly concerned here with an examination of the cultural counterpart to that American popular front. The breadth of his study is stunning, ranging from the compositional innovations of Duke Ellington and blues popularizations of Josh White to the Marxist critical theorizing of Kenneth Burke, from Orson Welles's Shakespeare adaptations to Tillie Olson's feminist-labor stories. But this is not a work of popular history in any sense; it is a model of currents in cultural studies. Denning has produced a work that will sit alongside Warren Susman's Culture as History (Pantheon, 1985) as the deepest contemplation of Depression-era popular (and high) culture. - Library Journal

Desani, G. V. (2007). All About H. Hatterr
. New York, New York Review Books.
Wildly funny and wonderfully bizarre, All About H. Hatterr is one of the most perfectly eccentric and strangely absorbing works modern English has produced. H. Hatterr is the son of a European merchant officer and a lady from Penang who has been raised and educated in missionary schools in Calcutta. His story is of his search for enlightenment as, in the course of visiting seven Oriental cities, he consults with seven sages, each of whom specializes in a different aspect of "Living." Each teacher delivers himself of a great "Generality," each great Generality launches a new great "Adventure," from each of which Hatter escapes not so much greatly edified as by the skin of his teeth. The book is a comic extravaganza, but as Anthony Burgess writes in his introduction, "it is the language that makes the book. . . . It is not pure English; it is like Shakespeare, Joyce, and Kipling, gloriously impure."

Desmond, Adrian J. and James R. Moore (1991). Darwin
. New York, N.Y., Viking Penguin.
A sweeping biography in which Desmond (The Ape's Reflexion) and Moore (The Post-Darwinian Controversies) illustrate not only the familiar Darwinian thesis that life evolves--that it depends on an interplay of nature and culture and of inherited and acquired traits--but also the contemporary thesis that all science is in some way autobiographical. On a personal level, the authors say, Darwin developed from a pleasure-loving descendant of doctors and industrialists into an adventurer who undertook a five-year voyage around the world, and then into a recluse, a mad scientist racked by a mysterious illness, possibly psychogenic in origin, ruefully observing in his ten children the weaknesses he believed they had inherited by his marrying his first cousin. Professionally, Darwin was an observer and collector, interested in geology and zoology, famous in his own day for his tireless study of barnacles, worm castings, and pigeons, reluctant to theorize or to affirm the principles of evolution that had been evident to his grandfather Erasmus and were confirmed by most of the scientific community. Placing Darwin in context, Desmond and Moore demonstrate how social and political forces (the role of Malthus, the political radicals associated with the Westminster Review) contributed to his reading of nature. They also show Darwin participating in the professionalization of science, which developed from a collection of pious, wealthy gentlemen amateurs into various specialized and secularized disciplines with their own hierarchies and competition.

Desmond, Matthew (2016). Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
. New York, NY, Crown.
Through both personal stories and data, Desmond proves that eviction undermines self, family, and community, bearing down disproportionately hard on women with children. In Milwaukee, being behind on rent gives landlords the opening to serve an eviction notice, which leads to a court date. On the face of it, it may seem easy to side with the landlords—of course tenants should pay their rent. But as Evicted pulls back layer after layer, what's exposed is a cycle of hurt that all parties—landlord, tenant, city—inflict on one another. Whether readers agree with Desmond's conclusions for how to break this cycle in order to strengthen families and neighborhoods, it's obvious by the end of Evicted that there is no easy fix, and that people—some addicts, some criminals—will slip through the cracks. But it should be just as obvious that we must still try.

Deutscher, Isaac (1980). The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921; The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940 and The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929
. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of the great Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky although written over one half century ago remains the standard biography of the man.

Deutscher, Isaac (1967). Stalin: A Political Biography
. London, Oxford University Press.
The author makes no attempt to deny the enormous and notorious crimes that Stalin has committed. But in mitigation he pleads the revolutionary and military circumstances under which the Soviet dictator has had to make his way, and asks for recognition of Stalin's creative accomplishments in transforming Russia into a modern socialist state. In tracing Stalin's ideological development, his struggle to achieve supreme power and the uses to which he put that power, Mr. Deutscher covers no small part of the main currents of Soviet history. Nearly half the text deals with Russia's foreign relations and their reaction on her domestic affairs. Some critics allege that the author's views have been too much colored by Trotsky's interpretations. But in general this seems probably as adequate a biography as we shall have until the passage of time shall have lent us still truer perspective.

Devlin, Tom, editor (2015). Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels
. Montreal, Quebec, Drawn & Quarterly.
An illustrated history of Canadian micro-publisher Drawn & Quarterly. With hundreds of pages of comics by Drawn & Quarterly cartoonists, D+Q: 25 features new work by Kate Beaton, Chester Brown, Michael DeForge, Tom Gauld, Miriam Katin, Rutu Modan, James Sturm, Jillian Tamaki, Yoshihiro Tatsumi alongside rare and never-before-seen work from Guy Delisle, Debbie Drechsler, Julie Doucet, John Porcellino, Art Spiegelman, and Adrian Tomine, and a cover by Tom Gauld. Editor Tom Devlin digs into the company archives for rare photographs, correspondence, and comics; assembles biographies, personal reminiscences, and interviews with key D+Q staff; and curates essays by Margaret Atwood, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Lethem, Deb Olin Unferth, Heather O'Neill, Lemony Snicket, Chris Ware, and noted comics scholars.

Di Giovanni, Janine (2003). Madness Visible: A Memoir of War
. New York, Knopf.
"It is only possible to love one war," writes di Giovanni in this devastating memoir of the Balkans, quoting another intrepid war journalist, Martha Gellhorn. For Gellhorn, it was the Spanish Civil War; for di Giovanni, it's the series of conflicts that, since 1991, have consumed the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Expanded from a Vanity Fair article, this book presents a harrowing firsthand account of a region's spiral into madness. Di Giovanni, a senior foreign correspondent for The Times (London), was there almost from the beginning: she shuddered through the first icy winter of the Sarajevo siege (the longest in modern history); she sipped tea with Arkan, the dreaded leader of the ethnic-cleansing paramilitary Tigers; she stood shoulder to shoulder with Serb revolutionaries on "Day One" of the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic. The book deals primarily with di Giovanni's experiences covering the most recent war-1999's conflict in Kosovo-but it moves through time from the initial dissolution of Yugoslavia to the most recent, guardedly optimistic attempts at reconstruction. Di Giovanni provides ample historical context to the fighting (readers seeking to understand the separatist impulse of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church or Milosevic's "mother complex" have plenty of evidence to play with), but eventually, the names and dates of massacres and treaties pale next to the spectacle of pure horror: a dog trotting by with a human hand in its mouth; a crazed woman lying naked in full view of snipers, begging to be shot. Di Giovanni has written a tragic book that vividly memorializes the millions who suffered in the name of religion, nationality and ego.

di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi and Archibald Colquhoun (2007). The Leopard: With Two Stories and a Memory
. New York, Pantheon.
The Leopard is set in Sicily in 1860, as Italian unification is coming violently into being, but it transcends the historical-novel classification. E.M. Forster called it, instead, "a novel which happens to take place in history." Lampedusa's Sicily is a land where each social gesture is freighted with nuance, threat, and nostalgia, and his skeptical protagonist, Don Fabrizio, is uniquely placed to witness all and alter absolutely nothing. Like his creator, the prince is an aristocrat and an astronomer, a man "watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it." Far better to take refuge in the night skies. What renders The Leopard so beautiful, and so despairing, is Lampedusa's grasp of human frailty and his vision of Sicily's arid terrain--"comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung waves into frenzy." Though the author had long had the book in mind, he didn't begin writing it until he was in his late 50s. He died at 60, soon after it was rejected as unpublishable.

Archibald Colquhoun's lyrical translation also contains 70 more precious pages of Lampedusa--a memoir, a short story, and the first chapter of a novel. In Places of My Infancy the author warns that "the reader (who won't exist) must expect to be led meandering through a lost Earthly Paradise. If it bores him. I don't mind." Luckily, the reader does exist; even more luckily, boredom is not an option.

Di Prima, Diane (1998). Loba
. New York, Penguin Books.
A prolific writer generally associated with the Beat Generation, Di Prima deserves wider recognition. This epic poem, originally published in 1978 as a work in progress (eight parts) in a nicely illustrated edition, appears here in its completed form (16 parts) for the first time. For Di Prima the Loba, or she-wolf, represents a fundamental feminine principle, a powerful force underlying female sexuality. With reference to legendary figures including Eve, Helen of Troy, the Virgin Mary, and Kali, she explores this mysterious energy as the source of a unique female consciousness. The strength of these poems lies in Di Prima's ability to "make it new "-to synthesize mythological elements from a wide range of cultures into a unique vision based on Navajo wolf mythology.

Di Prima, Diane (1998). Memoirs of a Beatnik
. New York, Penguin.
Long regarded as an underground classic for its gritty and unabashedly erotic portrayal of the Beat years, Memoirs of a Beatnik is a moving account of a powerful woman artist coming of age sensually and intellectually in a movement dominated by a small confederacy of men, many of whom she lived with and loved. Filled with anecdotes about her adventures in New York City, Diane di Prima's memoir shows her learning to "raise her rebellion into art," and making her way toward literary success. Memoirs of a Beatnik offers a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumphs of the imagination.

Dick, Philip K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday.
By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. . . They even built humans. Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in. Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.

Dick, Philip K. (1993). Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
. New York, Vintage Books.
On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that 30 million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner is not a has-been but a never-was -- a man who has lost not only his audience but all proof of his existence. And in the claustrophobic betrayal state of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loss of proof is synonyms with loss of life. Taverner races to solve the riddle of his disappearance", immerses us in a horribly plausible Philip K. Dick United States in which everyone -- from a waiflike forger of identity cards to a surgically altered pleasure -- informs on everyone else, a world in which omniscient police have something to hide. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center.

Dick, Philip K. (1992). The Man in the High Castle
. New York, Vintage Books.
It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. the few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.

Dick, Philip K. (2000). The Philip K. Dick Reader
. New York, Citadel.
His religions, psychoses, divorces, and drug use aside, Philip K. Dick changed the face of American science fiction with his mind-bending writing. There may be readers who have only heard of him as the mind behind Blade Runner (based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). But even casual PKD fans should take a look at these 24 short stories, among them, Second Variety, from which the movie Screamers was made, and We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, basis of the Schwarzenegger film Total Recall. Other standouts include The Turning Wheel, The Last of the Masters, Tony and the Beetles, and The Minority Report. Readers will recognize PKD's trademark themes: capitalism and the American dream run amok, a disquieting loss of ability to distinguish friends from enemies, and humans versus machines.

Dick, Philip K. (1991). Ubik
. New York, Vintage Books.
Philip K. Dick's searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation is a tour de force of panoramic menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again.

Dickens, Charles (1992). Oliver Twist
. New York, Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
Novel by Charles Dickens, published serially from 1837 to 1839 in Bentley's Miscellany and in a three-volume book in 1838. The novel was the first of the author's works to depict realistically the impoverished London underworld and to illustrate his belief that poverty leads to crime. Written shortly after adoption of the Poor Law of 1834, which halted government payments to the poor unless they entered workhouses, Oliver Twist used the tale of a friendless child, the foundling Oliver Twist, as a vehicle for social criticism. While the novel is Victorian in its emotional appeal, it is decidedly unsentimental in its depiction of poverty and the criminal underworld, especially in its portrayal of the cruel Bill Sikes, who kills his kindly girlfriend Nancy for helping Oliver and who is himself accidentally hung by his own rope.

Dickens, Charles (1993). Nicholas Nickleby
. New York, Knopf: Distributed by Random House, Inc.
Novel by Charles Dickens, originally published in 20 monthly installments by "Boz" from 1838 to 1839 and published in book form in 1839. An early novel, this melodramatic tale of young Nickleby's adventures as he struggles to seek his fortune in Victorian England resembles The Pickwick Papers in structure, although not always in tone. Throughout, comic events are interspersed with Dickens' moving indictment of society's ill treatment of children and the cruelty of the educational system.

Dickens, Charles (2000). David Copperfield
. New York, Modern Library.
Hugely admired by Tolstoy, David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens's own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness, heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains. Praising Dickens's power of invention, Somerset Maugham wrote: "There were never such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens's exultant imagination, you can never quite forget them."

Dickens, Charles (2002). A Christmas Carol
. New York, HarperFestival.
An immediate bestseller when it was first published in December 1843, A Christmas Carol has endured ever since as a perennial Yuletide favorite. Charles Dickens's beloved tale about the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who comes to know the meaning of kindness, charity, and goodwill through a haunting Christmas Eve encounter with four ghosts, is a heartwarming celebration of the spirit of Christmas.

Dickens, Charles and Edward Chauncey Baldwin (1906). A Tale of Two Cities
. Chicago, Scott, Foresman & company.
Novel by Charles Dickens, published both serially and in book form in 1859. The story is set in the late 18th century against the background of the French Revolution. Although Dickens borrowed from Thomas Carlyle's history, The French Revolution, for his sprawling tale of London and revolutionary Paris, the novel offers more drama than accuracy. The scenes of large-scale mob violence are especially vivid, if superficial in historical understanding. The complex plot involves Sydney Carton's sacrifice of his own life on behalf of his friends Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette. While political events drive the story, Dickens takes a decidedly antipolitical tone, lambasting both aristocratic tyranny and revolutionary excess--the latter memorably caricatured in Madame Defarge, who knits beside the guillotine. The book is perhaps best known for its opening lines, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and for Carton's last speech, in which he says of his replacing Darnay in a prison cell, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."

Dickens, Charles and Charlotte Mitchell (2003). Great Expectations
. London, Penguin Books.
This was Dickens' second-to-last complete novel. It was first published as a weekly series in 1860 and in book form in 1861. Early critics had mixed reviews, disliking Dickens' tendency to exaggerate both plot and characters, but readers were so enthusiastic that the 1861 edition required five printings. Similar to Dickens' memories of his own childhood, in his early years the young Pip seems powerless to stand against injustice or to ever realize his dreams for a better life. However, as he grows into a useful worker and then an educated young man he reaches an important realization: grand schemes and dreams are never what they first seem to be. Pip himself is not always honest, and careful readers can catch him in several obvious contradictions between his truth and fantasies. Victorian-era audiences were more likely to have appreciated the melodramatic scenes and the revised, more hopeful ending. However, modern critics have little but praise for Dickens' brilliant development of timeless themes: fear and fun, loneliness and luck, classism and social justice, humiliation and honor. Some still puzzle over Dickens' revision that ends the novel with sudden optimism, and they suggest that the sales of Dickens' magazine All the Year Round, in which the series first appeared, was assured by gluing on a happy ending that hints Pip and Estella will unite at last. Some critics point out that the original ending is better because it is more realistic since Pip must earn the self-knowledge that can only come from giving up his obsession with Estella. However, Victorian audiences eagerly followed the story of Pip, episode by episode, assuming that the protagonist's love and patience would win out in the end. Modern editions contain both denouements for the reader to choose a preference.

Dickey, James (1967). Poems 1957-1967
. Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press.
Since World War II, in a wholesome display of the instinct for survival, American poetry has gradually returned to a kind of public usefulness. It is almost as though, thinking of the common reader, poets had recalled a warning from The Waste Land: "He's been in the Army four years, he wants a good time / and if you don't give it to him, there's others will." The generation of Lowell, Jarrell, and Wilbur, following that of Eliot, Pound and Stevens, represents a great step in the direction of that good time. Another generation of Waste Lands and Cantos and Harmoniums, and the audience for Poetry might have withered or scholared away entirely. Introducing the first book, "Into the Stone," John Hall Wheelock said: "James Dickey reveals himself as a poet concerned primarily with the direct impact of experience, the complex of sensations, feelings and responses involved when we are living something rather than thinking about it." The best of Dickey's poems achieve living characterizations reminiscent of Randall Jarrell's. Whether he is speaking in the first person, as in "The Shark's Parlor" and "Sustainment," or in an imaginary persona as in "Power and Light" and "Falling" (to cite only four of the wholly successful poems in the book), he convinces us of the human voice and predicament.

Dickie, John (2008). Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food
. New York, Free Press.
Everyone loves Italian food. But how did the Italians come to eat so well? The answer lies amid the vibrant beauty of Italy's historic cities. For a thousand years, they have been magnets for everything that makes for great eating: ingredients, talent, money, and power. Italian food is city food. With its delectable mix of vivid storytelling, groundbreaking research, and shrewd analysis, Delizia! is as appetizing as the dishes it describes. This passionate account of Italy's civilization of the table will satisfy foodies, history buffs, Italophiles, travelers, students -- and anyone who loves a well-told tale.

Dickinson, Emily and Thomas Herbert Johnson (1997). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
. Boston, Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Co.
Complete is the keyword here as this is the only edition currently available that contains all of Dickinson's poems. The works were originally gathered by editor Johnson and published in a three-volume set in 1955.

DiEugenio, James and Lisa Pease (2003). The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X
. Los Angeles, CA, Feral House.
Probing deep into four hidden histories, the material released should dispel any notions of 'lone nuts' or coincidence. These articles cut a clear path through the thick jungle of disinformation that has grown around these events and expose the truly hideous teratomas that thrive and bloom under the canopy of 'national security.'

Diski, Jenny (2009). The Sixties
. New York, Picador.
Like many other members of her generation, journalist and author Diski (On Trying to Keep Still) was drifting during the 1960s: she took drugs, had sex, and spent time in mental institutions in her attempts to subvert the Establishment. Cutting through the patina of nobility, nostalgia and idealism by which most of her fellows remember the time, Diski describes a counterculture ruled by intense self-absorption, a misguided, idealist attempt at radical reform that led directly to the corruption of the '80s. Diski brings as much objectivity to bear as she can, and her British perspective keeps her a few paces removed from the conflicts over civil rights and Vietnam. Her writing is pointed, holding many (herself included) to rigorous scrutiny, a cultural deconstruction that pushes back against the generally accepted, media-friendly, and very American image of the free-love '60s. Even readers familiar with the history will find her insights absorbing and eyebrow-raising. Though her conclusion falls short of condemnation-their motives were too pure for that-Diski makes succinct, clever and meaningful arguments exposing a self-mythologizing generation and its ultimate failures of both fore- and hindsight.

DK Publishing (1997). Chronicle of the Cinema
. New York, DK Pub.
This entry in the Dorling Kindersly "Chronicle" series is the most beautiful of the recent histories of the moving picture's first century. Within nine sections, each year begins with a page of significant events and a full-page photo or stunningly reproduced poster. Ensuing pages include black-and-white and color photos with text and smaller posters. In eight relatively brief special essays (covering sound, studios, color, Academy Awards, cameras, hit movies, music, and special effects), a great deal of information is covered in an even-handed manner. No genre is shortchanged; the international scene is covered; most, if not all, major stars and directors receive their due. General and film indexes make all this information easily accessible. For scholars it may be just a refresher, while for others, it will work as a handsome introduction. For both it will be an aesthetic delight.

DK Travel (2018). DK Eyewitness Travel Guide Canada
. New York, Penguin.
Discover Canada region-by-region, from rural coastal villages to flat prairies and teeming metropolises. Includes unique cutaways, floor plans, and reconstructions of must-see sights, plus street-by-street maps of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and other historic Canadian cities and towns.

DK Travel (2018). Top 10 Toronto
. New York, Penguin.
Pocket-sized guide to the best things in Toronto, packed with photos and maps, insider tips, and useful advice.

Dodd, David G. (commentary, editor); Alan Trist (editor) (2005). The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics: The Collected Lyrics of Robert Hunter and John Barlow, Lyrics to All Original Songs, with Selected Traditional and Cover Songs
. New York, Free Press.
Do you know the way to Fennario? Or wonder where the Nuthatch winters? What is the "Buck Dancer's Choice?" And where do the four winds dwell? If these are questions that leave you wondering then David Dodd's The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics may just be the skeleton key you've been looking for. Every Deadhead knows there is something profound hidden within their lyrics, even if most of the nuances go by unnoticed. Why are the obscure tales of their characters' (Jack Straw, Black Peter, August West, et al) trials and tribulations on the psychedelic Americana landscape so intriguing? What is the deal with the reoccurring imagery that popped in and out of their songs for decades (the crows, light and darkness, rolling rivers, gambling, playing cards, space, and, of course, roses)? It is clear the Grateful Dead's lyricists Robert Hunter and John Barlow tapped into the well of the collective subconscious for material, but rarely were any explanations provided. Fans were basically on their own to put the pieces together themselves, until now.

Doig, Jameson W. (2001). Empire on the Hudson: Entrepreneurial Vision and Political Power at the Port of New York Authority
. New York, Columbia University Press.
Doig traces the evolution of the Port Authority from the battles leading to its creation in 1921 through its conflicts with the railroads and its expansion to build bridges and tunnels for motor vehicles. Chronicling the adroit maneuvers that led the Port Authority to take control of the region's airports and seaport operations, build the largest bus terminal in the nation, and construct the World Trade Center, Doig reveals the rise to power of one of the world's largest specialized regional governments.

Donald, David Herbert (1995). Lincoln
. New York, Simon & Schuster.
The man who became our greatest president seems, from our vantage point, to have been an obvious choice for the job. But as esteemed Lincoln scholar Donald indicates in this magisterial yet intimate new biography, when people first began discussing the idea of Lincoln for president in 1860, the prairie lawyer had few of the usual qualifications for the office. There was no inevitability about his progress from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., a path Donald nonetheless follows in luxuriant detail. Writing as complete and as believable a psychological portrait as possible from this distance, the author tells of a man who started with few advantages but spent his whole life learning and growing. Ironically, Lincoln was by nature a reactor, not an instigator; he believed his existence was controlled by a higher authority. From the deprivations of his frontier childhood, Lincoln "carried away from his brief schooling the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal." Lincoln took considerable time, though, finding the niche whereby he could support himself; the legal field eventually drew him, and drew out his talents, as did his interest in politics. How he eventually became the leading Republican in Illinois, then president, and then successful commander-in-chief is a wondrous story, and it is brilliantly interpreted here.

Dondis, Donis A. (1973). A Primer of Visual Literacy
. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
Dondis provides an in-depth analysis of visual literacy and the development of visual awareness and experience from the point of birth through the then-innovative technology of television. Dondis describes the categorization of images along a popular to fine art scale and stresses the impact that photography has on visual learning.

Doniger, Wendy (2009). The Hindus: An Alternative History
. New York, Penguin Press.
Learned, fluent, and entertaining in spite of the complexity of this ambitious undertaking, Doniger is also controversial, a role she embraces, confident that fresh viewpoints are essential to understanding the worlds that shaped the Hindu tradition, and the ways Hindus shaped society. While Doniger delves deeply into the Vedas and the "two great poems," Ramayana and Mahabharata, she searches other spheres for clues to the lives of women and the lower castes. She also analyzes depictions of animals, which are central to Hindu tales and the "cultural ideal" of nonviolence. As she energetically parses the relationships between gods and humans, karma and renunciation, asceticism and sensuality, priests and kings, men and women, she is also seeking glimpses into everyday Hindu life during each of India's empires. Lavishly detailed, dynamic, and encompassing, Doniger's multidimensional history celebrates Hindu wisdom, diversity, and pluralism with knowledge, insight, and passion. --Donna Seaman

Donne, John and Charles M. Coffin (1967). The Complete Poetry of John Donne
. New York, Modern Library.
Donne's poetry embraces a wide range of secular and religious subjects. He wrote cynical verse about inconstancy, poems about true love, Neoplatonic lyrics on the mystical union of lovers' souls and bodies and brilliant satires and hymns depicting his own spiritual struggles. The two "Anniversaries" - "An Anatomy of the World" (1611) and "Of the Progress of the Soul" (1612)--are elegies for 15-year-old Elizabeth Drury.

Whatever the subject, Donne's poems reveal the same characteristics that typified the work of the metaphysical poets: dazzling wordplay, often explicitly sexual; paradox; subtle argumentation; surprising contrasts; intricate psychological analysis; and striking imagery selected from nontraditional areas such as law, physiology, scholastic philosophy, and mathematics.

Dorn, Edward (2013). Edward Dorn: Collected Poems
. Manchester, England, Carcanet Press Ltd.
Dorn was associated with Black Mountain poets Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, writers who, like Dorn, took their early bearings from Charles Olson.

For the reader coming to Dorn for the first time, and faced with a book this long and this unusual, there are three good places to start, none of which is the beginning: the love poems of Nine Songs (1965), the first book of his psychedelic cowboy epic Gunslinger (1968), and the posthumously published Chemo Sabe (2001), in which the dying poet describes his cancer against the background of the Clinton impeachment and American foreign policy adventures.

Dorn's poetry is many things at once: rangy and compressed, rough and refined, metaphysical and crude, slangy and grandiloquent, subtle and hectoring. He has recesses of esoteric knowledge yet his poems are riddled with pop culture, buzzing with philosophy, history, high and low politics, theology and economics. - Patrick McGuinness

Dorn, Edward (1989). Gunslinger
. Durham, [N.C.], Duke University Press.
The late Ed Dorn wrote a masterpiece with "Gunslinger", an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorn's narrating inquiry into the nature of the search.

Dorsey, Pat and Morningstar Inc. (2004). The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing: Morningstar's Guide to Building Wealth and Winning in the Market
. Hoboken, N.J., John Wiley.
"By resisting both the popular tendency to use gimmicks that oversimplify securities analysis and the academic tendency to use jargon that obfuscates common sense, Pat Dorsey has written a substantial and useful book. His methodology is sound, his examples clear, and his approach timeless." Christopher C. Davis Portfolio Manager and Chairman, Davis Advisors. Over the years, people from around the world have turned to Morningstar for strong, independent, and reliable advice. The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing includes stock research and investment strategies covering a wide range of stock-related topics.

Dos Passos, John (2000). Manhattan Transfer
. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co.
Considered by many to be John Dos Passos's greatest work, Manhattan Transfer is an "expressionistic picture of New York" (New York Times) in the 1920s that reveals the lives of wealthy power brokers and struggling immigrants alike. From Fourteenth Street to the Bowery, Delmonico's to the underbelly of the city waterfront, Dos Passos chronicles the lives of characters struggling to become a part of modernity before they are destroyed by it.

Dos Passos, John (2003). Novels, 1920-1925
. New York, N.Y., Library of America.
Written in the decade before the publication of his famous U.S.A. trilogy, the three early novels collected in this volume record the emergence of John Dos Passos as a bold and accomplished chronicler of the upheavals of the early 20th century.

Dos Passos drew upon his experiences as a volunteer ambulance driver serving near Verdun in writing One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1920), in which an idealistic young American learns of the fear, uncertainty, and camaraderie of war through his encounters with French soldiers and civilians. The unexpurgated text presented in this volume restores passages censored by the novel's original publisher. In Three Soldiers (1921) Dos Passos engaged in a deeper exploration of World War I and its psychological impact upon an increasingly fractured civilization. The novel depicts the experiences of Fuselli, a store clerk from San Francisco pathetically eager to win promotion; Chrisfield, an Indiana farmer who comes to hate army discipline; and Andrews, an introspective aspiring composer from New York, as they fight in the final battles of the war and then confront a world in which an illusory peace offers little respite from the dehumanizing servility and regimentation of militarized life.

Dos Passos described Manhattan Transfer (1925), a kaleidoscopic portrait of New York City in the first two decades of the 20th century, as "utterly fantastic and New Yorkish." Drawing on the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser and the modernism of James Joyce, the novel follows the rising and falling fortunes of more than a dozen characters as they move through a bewildering maze of tenements and skyscrapers in which Wall Street speculators, theatrical celebrities, impoverished immigrants, and anarchist rebels all strive to make sense out of the chaos of modern urban existence.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (2001). The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
. New York, Modern Library.
This collection, unique to the Modern Library, gathers seven of Dostoevsky's key works and shows him to be equally adept at the short story as with the novel. Exploring many of the same themes as in his longer works, these small masterpieces move from the tender and romantic White Nights, an archetypal nineteenth-century morality tale of pathos and loss, to the famous Notes from the Underground, a story of guilt, ineffectiveness, and uncompromising cynicism, and the first major work of existential literature. Among Dostoevsky's prototypical characters is Yemelyan in The Honest Thief, whose tragedy turns on an inability to resist crime. Presented in chronological order, in David Magarshack's celebrated translation, this is the definitive edition of Dostoevsky's best stories.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (1955). The Brothers Karamazov.
. Chicago, Britannica Great Books.
A passionate philosophical novel that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia. Dostoyevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, which inspired the main setting. Since its publication, it has been acclaimed all over the world by intellectuals as one of the supreme achievements in literature.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (1982). Crime and Punishment
. Pennsylvania, Franklin Library.
Novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, published in 1866 as Prestupleniye i nakazaniye. Dostoyevsky's first masterpiece, the novel is a psychological analysis of the poor student Raskolnikov, whose theory that humanitarian ends justify evil means leads him to murder a St. Petersburg pawnbroker. The act produces nightmarish guilt in Raskolnikov. The narrative's feverish, compelling tone follows the twists and turns of Raskolnikov's emotions and elaborates his struggle with his conscience and his mounting sense of horror as he wanders the city's hot, crowded streets. In prison, Raskolnikov comes to the realization that happiness cannot be achieved by a reasoned plan of existence but must be earned by suffering. The novel's status as a masterpiece is chiefly a result of its narrative intensity and its moving depiction of the recovery of a man's diseased spirit.

Doucet, Julie (2018). Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet
. Montréal, Drawn and Quarterly.
"These are among the most personal and powerfully intimate comics ever made. In their obsessive, utterly-fearless precision they draw us fully into Doucet’s private dream-vision, a gleefully-nihilistic, rageful and tenderly melancholic perspective on a dark and complicated world, the panels so dense with raw anthropomorphous energy they seem more like living organisms than lines on paper." ―Daniel Clowes.

Doucet, Julie (2006). My Most Secret Desire
. Montreal, Quebec. New York, Drawn & Quarterly.
Originally published in her comic book Dirty Plotte, then collected in 1995 (and slightly expanded for this edition), Doucet's adaptations of her dreams are some of her weirdest, strongest and funniest work. The French-Canadian artist writes in hilariously crumpled English (one story is called "An Happy Ending Nigthmare" [sic]) and draws herself as an abject, bedheaded mess ambling through a world littered with garbage. She doesn't seem to hold anything back from her subconscious - sexual fantasies, genital mutilations, messy apartments - they're all represented. One section is devoted to dreams in which she turns into a man; another long piece presents a series of dreams about having a baby (who variously has a tail or is a small cat or "wants to go back in"). Doucet's sense of humor is intimately tied to her cluttered but striking visual style: one of the book's funniest strips is a one-pager in which she imagines what it would be like to shave if she were a man, mimicking the facial contortions (and bloody nicks) of men looking into a mirror with a razor and concluding with an ear-to-ear grin as she yells, "Haaaaaaaaaaaa!!!" The more screwed-up her fantasies are, the more entertaining they get, and almost every panel is a scribbly, quirky delight.

Douglass, Frederick (1994). Autobiographies
. New York, Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the U.S. by Penguin Books.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., editor: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; My Bondage and My Freedom; Life and Times. For the first time in a single authoritative volume, the eloquent and revolutionary memoirs of the rebellious slave who galvanized the nation. Douglass's narratives, classics of American writing, stunned the world and have shocked and moved readers ever since. Fascinating firsthand accounts of slavery and abolitionism, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the emerging struggle for civil rights, they are above all the inspiring story of a self-made American: a slave who became an adviser to presidents, minister to Haiti, and one of the most powerful African-American voices in history.

Douglass, Frederick, John W. Blassingame, et al. (2001). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
. New Haven, Yale University Press.
In 1845, just seven years after his escape from slavery, the young Frederick Douglass published this powerful account of his life in bondage and his triumph over oppression. The book, which marked the beginning of Douglass's career as an impassioned writer, journalist, and orator for the abolitionist cause, reveals the terrors he faced as a slave, the brutalities of his owners and overseers, and his harrowing escape to the North. It has become a classic of American autobiography.
This edition of the book, based on the authoritative text that appears in Yale University Press's multivolume edition of the Frederick Douglass Papers, is the only edition of Douglass's Narrative designated as an Approved Text by the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions. It includes a chronology of Douglass's life, a thorough introduction by the eminent Douglass scholar John Blassingame, historical notes, and reader responses to the first edition of 1845.

Dower, John W. (2017). The Violent American Century: War and Terror since World War II
. Chicago, IL, Haymarket Books.
Addresses the U.S.-led transformations in war conduct and strategizing that followed 1945 -- beginning with brutal localized hostilities, proxy wars, and the nuclear terror of the Cold War, and ending with the asymmetrical conflicts of the present day. The military playbook now meshes brute force with a focus on non-state terrorism, counterinsurgency, clandestine operations, a vast web of overseas American military bases, and - most touted of all - a revolutionary new era of computerized "precision" warfare. By contrast to World War II, postwar death and destruction is comparatively small. By any other measure, it is appalling -- and shows no sign of abating.

Downey, Morgan (2009). Oil 101
. New York, NY, Wooden Table Press.
Since 1859, oil has enabled and defined our economic, social and political landscape. Throughout this time, abundant supply ensured low, stable prices and the inner workings of the oil industry remained relatively obscure. Following a century and a half of relative calm, oil prices have become much more volatile as the sustainability and growth of reliable supply sources have been brought into question. Downey provides the facts one needs to understand oil, from its history and chemistry, to refining, finished products, storage, transportation, alternatives, and how prices are determined every day in global wholesale oil markets and how those markets are connected to prices at the pump.

Dowson, John (1974). A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion, Geography, History, and Literature
. Ludhiana, Lyall Book Depot.
Originally published in 1894, Dowson's Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology remains the most comprehensive, authoritative, and concise work on the subject. It is to all intents and purposes a dictionary of Hinduism, and although there have been other larger and more diffuse attempts at the subject, none has been more successful. Revised over a number of years, this volume is a reprint of the seventh edition, considered to be the work at the height of its usefulness for the reader. Arranged alphabetically, the dictionary has hundreds of entries on a host of deities and myths, demons, etymology, ethics, esoteric writings, faith, fire, Hell, sacrifice, incarnations, mystic words, philosophy, revelation, sleep, the supreme soul, the three worlds and many other subjects, ending with a Sanskrit index and a general index.

Doyle, Arthur Conan (1960). The Complete Sherlock Holmes
. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday.
This volume, authorized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's estate, contains all 4 full-length novels and all 56 short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. At over a thousand pages, the weighty tome is a perfect gift for budding amateur sleuths, and it is an ideal companion for a long stay on a desert island (or a leisurely trip through the English countryside). As the reader wades past the tense introductions of A Study in Scarlet and moves towards such classic tales as The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Adventure of the Speckled Band, and The Final Problem, she is sure to draw her own conclusions about Holmes's veiled past and his quirky relationship with his "Boswell", Watson. Doyle never revealed much about Holmes's early life, but the joy of reading the complete Holmes is assembling the trivia of each story into something like a portrait of the detective and his creator. By the end of the long journey through London and across Europe, with a long stopover at Reichenbach Falls), one is apt to have found a friend for life. - Patrick O'Kelley

Draper, Hal (1977). Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
. New York, Monthly Review Press.

Dreiser, Theodore (2003). An American Tragedy
. New York, Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the U.S. by Penguin Putnam.
A tremendous bestseller when it was published in 1925, An American Tragedy is the culmination of Theodore Dreiser's elementally powerful fictional art. Taking as his point of departure a notorious murder case of 1910, Dreiser immersed himself in the social background of the crime to produce a book that is both a remarkable work of reportage and a monumental study of character. Few novels have undertaken to track so relentlessly the process by which an ordinary young man becomes capable of committing a ruthless murder, and the further process by which social and political forces come into play after his arrest.

In Clyde Griffiths, the impoverished, restless offspring of a family of street preachers, Dreiser created an unforgettable portrait of a man whose circumstances and dreams of self-betterment conspire to pull him toward an act of unforgivable violence. Around Clyde, Dreiser builds an extraordinarily detailed fictional portrait of early twentieth-century America, its religious and sexual hypocrisies, its economic pressures, its political corruption. The sheer prophetic amplitude of his bitter truth-telling, in idiosyncratic prose of uncanny expressive power, continues to mark Dreiser as a crucially important American writer. An American Tragedy, the great achievement of his later years, is a work of mythic force, at once brutal and heartbreaking.

Dresch, Paul (2000). A History of Modern Yemen
. Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press.
Yemen's modern history is unique and deserves to be better understood. While the borders of most Middle East states were defined by colonial powers after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a single Yemeni state was not formed until 1990. In fact, much of Yemen's twentieth-century history was taken up constructing such a state, forged after years of civil war. The book is augmented by illustrations, maps and a detailed chronology.

Dreyfuss, Robert (2005). Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam
. New York, Metropolitan Books.
Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with dozens of policy makers and CIA, Pentagon, and foreign service officials, Robert Dreyfuss follows the trail of American collusion from support for the Muslim Brotherhood in 1950s Egypt, to links with Khomeini and Afghani jihadists, to longstanding ties between radical Islamists and the leading banks of the West. The result is as tragic as it is paradoxical: originally deployed as pawns to foil nationalism and communism, extremist mullahs and ayatollahs now dominate the landscape, thundering against freedom of thought, science, women's rights, secularism--and their former patron. Chronicling a history of double-dealing, cynical exploitation, and humiliating embarrassment that continues to this day, Devil's Game reveals a pattern that, far from furthering democracy or security, ensures a future of blunders and blowback.

Drnaso, Nick (2018). Sabrina
. Montreal, Drawn and Quarterly.
When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens. An indictment of our modern state, Drnaso contemplates the dangers of a fake news climate. The follow-up to Nick Drnaso’s Beverly, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens. Presenting an indictment of our modern state, Drnaso contemplates the dangers of a fake-news climate. Timely and articulate, Sabrina leaves you gutted, searching for meaning in the aftermath of disaster.

Drury, Shadia B. (1988). The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss
. New York, St. Martin's Press.
This book explores the political thought of Leo Strauss, a philosopher most noted for playing a key role in neoconservative thought in America. Drury explores Strauss's thought and its role in American politics, exposing what she argues are the elitist, nearly authoritarian strains within it and those who follow it. A polemic against Strauss and his followers, the original edition has won Drury little friendship from the neoconservative camp and this revised edition with a new introduction is sure to continue the controversy among political theorists.

Drury, Shadia B. (1994). Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics
. New York, St. Martin's Press.
Alexandre Kojve (1902-1968) was Hegel's most famous interpreter, reading Hegel through the eyes of Marx and Heidegger simultaneously. The result was a wild if not hypnotic mlange of ideas. In this book, Drury reveals the nature of Kojve's Hegelianism and the extraordinary influence it has had on French postmodernists on the left (Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, and Michel Foucault) and American postmodernists on the right (Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and Francis Fukuyama). According to Drury, Kojve followed Hegel in thinking that reason has triumphed in the course of history, but it is a cold, soulless, instrumental, and uninspired rationalism that has conquered and disenchanted the world. Drury maintains that Kojve's conception of modernity as the fateful triumph of this arid rationality is the cornerstone of postmodern thought. Kojve's picture of the world gives birth to a dark romanticism that manifests itself in a profound nostalgia for what reason has banished - myth, madness, disorder, spontaneity, instinct, passion, and virility. In Drury's view, these ideas romanticize the gratuitous violence and irrationalism that characterize the postmodern world.

Du Bois, W. E. B. and David L. Lewis (1992). Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
. New York, Atheneum.
Du Bois took a revolutionary new look at Reconstruction in the 1930's, providing a fresh view that went largely ignored until recent books by Foner and Litwack resuscitated this overlooked period in American history. Du Bois summons up his great intellectual bearing to illustrate that from being the unmitigated failure that Reconstruction has long been portrayed as, it was the crucible of civil rights legislation, a time when there was very definitely hope that America would redefine itself along more egalitarian lines. While the book deals predominately with the black man's point of view, Du Bois offers a principled Marxist view of labor relations at the time, and how the leading Radical Republicans tried to come to terms with the new industrial society that was emerging in America.

Du Bois was a very compelling writer, he cuts through the layers of history to reveal the soul of the persons most greatly affected by Reconstruction. He charts the troubled waters of the Civil War, and the Presidential attempts at Reconstruction which followed the Union victories in the South. He provides a candid view of Lincoln, who struggled with his own prejudices, but eventually came to accept the black man because of the pivotal role he played in the war.

Dube, Wolf Dieter (1973). Expressionism
. New York, Praeger Publishers.

Dufty, David F. (2012). How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick's Robotic Resurrection
. New York, Henry Holt and Co.
The stranger-than-fiction story of the creation and loss of an artificially intelligent android of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Readers get a fascinating inside look at the scientists and technology that made this amazing android possible.

Duggan, Christopher (2014). A Concise History of Italy, 2nd Edition
. Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press.
Duggan's acclaimed introduction to Italy charts the country's history from the fall of the Roman Empire in the west to the present day and surveys the difficulties Italy has faced during the last two centuries in forging a nation state. Duggan weaves together political, economic, social and cultural history, and stresses the alternation between materialist and idealist programmes for forging a nation state. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to offer increased coverage of nineteenth and twentieth-century Italy, as well as a new section devoted to Italy in the twenty-first century.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (2015). An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
. Boston, Beacon Press.
An Indigenous Peoples' History pulls up the paving stones and lays bare the deep history of the United States, from the corn to the reservations. If the United States is a 'crime scene,' as she calls it, then Dunbar-Ortiz is its forensic scientist. A sobering look at a grave history. -Vijay Prashad

Durrenmatt, Friedrich (1991). The Physicists
. New York, Grove Weidenfeld.
The Physicists is a provocative and darkly comic satire about life in modern times, by one of europe's foremost dramatists and author of the internationally celebrated The Visit. The world's greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Mobius, is in a madhouse, haunted by recurring visions of King Solomon. He is kept company by two other equally deluded scientists: one who thinks he is Einstein, another who believes he is Newton. It soon becomes evident, however, that these three are not as harmleely lunatic as they appear. Are they, in fact, really mad? Or are they playing some murderous game, with the world as the stake? For Mobius has uncovered the mystery of the universe - and therefore the key to its destruction - and Einstein and Newton are vying for this secret that would enable them to rule the earth. Added to this treacherous combination is the world renowned pscychiatrist in charge, the hunchbacked Mathilde von Zahnd, who has some diabolical plans of her own. With wry, penetrating humor, The Physicists probes beneath the surface of modern existence and, like Marat/Sade, questions whether it is the mad who are the truly insane.

Dugan, Alan (2001). Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry
. New York, Seven Stories Press.
In this complete collection that tracks his 40-year career and its shifting concerns, Alan Dugan -- winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Prix de Rome from the National Institute of Arts and Letters -- adds to his legend with nearly three dozen new poems. Dugan spent World War II in the Army Air Corps, and several of his early poems are wry testaments to the somber business of modern warfare. Others plumb the depths of existential angst with bracing black humor and brio.

Duiker, William J. (2000). Ho Chi Minh
. New York, Hyperion.
Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) fought for half a century to free Vietnam from foreign domination, and the story of his life illuminates the ongoing struggle between colonialism and nationalism that still shapes world history. William J. Duiker, who served in Saigon's U.S. embassy during the Vietnam War, spent 30 years delving into Vietnamese and European archives, as well as interviewing Minh's surviving colleagues, in order to write this definitive biography. The son of a civil servant from a traditionally rebellious province, the future president of North Vietnam was known for more than 20 years as Nguyen That Thanh. It was under this name that he founded the Vietnamese Communist Party, having concluded after reading Lenin's analysis of imperialism that revolutionary Marxism was the most effective tool to achieve Vietnam's independence. He spent 30 years in exile, cementing his communist ties in Moscow and working with Vietnamese rebels from a base in China, before assuming the name Ho Chi Minh in 1942, when the forces unleashed by World War II seemed to be clearing the way for Vietnamese liberation. French intransigence and American anti-communism would delay the emergence of an independent, united Vietnam for another 30 years, but Ho became an icon who inspired the communist North and the Southern Vietcong to keep fighting. Focusing almost exclusively on political events and ideological debates, Duiker depicts Ho as a nationalist first and foremost, but also as a convinced (though pragmatic) Marxist who believed socialism would help his country modernize and correct ancient inequities.

Dumas, Alexandre (1999). The Three Musketeers
. New York, Modern Library.
Novel by Alexandre Dumas pere, published in French as Les Trois Mousquetaires in 1844. A historical romance, it relates the adventures of four fictional swashbuckling heroes who lived during the reigns of the French kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV. At the beginning of the story D'Artagnan arrives in Paris from Gascony and becomes embroiled in three duels with the three musketeers Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. The four become such close friends that when D'Artagnan serves an apprenticeship as a cadet, which he must do before he can become a musketeer, each of his friends takes turns sharing guard duty with him. The daring escapades of the four comrades are played out against a background of court intrigue involving the powerful Cardinal Richelieu. Dumas wrote two sequels that concerned D'Artagnan and the three musketeers: Vingt Ans apres (Twenty Years After, 1845) and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ou dix ans plus tard (The Vicomte de Bragelonne; or, Ten Years Late, 1848-50).

Dumas, Bob A. and John E. McCarthy (2007). Transition to Higher Mathematics: Structure and Proof
. Boston, McGraw-Hill.
This text is designed to help students develop the abstract mathematical thinking skills necessary for success in later upper-level majors math courses. As lower-level courses such as calculus rely more exclusively on computational problems to service students in the sciences and engineering, math majors increasingly need clearer guidance and more rigorous practice in proof technique to prepare themselves for advanced math curriculum. With their friendly writing style Bob Dumas and John McCarthy teach students how to organize and structure their mathematical thoughts, how to read and manipulate abstract definitions, and how to prove or refute proofs by effectively evaluating them. A wealth of exercises give students the practice they need.

Duncan, David Ewing (1998). Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year
. New York, Bard.
The days march along, one by one, oblivious of the human effort to impose order on them--chopping them into seconds, minutes and hours and then grouping them into weeks, months, years, decades, centuries and millennia. The effort stretches from the markings someone made on an eagle bone about 13,000 years ago to the oscillations of the cesium clock. And still we have to tinker to make the calendar fit the tropical or solar year of 365.242199 days, or 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. Duncan traces the story engagingly, telling of calendars based on the seasons of the Nile and the cycles of the moon, of the Julian and Gregorian reforms and of the consternation that ensued in England when the nation finally switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, necessitating a correction that took 11 days from the "Old Style" calendar and made many people believe their lives had been shortened. As The Ladies Diary: or, Woman's Almanack reminded its readers: "1752 September hath only XIX Days in this Year" because "The Account of Time has each Year run a-head of Time by the Sun." It still does, by about 25.96 seconds a year, which means that tinkering will continue.

Duncan, Robert Edward (1969). The Opening of the Field
. London, Cape.
This was Robert Duncan's first major collection - originally brought out in 1960. In it Duncan introduced his "Structures of Rime," the open series he has since continued in his two subsequent collections, "Roots and Branches" (1964) and "Bending the Bow" (1968), and in which he affirms his belief in the universal integrity of the poem itself in the living process of language.

Duncan, Robert Edward (1969). Roots and Branches: Poems
. New York, New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Nominally attached to the Black Mountain school, Robert Duncan is indebted primarily to the technique of Williams and superficially to the esthetics of Olson. Covered with the measles of multiple allusions, haphazardly read in everything from the classics to the Surrealists or the theosophists, Duncan's intellectual growth resembles a convolvulus spreading its tendrils across a floating world, catching a bit of information here, an insight there.

In much the same way, as man can be considered always more than the sum of his thoughts, so the majority of poems in Roots and Branches appear to be always more than the poems themselves, each of them part of an evolving process, anti-scientific in temperament, yet strangely scientific in method. That is to say, all statements remain more or less relative, awaiting the "corroboration" of further statements, and just so all significations seem tentative. Thus emerging only to be expunged, Robert Duncan's microscopic particulars extend backwards and forwards, within and without, entertaining a moment-by-moment accretion and subtraction. On the subjective level, a kind of libidinous drift; on the objective one, a philosophic monologue.

Duncan, Robert Edward (1971). Bending the Bow
. London, Cape.
Duncan's peers, who included Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley, along with the many dynamic literary movements he was involved in, helped shape his poetics. However, his spiritual upbringing was also deeply influential. After Duncan's mother died during his birth, he was adopted by a couple who practiced an occult religion known as theosophy. With reincarnation among its articles of faith, theosophy sees every event in life as cosmologically significant and unified with all others. The influence is evident in much of his work, including the title poem of Bending the Bow and selections from the series "Passages."

Duncombe, Stephen (2002). Cultural Resistance Reader
. London; New York, Verso.
From the Diggers seizing St. Georges Hill in 1649 to Hacktivists staging virtual sit-ins in the 21st century, from the retributive fantasies of Robin Hoods to those of gangsta rappers, culture has long been used as a political weapon. This expansive and carefully crafted reader brings together many of the classic texts that help to define culture as a tool of resistance. With illuminating introductions throughout, it presents a range of theoretical and historical writings that have influenced contemporary debate, providing tools for the reader's own interventions. In these pages can be found the work of Karl Marx, Matthew Arnold, Antonio Gramsci, C.L.R. James, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Virginia Woolf, Mikhail Bakhtin, Stuart Hall, Christopher Hill, Janice Radway, Eric Hobsbawm, Abbie Hoffman, Mahatma Gandhi, Dick Hebdige, Hakim Bey, Raymond Williams, Robin Kelley, Tom Frank and more than a dozen others - including a number of new activists/authors published here for the first time.

Dunning, John Harris and Michael Kennedy (2018). Tumult
. London, SelfMadeHero.
Adam Whistler has it all, so why does he feel so empty? When he breaks his ankle on a Mediterranean holiday he impulsively ends his relationship, toppling himself into emotional free fall.

At a house party he meets—and beds—the lovely Morgan. But when he encounters her a few days later she has no memory of him and introduces herself as Leila. Leila has dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personalities.

People are being murdered and Leila fears that Morgan, the personality Adam first met, is the killer. He doesn’t believe that any part of her is capable of it, so he sets out to unravel the mystery of her past. Tumult is a stylish, contemporary psychological thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith.

Duras, Marguerite (1976). India Song
. New York, Grove Press: distributed by Random House.
Unseen voices narrate this story of the affair between the haunting Anne-Marie Stretter and the disgraced French vice-consul in Lahore. In the India of 1937, with the smell of the laurels and leprosy permeating the air, the characters perform a dance of doomed love to the strains of a dying colonialism.

Duras, Marguerite (1990). Four Novels
. New York, Grove Weidenfeld.
Four novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, Ten-thirty on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas.

Duras, Marguerite and Joël Farges (1987). Marguerite Duras
. San Francisco, City Lights Books.

Durgnat, Raymond (1974). Jean Renoir
. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Beneath his grieved and echoing humanity, the mature Renoir is often exactly what he calls himself, "a child of the belle epoque," full of dreamlike childlike insouciance, of anarchist sympathies (in at least four of his films, by my count, the "murderers" go free), of penchants for amateur theatricals, for spyglasses, for the raw and underlying decorum of seas and rivers, even floods (it seems only fitting that the first of the films he made in Hollywood was called Swamp Water). What Death and God are for Bergman, Nature and Love are for Renoir. His is a landscape of transformations, but without theology, without dogma, a humanist and pantheist landscape, contradictory, persevering, hedonistic, invincibly tolerant. One remembers especially the quick triumphant endings (Dalio and Gabin plunging across the snow under the shadow of the German border patrol), or those dying away on a melodious comic diminuendo (Boudou the unlikely bridegroom mindlessly upsetting the boat that was carrying him and his bride to respectability, ungraciously sharing scraps of his beggar's feast with a donkey, resuming his destiny as king of the road - as wry and spry and magical an ending as any I know in the history of films). -- Robert Mazzocco, NYRB

Durgnat, Raymond (1999). WR: Mysteries of the Organism
. London, British Film Institute.
In Dusan Makajev's controversial and explicit WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), 'WR' is Wilhelm Reich , maverick intellectual, sexual pioneer and theorist of 'Orgone energy', but also 'world revolution'. WR stages an encounter between psychotherapy and Marxism, sexual permissiveness and socialism. Juxtaposing hippie America and cold war Yugoslavia, it's a film of ideas and sensations which speaks urgently to the contemporary world.

Raymond Durgnat thinks that WR is an adventure playground, a 'jungle gym' which the film's spectators enter and interact with. It's intellectual cinema, and a film which prophesied the horror of the conflict and slaughter in what is now the former Yugoslavia. One of the last published works of a legendary film critic.

Duriez, Colin (2000). The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia: A Complete Guide to His Life, Thought, and Writings
. Wheaton, Ill., Crossway Books.
Essential information on C.S. Lewis's life, relationships, and beliefs, as well as the main themes and characters in his work. Substantial essays on the major aspects of Lewis's life, a complete list of his works, and a guide that categorizes many of the related articles is also included.

Dyer, Geoff (1996). But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz
. New York, North Point Press.
In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skillfully evokes the music and the men who shaped modern jazz. Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonious Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of But Beautiful, and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician's style.

Dylan, Bob (2004). Chronicles: Volume One
. London; New York, Simon & Schuster.
By turns revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities -- smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book's side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

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