KWSnet

Also:   Books    |    Movies    |    Music                                          

Recommended Books: M (author sort)

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

MacBean, James Roy (1975). Film and Revolution. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

A post Bazin aesthetics of the cinema grounded in Marxist ideology. the longest part of the book, devoted to Jean-Luc Godard, shows how godard, sometimes working alone, sometimes in collaboration with Gorin and the Dziga Vertov group, hopes to make his contribution to the revolution of society by inventing a revolutionary cinema. the author offers intelligent, probinjg analyses of Godard's major films; Two or Three Things I Know About Her, La Chhinoise, Made in USA, Weekend, Le Gai Savir, One Plus One, Wind from the East, British Sounds, Tout Va Bien, and others. Part II, "Film and Revolution on Many Fronts," turns to other film-makers and contains critiques of films by Solanas, Kramer, Rossellini, Makavejev, Ophuls and Harris, and Petri. In Part II MacBean examines the semiology of the cinema proposed by Chrisitan Metz, attacks its theoretical foundations, and arguse that Metz, by attempting to ignore ideology, has succeeded only in producing a "tedious taxonomy of the banal." After pointing out that our art forms must change with our politics, MacBean attempts to demystify the class ideology perpetuated by the mass media. Illustrated with more than 50 black-and-white stills.

Macdonald, Ross (1996). Black Money. New York, Knopf.
When Lew Archer is hired to get the goods on the suspiciously suave Frenchman who's run off with his client's girlfriend, it looks like a simple case of alienated affections. Things look different when the mysterious foreigner turns out to be connected to a seven-year-old suicide and a mountain of gambling debts.

Macdonald, Ross (1996). The Chill. New York, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard.
"The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure," wrote Ross Macdonald in his 1981 Self-Portrait. Nowhere in his work does he better demonstrate this principle than in The Chill, first published in 1964. The plot is one of Macdonald's most masterfully constructed. Private detective Lew Archer is engaged to trace a missing spouse, who has vanished--apparently of her own free will--only a day into her honeymoon. Archer begins pulling at the threads of the case, and by page 25 they're already starting to reveal a deeper, darker story involving two murders 20 years apart. Macdonald's economical prose propels the reader forward from one action-packed scene to another, while the scenes in turn pile up to paint a rich, complex picture of buried memories, anguished relations between parents and children, the arrogance of the rich, and the search for identity. Then, at the end, one of the author's best surprise reversals changes the picture's colors entirely.

Macdonald, Ross (1996). The Drowning Pool. New York, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard.
The Drowning Pool, first published in 1950, is the second Lew Archer novel. It opens in classic hard-boiled fashion, with a well-dressed woman hesitantly engaging Archer's services at his L.A. office. Soon he's digging up secrets in her oil-rich hometown, and the themes that preoccupied Macdonald throughout his career begin to emerge: tormented families, buried secrets that fester through multiple generations, environmental destruction, concealed paternity, and the brutal contrast between rich and poor. Macdonald's later novels--including The Galton Case (1959), The Chill (1964), and The Underground Man (1971)--showed increased maturity and a tone less tied to tradition, but The Drowning Pool returns to the virtues that are the hallmarks of Mcdonald's work: complex and compelling plotting, psychological depth, just enough mayhem, and highly economical prose that routinely rises to something near poetry

Macdonald, Ross (1996). The Galton Case. New York, Vintage Books.
The Galton Case, published in 1959, was Ross Macdonald's breakthrough book. Its predecessors are craftsmanlike, highly literate, hard-boiled detective stories; The Galton Case and most of its successors are literature that happens to inhabit the detective-story form. For Macdonald the man, Galton was the first book in which he explored his deepest personal concerns (he was the child of a broken home who was passed from relative to relative in his youth). For readers, it's the book in which he first perfected the balancing act that became his trademark: a tightly written page-turner that also probes profound themes and frequently rises to something like poetry.

The tale opens with detective Lew Archer visiting the swanky offices of a lawyer acquaintance, who engages him to hunt for a long-missing scion of the rich Galton family. Though the case seems fruitless, Archer begins digging. Soon a seemingly unrelated crime intrudes--but Archer tells us, "I hate coincidences." As he roams California (and, briefly, Nevada) following leads and hunches, he gradually uncovers a long-buried tale of deception, hatred, and the power of illusion. As usual, Macdonald can accomplish more with three lines of dialogue and a simple description than most writers can in three pages. The connection between Archer's two cases finally clicks about three-quarters of the way through the book, and the moving denouement, with its final plot twist, takes place in a hardscrabble Canadian boarding house much like those in which Macdonald spent parts of his childhood.

Macdonald, Ross (1998). The Wycherly Woman. New York, Vintage Books.
Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired Archer to find her. That was plenty of time for a young girl who wanted to disappear to do so thoroughly--or for someone to make her disappear. Before he can find the Wycherly girl, Archer has to deal with the Wycherly woman, Phoebe's mother, an eerily unmaternal blonde who keeps too many residences, has too many secrets, and leaves too many corpses in her wake.

Macdonald, Ross (1998). The Zebra-Striped Hearse. New York, Vintage Books.
A classic Lew Archer mystery from a Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master. Archer is on a long, wild journey up and down the coasts of California and Mexico trying to find the killer of two--more or less--innocent people. The zebra-striped hearse is just another hazy piece in this sinister puzzle facing the intrepid gumshoe.

Machado, Antonio and Alan S. Trueblood (1982). Selected Poems. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Machado was perhaps the most "poetic" among all the poets from Spain's "Generation of 98" movement. His are simple poems of love, the countryside, clouds, mountains, rivers, about the absence of Leonor, his beloved wife, who died early. This is the Spain which suffers in silence, without the tormented and exhalted screams of other poets, like Leon Felipe. The small towns and cities where Machado spent most of his life come alive in his easy, lucid verses. As said before, the absence of Leonor covers his poetry with the longing of persons, places and things long gone. Not experimental, urban, or visionary poetry: only the intelligent reflections of the poet on his surroundings, past and present.

Machiavelli, Niccolò and Peter Constantine (2007). The Essential Writings of Machiavelli. New York, Modern Library.
The volume features essays that appear in English for the first time, such as "A Caution to the Medici" and "The Persecution of Africa." Also included are complete versions of the political treatise, The Prince, the comic satire The Mandrake, The Life of Castruccio Castracani, and the classic story "Belfagor", along with selections from The Discourses, The Art of War, and Florentine Histories. Augmented with useful annotations and cross-references. Machiavelli's stress on political necessity rather than moral perfection helped inspire the Renaissance by renewing links with Thucydides and other classical thinkers. This new collection provides deeper insight into Machiavelli’s personality as a writer, thus broadening our understanding of him.

Macintyre, Ben (1997). The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
Arthur Conan Doyle fictionalized him as the superhuman Professor Moriarty, and the popular press luridly chronicled his daring heists, though the police never managed to convict him of anything major until he was nearly 50. Forgotten since his 19th-century heyday, master thief Adam Worth (1844-1902) gets a contemporary dusting-off in this cheerfully cynical biography by a British journalist, who sees Worth's story as a case study in Victorian hypocrisy. The colorful New York and London underworlds are as meticulously described as Worth's surprisingly attractive personality.

Mack, David (2015). Kabuki Library Edition, Volume 1. Milwaukie, OR, Dark Horse Books.
Celebrating twenty years of Kabuki, this is the first volume in a complete set of large oversize library editions collecting the entire critically acclaimed Kabuki series.

This edition collects the first two original Kabuki volumes: Circle of Blood and Dreams. With eleven issues and loads of extras, this is the book that fans of Kabuki have been waiting for and the perfect starting point for brand-new readers..

Mack, David (2015). Kabuki Library Edition, Volume 2. Milwaukie, OR, Dark Horse Books.
Celebrating twenty years of Kabuki, this second volume in a complete set of large, oversized library editions of the entire critically acclaimed Kabuki series collects the Kabuki volumes Skin Deep and Metamorphosis.

Isolated and psychologically tormented, Kabuki finds her only friend in a mystery woman who sends her handwritten notes folded into origami animals. Featuring a total of twelve separate issues and collected with loads of extras, this is the next great edition that fans of Mack and Kabuki have been waiting for.

Mack, David (2016). Kabuki Library Edition, Volume 3. Milwaukie, OR, Dark Horse Books.
This edition collects Kabuki Volume 7: The Alchemy and more—including all-new material by David Mack. With the help of Akemi, Kabuki has escaped from Control Corps amid all the fallout and mayhem. And now that Kabuki has the chance to learn what her true calling in this life is, it seems there is a kind of Akemi network. A network that Kabuki herself will be asked to help in. And it seems Akemi is attempting a kind of revolution. One that Akemi expects Kabuki to play a major part in. A revolution that will change the landscape of their world forever.

Mack, David (2016). Kabuki Library Edition, Volume 4. Milwaukie, OR, Dark Horse Books.
Celebrating twenty years of Kabuki, this is the last volume in a complete set of the entire critically acclaimed Kabuki series in large oversize library editions.

This edition collects the Kabuki volumes Masks of the Noh, Scarab, and more! The Noh operatives learn Kabuki has gone rogue and is now deemed a liability. With instructions to infiltrate the Control Corps installation, they have one goal: find Kabuki. If she’s dead, bring back her corpse. If she’s alive... bring back her corpse.

MacLean, Nancy (2017). Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. New York, Viking.
An explosive expose of the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, and change the Constitution. Perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government. Behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect--the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan--and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan's work in teaching others how to divide America into "makers" and "takers." And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan's strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok.

MacNeil, Karen (2015). The Wine Bible. New York, Workman Publishing Co.
The Wine Bible grounds the reader deeply in the fundamentals while layering on informative asides, tips, amusing anecdotes, definitions, glossaries, photos, maps, labels, and recommended bottles.

Madison, Deborah and Edward Espe Brown (2001). The Greens Cook Book: Extraordinary Vegetarian Cuisine from the Celebrated Restaurant. New York, Broadway Books.
The founding chef of the Zen Center of San Francisco's Greens Restaurant tantalizes readers with more than 275 stellar vegetarian recipes. Drawing upon a variety of traditions - Southern France and Italy, Asia, Mexico and the American Southwest - Madison encourages the use of fresh vegetables, herbs and spices, quality oils and other staples, the building of flavors with stocks and the harmonizing of tastes, textures and colors. Mealtimes will be vibrant, sensory celebrations when readers serve up Mexican vegetable soup with lime and avocado, red and yellow pepper tart, goat-cheese pizza with red onions and green olives, zucchini-and-basil filo with pine nuts, blueberry cream-cheese tart and Brazilian chocolate cake. A cornucopia of seasonal menus, extensive directions, wine suggestions, and glossaries of kitchen equipment and ingredients enhance this superior collection. Brown also wrote The Tassajara Bread Book.

Madison, James and Jack N. Rakove (1999). Writings. New York, Library of America.
Jack N. Rakove, editor. Over 200 years after the founding of the federal republic, James Madison remains the most important political thinker in American history. The prime framer of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Madison was also a brilliant expositor of the new republican government and its underlying principles. His eloquent and insightful writing on freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the press, the rights of minorities under majority rule, the role of the states in the federal system, and the separation of powers are central to American political thought and speak to the controversies of the present day.

Arranged chronologically, Writings contains 197 essays, addresses, speeches, private memoranda, and letters written between 1772 and 1836. Included are all 29 of Madison's contributions to The Federalist, as well as revealing letters and speeches from the Constitutional Convention, the crucial Virginia ratifying convention, and the first federal Congress that illuminate his central role in framing and ratifying the Constitution and adopting the Bill of Rights. Early letters from the Revolution and the Confederation record Madison's strong commitment to religious freedom, his acute observations on the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, and the beginning of his historic political collaboration with Thomas Jefferson.

Selections from the 1790s include eloquent denunciations of the Alien and Sedition Acts and candid private appraisals of George Washington and John Adams. Writings from his terms as secretary of state and president record his determination to uphold American independence during the conflicts of the Napoleonic era and his leadership of the nation during the fiercely controversial War of 1812. Letters and memoranda from his retirement demonstrate his opposition to nullification and secession, his illusory hopes for African colonization as a solution to the dilemma of slavery, and his deepening concern over the sectional threat to the federal union he loved.

Madhubuti, Haki R. (2009). Liberation Narratives: New and Collected Poems 1966-2009. Chicago, Third World Press.
Spanning a long career, these poems helped define and sustain a movement that added music and brash street language to traditional poetics. Like Amiri Barka (aka LeRoi Jones), this poet and social activist has long combined the personal and the political by adding anger, activism, and outsider art to well-crafted poems. Spoken-word poetry and "message" poetry aimed at community healing are innovations in the later works, and as a whole the poems provide an overview of emerging black culture as they borrow language from black consciousness, hip-hop, political speeches, and motivational talks.

Madley, Benjamin (2016). An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.
Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide.

Madley describes pre-contact California and precursors to the genocide before explaining how the Gold Rush stirred vigilante violence against California Indians. He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and the broad societal, judicial, and political support for genocide. Many participated: vigilantes, volunteer state militiamen, U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. congressmen, California governors, and others. The state and federal governments spent at least $1,700,000 on campaigns against California Indians. Besides evaluating government officials' culpability, Madley considers why the slaughter constituted genocide and how other possible genocides within and beyond the Americas might be investigated using the methods presented in this groundbreaking book.

Magdoff, Fred and Chris Williams (2017). Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, who have devoted their lives to activism, Marxist analysis, and ecological science, provide informed, fascinating accounts of how a new world can be created from the ashes of the old. Their book shows that it is possible to envision and create a society that is genuinely democratic, equitable, and ecologically sustainable.

Magill, Frank Northen (1961). Masterpieces of World Philosophy in Summary Form. New York, Harper.
These 200 essays summarize and explain the significance of the writings of 139 masters of Eastern and Western thought (from the early Greeks to the present). Useful reference information is provided on authors, and a glossary of philosophical terms is at the front of the book.

Magnum Photos inc. (1999). Magnum Degrees. London, Phaidon Press.
A 1947 lunch meeting of four friends proved to be one of the most auspicious dates in the history of photojournalism. It was around a lunch table that day that Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David Seymour--each recently returned from covering World War II and its aftermath--formed the Magnum photo agency. Since then, Magnum photographers, with their singular knack for capturing history in an instant, have been responsible for creating many of the most iconic images of our world, in both war and peace. Magnum Degrees is a selection of agency photos that illustrates the range of subject matter and imagery the photographers have captured over the last half century.

The book, which overflows with photographs and includes only the briefest amount of text, is arranged thematically to effectively highlight the wide scope of images even within a narrow field. In "Middle East," Larry Towell captures boys playing in Gaza, while Micha Bar-Am trains his camera on a Jewish man, wrapped in a prayer shawl, fleeing a smoke bomb in Jerusalem. In "India," in the town of Benares, Ferdinando Scianna snaps photos of an excruciatingly thin man carrying his dead daughter and two nicely dressed young girls frolicking in the water. In "Religion," photographer Abbas trains his lens both on a man reenacting the Crucifixion in the Philippines and a woman being physically moved by the Holy Spirit in a rural Georgia church. As some of the themes-- "Refugees," "Child Victims," "In the Camps," "War in Africa "--suggest, many of the images here are powerfully disturbing. Others, particularly those collected under the headings "Trees," "Fishing," and "Architecture," are lyrically beautiful. Still others, like Martin Parr's photographs of tourists on vacation the world over, are witty and comic. Taken together, the thousand or so photos here capture the often surprising, always complex nature of humanity and do justice to the agency founders' original intention to "document the world as it really is." - Jordana Moskowitz

Magon, Ricardo Flores (2005). Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magon Reader. Oakland, CA, AK Press.
Along with Emiliano Zapata, Ricardo Flores Magon (b. 1874) is regarded as one of the most important figures of the Mexican revolution. Through his newspaper Regeneracion, he boldly criticized the injustices of the country's military dictatorship and worked to build the popular movement that eventually overthrew it. Exiled to the United States, Flores Magon continued to agitate for revolution in Mexico. Transcending nationalism, he also dreamed of a world free from all forms of injustice. Both the US and Mexican governments responded with harsh repression. Leavenworth Penitentiary ultimately murdered him in 1922.

This volume collects the first English translations of Flores Magon's most important writings. A lengthy historical overview, chronology, maps, images, and bibliography provide context for his work.

Maharidge, Dale (2004). Homeland. New York, Seven Stories Press.
Homeland is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Maharidge's biggest and most ambitious book yet, weaving together the disparate and contradictory strands of contemporary American society-common decency alongside race rage, the range of dissenting voices, and the roots of discontent that defy political affiliation. Here are American families who can no longer pay their medical bills, who've lost high-wage-earning jobs to NAFTA. And here are white supremacists who claim common ground with progressives. Maharidge's approach is rigorously historical, creating a tapestry of today as it is lived in America, a self-portrait that is shockingly different from what we're used to seeing and yet which rings of truth.

Dale Maharidge is among the very few American journalists attempting to describe the full range of the American experience. Together with Michael Williamson, who's produced several other important books about the other America, including their first book together, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, based on a three-year journey through homeless encampments from coast to coast, and The Last Great American Hobo. Journey to Nowhere inspired Bruce Springsteen to write two of the songs on his album The Ghost of Tom Joad, including "Youngstown," based on a conversation between Maharidge and two former steelworkers, and "New Timer." And Their Children After Them won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990. Maharidge has been a visiting professor of journalism at Columbia University and Stanford. Maharidge was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1998. He now lives in Northern California.

Michael Williamson is a photographer for the Washington Post with numerous honors including the World Press Photo and Nikon World Understanding Through Photography awards.

Maharidge, Dale and Michael Williamson (2004). And Their Children after Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South. New York, Seven Stories Press.
The collaborative effort of photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, portrayed the lives of three sharecropper families in the South during the Depression, giving witness to the tyranny of the tenant farming system that enslaved some nine million tenants in 1936. Their book was at once poetic, scathing, compelling, and tragic. Fifty years later, Maharidge and Williamson have revisited, photographed, and interviewed the surviving members and descendants of the Gudger, Ricketts, and Woods families shown in that book.

Mahfouz, Naguib (1993). Adrift on the Nile. New York, Doubleday.
In Nobel Prize winner Mahfouz's newly translated work, a houseboat on the Nile is a nightly diversion for a small circle of friends. Careers in the arts, business, law, and civil service are forgotten as the waterpipe makes its rounds, the intoxicating kif erasing all sense of responsibility. Anis, the "master of ceremonies," tends the pipe and drifts in his narcotic dreams while the others extol the absurdity of addiction. Their tranquility ends, however, when Samara, a young journalist, comes to study the group. She is the grain of seriousness that irritates them in their escapist shell, and around her swirls a nightly dispute over purpose, duty, love, and morality. A car accident crystallizes the argument, shattering the group as each confronts inescapable responsibility. The houseboat is a consistent metaphor in Mahfouz's writing, the vessel of escape in a complex and changing society. Adrift on the Nile skillfully dissects this metaphor but sacrifices the rich narrative and vibrant life that mark his other works.

Mahfuz, Najib (2001). The Cairo Trilogy. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Naguib Mahfouz's magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time. The Nobel Prize - winning writer's masterwork is the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain's occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. Palace Walk introduces us to his gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and his three sons-the tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute hedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal. Al-Sayyid Ahmad's rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination in Palace of Desire, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s. Sugar Street brings Mahfouz's vivid tapestry of an evolving Egypt to a dramatic climax as the aging patriarch sees one grandson become a Communist, one a Muslim fundamentalist, and one the lover of a powerful politician.

Throughout the trilogy, the family's trials mirror those of their turbulent country during the years spanning the two World Wars, as change comes to a society that has resisted it for centuries. Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, The Cairo Trilogy is the achievement of a master storyteller.

Mahfouz, Naguib (1995). Arabian Nights and Days. New York, Anchor.
A clever, witty concoction that begins on the day following the Thousand and One Nights, when the vizier Dandan learns that his daughter, Shahrzad, has succeeded in saving her life by enthralling the sultan with wondrous tales. But Shahrzad is miserable and distrusts her husband, who, she suspects, is still capable of bloody doings. All is not well outside the palace either, where a medieval Islamic city teems with anxious souls. Many of them, like the devout Skeikh Abdullah al-Balkhi, strive to attain a high spiritual station, but few succeed, especially when genies and angels intervene, as they do often in this series of linked intrigues and adventures. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz refashions the classic tales of Scheherazade in his own imaginative, spellbinding style. Here are genies and flying carpets, Aladdin and Sinbad, Ali Baba, and many other familiar stories, made new by the magical pen of the acknowledged dean of Arabic letters.

Mahfouz, Naguib (1997). Children of Gebelaawi (Children of the Alley). Pueblo, Colo., Passeggiata Press.
Gabalawi's mansion sits at the desert's edge, surrounded by high-walled gardens. His sons, however, quarrel over his estate, and the omnipotent gangster banishes them from his earthly paradise. Their descendants settle outside the wall, desperately poor but always praying to Gabalawi for salvation. As each succeeding generation spawns its messiah, the people rise up against the ruling gangsters, seizing their portion of the estate, but greed and ignorance prove their ultimate undoing, poverty and suffering their inescapable fate. Mahfouz masterly unfolds this timeless story of oppression and a people's longing for deliverance from themselves. As in "The Harafish", he focuses on how principle is coopted by mob psychology and all good works are subject to the entropy of corruption.

Mahfouz, Naguib (2000). The Day the Leader Was Killed. New York, Anchor Books.
From the Nobel Prize laureate and author of the acclaimed Cairo Trilogy, a beguiling and artfully compact novel set in Sadat's Egypt. The time is 1981, Anwar al-Sadat is president, and Egypt is lurching into the modern world. Set against this backdrop, The Day the Leader Was Killed relates the tale of a middle-class Cairene family. Rich with irony and infused with political undertones, the story is narrated alternately by the pious and mischievous family patriarch Muhtashimi Zayed, his hapless grandson Elwan, and Elwan's headstrong and beautiful fiancee Randa. The novel reaches its climax with the assassination of Sadat on October 6, 1981, an event around which the fictional plot is skillfully woven.

Mahfouz, Naguib (1997). Echoes of an Autobiography. New York, Doubleday.
"Do you deny that you had your share of the warmth of the world and its fragrance?" one interloper asks the elderly, often weary narrator in one of the series of allegorical reflections that frame the life of the Egyptian Nobel laureate (e.g., Children of the Alley). Mahfouz transcends the traditional autobiography here, offering instead distillations of an impossibly full and eventful career. The brief anecdotes recall the narrator's youth, a time "pure and unsullied "; temptation and longing to return to the embrace of family; dreams; fears of lost esteem and fallen glory; and sensuous epiphanies. A particular light, aroma, or tune will recall for the narrator, now in old age and hounded by death, snatches of a time he despairs of repossessing. Mahfouz surrenders the last quarter of this slim volume to the pithy parables of the sheikhs?as if to signal the end ("What I endured from desire made my life a yearning concealed in nostalgia"). Mahfouz's language carries the gravity of religious truth and the lyrical clarity of poetry.

Mahfouz, Naguib (1995). The Harafish. New York, Anchor Books.
The al-Nagi family's history through ten generations in their Cairo alley is "nothing more than a succession of deviations, disasters, lessons not learned." Ashur, the clan chief and ruler of the community, returns after the plague years to find the neighborhood deserted. Appropriating all the wealth and property, he distributes it to the impoverished (the harafish), creating the "Covenant of Ashur". His legend is badly served, however, when succeeding generations succumb to the family curse: "A desire for status, money and possessions, at the heart of which was anxiety and fear." Brother kills brother, and son kills father. The devil is evoked to grant immortality, and debauchery is a common refuge. Mahfouz is at his best in this sweeping meditation on the price, demands, and rewards of greatness.

Mahfouz, Naguib (1992). Midaq Alley. New York, Anchor Books.
Written in the 1940s, this novel by the Egyptian Nobel laureate Mahfouz deals with the plight of impoverished classes in an old quarter of Cairo. The lives and situations depicted create an atmosphere of sadness and tragic realism. Indeed, few of the characters are happy or successful. Protagonist Hamida, an orphan raised by a foster mother, is drawn into prostitution. Kirsha, the owner of a cafe in the alley, is a drug addict and a lustful homosexual. Zaita makes a living by disfiguring people so that they can become successful beggars. Transcending time and place, the social issues treated here are relevant to many Arab countries today. With this satisfying tale, Mahfouz, often called the Charles Dickens of Arabic literature, achieves a high level of excellence as a novelist and storyteller.

Mahfouz, Naguib. (1993). Miramar. New York, Anchor Books.
A highly charged, tightly written tale of intersecting lives that provides us with both an engaging and powerful story as well as a vivid portrait of life in Egypt in the late 1960's.

Mahfouz, Naguib (2001). Mirrors. Cairo, Egypt, American University in Cairo Press.
Mirrors is one of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz's more unusual works. First published in serialized form in the Egyptian television magazine, it consists of a series of vignettes of characters from a writer's life-a writer very like Mahfouz himself. And accompanying each vignette is a portrait of the character by a friend of the author, the renowned Alexandrian artist Seif Wanli.

Through each vignette-whether of a lifelong friend, a sometime adversary, or a childhood sweetheart-not only is that one character described but much light is thrown on other characters already familiar or yet to be encountered, as well as on the narrator himself, who we come to know well through the mirrors of his world of acquaintances.

At the same time, Mirrors also reflects the recent history of Egypt, its political movements, its leaders, its wars, and its peace, all of which affect the lives of friends and enemies and of the narrator himself. As the translator writes in his Introduction, "the narrator's acquaintances from childhood, schooldays, and civil service career take him from the lofty heights of intellectual salons to the seemy squalor of brothels and drug dens; from the dreams of youth and nationalistic ideals to the sobering realities of post-revolutionary society and clashing economic and political values."

The apparently simple but penetrating portraits by Seif Wanli add an extra, distinctive dimension to this already intriguing book. They originally appeared with the serialized texts in the television magazine, but were omitted when the book was first published in 1972, and were also omitted when the English translation first appeared in 1977. Now, in this special edition, the pictures and the complete text appear together for the first time.

Mahfouz, Naguib (2008). The Thief and the Dogs. New York, Anchor Books.
Out of prison for less than a day, thief Said Mahran quickly resumes his old ways, and worse. Angered by his young daughter's refusal to even shake hands with the parent she has not seen in four years, and by the chilly reception from Rauf Ilwan, a former colleague in crime whom he suspects of having betrayed him to the police, Mahran goes berserk and seeks revenge with a gun. But this onetime Robin Hood (an ardent nationalist, he stole only from "people who deserved to be robbed") accidentally murders two innocents instead of his intended victims, the new husband of his ex-wife and Ilwan. Pursued by the press and the police, he finds refuge with a prostitute he knows; her flat has a view of a cemetery. The Nobel laureate writes here with remarkable clarity and eloquence. His tale of the haunted, hunted Mahran feverish and suspenseful, introspective and subtle. Naguib Mahfouz's novella of post-revolutionary Egypt combines a vivid pychological portrait of an anguished man with the suspense and rapid pace of a detective story.

Mailer, Norman (1992). Advertisements for Myself. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Anyone with a serious interest in American and in twentieth-century literature will applaud the reprinting of Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself. No single work of his, before or since, is as important to an understanding of his literary career or of his emergence as an authentic public personality, and none is as fully representative of the range and variety of his concerns. - Richard Poirier

Originally published in 1959, Advertisements for Myself is an inventive collection of stories, essays, polemic, meditations, and interviews. It is Mailer at his brilliant, provocative, outrageous best. Emerging at the height of "hip," Advertisements is at once a chronicle of a crucial era in the formation of modern American culture and an important contribution to the great autobiographical tradition in American letters.

Mailer, Norman (1998). The Executioner's Song. New York, Vintage International.
The Executioner's Song is a work of unprecedented force. It is the true story of Gary Gilmore, who in 1977 became the first person executed in the United States since the reinstitution of the death penalty. Gilmore, a violent yet articulate man who chose not to fight his death-penalty sentence, touched off a national debate about capital punishment. He allowed Norman Mailer and researcher Lawrence Schiller complete access to his story. Mailer took the material and produced an immense book with a dry, unwavering voice and meticulous attention to detail on Gilmore's life--particularly his relationship with Nicole Baker, whom Gilmore claims to have killed. What unfolds is a powerful drama, a distorted love affair, and a chilling look into the mind of a murderer in his countdown with a firing squad.

Mailer, Norman (2013). The Fight. New York, Random House.
The 'fight' is the 1975 world heavyweight championship bout in Zaire between then reigning king of the ring Muhammad Ali and up-and-coming George Foreman. Mailer relays the events of the actual fight and includes the observations of George Plimpton, Hunter S. Thompson, and others.

Mailer, Norman (1973). Marilyn, a Biography. [New York, Grosset & Dunlap.
"Marilyn, a Biography" was Norman Mailer's first attempt at biography, but this is really much more than a meditation on the woman who was the major sex symbol of 20th Century American Popular Culture. Mailer's goal is to attempt to understand a beautiful, complex, and tragic woman, and he is particularly taken with the contradictions Monroe's life presents to us. He also presents her as a symbol of the bizarre decade of the 1950s in which she made her impact. What you have to keep in mind it that Mailer makes no distinction between fact and speculation as they are merged his mind. Mailer has the novelist's desire to connect the dots and complete the picture, and certainly the splash the publication of this book made, a quarter-century after the publication of "The Naked and the Dead," would appeal to the author's legendary ego.

However, in addition to being a biography this volume is also a pictorial retrospective of an actress whose greatest love affair may well have been with the camera. During the 1950s Marilyn Monroe was the most photographed person on the face of the planet. During that time Lawrence Schiller was a young photographer who would take the celebrate color photographs of a nude Monroe frolicking in and around a pool on the shot on the set of "Something's Got to Give," the film from which she was fired shortly before her death. Years later Schiller arranged a photographic exhibit from the stills of many major photographers who had worked with her, such as Richard Avedon and Bert Stern. The exhibit was called "Marilyn Monroe: The Legend and the Truth," and toured the United States and Japan. The photographs are arranged here as a photograph essay to offer a counterpoint to Mailer's text.

Mailer, Norman (1998). The Naked and the Dead. New York, H. Holt.
Mailer was inducted into the army in March 1944, less than a year after graduating with honors from Harvard with a B.S. in engineering. His experience in the army as a surveyor in the field artillery, an intelligence clerk in the cavalry and a rifleman with a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippine mountains, gave him the idea for a novel about World War II. Shortly after his discharge he began writing The Naked and the Dead which was published in 1948. The novel, a critical and commercial success, was at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for eleven weeks, and brought Mailer immediate recognition as one of America's most promising writers. The Naked and the Dead remains one of the classic novels of World War II.

Maimonides, Moses, Shlomo Pines, et al. (1963). The Guide of the Perplexed. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
This monument of rabbinical exegesis written at the end of the twelfth century has exerted an immense and continuing influence upon Jewish thought. Its aim is to liberate people from the tormenting perplexities arising from their understanding of the Bible according only to its literal meaning. This edition contains extensive introductions by Shlomo Pines and Leo Strauss, a leading authority on Maimonides.

Mak, Geert (2008). In Europe: Travels through the Twentieth Century. New York, Vintage Books.
From the First World War to the waning days of the Cold War, a poignant exploration on what it means to be European at the end of the twentieth-century. Geert Mak crisscrosses Europe from Verdun to Berlin, Saint Petersburg to Srebrenica in search of evidence and witnesses of the last hundred years of Europe. Using his skills as an acclaimed journalist, Mak locates the smaller, personal stories within the epic arc of history-talking to a former ticket-taker at the gates of the Birkenau concentration camp or noting the neat rows of tiny shoes in the abandoned nursery school in the shadow of Chernobyl. His unique approach makes the reader an eyewitness to a half-forgotten past, full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights and touching encounters. Sweeping in scale, but intimate in detail In Europe is a masterpiece.

Maland, Charles J. (1989). Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.
Charles Maland focuses on the cultural sources of the on-and-off, love-hate affair between Chaplin and the American public that was perhaps the stormiest in American stardom.

Malaparte, Curzio. The Skin. New York, NY, New York Review of Books Classics.
"It is a shameful thing to win a war." The reliably unorthodox Curzio Malaparte's own service as an Italian liaison officer with the Allies during the invasion of Italy was the basis for this searing and surreal novel, in which the contradictions inherent in any attempt to simultaneously conquer and liberate a people beset the triumphant but ingenuous American forces as they make their way up the peninsula. Malaparte's account begins in occupied Naples, where veterans of the disbanded and humiliated Italian army beg for work, and ceremonial dinners for high Allied officers or important politicians feature the last remaining sea creatures in the city's famous aquarium. He leads the American Fifth Army along the Via Appia Antica into Rome, where the celebrations of a vast, joy-maddened crowd are only temporarily interrupted when one well-wisher slips beneath the tread of a Sherman tank. As the Allied advance continues north to Florence and Milan, the civil war intensifies, provoking in the author equal abhorrence for killing fellow Italians and for the "heroes of tomorrow," those who will come out of hiding to shout "Long live liberty" as soon as the Germans are chased away. Like Celine, another anarchic satirist and disillusioned veteran of two world wars, Malaparte paints his compatriots as in a fun-house mirror that yet speaks the truth, creating terrifying, grotesque, and often darkly comic scenes that will not soon be forgotten. Unlike the French writer however, he does so in the characteristically sophisticated, lush, yet unsentimental prose that was as responsible for his fame as was his surprising political trajectory. The Skin was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. -NYRB

Maley, Terry S. (1994). Field Geology, Illustrated. Boise, Idaho, Mineral Land Publications.
Field Geology Illustrated is a reliable, in depth field reference for professional geologists, serious amateur geologists, and other environmental scientists. This entirely new second edition represents the first detailed, comprehensive book on field geology in 20 years. Richly illustrated with 688 high-quality photographs and 300 interpretative sketches, this 704-page book is printed on glossy paper to show important strucutural and textural features. Contents include marine geological surveys, plutonic rocks_olcanic rocks, continental deposits, marine deposits, deformed rocks (joints, faults, folds, cleavage) weathering processes and soils, ground water, mineral deposits, and the public land survey system.

Malkiel, Burton Gordon (2007). A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing. New York, W. W. Norton.
The million-copy bestseller, revised and updated with new investment strategies for retirement and the insights of behavioral finance. Updated with a new chapter that draws on behavioral finance, the field that studies the psychology of investment decisions, here is the best-selling, authoritative, and gimmick-free guide to investing. Burton Malkiel evaluates the full range of investment opportunities, from stocks, bonds, and money markets to real estate investment trusts and insurance, home ownership, and tangible assets such as gold and collectibles. This edition includes new strategies for rearranging your portfolio for retirement, along with the book's classic life-cycle guide to investing, which matches the needs of investors in any age bracket. A Random Walk Down Wall Street long ago established itself as a must-read, the first book to purchase before starting a portfolio.

Malkiel, Burton G. and Charles D. Ellis (2010). The Elements of Investing. Hoboken, N.J., Wiley.
No one knows more about investing than Charley Ellis and Burt Malkiel and no one has written a better investment guide. These are the best basic rules of investing by two of the world's greatest financial thinkers.

Mallarme, Stephane and Mary Ann Caws (1982). Selected Poetry and Prose. New York, New Directions Books.

Malory, Thomas and John Matthews (2000). Le Morte D'arthur. London, New York, Cassell.
A complete, unabridged edition of one of the most famous chronicles of the Arthurian legends comes with new illustrations. Edited by a lifelong scholar of the legends, the book includes some widely accepted corrections.

Mamet, David (1977). American Buffalo: A Play. New York, Grove Press.

In a Chicago junk shop three small time crooks plot to rob a man of his coin collection. Its existence came to light when the collector found a valuable "buffalo nickel" in the shop. The three plotter punks fancy themselves as businessmen pursuing the legitimate concerns of free enterprise. In reality they are Donny, the stupid junk shop owner; Bobby, a spaced out young junkie Donny has befriended and finally "Teacher," violent paranoid braggart. But their plans come to naught and in reality are futile, vulgar verbal exercises. The play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the 1977 season.

Mamet, David (1978). A Life in the Theatre: A Play. New York, Grove Press: distributed by Random House.
A Life in the Theatre takes us into the lives of two actors: one young and rising into the first full flush of his success; the other older, anxious, and beginning to wane. In a series of short, spare, and increasingly raw exchanges, we see the estrangement of youth from age and the wider, inevitable, endlessly cyclical rhythm of the world.

Mamet, David (1981). Lakeboat: A Play. New York, Grove Press.
The play, apparently the first by Mr. Mamet, was originally staged by John Dillon at the Milwaukee Repertory Company. The work is close in spirit to the author's other early short plays, combining the counterpointed style of ''Sexual Perversity in Chicago'' with the shaggy taletelling of ''Duck Variations.''

The author's spokesman, a young college student (David Marshall Grant), ships aboard the lakeboat T. Harrison on the Great Lakes. The play is his dramatized logbook and also his rite of passage, as old salts - and a few young ones - fill his ears with the wonder of their stories of seduction and their recurrent dreams.

John Spencer, as a down-to-earth seaman with the looks but not the laconic manner of Steve McQueen in ''The Sand Pebbles,'' unravels the yarn of his first sexual conquest, a hilarious Rabelaisian tale of four-star male chauvinism. In contrast, there is Larry Shue as a taciturn malingerer, who seems less like a sailor than a stowaway. In a moment of reflection, he confesses that he once wanted to be a ballet dancer, and his eyes light up at the memory. What makes the scene so amusing is that Mr. Shue is the last person one could imagine lifting a swan on stage.

Mr. Mamet's crew repeatedly reveals sudden turns of personality, delivered with such sincerity that we come to be believers - and some of the tales are as tall as Twain. One of the saltiest seamen is played by Clarence Felder. His job, he insists in a loud voice, is watching, not doing. He is all brawn and bluster and always seems on the verge of exploding, but occasionally he interjects an insight, as in his statement, ''This boat's becoming a bureaucracy.''

Highest in the hierarchy is the captain, called Skippy, and played with comic dispatch by Dominic Chianese. He introduces Mr. Grant to his duty by demanding to know what his F-and-E number is. The boyish Mr. Grant stares blankly even after the captain explains that the initials stand for fire and evacuation.

In this journey, there is neither fire nor evacuation, and not even a hint of adventure. Mr. Grant's most demanding assignment is to make a constant supply of egg sandwiches for the men on watch. Even the slapdash sandwiches are a source of amusement; the food disappears into a bottomless maw, and there is none for the captain.

Time stands still on the boat - a suitably seedy design by Laura Maurer - a fact that often catches the characters off guard. A seaman rushes on deck to announce breathlessly that one of the men ''lost two fingers in the main winch.'' Asked when the accident occurred, he answers matter of factly, ''A couple - four, five years ago.'' The plot, what there is of it, occurs off stage on land and deals with the man that Mr. Grant has replaced. No one seems to know exactly why he failed to report for duty, although for some inexplicable reason everyone assumes that he has been mugged by a whore in Chicago.

Watching the play, one is reminded not only of ''Life on the Mississippi,'' but also of Mister Roberts, as the craft plies its path from Tedium to Apathy. But there is no war to look forward to, and no tyrannical captain to rebel against. Lakeboat is like life, slightly askew.

Manchette, Jean-Patrick (2011). Fatale. New York, New York Review Books.
Whether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, for which nothing on heaven or earth has any value except its value in cash, there's no question that Aimee is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she's set her eyes on a backwater burg-where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different interests against each other the better to, as always, make a killing. But then something snaps: the master manipulator falls prey to a pure and wayward passion. Aimee has become the avenging angel of her own nihilism, exacting the destruction of a whole society of destroyers. An unholy original, Manchette transformed the modern detective novel into a weapon of gleeful satire and anarchic fun. In Fatale he mixes equal measures of farce, mayhem, and madness to prepare a rare literary cocktail that packs a devastating punch.

Manchette, Jean-Patrick (2014). The Mad and the Bad. New York, New York Review Books.
Michel Hartog, a sometime architect, is a powerful businessman and famous philanthropist whose immense fortune has just grown that much greater following the death of his brother in an accident. Peter is his orphaned nephew--a spoiled brat. Julie is in an insane asylum. Thompson is a hired gunman with an ulcerated gut. Michel, known for his kindly interest in the disadvantaged, hires Julie to look after Peter. And he hires Thompson to kill them. Julie and Peter escape. Thompson, gut groaning, pursues. Hunter and hunted make their way across France to the remote mountain estate to which Michel has retreated. Bullets fly. Bodies accumulate. The craziness is just getting started. Like Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated Fatale, The Mad and the Bad is a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, pitch-perfect work of creative destruction.

Manchette, Jean-Patrick (2002). The Prone Gunman. San Francisco, City Lights.
French hit man Martin Terrier wants to quit the killing-for-francs business and go home to marry his childhood sweetheart. Those in charge want him to assassinate one more person--the Arab sheik Hakim--and, confiscating Terrier's savings, coerce him to do so. Learning that his assignment is actually a setup that will truly be his final mission, Terrier foils the plot just in time, gets his revenge, gets the girl, and starts a new life in the Ardennes. Fin? Non. Terrier's blissful retirement and our happy ending are spoiled by the leftover bullet lodged in his brain and his unsavory new tendency to blabber. His lack of savings forces him to work as a waiter, and his wife, tired of poverty and three-minute coitus, eventually leaves him. Originally published in France in 1981, this taut, fast-paced novel flexes with all the standard noir elements: mysterious motives, a gritty hero, detailed technical descriptions of firearms, and a high corpse-to-page ratio. Its ironic denouement also tempts us to interpret it as a commentary on French politics and on the noir genre itself.

Manchette, Jean-Patrick & Jaques Tardi, Jenna Allen, tr. (2020). Streets of Paris, Streets of Murder: The Complete Graphic Noir of Manchette & Jacques Tardi, Volume 1. Seattle, Fantagraphics.
The first of two volumes presenting all of the world-renowned hardboiled crime graphic novels (one of which has never before been collected in English!) in a luxurious oversize format. In the never-before-collected Griffu, the titular character is a legal advisor, not a private eye, but even he knows that when a sultry blonde appears in his office after hours, he shouldn't trust her — and she doesn't disappoint. Griffu is soon ensnared in a deadly web of sexual betrayal, real estate fraud, and murder. In West Coast Blues, a young sales executive goes to the aid of an accident victim, and finds himself sucked into a spiral of violence involving an exiled war criminal and two hired assassins. This volume also offers a bonus, 21-page unfinished story by Manchette and Tardi, as well as a single page introduction to another incomplete story, both appearing in English for the first time..

Manchette, Jean-Patrick & Jaques Tardi, Jenna Allen, tr. (2020). Streets of Paris, Streets Of Murder: The Complete Noir of Manchette and Jacques Tardi, Volume 2. Seattle, Fantagraphics.
A globally acclaimed crime novelist and a pioneering cartoonist team up to bring readers two graphic novel noir thrillers, collected in an oversized format. The second of two volumes presenting all four hardboiled graphic crime novels by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Tardi. Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot — Martin Terrier, killer-for-hire, needs just one more big job so that he can turn in his guns for good and return home to marry his childhood sweetheart. But soon, he's on the run — not only from the authorities and his treacherous ex-clients, but also from a crime syndicate seeking revenge for an earlier hit on one of theirs. In Run Like Crazy, Run Like Hell, philanthropist Michael Hartog hires Julie, just out of a psychiatric asylum, as a nanny. But he plans to fake the kidnapping of his son, Peter — and frame Julie for it. But Julie is no pushover, and soon, Julie and Peter are on the run, pursued by the police, and by Hartog's enforcer, the hulking contract killer, Thompson..

Manchette, Jean-Patrick (2002). Three to Kill. San Francisco, City Lights Books.
Businessman Georges Gerfaut witnesses a murder and is pursued by the killers. His conventional life knocked off the rails, Gerfaut turns the tables and sets out to track down his pursuers. Along the way, he learns a thing or two about himself. Manchette - masterful stylist, ironist, and social critic - limns the cramped lives of professionals in a neo-conservative world.

Mandel, Ernest (1969). Marxist Economic Theory. New York, Monthly Review Press.
The book contains a clear exegesis of classical theory: the historical development of capitalism, the increasing dominance of exchange value, the relentless pursuit of surplus-value, the inevitable development of exploitation, the various crises and contradictions of capitalism, the development of trusts and cartels, and the inexorable drive towards oligopoly, the role of the state in bolstering profits, and providing legal and social control mechanisms without which capital accumulation can't take place, and the rise of imperialism as capital seeks to expand. Along with this book, one might recommend Baran and Sweezy's classic, "Monopoly Capital."

Mandel, Ernest and George Edward Novack (1970). The Marxist Theory of Alienation: Three Essays. New York, Pathfinder Press.

Alienation from one's fellow human beings is rooted in the development of class society itself, the authors argue. It can be overcome only through the revolutionary fight for a society both free of domination by the capitalist class, and with complete democratic control of the government and economy by working people.

Mander, Jerry (2012). The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System. Berkeley, CA, Counterpoint.

Examines the environmental and social problems of capitalism, arguing that certain problems of the system are intrinsic to its structures and cannot be reformed.

In the vein of his bestseller, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, nationally recognized social critic Jerry Mander researches, discusses, and exposes the momentous and unsolvable environmental and social problems of capitalism.

Mander argues that capitalism is no longer a viable system: "What may have worked in 1900 is calamitous in 2010." Capitalism, utterly dependent on never-ending economic growth, is an impossible absurdity on a finite planet with limited resources. Climate change, together with global food, water, and resource shortages, is only the start.

Mander draws attention to capitalism's obsessive need to dominate and undermine democracy, as well as to diminish social and economic equity. Designed to operate free of morality, the system promotes permanent war as a key economic strategy. Worst of all, the problems of capitalism are intrinsic to the form. Many organizations are already anticipating the breakdown of the system and are working to define new hierarchies of democratic values that respect the carrying capacities of the planet.

Mander, Jerry (1978). Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York, Morrow.
A total departure from previous writing about television, this book is the first ever to advocate that the medium is not reformable. Its problems are inherent in the technology itself and are so dangerous -- to personal health and sanity, to the environment, and to democratic processes -- that TV ought to be eliminated forever. Weaving personal experiences through meticulous research, the author ranges widely over aspects of television that have rarely been examined and never before joined together, allowing an entirely new, frightening image to emerge. The idea that all technologies are "neutral," benign instruments that can be used well or badly, is thrown open to profound doubt. Speaking of TV reform is, in the words of the author, "as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns."

Manguel, Alberto (1996). A History of Reading. New York, Viking.
Writer, translator, and editor Manguel (In Another Part of the Forest) has produced a personal and original book on reading. In 22 chapters, we find out such things as how scientists, beginning in ancient Greece, explain reading; how Walt Whitman viewed reading; how Princess Enheduanna, around 2300 B.C., was one of the few women in Mesopotamia to read and write; and how Manguel read to Jorge Luis Borges when he became blind. Manguel selects whatever subject piques his interest, jumping backward and forward in time and place. Readers might be wary of such a miscellaneous, erudite book, but it manages to be invariably interesting, intriguing, and entertaining. Over 140 illustrations show, among other things, anatomical drawings from 11th-century Egypt, painting of readers, cathedral sculptures, and stone tables of Sumerian students. The result is a fascinating book to dip into or read cover to cover.

Mankell, Henning (2005). Before the Frost. New York, Vintage.
Kurt Wallander and his daughter Linda join forces to search for a religious fanatic on a murder spree. Just graduated from the police academy, Linda Wallander returns to Skane to join the police force, and she already shows all the hallmarks of her father--the maverick approach, the flaring temper. Before she even starts work she becomes embroiled in the case of her childhood friend Anna, who has inexplicably disappeared. As the case her father is working on dovetails with her own, something far more dangerous than either could have imagined begins to emerge. They soon find themselves forced to confront a group of extremists bent on punishing the world's sinners.

Mankell, Henning (2004). Dogs of Riga. New York, Vintage.
On the Swedish coastline, two bodies, victims of grisly torture and cold execution, are discovered in a life raft. With no witnesses, no motives, and no crime scene, Detective Kurt Wallander is frustrated and uncertain he has the ability to solve a case as mysterious as it is heinous. But after the victims are traced to the Baltic state of Latvia, a country gripped by the upheaval of Soviet disintegration, Major Liepa of the Riga police takes over the investigation. Thinking his work done, Wallander slips into routine once more, until suddenly, he is called to Riga and plunged into an alien world where shadows are everywhere, everything is watched, and old regimes will do anything to stay alive.

Mankell, Henning (2003). Faceless Killers. New York, Vintage.
The first in the Kurt Wallander series.

It was a senselessly violent crime: on a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck. And as if this didn't present enough problems for the Ystad police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman's last word is foreign, leaving the police the one tangible clue they have, and in the process, the match that could inflame Sweden's already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments.

Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecuter who has peaked his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve.

Mankell, Henning (2004). The Fifth Woman. New York, Vintage.
In an African convent, four nuns and a unidentified fifth woman are brutally murdered--the death of the unknown woman covered up by the local police. A year later in Sweden, Inspector Kurt Wallander is baffled and appalled by two murders. Holger Eriksson, a retired car dealer and bird watcher, is impaled on sharpened bamboo poles in a ditch behind his secluded home, and the body of a missing florist is discovered--strangled and tied to a tree. The only clues Wallander has to go on are a skull, a diary, and a photo of three men. What ensues is a case that will test Wallander's strength and patience, because in order to discover the reason behind these murders, he will also need to uncover the elusive connection between these deaths and the earlier unsolved murder in Africa of the fifth woman.

Mankell, Henning (2002). Firewall. New York, Vintage.
A body is found at an ATM the apparent victim of heart attack. Then two teenage girls are arrested for the brutal murder of a cab driver. The girls confess to the crime showing no remorse whatsoever. Two open and shut cases. At first these two incidents seem to have nothing in common, but as Wallander delves deeper into the mystery of why the girls murdered the cab driver he begins to unravel a plot much more involved complicated than he initially suspected. The two cases become one and lead to conspiracy that stretches to encompass a world larger than the borders of Sweden.

Mankell, Henning (2007). The Man Who Smiled. New York, Vintage.
After killing a man in the line of duty, Kurt Wallander resolves to quit the Ystad police. However, a bizarre case gets under his skin.

A lawyer driving home at night stops to investigate an effigy sitting in a chair in the middle of the highway. The lawyer is hit over the head and dies. Within a week the lawyer's son is also killed. These deeply puzzling mysteries compel Wallander to remain on the force. The prime suspect is a powerful corporate mogul with a gleaming smile that Wallander believes hides the evil glee of a killer. Joined by Ann-Britt Hoglund, Wallander begins to uncover the truth, but the same merciless individuals responsible for the murders are now closing in on him.

Mankell, Henning (2003). One Step Behind. New York, Vintage.
Swedish detective Kurt Wallander pursues a long, complex case sure to please those who like weighty police procedurals. Six weeks after three college students are murdered during a Midsummer's Eve party, their bodies hidden to prevent discovery, Wallander's secretive colleague Svedberg is found at home with half his head blown off. Wallander's persistent, occasionally brilliant, investigation points to a connection between Svedberg and the disappearance of the three young people. Soon after their bodies surface, a fourth friend, who was too sick to attend the party, is killed. More murders follow, with the exhausted, understaffed detectives just too late each time to prevent the next crime. Eventually the reader meets the killer, whose bizarre motive and methods the author gradually reveals. The dyspeptic Wallander, whose frazzled personal life is further impaired by the diabetes he ignores, works himself to exhaustion, sidestepping official procedure and making intuitive leaps to find the cold-blooded killer. The glum tone of the book, despite the setting during a warm and luxuriant late summer, reflects a crumbling Swedish society: government corruption is widespread; honest cops are disillusioned by abuses in high officialdom; rifts among social classes and between Swedes and recent immigrants abound. Mankell's writing is deadpan and stark, the plotting meticulous and exacting.

Mankell, Henning (2009). The Pyramid: The Origins of Kurt Wallander. New York, Vintage Books.
The five stories in this outstanding collection from Mankell (Faceless Killers) provide glimpses into Kurt Wallander's early life as a policeman as well as paint evocative portraits of contemporary Swedish society. An unremarkable businessman is poisoned in The Man on the Beach but, in typical Mankell fashion, the case is larger, more complex and more interesting than it first appears. In the volume's best entry, The Death of the Photographer, Simon Lamberg takes studio portraits of weddings and children, but a couple of nights each week, he uses his darkroom to distort published photographs of politicians and newsworthy people for a macabre personal scrapbook. It's a bizarre hobby, but the cause of Lamberg's brutal, apparently senseless death is an even stranger puzzle. Like the Wallander novels, these stories rank among the finest police procedurals being written today.

Mankell, Henning (2003). Sidetracked. New York, Vintage Books.
Kurt Wallander is called to a nearby rapeseed field where a teenage girl has been loitering all day long. He arrives just in time to watch her douse herself in gasoline and set herself aflame. The next day he is called to a beach where Sweden's former Minister of Justice has been axed to death and scalped. The murder has the obvious markings of a demented serial killer, and Wallander is frantic to find him before he strikes again. But his investigation is beset with a handful of obstacles - a department distracted by the threat of impending cutbacks and the frivolity of World Cup soccer, a tenuous long-distance relationship with a murdered policeman's widow, and the unshakably haunting preoccupation with the young girl who set herself on fire.

Mankell, Henning (2012). The Troubled Man. New York, Vintage.
A retired navy officer has vanished in a forest near Stockholm. Kurt Wallander is prepared to stay out of the relatively straightforward investigation - which is, after all, another detective's responsibility - but the missing man is his daughter's father-in-law.

With his typical disregard for rules and regulations, Wallander is soon pursuing his own brand of dogged detective work on someone else's case. His methods are often questionable, but the results are not: he finds an extremely complex situation which may involve the secret police and ties back to Cold War espionage. Adding to Wallander's concerns are more personal troubles. Having turned sixty, and having long neglected his health, he's become convinced that his memory is failing. As he pursues this baffling case, he must come to grips not only with the facts at hand, but also with his own troubling situation.

Mankell, Henning (2003). The White Lioness. New York, Vintage.
The execution-style murder of a Swedish housewife looks like a simple case even though there is no obvious suspect. But then Wallander learns of a determined stalker, and soon enough, the cops catch up with him. But when his alibi turns out to be airtight, they realize that what seemed a simple crime of passion is actually far more complex and dangerous. The search for the truth behind the killing eventually uncovers an assassination plot, and Wallander soon finds himself in a tangle with both the secret police and a ruthless foreign agent.

Mann, Paul (2006). The Ganja Coast. New York City, Felony & Mayhem.
A sleepy community on the Indian coast, Goa is a paradise for the international hippie brigade, drawn by the golden beaches and endless supply of cheap dope. Where there's drugs, of course, there's violence, but Goa is used to a certain manageable level of brutality, used to mellowing its impact in a haze of pot smoke. Lately, though, the ugliness has gotten worse. Professionals have moved in on the drug trade, and even the sweetest smoke can't cover the stink of corruption that's pouring from the highest levels of local government.

George Sansi, the half-Indian/half-English cop from Bombay who debuted in Season of the Monsoon, thinks he's seen about the worst the world can offer. But when he gets a call to help clean up Goa, he finds himself unprepared for the grimly dark side of paradise.

Mann, Paul (2005). Season of the Monsoon. New York City, Felony & Mayhem Press.
As a police detective in Bombay, Inspector George Sansi is used to struggling for order in one of the world's most exuberantly chaotic cities. But the mutilated corpse discovered in Bollywood taxes even Sansi's formidable skills. Could the murder have been a cult initiation gone hideously wrong? Was it the work of a serial killer? Was the victim killed as part of a political cover-up? Answering these questions will take Sansi from Bombay's teeming slums to the film community's palaces of excess and the menacing haunts of India's underworld. It will uncover a vast web of corruption that stretches from the powerful to the utterly powerless. And it will leave Sansi running for his life.

Mann, Thomas and H. T. Lowe-Porter (1996). The Magic Mountain. New York, Vintage.
One of the most influential and celebrated German works of the 20th century has been newly rendered in English by Woods, twice winner of the PEN Translation Prize. First published in 1929, Mann's novel tells the story of Hans Castorp, a modern everyman who spends seven years in an Alpine sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, finally leaving to become a soldier in World War I. Isolated from the concerns of the everyday world, he is exposed to the wide range of ideas that shaped a world on the verge of explosion. Considering what was to follow, the most poignant moment comes when Naphta, a Jewish-born Jesuit, defends the use of terror and the taking of life for the sake of an all-encompassing idea. Woods's work reads more naturally than the original translation, which, while faithful to the German, was stiff and forbidding.

Mann, Thomas and John E. Woods (1997). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend. New York, A.A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
The new translation, by the masterly John E. Woods, of one of Thomas Mann's most famous and important novels: his modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which twentieth-century Germany sells its soul to the devil.

Mann's protagonist, Adrian Leverkuhn, is one of the most significant characters in the literature of our era, for it is in him that Mann centers the tragedy of Germany's seduction by evil. This modern Faust is a great artist: Leverkuhn is a musical genius who trades body and soul in a Mephistophelian bargain for twenty-four years of triumph as the world's greatest composer. He is isolated, brilliant, a radical experimenter who both plays and thinks at the very edges of artistic possibility. The story of his life becomes an apocalyptic narrative of his country's moral collapse as it surges into the catastrophe of World War II. No simple symbolic figure, Leverkuhn is himself, almost paradoxically, a morally driven man in the vortex of an entire culture's self-destruction.

Through the wonderful--and terrible--story of Leverkuhn's life and death, Mann not only gave us his most profound writing on the very nature and heart of all art--how it is created and how it impinges on every aspect of our experience: artistic, religious, political, sexual, psychological--but also forced his countrymen (the novel was first published fifty years ago, in 1947) to come face-to-face with how they had fallen prey to all that was most lethal in their heritage.

Marc, Franz, Klaus Lankheit, et al. (1974). The Blaue Reiter Almanac. New York, Viking Press.
Kandinsky and Marc were the editors of the Blue Rider Almanac, which finally appeared in May 1912. Kandinsky later explained the origin of the name: "We made up the name - over coffee in the leafy garden at Sindelsdorf. Both of us loved blue. Marc - horses, I - riders." The Almanac was in fact a kind of showcase for very many of the most interesting developments in contemporary art and it also reflects some of the influences that contributed to them. In it there are reproductions of works by Picasso, Matisse, and the Douanier Rousseau among others as well as pictures by Kandinsky, Marc, and their friends; there are examples of the other major group of expressionist artists from Dresden and Berlin, Die Brucke (stylistically more coherent than the painters of the Blue Rider). But alongside EI Greco and Cezanne there are children's drawings, Bavarian peasant glass paintings and votive pictures from Bavarian and Russian churches, and many examples of ethnic art from all parts of the world. But the Almanac does not only deal with the visual arts: there are songs by Schoenberg (to words by Maeterlinck), Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern (a setting of a poem by Stefan George). There is a sketch by Kandinsky himself for an expressionist opera which indeed suggests some of his own abstract paintings in its description of the stage pictures. There are theoretical discussions - of the use of quarter tones in music, of the significance of symbolism in the music of Scriabin - and texts by Kandinsky himself, including a long essay "On the Question of Form," which, together with his "On the Spiritual in Art" published a few months previously, provides a theoretical justification of the abstraction into which his painting was moving.

March, Joseph Moncure; Art Spiegelman (illus.) (1994). The Wild Party: The Lost Classic. New York, Pantheon Books.
Published in 1928, this racy prose poem follows a night in the life of a vaudeville dancer that includes everything from hot sex to cold murder. This edition has 75 drawings by Art Spiegelman (Maus) and red velvet endpapers. The Wild Party? It's the book that made me want to be a writer." - William Burroughs

March, William (1989)). Company K. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press.
A sardonic minor masterpiece on World War I, Company K observes all the antiheroic conventions of the between-wars decades; yet author March was himself a Marine Corps noncom wounded three times, who won a D.S.C., Navy Cross, and Croix de Guerre, and had every right to the bitter pity with which he wrote his novel. Among its 113 characters, every military type is represented—the good soldier, the coward, the goldbrick, the rank-happy shavetail, the lucky, and the wound-prone. Each is caught in one lurid moment of his life, as if March had composed by the light of a Very pistol [i.e., the flare gun invented by U.S. Navy Lt. Edward W. Very]. —Time

Marciano, John (2016). The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? New York, Monthly Review Press.
On May 25, 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years – through November 11, 2025 -- commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, and the American soldiers ("the more than 58,000 patriots") who died in Vietnam. The fact that at least 2.1 million Vietnamese -- soldiers, parents, grandparents, children -- also died in that war will be largely unknown and entirely uncommemorated. And U.S. history barely stops to record the millions of Vietnamese who lived on after being displaced, tortured, maimed, raped, or born with birth defects, the result of devastating chemicals wreaked on the land by the U.S. military. The reason for this appalling disconnect of consciousness lies in an unremitting public relations campaign waged by top American politicians, military leaders, business people, and scholars who have spent the last sixty years justifying the U.S. presence in Vietnam. It is a campaign of patriotic conceit superbly chronicled by John Marciano in The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?

Marcos and Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Mexico) (2006). The Other Campaign = La Otra Campaña. San Francisco, City Lights.
A collection of texts by Subcomandante Marcos and his Zapatista companeros that articulate a vision for "change from below," a call to create social change beyond the limits of electoral politics. As Mexico approaches the presidential elections, Marcos and supporters are touring the country in an effort to build a broad-based movement. The book includes a recent interview with Marcos and speeches made by Zapatista comandantes, as well as the Zapatistas' "Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle," which places the indigenous struggle for democracy in its historical context and articulates an evolving vision for democracy, dignity, and justice.

Marcus, Harold G. (2002). A History of Ethiopia. Berkeley, University of California Press.
In this eminently readable, concise history of Ethiopia, Harold Marcus surveys the evolution of the oldest African nation from prehistory to the present. For the updated edition, Marcus has written a new preface, two new chapters, and an epilogue, detailing the development and implications of Ethiopia as a Federal state and the war with Eritrea.

Marcus, Millicent Joy (1993). Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
What is the impulse to transform literary narrative into cinematic discourse, and what are the factors that determine that transformation? Marcus explores this process by looking at key works by such major postwar Italian filmmakers as Visconti, De Sica, Pasolini, Fellini, and the Taviani brothers. Drawing on the methodologies of semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and ideological criticism, she finds that cinematic imaginations typically employ literary texts self-consciously to resolve specific artistic problems.

Marcus, Millicent Joy (1986). Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.
The movement known as neorealism lasted seven years, generated only twenty-one films, failed at the box office, and fell short of its didactic and aesthetic aspirations. Yet it exerted such a profound influence on Italian cinema that all the best postwar directors had to come to terms with it, whether in seeming imitation (the early Olmi), in commercial exploitation (the middle Comencini) or in ostensible rejection (the recent Tavianis). Despite the reactionary pressures of the marketplace and the highly personalized visions of Fellini, Antonioni. And Visconti, Italian cinema has maintained its moral commitment to use the medium in socially responsible ways--if not to change the world, as the first neorealists hoped, then at least to move filmgoers to face the pressing economic, political, and human problems in their midst. From Rossellini's Open City (1945) to the Taviani brothers' Night of the Shooting Stars (1982), the author does close readings of seventeen films that tell the story of neorealism's evolving influence on Italian postwar cinematic expression.

Marcuse, Herbert (1966). Eros and Civilization; a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston, Beacon Press.
"A philosophical critique of psychoanalysis that takes psychoanalysis seriously but not as unchallengeable dogma. . . . The most significant general treatment of psychoanalytic theory since Freud himself ceased publication." - Clyde Kluckhohn, The New York Times

Marcuse, Herbert (1969). An Essay on Liberation. Boston, Beacon Press.
Marcuse, the author of One-Dimensional Man, argues that the traditional conceptions of human freedom have been rendered obsolete by the development of advanced industrial society. An Essay on Liberation outlines the new possibilities for contemporary human liberation.

Marcuse, Herbert (1972). Counterrevolution and Revolt. Boston, Beacon Press.
Marcuse's short work Counterrevolution and Revolt, written in 1972, has four sections: "The Left Under the Counterrevolution," "Nature and Revolution," "Art and Revolution" and "Conclusion." Marcuse admonishes the New Left for its concretion of Marxian theory, he cites the difficulty of a critical language's ability to stay negative of that which it opposes without being absorbed by it. Drawing from the difficulties of the New Left, Marcuse proclaims "While it is true that people must liberate themselves from their servitude, it is also true that they must first free themselves from what has been made of them in the society in which they live. This primary liberation cannot be 'spontaneous' because such spontaneity would only express the values and goals derived from the established system. Self-liberation is self-education but as such it presupposes education by others", revealing the "authoritarian tendencies among the New Left." Much of Marcuse's arguments draw from his seminal work One-Dimensional Man (1964). Also of interest from Marcuse are his An Essay on Liberation (1969) which, like CRR, may be considered an addendum to One-Dimensional Man and Negations (a collection of essays originally written in German 1934-38, trans. 1968). As for others, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967), Jean Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) and Simulacra and Simulation (1981), and much of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. Certainly, other Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) figures such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin (especially his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in Illuminations).

Marcuse, Herbert (1991). One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, Beacon Press.
One-Dimensional Man was written in 1964 and can be seen as an analysis of highly developed societies. In it, Marcuse criticizes both communist and capitalist countries for their lack of true democratic processes. Neither type of society creates equal circumstances for its citizens. Marcuse discusses the factors which inhibit criticism and analysis of society. He draws on Marx primarily because his analysis focuses on how the economy limits potential of people.

Marcuse believes that people are not free because they function within systems such as the economy. If people were really free, they would be free from these systems. For example, people would only have to work as little as possible to provide for their needs, not an established amount of time. He states that only when people are free from these systems can they determine what they really need or want. Because we are not yet free, we have "false needs ". These needs are exemplified by the range of choices which we are offered in our economy. However, each of these choices reinforces the social norms that now exists. Because each choice has the same result (reinforcement of social norms), there is no real choice. Marcuse says highly advanced societies are welfare/warfare states. Welfare states restrict freedom because they limit free time, access to necessary goods and services, and citizen's ability to realize true self-determination. The warfare state hinders a true analysis of society because it keeps people focused on fighting the "enemy" instead of focused on internal social problems

Marcuse, Herbert (1999). Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. New York, Humanity Books.
It is of the very definition of any "classic" work that it not only introduce a new depth and direction of thought, but that its original insights endure. Such is the case with Herbert Marcuse's Reason and Revolution. When this study first appeared in 1940, it was acclaimed for its profound and undistorted reading of Hegel's social and political theory. As its many editions bear witness, especially this one hundredth anniversary edition commemorating the author's birth, the appreciation of Marcuse's work has remained undiminished, and indeed it is today more relevant than ever before.

We are now faced with a political future that initiated itself with the sudden collapse of Soviet Communism and the unexpected declaration of a "New World Order." In this rapidly changing sea of political realities, there is no better guide to where we have been and to what we might expect than Marcuse. As he well understood, turbulent and spectacular political events always ran within channels earlier set by political theory; he equally understood that it was Hegel's often unappreciated and often misunderstood theory that actually set the fundamental path toward modern political life. It is a fortunate combination to have a scholar of Marcuse's unquestioned brilliance and lucid honesty addressing the sources and consequences of Hegel's social theory.

Margulis, Lynn and Karlene V. Schwartz (1998). Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth. New York, W.H. Freeman.
With diagrams, drawings, and photographs, this classic guide to the scientific classification of organisms into phylum can be used as a quick reference for systematics or as a source of information on evolutionary trends and organismal relationships. An appendix offers a listing of phyla and genera, with vernacular names when possible.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1989). The Futurist Cookbook. San Francisco, Bedford Arts.
In 1932 the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proposed a revolution in food. He dined his way from Milan to Paris to Budapest, staging eye-catching demonstrations with his talks.

Marini, Enrico (2018). Batman, Book 1: The Dark Prince Charming. Burbank, California, DC Comics.
When a young mother and her daughter appear on Bruce Wayne's doorstep, the famously wealthy playboy is rocked by the news that they bring. Then, when the child is suddenly kidnapped by the Joker, Batman must plunge deep into Gotham City's underworld to track her down and foil the Clown Prince of Crime's twisted plan. But what is the secret that connects these archetypal antagonists to this strange and mysterious young girl--and why does her case seem so deeply personal to both of them?

Acclaimed European comics creator Enrico Marini (Eagles of Rome, The Scorpion, Gypsy) makes his American comics debut with this stunning graphic novel showcasing his unique interpretations of Gotham City's most famous heroes and villains. Collecting the lushly painted two-volume original series, this special hardcover edition of Batman: The Dark Prince Charming features an introduction as well as a new sketchbook section by the artist. Collects Batman: The Dark Prince Charming #1-2.

Markels, Julian (2003). The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Markels shows how a Marxian imagination is at work in a range of literary works, often written by non-Marxists. In a field notorious for its difficulty, The Marxian Imagination is a remarkably accessible text. Its central arguments are constantly developed and tested against readings of important novels, ranging from Dickens's Hard Times to Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. It concludes with a telling critique of the work of the major Marxist literary theorists Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson.

Marley, Christopher (2008). Pheromone: The Insect Artwork of Christopher Marley. San Francisco, Pomegranate Communications.
Christopher Marley's graceful arrangements of jewel-like arthropods make converts of those who have seen insects as creepy - these are stunning works of art, his delicate butterfly assemblages sublime. Marley's keen eye for design combines with his entomological education to produce mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic bug mandalas and striking up-close-and-personal single-insect portraits. The iridescent colors of beetle shells and moth wings are his pigments in a seemingly endless brilliant palette. The photographs of these arrangements present the bugs in their natural state: he does not digitally enhance any of the images. Each gorgeous creation is identified with its scientific and common names, and many are accompanied by concise descriptive text. In succinct essays, Marley writes about insect collecting and its benefits to the environment; he describes his creative process in choosing and arranging the creatures for optimal visual effect. The more than 170 color photographs in Pheremone will appeal to anyone intrigued by dazzling design, beautiful bugs, entomology, or all three. Accompanying the broad sample of Marley's work is a series of essays by the artist: "Design of Insects," "Insects in Design," "History," "Color," "The Coleoptera Mosaics: An Exercise in Color," "Repetition," "Structure," "Texture," "Variations," "Botanicals," "Size," and "Environmental Effects."

Márquez, Gabriel García (1999). Collected Stories. New York, Harper Collins Pub.
Collected here are twenty-six of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most brilliant and enchanting short stories, presented in the chronological order of their publication in Spanish from three volumes: Eyes of a Blue Dog, Big Mama's Funeral, and The Incredible and Sad Tale of lnnocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother. Combining mysticism, history, and humor, the stories in this collection span more than two decades, illuminating the development of Marquez's prose and exhibiting the themes of family, poverty, and death that resound throughout his fiction.

Márquez, Gabriel García; Edith Grossman (2004). The General in His Labyrinth: A Novel. New York, Everyman's Library.
General Simon Bolivar, "the Liberator" of five South American countries, takes a last melancholy journey down the Magdalena River, revisiting cities along its shores, and reliving the triumphs, passions, and betrayals of his life. Infinitely charming, prodigiously successful in love, war and politics, he still dances with such enthusiasm and skill that his witnesses cannot believe he is ill. Aflame with memories of the power that he commanded and the dream of continental unity that eluded him, he is a moving exemplar of how much can be won - and lost - in a life.

Márquez, Gabriel García (1989). Love in the Time of Cholera. New York, N.Y., U.S.A., Penguin Books.
While delivering a message to her father, Florentino Ariza spots the barely pubescent Fermina Daza and immediately falls in love. What follows is the story of a passion that extends over 50 years, as Fermina is courted solely by letter, decisively rejects her suitor when he first speaks, and then joins the urbane Dr. Juvenal Urbino, much above her station, in a marriage initially loveless but ultimately remarkable in its strength. Florentino remains faithful in his fashion; paralleling the tale of the marriage is that of his numerous liaisons, all ultimately without the depth of love he again declares at Urbino's death. In substance and style not as fantastical, as mythologizing, as the previous works, this is a compelling exploration of the myths we make of love.

Márquez, Gabriel García; J. S. Bernstein, et al. (2005). No One Writes to the Colonel: and Other Stories. New York, Perennial Classics.
"These stories are told in spare, unpretentious but picturesque prose, compassionate of human frailty, but also rich in wit and irony. The characters are all too human, alternately humorous and tragic." - Library Journal

Márquez, Gabriel García (1998). One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York, Perennial Classics.
Probably García Márquez's finest and most famous work. One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of a mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.

Marlowe, Christopher, David M. Bevington, et al. (1995). Tamburlaine, Parts I and II; Doctor Faustus; the Jew of Malta; Edward II. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), a man of extreme passions and a playwright of immense talent, is the most important of Shakespeare's contemporaries. This edition offers his five major plays, which show the radicalism and vitality of his writing in the few years before his violent death.

Marshall, James Vance (2012). Walkabout. New York, New York Review Books.
A plane crashes in the vast Northern Territory of Australia, and the only survivors are two children from Charleston, South Carolina, on their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide. Mary and her younger brother, Peter, set out on foot, lost in the vast, hot Australian outback. They are saved by a chance meeting with an unnamed Aboriginal boy on walkabout. He looks after the two strange white children and shows them how to find food and water in the wilderness, and yet, for all that, Mary is filled with distrust.

Marshall, Peter (1992). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London, HarperCollins.
Lively and authoritative, this study of a widely misunderstood subject skillfully navigates the rough waters of anarchistic concepts - from Taoism to Situationism, ranters to punk rockers, individualists to communists, and anarcho-syndicalists to anarcha-feminists. Exploring key anarchist ideas of society and the state, freedom and equality, authority and power, the record investigates the successes and failures of anarchist movements throughout the world. Presenting a balanced and critical survey, the detailed document covers not only classic anarchist thinkers - such as Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Reclus, and Emma Goldman - but also other libertarian figures, such as Nietzsche, Camus, Gandhi, Foucault, and Chomsky. Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand what anarchists stand for and what they have achieved, this fascinating account also includes an epilogue that examines the most recent developments, including postanarchism and anarcho-primitivism as well as the anarchist contributions to the peace, green, and global justice movements of the 21st century.

Marshall, Stephen A. (2008). 500 Insects: A Visual Reference. Buffalo, N.Y., Firefly Books.
Stephen Marshall has selected 500 of the most interesting insects from his travels to North and South America, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand and beyond. Beautiful photographs show the insects in their natural habitats, and informative "factfiles" provide further details about the lives of these fascinating creatures. Some of the insects are new species, photographed here for the first time. In addition to the entries for each of the species, there is an introduction on insect biology, classification and distribution, along with information on collecting and photographing insects.

Martin, Dannie M. and Peter Y. Sussman (1993). Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog. New York, W.W. Norton.
Dannie "Red Hog" Martin began writing while serving time in a California prison for a bank robbery. His powerful, sometimes surprisingly funny, and often tragic articles about life behind bars were accepted by coauthor Sussman for the "Sunday Punch" section of the San Francisco Chronicle and are collected here. Martin vividly reveals the authentic situations and characters in the pen, from his debut expose about AIDS in prison to the story of one Dragline Halcomb's exploits as Folsom Prison's top gambler. He also sheds light on the abuses of civil liberties that occur every day in the penal system. But Martin's writings are only part of why this book is so valuable. Despite (or probably because of) his success, prison authorities tried to restrict his publication and put him in an isolation unit. Sussman's accounting of the struggles against the federal prison bureaucracy to gain Martin the right to free expression constitutes the rest of what makes the book important, especially with regard to the First Amendment. - Aaron Cohen

Martin, Jonathan (2015). Empowering Progressive Third Parties in the United States. New York, Routledge.
This collection of writings explores how progressive third parties in the U.S. can become more electorally successful and politically influential. Contributors include key participants in and observers of the U.S. left third party movement. Nearly all have previously authored books or articles on progressive politics. Many have led effective left third party efforts, and some have held elected office on behalf of a progressive third party. Together the writers reflect on a wide range of relevant parties, including the Green Party, the Vermont Progressive Party, the Labor Party, the Working Families Party, Socialist Alternative, and potential new parties on the American left. The authors highlight a variety of strategies and conditions that may facilitate electoral breakthroughs by such parties and their candidates. Overall, the collection suggests that U.S. progressive third parties may make more headway if they thoughtfully combine their idealism and sense of urgency with a flexible, pragmatic approach to gaining power.

Martinez, Antonio Garcia (2016). Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. New York, HarperCollins.
Liar's Poker meets 'The Social Network' in an irreverent exposé of life inside the tech bubble, from industry provocateur Antonio García Martínez, a former Twitter advisor, Facebook product manager and startup founder/CEO. If you think you know the back-story of the founding of Facebook because you saw 'The Social Network,' think again: Antonia Garcia Martinez's 'Chaos Monkeys' tells a more complete and sometimes darker story about the founding and development of Mark Zuckerberg's multi-billion-dollar invention. This is not a whodunit (we know who did it -- Zuckerberg, those rowing twins, and assorted Harvard frenemies) so much as a procedural, a chronicle by the data-guru who was eventually forced out of Facebook (he went to Twitter) -- but not before gathering some pretty interesting social data of his own: about Zuckerberg, about other Silicon valley 'chaos monkeys,' and about the culture that spawned all of them.

Marx, Karl, Ben Fowkes, et al. (1981). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. London; New York, N.Y., Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.
Capital, one of Marx's major and most influential works, was the product of thirty years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. This new translation of Volume One, the only volume to be completed and edited by Marx himself, avoids some of the mistakes that have marred earlier versions and seeks to do justice to the literary qualities of the work. The introduction is by Ernest Mandel, author of Late Capitalism, one of the only comprehensive attempts to develop the theoretical legacy of Capital.

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels; Martin Rowson, illustrator. (2005). Communist Manifesto, The: A Graphic Novel. London, SelfMadeHero.
A jauntily irreverent but fundamentally serious take on a vastly influential political work.

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, et al. (2005). The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document. Chicago, IL, Haymarket Books.
An authoritative introduction to history's most important political document, with the full text of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. This beautifully organized and presented edition of The Communist Manifesto is fully annotated, with clear historical references and explication, additional related texts, and a glossary that will bring the text to life for students, as well as the general reader.

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, et al. (1999). The Communist Manifesto: With Related Documents. Boston, Bedford/St. Martin's.
In this edition of Marx and Engels's classic text, Toews proposes new guidelines for reassessing the work to help students reconstruct the meaning of the Manifesto in its time and at the close of the twentieth century. Together with the complete text of the work, this brief volume includes some key foundational documents by Hegel, Marx, Engels, and others that show the evolution of and influences on Marxist theory over time. The editor's introduction traces the trajectory of Marx's thought from the 1830s onward, while providing background on the political, social, and intellectual contexts of which the Manifesto was a historical product.

Marx, Karl (1964). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York, International Publishers.
Communism as a political movement attained global importance after the Bolshevicks toppled the Russian Czar in 1917. After that time the works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, especially the influential Communist Manifesto (1848), enjoyed an international audience. The world was to learn a new political vocabulary peppered with "socialism," "capitalism," "the working class," "the bourgeoisie," "labor theory of value," "alienation," "economic determinism," "dialectical materialism," and "historical materialism." Marx's economic analysis of history has been a powerful legacy, the effects of which continue to be felt world-wide.

Serving as the foundation for Marx's indictment of capitalism is his extraordinary work titled Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, written in 1844 but published nearly a century later. Here Marx offers his theory of human nature and an analysis of emerging capitalism's degenerative impact on man's sense of self and his creative potential. What is man's true nature? How did capitalism gain such a foothold on Western society? What is alienation and how does it threaten to undermine the proletariat? These and other vital questions are addressed as the youthful Marx sets forth his first detailed assessment of the human condition.

Marx, Karl (1975). Early Writings. New York, Vintage Books.

Marx wrote the essays included here during 1843-1844, when he was 25 and formulating his theory of historical materialism. In this period, which came before he began to work with Frederich Engels, Marx rejected the influence of Feuerbach and Hegel. his reaction to these two seminal thinkers reveals the philosophical and practical reasons for Marx's break with idealistic philosophy and the formation of his own system of thought.

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, et al. (1998). The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Amherst, N.Y., Prometheus Books.
A polemical work aimed at the neo-Hegelian philosophical school. In it, Marx and Engels attributed the "ruling ideas" of any given historical period to that age's dominant class, but their explanation of the workings of ideology moved beyond simplistic assertions of cause-and-effect relationships between power and ideas, or some one-to-one correspondence between economic forces and cultural trends.

Marx and Engels inherited the Napoleonic sense of ideology as confusion or distraction from the practical realities of everyday life, as opposed to the later use of "ideologies" (still common today) to refer to specific political views or agendas. In The German Ideology they began to transform the meaning of "ideology" more toward the sense of "false consciousness," a way of misunderstanding the world and our place in it. What is most important, they suggest the inescapable nature of ideology, that is, that it refers to that which we just do not see, comprehend, or anticipate as we confront the world.

Marx, Karl and David McLellan (1971). Grundrisse. London, Macmillan.

Grundrisse is Karl Marx's great unfinished work. It is part of a grand design Marx formulated for an economic-political system, of which Capital is the only completed section. Many of the ideas suggested in Capital were expanded in Grundrisse, and although it exists on ly in the form of notebooks and partially completed sections, it is both a clear and coherant work. Though ling available in the Moscow archives, it was not published in German until 1939 and this edition marks its first complete appearance in English. Translated, with a foreward, by Martin Nicolaus.

Marx, Karl and Saul Kussiel Padover (1979). The Letters of Karl Marx. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall.
In this major work of scholarship, Dr. Saul K. Padover, one of America's leading authorities on Karl Marx, has translated and brought together over 350 letters written by Karl Marx, most of which have never before been published in English.

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, et al. (1978). The Marx-Engels Reader. New York, Norton.
Essential writings of Marx and Engels. Part I presents the writings of the young Marx, the works which have aroused so much interest and debate in recent years. Part II includes works critical of capitalism. In Part III are the works which outline the program, strategy, and tactics of the revolutonary movement. Part IV includes writings on society and politics in the nineteenth century. The concluding section, Part V, presents the later writings of Engels, in which Marxism was popularized and systematized for the benefit of the masses.

Marx, Karl and David Fernbach (1973). Political Writings, Volume 1, The Revolutions of 1848. London, Allen Lane; New Left Review.

This volume incorporates all of Karl Marx's major political writings from the tumultuous years of 1842 to 1850. In it, his political theory is clarified in a number of comparatively short and accessible works. All of the major themes of Marx's work - the unity among philosophy, economics and politics; the objective of a unified germany and a revolutionary bid for power; the belief that the French revolution was a suitable model for the german revolution - are presented in the pieces in this volume. Included are The Manifesto of the Communist Party, speeches on Poland, the demands of the Communist party in Germany, articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and addresses and mintues of the Central committee to the Communist League. Very little of Marx's writing during this period has been translated into English before: virtually all of The Revolution of 1848 is presented here for the first time in english.

Marx, Karl and David Fernbach (1992). Political Writings, Volume 2: Surveys from Exile. New York, Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.

Covering 1850 to 1864, the years of Marx's exile in England, this volume includes some of Marx's most famous political writings. The Class Struggles of France and The Eighteenth Brumaire, here in striking new translations, represent major, fascinating developments in Marx's work, and it was while he was writing them that he began to write Capital. In the former, Marx begins his formulation of class-struggle theory, and in the latter, Marx deals with the paradox of a state power that both dominated civil society and arbitrated class struggles, and describes, as well, a future communist society. The rest of the volume was originally written in English by Marx while he was the London political correspondent for The New York Daily Tribune, covering events that occurred in almost every portion of the globe - England, India, North America, Poland, and China.

Marx, Karl (1974). Political Writings, Volume 3, The First International and After. New York, Random House.

Includes the major writings of Marx and a few pieces oby engels written between 1964 and Marx's death in 1883. The year 1864, when the International Working Men's Association was founded, marked a decisive period of change: modern industry had begun to make substantial headway throughout europe, and scientific communism could now find the material base it needed. In the writings in this volume, Marx directs his attention to the practical application of the theories laid down in the Manifesto. Included are: Documents of the First International (1864-72); articles on Germany, Ireland, the Franco-Prussian War, the Civil War in France, Poland and Russia; Political Indifferentism; an excerpt from Conspectus of Bakunin's 'Statism and Anarchy'; critique of the Gotha Programme; Circular Letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Brake, et al.; Introduction to the Programme of the French Workers' Party; and The Curtain Raised. many of the pieces appear in new and definitive translations.

Masamune, Shirow (2009). The Ghost in the Shell, Volume 1. New York, Kodansha Comics.
Deep into the twenty-first century, the line between man and machine has been inexorably blurred as humans rely on the enhancement of mechanical implants and robots are upgraded with human tissue. In this rapidly converging landscape, cyborg superagent Major Motoko Kusanagi is charged to track down the craftiest and most dangerous terrorists and cybercriminals, including 'ghost hackers' who are capable of exploiting the human/machine interface and reprogramming humans to become puppets to carry out the hackers' criminal ends. When Major Kusanagi tracks the cybertrail of one such master hacker, the Puppeteer, her quest leads her into a world beyond information and technology where the very nature of consciousness and the human soul are turned upside down

Masamune, Shirow (2010). The Ghost in the Shell, Volume 2: Man-Machine Interface. New York, Kodansha Comics.
March 6, 2035. Motoko Aramaki is a hyper-advanced cyborg, a counter-terrorist net security expert, heading the investigative department of the giant multi-national, Poseidon Industrial. Partly transcending the physical world and existing in a virtual world of networks, Motoko is a fusion of multiple entities and identities, deploying remotely controlled prosthetic humanoid surrogates around the globe to solve a series of bizarre incidents. Meanwhile, Tamaki Tamai, a psychic investigator from the Channeling Agency, has been commissioned to investigate strange changes in the temporal universe, brought about by two forces, one represented by the teachings of a professor named Rahampol, and the other by the complex, evolving Motoko entity. What unfolds will all be in a day's work - a day that will change everything, forever.

Matisse, Henri and John M. Jacobus (1982). Henri Matisse. New York, Abrams.
Henri Matisse is all the more cherished because his work celebrates the positive aspects of life, as evidenced by the titles of many of his major paintings: Luxe, Calme et Volupte, La Joie de Vivre, La Danse, Musique, to mention but a few. His explosions and juxtapositions of color and pattern inspire pure delight in the beholder, and his mastery of line, volume, and form are perhaps unequaled in the art of our time. The vitality, energy, and life-enhancing qualities that radiate from his art represent distillation of all that is affirmative in the human condition and are given immortality through that rare and indefinable quality known as genius.

The art of Matisse describes a trajectory leading from realism to abstraction, from darkness to light, from the cold of the north to the heat of the south, a route marked off by such revolutionary innovations as the burst of color found in Fauvism or the invention of his cut-outs. Matisse was still creating at a time in his life when many artists are content to rest on their laurels.

Since its original publication in 1984, this book by Pierre Schneider stands alone as the bible on the art of Matisse. The author spent fourteen years amassing a prodigious amount of information on the artist, and includes his own personal and original views on the work. Including over nine hundred illustrations, this is the most substantial reference of the works of Matisse ever published.

Matsen, Patricia P., Philip B. Rollinson, et al. (1990). Readings from Classical Rhetoric. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press.
There is no comparable anthology for strictly classical studies of rhetoric. Does not always include primary sources from the full range of classical authorities, but usefully includes selections from sources not primarly considered rhetorical but which do manifest the rhetorical tradition (Homer, etc.). Excellent set of both orations and of critical writings about rhetoric.

Mattei, Ugo and Laura Nader (2008). Plunder: When the Rule of Law Is Illegal. Malden, Mass., Blackwell Pub.
Plunder examines the dark side of the rule of law and explores how it has been used as a powerful political weapon by Western countries in order to legitimize plunder, the practice of violent extraction by stronger political actors victimizing weaker ones.

Matthews, Anne (Compiler), Nancy Caldwell Sorel (Compiler), Roger J. Spiller (Compiler) (1995). Reporting World War II, Vol. 1: American Journalism 1938-1944. New York, Library of America.
Drawn from wartime newspaper and magazine reports, radio transcripts and books, this unique two-volume anthology collects 191 pieces by 80 writers. In this volume, William L. Shirer and Howard K. Smith observe Nazi Germany from the inside; A.J. Liebling chronicles the North African campaign; Edward R. Murrow and Ernie Pyle cover London during the Blitz; Margaret Bourke-White reports from Russian and Italy. On the home front, E.B. White visits a bond rally in Maine, and James Agee dissects Hollywood war movies. Also included are African-American journalists on racism in the military, and a firsthand account of the internment of Japanese-Americans. Contains a chronology of the war, maps, biographical profiles, explanatory notes and glossary, and an index. An insert features 32 pages of photographs of the correspondents. A companion volume covers 1944-1946. "The reporters are fearless, unpretentious, professional, vivid, and smart." - David Remnick, The New Yorker.

Matthews, Anne (Compiler), Nancy Caldwell Sorel (Compiler), Roger J. Spiller (Compiler) (1995). Reporting World War II, Vol. 2: American Journalism 1944-1946. New York, Library of America.
This anthology evokes an extraordinary period in American history-and in American journalism. Drawn from wartime newspaper and magazine reports, radio transcripts, and books, Reporting World War II captures the war's unfolding drama through the work of over eighty writers, the best of a remarkable generation of reporters. In this volume, Ernie Pyle bears witness to war in the foxholes; A.J. Liebling covers D-Day; Robert Sherrod and Tom Lea record the horrors of Pacific Island warfare; Edward R. Murrow and Martha Gellhorn describe the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. Two great books are included in full: Bill Mauldin's Up Front with all 162 cartoons, and John Hersey's Hiroshima. Contains a chronology of the war, maps, profiles of the journalists, glossary, notes, and an insert featuring 32 pages of photographs of the correspondents. A companion volume covers 1938-1944.

Matthews, J. H. (1975). The Custom-House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surrealist Stories. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Forty-seven short stories by 24 surrealist writers written between 1922 and 1973 illustrating the gamut of surrealist short narrative style from fully structured tales to automatic writing.

Matthiessen, Peter (1987). Partisans. New York, Vintage Books.

In Partisans Matthiessen focuses upon an ineffectual son of the American bourgeoisie. Barney Sand, alienated from family and culture, proceeds on a search for a revolutionary who had befriended him as a child. By means of a descent into Parisian working class life on which Barney is led by a Stalinist Party functionary named Marat, Matthiessen parallels the physical search with an inquiry into the motives for revolutionary action. The Brechtian portrayal of proletarian conditions denies Barney the clarity available to those who think in the abstract. The bestial lives of the poor make sympathy, or even the belief in their natural rectitude, impossible for Barney, and a politics without idealism is beneath his consideration. All that Matthiessen permits Barney to grasp is that revolutionaries have strong convictions for which they will sacrifice - the man for whom he searches gives life and reputation. But since there can be no doubt that revolutionary forces are in motion, the failure to comprehend must lie in Barney. Matthiessen seems to be suggesting that so long as thought and action are held to be categorically separate, as they are in Barney's mind, no motive will be sufficient for action and no action entirely justifiable. It is integration of both in practice that makes a revolutionary, and comprehension of that fact is necessary for modern men to make their lives adequately human.

Matthiessen, Peter (1992). In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. New York, Penguin Books.
On a hot June morning in 1975, a desperate shoot-out between FBI agents and Native Americans near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, left an Indian and two federal agents dead. Four members of AIM, the American Indian Movement, were indicted on murder charges, and one, Leondard Peltier, was convicted and is now serving consecutive life sentences in a federal penitentiary. Behind this violent chain of events lie issues of great complexity and profound historical resonance, brilliantly explicated by Peter Mathiessen in this controversial book. In a comprehensive history of the despartate Indian efforts to maintain their traditions, Matthiessen reveals the Lakota tribe's long struggle with the U.S. government, from Red Cloud's War and Little Big Horn in the nineteenth century to the shameful discrimination that led to the new indian wars of teh 1970s. Kept off the shelves for eight years because of one of the most protracted and bitterly fought legal cases in publishing history, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse makes clear why the traditional indian concept of the sacred inviolability of the earth is so important, especially at a time when increasing populations are destroying the precious resources of our world.

Mattison, Robert Saltonstall and Robert Rauschenberg (2003). Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Rauschenberg has been so prolific that few critics have a handle on his vast output or the sensibility and ideas behind it. Enter intrepid art historian Mattison, who observes Rauschenberg hard at work in his enormous, immaculate, high-tech Florida studio, where this master of intuition and spontaneity, who is actually as organized and efficient as an emergency room physician, works with a crew of energetic assistants at a breathless pace. Collaborations and an atmosphere conducive to the unexpected are crucial to Rauschenberg's "unfettered creativity," Mattison realizes, and the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images that characterize Rauschenberg's work reflects his keen interest in the flux and multifariousness of life. Mattison also analyzes Rauschenberg's 20-year collaboration with choreographer Trisha Brown, parses Rauschenberg's attunement to urban life and fascination with space exploration, ponders the aesthetic implications of the artist's dyslexia, and chronicles Rauschenberg's wildly ambitious and highly controversial project entailing travel to and the making and exhibiting of art in 11 countries. Mattison's unique approach greatly enhances our appreciation for this taken-for-granted artist and his phenomenally complex art.

Maugham, W. Somerset (2003). The Razor's Edge. St. Louis, MO, Turtleback Books.
Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of his spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilliant characters - his fiance Isabel whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliott Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. Maugham himself wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.

Maurer, David W. (1999). The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man. New York, Anchor Books.
During the first three decades of the 20th century, a legion of smooth-talking, quick thinking, mostly nonviolent criminals traveled America taking people's money. They grew more skilled as the years passed, devising ruses more intricate than the last, including staging scenes with props and sets, and scripting dialogue. Yet con men shared information only through what might be called oral tradition. Enter a professor of linguistics. Maurer first published this book, long out of print, in 1940, when he could see the dynamics of this kind of crime rapidly changing and the world of the original con man fading He embraced that world and devoured its schemes, its nuances and its language. The exemplary rip-offs (called "tear-offs" in the '30s) Maurer collected come from con men themselves, and they are retold complete with suggested dialogue of the time. Businessmen traveled on ships and trains for days and stayed in strange cities for weeks at a time waiting for the deal to close, becoming marks (the victims) scooped up by ropers (the scouts who brought victims in). As proof of their talent, con men sought out big game: the entrepreneurial veteran, the crafty wannabe and the successful risk taker. Maurer methodically documents how the three biggest ploys evolved and details the process of cleanly and cleverly removing large amounts of money from a befuddled mark step by step.

Maxwell, William J. (2015). F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press.
Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau's intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem's renaissance and Hoover's career at the Bureau, secretive FBI 'ghostreaders' monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover's death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau's close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as William J. Maxwell reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century. Taking his title from Richard Wright's poem The FB Eye Blues, Maxwell details how the FBI threatened the international travels of African American writers and prepared to jail dozens of them in times of national emergency. All the same, he shows that the Bureau's paranoid style could prompt insightful criticism from Hoover's ghostreaders and creative replies from their literary targets. For authors such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Sonia Sanchez, the suspicion that government spy-critics tracked their every word inspired rewarding stylistic experiments as well as disabling self-censorship. Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, F.B. Eyes is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature.

May, Derwent (2001). Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement. London, HarperCollins.
Entering its centennial year, the Times Literary Supplement, that British bastion of highbrow book culture, has a circulation of just 35,000. So it should not surprise anyone if a 600-page, painstakingly thorough history of the supplement generates sales somewhat more meager than that. This is something of a shame, for despite its wrist-cracking bulk and geological pace, this volume is stylishly written, affectionate and more entertaining than it has any right to be. May, a TLS contributor and longtime Times man, closely chronicles the supplement's tenuous start (it was originally issued to cover book reviews squeezed out of the regular Times by parliamentary reports) and frequent financial crises the TLS would inevitably be rescued in the nick of time by one high-minded millionaire or another. May faithfully traces the rise of such famous contributors as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, freed by anonymity (there were no bylines in those days) to write searingly vivid critiques. (Of one unlucky title Woolf wrote, "You draw from it that sense of instruction in unimportant matters which you get by looking from the train window at a flat stretch of countryside.") May is equally good following the uncertain early fate of works destined for immortality, like The Waste Land and Ulysses. The correspondence of hawk-eyed TLS subscribers, pouncing on errors in translations of Catullus, will delight those with a taste for the absurd. It is hard to imagine any but the most stout-hearted TLS reader undertaking this long journey from cover to cover, but American literary scholars will likely treasure this heroic record of a periodical that took the life of the mind more seriously than most.

May, Herbert Gordon and Bruce Manning Metzger (1977). The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: Revised Standard Version, Containing the Second Edition of the New Testament and an Expanded Edition of the Apocrypha. New York, Oxford University Press.
Students, professors and general readers alike have relied upon the Oxford Annotated Bible for essential scholarship and guidance to the world of the Bible for four decades. Now a new editorial board and team of contributors have completely updated this classic work. The result is a volume which maintains and extends the excellence the Annotated's users have come to expect, bringing new insights, information, and approaches to bear upon the understanding of the text of the Bible. The new edition includes a full index to all of the study material (not just to the annotations), and one that is keyed to page numbers, not to citations. And, to make certain points in the text clearer for the reader, there are approximately 40 in-text, line drawing maps and diagrams. With the best of the Annotated's traditional strengths, and the augmentation of new information and new approaches represented in current scholarship, the Third Edition will continue to serve as the reader's and student's constant resource.

Mayer, Jane (2016). Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York, Doubleday.

Why is America living in an age of profound and widening economic inequality? Why have even modest attempts to address climate change been defeated again and again? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? In a riveting and indelible feat of reporting, Jane Mayer illuminates the history of an elite cadre of plutocrats -- headed by the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olins, and the Bradleys -- who have bankrolled a systematic plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. Mayer traces a byzantine trail of billions of dollars spent by the network, revealing a staggering conglomeration of think tanks, academic institutions, media groups, courthouses, and government allies that have fallen under their sphere of influence. Drawing from hundreds of exclusive interviews, as well as extensive scrutiny of public records, private papers, and court proceedings, Mayer provides vivid portraits of the secretive figures behind the new American oligarchy and a searing look at the carefully concealed agendas steering the nation. Dark Money is an essential book for anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.

Mayer, Ralph (1969). A Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques. New York, Crowell.

Definitions of terms encountered in the study and practice of the visual arts and in their literature. Covers all forms of easel and mural paintings, drawing, sculpture, the graphic arts, photography, ceramics, and mosaic. There are entries on schools, styles, and periods, but chief emphasis of the book is on the materials and methods of the artist. Materials are defined in terms of compositions, source, use, and characteristic properties; processes and techniques are defined in terms of their practical application and results. Tools and equipment are described and illustrated with copious line drawings.

Mayer, Ralph and Steven Sheehan (1991). The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques. New York, N.Y., U.S.A., Viking.
The study of artists' materials and their application to the various techniques of paiting covers a number of separate subjects, including pigments, oils, acrylics, tempera, grounds, watercolor, pastel, mural painting, gums, waxes, chemistry, conservation and various other topics including toxicity.

Mayol, Jacques (2000). Homo Delphinus: The Dolphin within Man. Reddick, FL, USA, Idelson-Gnocchi Publishers.
This large format, gorgeously photographed volume, is the culmination of a lifetime of personal oceanic experiences by Jacques Mayol, easily one of the most accomplished free divers of his or any other generation.

Jacques Mayol, holder of a dozen world breathhold diving records, was the first man to descend to 100 meters (330 feet), a feat he accomplished in 1976. He followed this with yet another record breaking drop to 105 meters (346 feet) at the age of 56. A Frenchman born in China, Jacques Mayol now splits his time between homes on the island of Elba in Italy, the island of South Caicos in the Turks & Caicos and a full life in Japan. He is a practitioner of Yoga, Zen and other Oriental life philosophies, essential disciplines he incorporates into his free diving practices.

Homo Delphinus demonstrates an exceptional personal vision of the interaction between one man and the sea. It also provides a superb explanation of how the separate disciplines of science and philosophy come together to allow these extraordinary free diving explorations of the ocean. This theme goes hand in hand with Jacques' deep abiding love for the ocean and it's inhabitants, particularly dolphins. He spends much of the book exploring both the affection and the similarities existing between man and dolphin, a heartfelt search for "the dolphin dormant in all of us ".

The adventures in Jacques' life were chronicled in the landmark Luc Bresson film 'The Big Blue'. He has been the subject of numerous national and international broadcast interviews and print features. Jacques is also one of the world's leading authorities on 'apnea', a phenomenal physical discipline which reduces heart rate and respiratory functions, thus allowing him to perform his remarkable diving feats.

Mazzucchelli, David (2008). Asterios Polyp. New York, Pantheon Books.
For decades, Mazzucchelli has been a master without a masterpiece. Now he has one. His long-awaited graphic novel is a huge, knotty marvel, the comics equivalent of a Pynchon or Gaddis novel, and radically different from anything he's done before. There are fascinating digressions on aesthetic philosophy, as well as some very broad satire, but the core of the book is Mazzucchelli's odyssey of style-every major character in the book is associated with a specific drawing style and visual motifs, and the design, color scheme and formal techniques of every page change to reinforce whatever's happening in the story. Although Mazzucchelli stacks the deck-few characters besides Polyp and his inamorata, the impossibly good-hearted sculptor Hana, are more than caricatures-the book's bravado and mastery make it riveting even when it's frustrating, and provide a powerful example of how comics use visual information to illustrate complex, interconnected topics.

McArthur, Tom (1992). The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
A language-lover's dream, The Oxford Companion to the English Language is a thousand-page cornucopia covering virtually every aspect of the English language as well as language in general. The range of topics is remarkable, offering a goldmine of information on writing and speech (including entries on grammar, literary terms, linguistics, rhetoric, and style) as well as on such wider issues as sexist language, bilingual education, child language acquisition, and the history of English. There are biographies of Shakespeare, Noah Webster, Noam Chomsky, James Joyce, and many others who have influenced the shape or study of the language; extended articles on everything from psycholinguistics to sign language to tragedy; coverage of every nation in which a significant part of the population speaks English as well as virtually every regional dialect and pidgin (from Gullah and Scouse to Cockney and Tok Pisin). In addition, the Companion provides bibliographies for the larger entries, generous cross-referencing, etymologies for headwords, a chronology of English from Roman times to 1990, and an index of people who appear in entries or bibliographies. And like all Oxford Companions, this volume is packed with delightful surprises. We learn, for instance, that the first Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard later became President (John Quincy Adams); that "slogan" originally meant "war cry "; that the keyboard arrangement QWERTY became popular not because it was efficient but the opposite (it slows down the fingers and keeps them from jamming the keys); that "mbenzi" is Swahili for "rich person" (i.e., one who owns a Mercedes Benz); and that in Scotland, "to dree yir ain weird" means "to follow your own star."

McBride, Joseph (2006). What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career. Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky.
With Orson Welles, all roads lead to Citizen Kane, and it's there that many of his troubles began, McBride asserts in his lengthy examination of the famed filmmaker's career. Labeled a communist by the vengeful publisher William Hearst, Welles found himself blacklisted in the industry. He left for Europe, later writing in Esquire that he "chose freedom." He produced only two movies during the eight years he spent abroad, but McBride asserts that his expatriate period resulted in tremendous growth as an independent filmmaker. Much of the book revolves around the saga of Welles's unfinished Hollywood satire, The Other Side of the Wind, which the author also worked on.

McCalman, Max and David Gibbons (2002). The Cheese Plate. New York, Clarkson Potter.
Max McCalman, maetre fromager at New York's Picholine and Artisanal restaurants, with writer David Gibbons, has prepared The Cheese Plate as an introduction to world-class cheeses. McCalman offers a brief overview then points the way toward profiles of various producers, discussions of how the various cheeses are made, how to store, unwrap, serve, what's good and what's not, pairings for tastings, tips and arcana. Susan Salinger's 55 full-color photographs enrich this presentation. Beginning with chapters that explore cheese creation--a fascinating partnership of animal, terroir (place of origin), and skills honed over the millennia--the book then provides succinct buying, storing, and serving advice.

McCalman, Max and David Gibbons (2005). Cheese: A Connoisseur's Guide to the World's Best. New York, Clarkson Potter.
As the maître fromager at New York's acclaimed Picholine restaurant (the first in the country to offer a serious cheese program) and author of the widely acclaimed The Cheese Plate, McCalman has selected, tasted, and studied hundreds of cheeses, serving them to thousands of cheese lovers. And now he has created the definitive reference on the subject. Cheese profiles about 200 of the world's best cheeses - and only the best - complete with all the practical information you could need and all the fascinating details you could want.

McCarthy, Mary (1952). The Groves of Academe. New York, Harcourt.
Henry Mulcahy, a literature instructor at progressive Jocelyn College, is informed that his appointment will not be continued. Convinced he is disliked by the president of Jocelyn because of his abilities as a teacher and his independence of mass opinion, Mulcahy believes he is being made the victim of a witch-hunt. Plotting vengeance, Mulcahy battles to fight for justice and, in the process, reveals his true ethical nature.

McCaughan, Michael (2002). True Crimes: Rodolfo Walsh - The Life and Times of a Radical Intellectual. London, Latin America Bureau.
Rodolfo Walsh was a tireless investigative journalist who uncovered real political crimes, a writer who felt that 'the concern of the intellectual is by definition the conscience. He was in Cuba in 1959, participating in the first revolutionary press service in Latin America, Prensa Latina. When a coded telex arrived in their offices by mistake, Walsh deciphered the plans for the US invasion of Cuba being planned in Guatemala by the CIA.

In 1977, on the anniversary of the coup that marked the worst terror ever known in Argentina, Rodolfo Walsh published his "Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta", exposing the torture, disappearance and murder of thousands of citizens by the State. He also accused the military government of economic mismanagement on such a scale that the country would be unable to recover - a prediction that has come true. In return he was gunned down in the streets of Buenos Aires by a military death squad. His books were banned and burned by the military dictatorship.

True Crimes is an anthology of Rodolfo Walsh's writings, with the best of his journalism, fiction and autobiography. Three complete short stories are included, among them, "That Woman," voted best Argentinian story of the twentieth century by prominent writers, critics and publishers in 1999, up against literary giants such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar. True Crimes is the first account of his life to be published.

McCay, Winsor and Peter Maresca (2005). Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!. Palo Alto, CA, Sunday Press Books.
"Likely the most spectacular book about comics ever" - Los Angeles Times. Celebrate the 100th birthday of Winsor McCay's masterpiece with this full original size, 120-page hardbound volume. It features Nemo's best from 1905-1910, all printed in the actual newspaper-page size, 16 x 21 inches. It was the greatest comic strip of its day, perhaps the greatest of all time, acclaimed the world over for its artistic majesty, unbounded imagination, and ground-breaking techniques that helped define a new art form. But since its debut 100 years ago, it has been all but impossible to view these masterpieces in their original size and colors. Little Nemo in Slumberland can now be seen as creator Winsor McCay intended; 110 digitally-restored, full-size prints presented in incredible detail displaying the superb draftsmanship and unique comic style of the prolific McCay. This magnificent volume has become the most highly praised book of its kind. From a testimonial by writer and artist Art Spiegelman: "This heartbreakingly beautiful book is the reinvention of Winsor McCay - as if he was being published for the first time. Only better." Famed graphic novelist Chris Ware calls Splendid Sundays "A wonderful thing. It's 'the book of the year." Writer Niel Gaiman says, "It is every bit as gorgeous, as inspiring, and as necessary as I had hoped." And from Simpsons creator Matt Groening, "It's just amazing!"

McChesney, Robert W. (2008). The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. New York, Monthly Review Press.
More than any other work, The Political Economy of Media demonstrates the incompatibility of the corporate media system with a viable democratic public sphere, and the corrupt policymaking process that brings the system into existence. Among the most acclaimed communication scholars in the world, Robert W. McChesney has brought together all the major themes of his two decades of research. Rich in detail, evidence, and thoughtful arguments, The Political Economy of Media provides a comprehensive critique of the degradation of journalism, the hyper-commercialization of culture, the Internet, and the emergence of the contemporary media reform movement.

McChesney, Robert W. (1999). Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.
The first paperback edition of a myth-breaking book on media, from one of today's most reputable and insightful media historian/critics. Winner of Harvard's Goldsmith Book Prize, Rich Media, Poor Democracy challenges the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information "choices" is a democratic one. Robert McChesney, whom Marc Crispin Miller calls "the greatest of our media historians," argues that the major beneficiaries of the so-called Information Age are wealthy investors, advertisers, and a handful of enormous media, computer, and telecommunications corporations. This concentrated corporate control, McChesney maintains, is disastrous for any notion of participatory democracy. Combining unprecedented detail on current events with historical sweep, in a book Noam Chomsky calls a "rich and penetrating study," McChesney chronicles the waves of media mergers and acquisitions in the late 1990s. He reviews the corrupt and secretive enactment of public policies surrounding the internet, digital television, and public broadcasting. He also addresses the gradual and ominous adaptation of the First Amendment as a means of shielding corporate media power and the wealthy, and he debunks the myth that the market compels media firms to "give the people what they want." In an eye-opening call to action, McChesney warns that we must organize politically to restructure the media if we want democracy to endure.

McClure, Michael (1967). The Beard; [a Play]. New York, Grove Press.
Billy the Kid (fabled outlaw of American folklore) and Jean Harlow (cinema star and uber-Marilyn Monroe) meet in blue velvet Eternity.

McClure, Michael (1974). Rare Angel (Writ with Raven's Blood). Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press.

McClure, Michael (1975). Jaguar Skies. New York, New Directions Pub. Corp.
"Poetry is a muscular principle - an athletic song or whisper of flashy thought. We can be as serious as blue-black gloom or bright as a buttercup in the dawn. The spirit of poetry is loops we send out from the expanding helix of our lives. With poetry we can meet an old perception on a mountain top or in a subway, or view a new perception loping in the distance like a wolf - or glimmering like an opal in the twilight."
- Foreword to Jaguar Skies (1975)

McClure, Michael (1976). Gorf: Or, Gorf and the Blind Dyke. New York, New Directions Pub. Corp.
A play, with photos from the acclaimed original stage production at San Francisco's Magic Theatre in 1974.

McClure, Michael (1978). Antechamber, & Other Poems. New York, New Directions.

McClure, Michael (1983). Fragments of Perseus. New York, N.Y., New Directions Pub. Corp.
Poetry.

McClure, Michael (1994). Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac. New York, Penguin Books.
Eloquent discussions on the Beat Movement and its connections to the world.

McClure, Michael and Franz Kafka (1980). Josephine, the Mouse Singer. New York, New Directions Pub. Corp.

McCorkle, James (1990). Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry. Detroit, Wayne State University Press.

McCoy, Alfred W. (2006). A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. New York, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co.
In this revelatory account of the CIA's secret, fifty-year effort to develop new forms of torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy uncovers the deep, disturbing roots of recent scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Far from aberrations, as the White House has claimed, A Question of Torture shows that these abuses are the product of a long-standing covert program of interrogation.

Developed at the cost of billions of dollars, the CIA's method combined "sensory deprivation" and "self-inflicted pain" to create a revolutionary psychological approach - the first innovation in torture in centuries. The simple techniques - involving isolation, hooding, hours of standing, extremes of hot and cold, and manipulation of time - constitute an all-out assault on the victim's senses, destroying the basis of personal identity. McCoy follows the years of research - which, he reveals, compromised universities and the U.S. Army - and the method's dissemination, from Vietnam through Iran to Central America. He traces how after 9/11 torture became Washington's weapon of choice in both the CIA's global prisons and in "torture-friendly" countries to which detainees are dispatched. Finally McCoy argues that information extracted by coercion is worthless, making a case for the legal approach favored by the FBI.

Scrupulously documented and grippingly told, A Question of Torture is a devastating indictment of inhumane practices that have spread throughout the intelligence system, damaging American's laws, military, and international standing.

McCoy, Alfred W. (2017). In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. Chicago, Haymarket Books.
In a completely original analysis, prize-winning historian Alfred W. McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power -- from the 1890s through the Cold War -- and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century through a fusion of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances. McCoy then analyzes the marquee instruments of US hegemony: covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.

Peeling back layers of secrecy, McCoy exposes a military and economic battle for global domination fought in the shadows, largely unknown to those outside the highest rungs of power. Can the United States extend the “American Century” or will China guide the globe for the next hundred years? McCoy devotes his final chapter to these questions, laying out a series of scenarios that could lead to the end of Washington’s world domination by 2030.

McCoy, Alfred W. (2003). The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade: Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central America, Colombia. Chicago, Lawrence Hill Books: Distributed by Independent Publishers Group.
Nearly 20 years ago, McCoy wrote The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, which stirred up considerable controversy, alleging that the CIA was intimately involved in the Vietnamese opium trade. In the current volume, a substantially updated and longer work, he argues that pk the situation basically hasn't changed over the past two decades; however the numbers have gotten bigger. McCoy writes, "Although the drug pandemic of the 1980s had complex causes, the growth in global heroin supply could be traced in large part to two key aspects of U.S. policy: the failure of the DEA's interdiction efforts and the CIA's covert operations." He readily admits that the CIA's role in the heroin trade was an "inadvertent" byproduct of "its cold war tactics," but he limns convincingly the path by which the agency and its forebears helped Corsican and Sicilian mobsters reestablish the heroin trade after WW II and, most recently, "transformed southern Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin." Scrupulously documented, almost numbingly so at times, this is a valuable corrective to the misinformation being peddled by anti-drug zealots on both sides of the aisle.

McCoy, Horace (1996). Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. London; New York, Serpent's Tail.
This once-famous noir novel (by the author of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) was originally published in 1948 and inspired an excellent (and long neglected) James Cagney film. In a grating and deliberately stiff style that reflects his arrogant egotism, college-educated 'Ralph Cotter' (his alias) relates the story of his escape from a prison farm, involvement with willing and dangerous women, and complicity with a corrupt establishment dominated by crooked cops and lawyers that he thinks he can bend to his own invincible will. Cotter is a pugnacious, violently sensual Middle American Raskolnikov, and his remorseless amorality resonates as chillingly today as it must have 50 years ago. Aficionados of hard-boiled fiction who think that Hammett, Cain, and Jim Thompson set the standard ought to take a look at Horace McCoy.

McCoy, Horace (1937). No Pockets in a Shroud. London, A. Barker.
The city of Colton is corrupt to its very foundations. Surrounded by lies, Mike Dolan wants to print the truth. He quits his job on The Times-Gazette and founds Cosmopolite with borrowed money. In his unsparing zeal to expose the city's criminals, he risks sudden death with each issue.

McCrum, Robert (2004). Wodehouse: A Life. New York City, W. W. Norton & Company.
An affectionate portrait of the prolific twentieth-century comic writer (1881-1975) discusses his creation of such characters as Jeeves, Psmith, and the Empress of Blandings; describes his contributions to Broadway and the London stage; details his internment in Germany during WW II; and moves on to his life in Southampton, NY.

McCullers, Carson and Library of America (Firm) (2001). Complete Novels. New York, Library of America.
When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published in 1940, Carson McCullers was instantly recognized as one of the most promising writers of her generation. The novels that followed established her as a master of Southern Gothic. Now, The Library of America collects her complete novels in an unprecedented single-volume edition that reveals the breadth and intensity of McCullers' achievement.

"McCullers' gift," writes Joyce Carol Oates, "was to evoke, through an accumulation of images and musically repeated phrases, the singularity of experience, not to pass judgment on it." McCullers effortlessly conveyed the raw anguish of her characters and the weird beauty of their perceptions. Set in small Georgia towns that are at once precisely observed and mythically resonant, McCullers' novels explore the strange, sometimes grotesque inner lives of characters who are often marginal and misunderstood. Above all, McCullers possessed an unmatched ability to capture the bewilderment and fragile wonder of adolescence.

In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), McCullers' assured debut novel, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a black doctor, and the widowed owner of a small-town cafe. Two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943), use melodramatic scenarios and freakish characters to explore the disfiguring violence of desire. The Member of the Wedding (1946), on which the play and film were based, tells of a young girl's fascination with her brother's wedding and is perhaps McCullers' most moving and accomplished novel. In Clock Without Hands (1960), the story of a terminally ill druggist, McCullers' produces some of her most forceful and indignant social criticism.

McCumber, David (1996). Playing Off the Rail: A Pool Hustler's Journey. New York, Random House.
This book provides a nonfiction account of the pool hustler's world, where the color of money can be a very dingy green. The author is a reporter who hooks up with a pool player and agrees to put up the money to travel the country while gambling his finances on the hustler's skills. In this entertaining on-the-road journal, we meet a host of colorful characters and run a gauntlet of high stakes, low-life, pool hall activity. Befitting the smoky atmosphere of the pool hall, the language is strong and the threat of violence is always imminent. Over the course of the book, the action becomes repetitive, but the story is told from a unique perspective that captures the genuine flavor of pool hustling.

McDonnell, Patrick, Karen O'Connell, et al. (2004). Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman. New York, H.N. Abrams.
Krazy Kat, created by George Herriman, made its debut in 1913. During its 31-year run, it was enormously popular with the public and with many writers, artists, and intellectuals of the time. Herriman's stories of the Kat and his tormentor, Ignatz Mouse, were both playful and philosophical. This book is the most comprehensive survey of the innovative cartoon masterpiece and the first major biographical work on the artist himself. Illustrated with more than 150 of Herriman's comic strips as well as never-before-published drawings, archival photographs, and personal letters, this book is a testament to the brilliance of his work.

McEwan, Ian (2002). Atonement: A Novel. New York, N.A. Talese/Doubleday.
This haunting novel is at once McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically penetrating, and his most sweeping and expansive. It is in effect two, or even three, books in one, all masterfully crafted. The first part ushers us into a domestic crisis that becomes a crime story centered around an event that changes the lives of half a dozen people in an upper-middle-class country home on a hot English summer's day in 1935. Young Briony Tallis, a hyperimaginative 13-year-old who sees her older sister, Cecilia, mysteriously involved with their neighbor Robbie Turner, a fellow Cambridge student subsidized by the Tallis family, points a finger at Robbie when her young cousin is assaulted in the grounds that night; on her testimony alone, Robbie is jailed. The second part of the book moves forward five years to focus on Robbie, now freed and part of the British Army that was cornered and eventually evacuated by a fleet of small boats at Dunkirk during the early days of WWII. This is an astonishingly imagined fresco that bares the full anguish of what Britain in later years came to see as a kind of victory. In the third part, Briony becomes a nurse amid wonderfully observed scenes of London as the nation mobilizes. No, she doesn't have Robbie as a patient, but she begins to come to terms with what she has done and offers to make amends to him and Cecilia, now together as lovers. In an ironic epilogue that is yet another coup de the tre, McEwan offers Briony as an elderly novelist today, revisiting her past in fact and fancy and contributing a moving windup to the sustained flight of a deeply novelistic imagination. With each book McEwan ranges wider, and his powers have never been more fully in evidence than here.

McFate, Sean (2014). The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
The Iraq War and Blackwater may seem like yesterday's headlines, but the private military industry is still going strong. In The Modern Mercenary, a book powered by deep research and filled with fascinating details, Sean McFate deftly explores both the historic parallels of today's trade in military services for hire, and its likely future. A persuasive, unsettling, and nonpolemical account describes the way private military and security contractors are changing the face of war.

McFadden, Chuck (2013). Trailblazer: A Biography of Jerry Brown. Berkeley, University of California Press.
McFadden traces Brown's childhood in San Francisco, his time studying for the priesthood, his unusual political career, and his romances-including a long-term relationship with singer Linda Ronstadt. He describes Brown's first two terms as governor advocating for farm workers, women and minorities, his time roaming the world in a spiritual quest, and his return to the gritty world of politics as chairman of the California Democratic Party and then mayor of Oakland. Political experts weigh in with thoughts about the remarkable 2010 campaign that saw the 72-year-old Brown winning his third term in office while being vastly outspent by Republican Meg Whitman. Concise, insightful, and enlivened by the events and personalities that colored the history of California, Trailblazer provides an intimate portrait of the pugnacious, adept politician who has bucked national trends to become a leader of one of the largest economies in the world.

McGee, Harold (2012)). Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes. New York, Penguin Press.
A companion volume to recipe books, a touchstone for spotting flawed recipes and making the best of them, Keys to Good Cooking is a welcome aid for cooks of all types -- translating the modern science of cooking into immediately useful information. Taking home cooks from market to table -- and teaching them the best way to select, prepare, and present an amazing array of food -- Keys to Good Cooking is a valuable resource for anyone who prepares food and wants to do it well.

McGee, Harold (2004). On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. New York, Scribner.
Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is a kitchen classic, the bible to which food lovers and professional chefs worldwide turn for an understanding of where our foods come from, what exactly they're made of, and how cooking transforms them into something new and delicious.

Now, for its twentieth anniversary, Harold McGee has prepared a new, fully revised and updated edition of On Food and Cooking. He has rewritten the text almost completely, expanded it by two-thirds, and commissioned more than 100 new illustrations. As compulsively readable and engaging as ever, the new On Food and Cooking provides countless eye-opening insights into food, its preparation, and its enjoyment.

McGeough, Paul (2009). Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas. New York, New Press: Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co.
Based on interviews conducted with key players and Hamas leader Khalid Mishal, the narrative focuses on the attempted assassination in 1997 of Mishal by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and examines how the bungled poisoning catalyzed Hamas - previously marginalized and labeled a terrorist group'to rise to power. The brazen attempt on Mishal's life in broad daylight while he was taking his sons for a haircut in Amman, Jordan, galvanized the movement; Mishal became a household name in the Middle East and Hamas members called him "the martyr who did not die." By 2004, Hamas's refusal to abandon the use of suicide bombers turned international opinion against the organization, but by this time even Jimmy Carter had visited Mishal, and Arafat's PLO had been pushed aside as the sole representative of the Palestinian cause. This is the definitive chronicle of the Middle East crisis during the Clinton years and in the post-9/11 era.

McGilligan, Patrick (2011). Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director. New York, It Books.
A rare glimpse into the life of the troubled filmmaker who directed Rebel Without a Cause traces the evolution of this creative genius, from his small-town roots to his success and ultimate alienation and banishment from Hollywood.

McGowan, David (2000). Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don't Want You to See. Monroe, ME, Common Courage Press.
Is the U.S. a beacon of progress? That's how the mainstream media want you to see it. But in Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don't Want You to See, David McGowan has compiled an index of disturbing facts that point to ominous trends. Did you know:

From mandatory minimum sentencing laws to new, more liberal search-and-seizure rules, from 'Three Strikes You're Out' to congressional legislation for a national ID card, in Derailing Democracy, David McGowan has compiled the facts to show that the noose around democracy is tightening every day.

McGraw-Hill (2003). Mcgraw-Hill Dictionary of Geology and Mineralogy. New York, McGraw-Hill.
Derived from the world-renowned McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, Sixth Edition, this vital reference offers a wealth of essential information in a portable, convenient, quick-find format. Whether you're a professional, a student, a writer, or a general reader with an interest in science, there is no better or more authoritative way to stay up-to-speed with the current language of geology and mineralogy or gain an understanding of its key ideas and concepts. Includes synonyms, acronyms, and abbreviations. Provides pronunciations for all terms. Covers such topics as physical geology, historical geology, mineralogy, marine geology, plate tectonics, petrology, sedimentology, and stratigraphy. Includes an appendix containing tables of useful data and information.

McGraw-Hill (2003). Mcgraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms. New York, McGraw-Hill.
It has been 30 years since the first edition of this encyclopedia was published. Over this span of time, the terminology in science and technology has expanded at a rapid rate, resulting in the addition of some 5,000 new terms in each edition. The sixth edition continues that expansion and now has some 110,000 terms and 125,000 definitions, accompanied by 3,000 black-and-white illustrations. The format continues as in the past, with letter-by-letter alphabetization. Synonyms, acronyms, and abbreviations are given within the definition. Pronunciation of each and every term continues to set this dictionary apart from other science and technology dictionaries. It is a large, heavy volume that lies flat when opened. It may be time for the publisher to consider a two-volume work for ease of handling by the patron.

Each entry is classed into one or more of 104 fields, from "Acoustics" to "Zoology," for which abbreviations are inserted in the definitions. These fields have been revised to reflect modern usage with some new ones added, including "Forensic Science" and "Neuroscience." A detailed scope note for each field is included near the front of the dictionary. The 3,000 illustrations are in the outside margin of each page near the appropriate term and are crisp and clear. One change that would be useful in future editions is referring the reader to the appendix when appropriate. Periodic table is defined in the main part of the dictionary but there is no reference to the periodic table in the appendix, which would be missed if one did not browse through the back matter. Among other items in the appendix are information on measurements systems, mathematical signs and symbols, and very brief biographies of Nobel laureates and individuals after whom scientific terms are named.

This continues to be the most comprehensive science and technology dictionary for the student, researcher, and layperson. It is recommended for most libraries.

McGuane, Thomas (1995). Panama. New York, Vintage Books.
The plot finds drugged-out and washed-up rock star Chet Pomeroy trying to get his act together in wild and wonderful Key West, Florida.

McGuffin, Gary and Joanie McGuffin (2008). Paddle Your Own Kayak: An Illustrated Guide to the Art of Kayaking. New York, Boston Mills Press. Distributed by Firefly Books (U.S.).
The authors discuss the kayak's Inuit history, types of kayaking, recommended kayak sizes and shapes, and proper gear and clothing. They also offer expert, step-by-step instructions on all of the sport's essential techniques. Illustrated with more than 600 color photographs and illustrations, Paddle Your Own Kayak is designed for both seasoned and novice kayaker.

McKay, Brett and Kate McKay (2009). The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man. Cincinnati, Ohio, How Books.
Taking lessons from classic gentlemen such as Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, authors Brett and Kate McKay have created a collection of the most useful advice every man should know to live life fully. This book contains a wealth of information that ranges from survival skills to social skills to advice on how to improve your character. Whether you are braving the wilds with your friends, courting your girlfriend or raising a family, you'll find practical information and inspiration for every area of life. Also visit The Art of Manliness website.

McKinley, Michael (2009). Hockey: A People's History. Toronto, McClelland & Stewart.
McKinley's history of the "fast, rough, beautiful game" comprehensively chronicles hockey from its genesis as a winter substitute for lacrosse. A companion to a similarly titled CBC TV series, the lavishly illustrated book combines punchy boxed features celebrating individuals and hockey oddments and a detailed tracing of the game's development. Among the tidbits one learns: the New York Rangers' name derives from a pun (their first owner was Tex Rickard, making them "Tex's Rangers"), women introduced the goalie mask (at various times, they employed a baseball catcher's mask and a fencing cage) decades before Ken Dryden became an inspiration to Friday the 13th's Jason, and women's professional hockey dates back nearly as far as men's but disappeared after the 1940s. Of course, McKinley returns frequently to hockey's hallowed rivalry: the Toronto Maple Leafs versus the Montreal Canadiens. Only the Yankees versus the Red Sox yarn can compare to that of the Francophone-beloved Canadiens and mercurial Conn Smythe's scheming to make the Leafs their outranking Anglo analogue. Bouts of hand-wringing over the way American money threatens hockey's Canadian identity punctuate the continuum as McKinley gives all the franchises and all the stars, from Cyclone Taylor to Maurice "Rocket" Richard to Wayne Gretzky, their due. Essential for general sports as well as hockey-intensive collections.

McLellan, David (1974). Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. New York, Harper & Row.

McLuhan, Marshall, Matie Molinaro, et al. (1987). Letters of Marshall Mcluhan. Toronto; New York, Oxford University Press.
Coiner of the famous phrase "the medium is the message" and author of two widely read, controversial volumes--The Guttenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media--Marshall McLuhan was one of the most talked about personalities of the 1960s. He appeared on the cover of Newsweek and The Saturday Review, was written about in Time, Life, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The National Review, was the subject of an hour-long documentary on NBC, and had an unforgettable walk-on role in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, playing himself. A seminal thinker, he introduced popular culture as a subject for serious thought, and started people thinking about how technology--especially electronic media--shapes the way we perceive the world. McLuhan corresponded with a vast number of people, from Hubert Humphrey and Jimmy Carter to popular advice columnist Ann Landers. Indeed, his correspondents amount to a Who's Who of western culture, both high and low, including Duke Ellington, Woody Allen, Jacques Maritain, Rollo May, Susan Sontag, Eugene Ionesco, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Bob Newhart. At times playful and at times profound, his letters offer an invaluable commentary on McLuhan's work and, in some instances, the most lucid and detailed explanation of his ideas available. A brilliant letter-writer and a genial man who made friends all over the world, Marshall McLuhan left behind a correspondence that brims with insight, good humor, and the love of language and word play. His letters offer an invaluable glimpse of the private life and inner thoughts of one of the great minds of the twentieth century.

McManners, John (1990). The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
Spanning two thousand years of stirring religious, cultural and political events, this lavishly illustrated volume provides the most authoritative and accessible history of Christianity ever published for the general reader.

The impact of Christianity on world civilization is almost incalculable, and in exploring this rich heritage, nineteen leading scholars range from the earliest origins to the present day to examine virtually every aspect of the faith. They discuss the apostle Peter and Roman Emperor Constantine, describe the role of Charlemagne in the expansion of the religion, and assess medieval scholasticism and the influence of Thomas Aquinas. The profound changes that occurred during both the Reformation and the Enlightenment are fully treated in chapters that offer revealing portraits of such key figures as Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and Rousseau. Fully one third of the book covers Christianity since 1800--with special studies of the faith as practiced in Britain and Europe, North and South America, Africa, India, and the Far East--offering a compelling continuous narrative filled with insight into the enormously diverse Christian world. In the final chapters, the authors consider questions of contemporary Christian theology, conscience and belief, and explore new concepts of Christian community.

Over 350 beautiful illustrations--including 32 full color plates--grace the text, ranging from mosaics, paintings and sculptures, to architecture and modern art. There are also ten maps, a chronology of important events, and an annotated guide to further reading.

McNally, D. (2002). A Long Strange Trip: The inside History of the Grateful Dead. New York, Broadway Books.
The Grateful Dead forever changed popular music by ushering in the psychedelic sound of the 1960s as they valiantly toured almost nonstop for three decades and consumed loads of illegal substances. Yet the most fascinating, and revealing, thing about the Dead is their fans the Deadheads: tie-dyed, drugged up and devoted in a way that makes Beatlemania look rational. What did the Dead have that fellow San Francisco bands Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Moby Grape lacked? As author McNally (Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America) explains in this entertaining and well-written book, the Dead built up their loyal following by treating fans as equals, as "companions in an odyssey." After improvisation, writes McNally, "the single largest element in the Dead's weltanschauung was their pursuit of group mind under the influence of LSD." As the Dead's publicist for more than 20 years, McNally packs this 600-pager full of intimate details otherwise unavailable, such as the time the group's janitor vetoed a suggestion from multimillion-dollar promoter Bill Graham as too "commercial." On the other hand, McNally clearly dodges the more unflattering and controversial aspects of the musicians' lives offstage; indeed, every living member of the original lineup provides glowing endorsements on the book's back cover. But perhaps McNally thinks the Dead's underside has been done to death; in any case, with a little prettifying he still manages to pen the most exhaustively researched book on the band to date.

McNeal, Tom (2013). Far Far Away. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Jeremy Johnson Johnson hears voices. Or, specifically, one voice: the ghost of Jacob Grimm, one half of The Brothers Grimm. Jacob watches over Jeremy, protecting him from an unknown dark evil whispered about in the space between this world and the next.

But Jacob can't protect Jeremy from everything. When coltish, copper-haired Ginger Boultinghouse takes a bite of a cake so delicious it's rumored to be bewitched, she falls in love with the first person she sees: Jeremy. In any other place, this would be a turn for the better for Jeremy, but not in Never Better, where the Finder of Occasions-whose identity and evil intentions nobody knows-is watching and waiting, waiting and watching. And as anyone familiar with the Brothers Grimm know, not all fairy tales have happy endings.

McNeaney, Erin (2016). Carry-on Traveller: The Ultimate Guide to Packing Light. Seattle, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
The Carry-On Traveller will teach you not only how to lighten your load, but how to pack everything you need into a single carry-on-size bag. You can apply these strategies to any trip, whether you are travelling for a week or a year, to hot or cold climates, alone or with kids. By travelling carry-on only, you’ll save time at airports, avoid wasting money on checked luggage fees (which are increasingly common), and reduce the stress of hauling bulky bags.

McWilliams, Carey (1976). California: The Great Exception. Santa Barbara, Calif., Peregrine Smith.
In 1949, lawyer, historian, and journalist Carey McWilliams stepped back to assess the state of California at the end of its first one hundred years--its history, population, politics, agriculture, and social concerns. As he examined the reasons for the prodigious growth and productivity that have characterized California since the Gold Rush, he praised the vitality of the new citizens who had come from all over the world to populate the state in a very short time. But he also made clear how brutally the new Californians dealt with "the Indian problem," the water problem, and the need for migrant labor to facilitate California's massive and highly profitable agricultural industry. As we look back now on 150 years of statehood, it is particularly useful to place the events of the past fifty years in the context of McWilliams's assessment in California: The Great Exception. Lewis Lapham has written a new foreword for this edition.

Mehring, Franz (1962). Karl Marx, the Story of His Life. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.

Meinhof, Ulrike Marie and Karin Bauer (2008). Everybody Talks About the Weather -- We Don't: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof. New York, Seven Stories Press.
No other figure embodies revolutionary politics, radical chic, and the promises and failures of the New Left quite like Ulrike Meinhof (1934-76). In the 1960s, she was known in Europe as a journalist and public intellectual, leading an exciting life in Hamburg's high society with her publisher husband and twin daughters. Ten years later, Meinhof gave up her bourgeois existence to form, with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, the Red Army Faction (RAF). Also called the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the group was notorious for its politically motivated acts of violence, including bombings, kidnappings, bank robberies, and shootouts with police.

What impels someone to abandon middle-class privilege for the sake of revolution? Meinhof, who spent the 1960s writing a column for the popular leftist magazine konkret, began to see the world in increasingly stark terms: the United States was emerging as an unstoppable superpower and Germany appeared to be run by former Nazis. Never before translated into English, Meinhof's 1960s columns published in konkret show a woman in transition, reflecting upon the major political events and social currents of her time. An essay by Karin Bauer contextualizes Meinhof's writings and mesmerizing life story within the political developments of the German Left. Bauer also explores Meinhof's afterlife and asks why Meinhof's ghost still haunts us today.

A relentless critic of her mother and of the Left, author and journalist Bettina Rohl, one of Meinhof's daughters, contributes an afterword that aims to tear down Meinhof's iconic status. Noting the increasingly desperate tone of Meinhof's writing, Nobel Prize Laureate Elfriede Jelinek reflects in her foreword on Germany's missed opportunity to learn from Meinhof's writings.

Mehring, Margaret (1990). The Screenplay: A Blend of Film Form and Content. Boston, Focal Press.
The Screenplay is written in an engaging manner, inviting the reader to develop their writing and creative abilities through projects and challenging exercises. This book also features illustrative excerpts from such successful screenplays as Witness, Out of Africa, Body and Soul, Beverly Hills Cop, Rebel Without a Cause, and An Officer and a Gentlemen.

Meister, Sarah Hermanson and Bill Brandt (2013). Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light. New York, NY, Museum of Modern Art.
Bill Brandt was the preeminent British photographer of the twentieth century, a founding father of photography's modernist tradition whose half-century-long career defies neat categorization. This publication presents the photographer's entire oeuvre, with special emphasis on his investigation of English life in the 1930s and his innovative late nudes. The Museum of Modern Art has been exhibiting and collecting Brandt's photographs since the late 1940s, and has recently more than doubled its collection of vintage prints of his work, which forms the core of this selection. An essay by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA, sets the artist's life and work in the context of twentieth-century photographic history. With rich duotone illustrations that highlight the special characteristics of Brandt's prints, this volume is an invaluable resource to students and scholars alike. Lee Ann Daffner, the Museum's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservator of Photographs, contributes an illustrated glossary of Brandt's retouching techniques, enhancing the appreciation of Brandt's printing processes. The book also includes a generously illustrated appendix of Brandt's published photo-stories during the Second World War.

Mellen, Joan (2005). A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History. Dulles, VA, Potomac Books.
Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in President John F. Kennedy's murder.

Garrison began by exposing the contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in killing Kennedy. A Farewell to Justice reveals that Oswald, no Marxist, was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to sabotage Garrison's investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. Garrison interviewed various individuals involved in the assassination, ranging from Clay Shaw and CIA contract employee David Ferrie to a Marine cohort of Oswald named Kerry Thornley, who was also a CIA asset. Garrison's suspects included CIA-sponsored soldiers of fortune enlisted in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, an anti-Castro Cuban asset, and a young runner for the conspirators, interviewed here for the first time by the author.

Building upon Garrison's effort, Mellen uncovers decisive new evidence and clearly establishes the intelligence agencies' roles in both a president's assassination and its cover-up, set in motion well before the actual events of November 22, 1963.

Melman, Seymour (2001). After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Democracyv. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
A longtime critic of the Pentagon and of American capitalism, Melman (emeritus, industrial engineering, Columbia University) here argues that the normal workings of corporate and government managerial control have resulted in grave production weaknesses in the United States. He contends that only by adopting workplace democracy can we avoid a collapse similar to that experienced by the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Melman describes state capitalism, explains how the business-government partnership works, and shows how this partnership has hurt workers and the communities in which they live. He also shows how the accumulation of capital and power corrodes production capabilities and how blue- and white-collar workers are responding. Generally, Melman's arguments are persuasive and his use of statistics reasonable. Especially noteworthy is his discussion of the problems associated with the Bureau of the Census's Current Population Reports. Summing up a lifetime of research, this important work provides an alternative look at the new economy and the roles that American workers and their unions can play in the new century.

Melville, Herman (1984). Pierre, or, the Ambiguities; Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile; the Piazza Tales; the Confidence-Man: His Masquerade; Uncollected Prose; Billy Budd, Sailor: (an inside Narrative). New York, N.Y., Literary Classics of the United States: Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Viking Press.
Harrison Hayford, editor. This third volume rounds out Melville's complete fiction with his dark and brilliant late works. The novels Pierre, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man forgo the buoyant high seas for a keen, bleak vision of life at home in America; they look forward to modernist fiction in their satire and formal experimentation. The Piazza Tales - including "Bartleby the Scrivener," "The Encantadas," and "Benito Cereno" and uncollected stories show Melville's dazzling mastery of many styles."Should find a place on every civilized person's bookshelf." - Los Angeles Times

"The stories of The Piazza Tales are among the most widely read of Melville's work. They evince a competence, even a mastery. 'I would prefer not to,' Bartleby famously says, and there is in all these tales a certain reserve, a toning down into brown and sombre colors the sunny colors and brilliant blacks of the earlier work, a desolation hauntingly figured forth by the eerie slave-seized ship of 'Benito Cereno' and the cinderlike islands of 'The Encantadas.' The style is not quite the assured, playful, precociously fluent, and eagerly pitched voice of the sea novels. It is a slightly chastened style, with something a bit abrasive and latently aggressive about it."

Melville, Herman and G. Thomas Tanselle (1983). Redburn, His First Voyage; White-Jacket, or, the World in a Man-of-War; Moby-Dick, or, the Whale. New York, N.Y., Literary Classics of the United States Distributed to the trade by the Viking Press.

Between 1849 and 1851, Melville wrote three masterful stories of the sea (including the classic Moby-Dick) that captured colorful and comic glimpses of shipboard life, the excitement of the whale hunt, and seascapes that move from the brutal to the sublime; they also displayed a marvelous command of language that mixes the ordinary talk of sailors with the rhythms of the Bible and Shakespearean hyperbole. Together the works in this Library of America volume reveal Melville's obsession with the possibilities of human freedom, the sacrifice of that freedom to the demands of social cohesion, and the submission of social groups - represented by the shipboard community - to traditional forms of authority.

Redburn, His First Voyage has long been one of Melville's most popular works. A first-person account of a young man's coming of age, his initiation into the life of sailors, and his exposure to the slums of Liverpool and the gaudy opulence of London gambling houses, Redburn narrates the adventures of innocence abroad in a world of vice, brutality, and deception.

White-Jacket is a semi-autobiographical work about an episode in Melville's life when, finding himself "on the beach" in the South Seas, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy for the voyage "round the Horn" and home. This story dramatizes the brutal practice of flogging, and the public outcry it engendered led finally to the abolition of such punishments by the Navy. Subtitled "The World in a Man-of-War," White-Jacket explores the warship as a microcosm of human society. Although Melville chafes at the annoyances of bureaucratic discipline and official ineptitude, he retains his humor, his eye for the absurd, and his pride in the democratic good-fellowship of his mess-mates.

Explosive adventure and a dazzling play of metaphor combine to make Moby-Dick one of the great epics in all of literature. Captain Ahab's hunt for the white whale drives the narrative at a relentless pace, while Ishmael's meditations on whales and whaling, on the sublime indifference of nature and the grimy physical details of the production of oil, provide a reflective counterpoint to the headlong idolatrous quest. Sometimes read as a terrifying study of monomania or as a critical inquiry into the sinister effects of making life into symbols, Moby-Dick also offers the more immediate pleasures found in the two earlier novels.

G. Thomas Tanselle, volume editor, has written on bibliography and publishing history, is an editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, and serves on the board of directors for The Library of America.

Mencken, H. L. and Charles A. Fecher (1989). The Diary of H.L. Mencken. New York, Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
A historical treasure: the never-before, published diary of the most outspoken, iconoclastic, ferociously articulate of American social critics -- the sui generis newspaperman, columnist for the Baltimore Sun, editor of The American Mercury, and author of The American Language, who was admired, feared, and famous for his merciless puncturing of smugness, his genius for deflating pomposity and pretense, his polemical brilliance. Walter Lippmann called him, in 1926, "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated Americans."

H. L. Mencken's diary was, at his own request, kept sealed in the vaults of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library for a quarter of a century after his death. The diary covers the years 1930 -- 1948, and provides a vivid, unvarnished, sometimes shocking picture of Mencken himself, his world, and his friends and antagonists, from Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner to Franklin D. Roosevelt, for whom Mencken nourished a hatred that resulted in spectacular and celebrated feats of invective.

From the more than 2,000 pages of typescript that have now come to light, the Mencken scholar Charles A. Fecher has made a generous selection of entries carefully chosen to preserve the whole range, color, and impact of the diary. Here, full scale, is Mencken the unique observer and disturber of American society. And here too is Mencken the human being of wildly contradictory impulses: the skeptic who was prey to small superstitions, the dare-all warrior who was a hopeless hypochondriac, the loving husband and generous friend who was, alas, a bigot.

Mencken, H. L. (2010). Prejudices: The Complete Series. New York, NY, Library of America.
H.L. Mencken was the most provocative and influential journalist and cultural critic in twentieth-century America. To read him is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as those of our own day, in the company of a writer of boundless curiosity and vivacious frankness.

In the six volumes of Prejudices (1919-1927), Mencken attacked what he felt to be American provincialism and hypocrisy, and championed writers and thinkers he saw as harbingers of a new candor and maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play, Mencken's prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller coaster ride over a staggering range of thematic territory: literature and journalism, politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink, music and painting, the absurdities of Prohibition and the dismal state of American higher education, and the relative merits of Baltimore and New York. Irreverent portraits of such major contemporaries as Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, and William Dean Howells contrast with explorations of fascinating byways of American culture in a time of tumultuous and often combative transition.

Menzel, Peter and Faith D'Aluisio (2000). Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
"Today's robots are explorers, space laborers, surgeons, maids, actors, pets." What do they look like? How do they work? And what's next? Tech photographer Menzel and journalist D'Aluisio worked together on Material World and Man Eating Bugs. Their latest collaboration joins terrific photos of robots to short essays, sidebars and interviews explaining what each robot can do, how it works and what problems it was designed to solve. Several researchers tell D'Aluisio that true artificial intelligence (AI) is coming soonAa couple even believe that smart machines will someday wipe out humans. But this volume doesn't really add up to an argument about our mechanoid future: instead, it's an informative view of some current work in robotics, from out-there AI research to practical (and profitable) surgical technology. Menzel and D'Aluisio divide the machines they chronicle into six groups: the first two sets try to copy human abilities, while other sorts of 'bots function more like machines in industry or in science education. Many gizmos have special abilities of obvious, even lifesaving, practical use: "Ariel the crab-robot walks pretty well underwater; " eventually, it will detect and clear mines. "Rosie," a remote boom crane robot, can help control damage from a reactor meltdown. Other constructions simulate human and animal actions, like running and walking - a field called "biomimicry." More impressive yet are robots designed to investigate psychology and cognition. Some of these are learning and teaching their creators what it means to be human.

Merlot, Jerome and Florent Ruppert, Bastien Vives (2022). Grande Odalisque & Olympia Box Set, The. Seattle, WA, Fantagraphics.
The complete two-volume adventures of the notorious cat burglar trio of Carole, Alex, and Sam. Specializing in the theft of fine art, the trio reinvents a profession that has lost much of its fun and insolence since its heyday in the early 20th century. After successfully stealing La Grande Odalisque by Ingrés from the Louvre (in Fantagraphics' acclaimed 2021 edition of the same name) and taking on the French Special Forces, the trio eyes Manet's Olympia in the eponymous sequel. Collectively the two books paint a vivid portrait of three of the most badass femmes fatales in recent comics memory.

Merwin, W.S. (1963). Medieval Epics. New York, Modern Library.
"The first great literary works of a culture are its epic chronicles, those that create simple hero-figures about whom the imagination of a nation can crystallize," observed V. S. Pritchett. Medieval Epics presents acclaimed translations of epic legends from four Western cultures.

Beowulf is the foundation of English literature. It celebrates the courage and leadership of the mythical Anglo-Saxon warlord in his battles with supernatural monsters. Hailed by John Gardner as "poetry of the highest order of intelligence and aesthetic sophistication . . . the greatest poem in Old English," Beowulf here was translated by William Alfred of Harvard.

The Nibelungenlied, in a version rendered by critic and academic Helen M. Mustard, endures as a remarkable fusion of history and poetry that is a vital component of German literature. Goethe maintained that knowledge of the work constituted an integral part of the country's education. Indeed, The Nibelungenlied later inspired Wagner's four-opera Ring cycle.

Also included in this edition are W. S. Merwin's translations of The Song of Roland, a chanson de geste extolling chivalric ideals in the France of Charlemagne, and The Poem of the Cid, the celebrated epic of Castilian Spain. "Both are the first great literary works to be written in their respective languages," noted Pritchett. The Song of Roland is animated by the crusading spirit and fortified by national and religious propaganda. In Merwin's translation of The Poem of the Cid the Champion now stands clearly and firmly on the dusty soil of Castile and we can know for what solid reasons he became the legendary national hero.

Messerli, Douglas (1994). The Sun & Moon Guide to Eating through Literature and Art. Los Angeles, Sun & Moon Press.
Food and literature are likely counterparts: stories, novels, and poetry often contain descriptions of repasts and other alimentary tidbits. This work began as a collection of recipes contributed by famous authors but evolved instead into over 100 food-related excerpts and short writings taken from world literature. The authors include Gertrude Stein, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, August Strindberg, John Cage, Djuna Barnes, and Vaclav Havel. The book is divided into eight "courses," including "Reunions and Tea," "Entrees," and "Memories, Cigars, Liquors and Late Night Snacks." Many of the selections are delightful, such as a strange story by John Perreault entitled "The Big Cheese," but a few suffer from being excerpted out of context. The abundant illustrations are reproduced from fine-art works.

Metcalf, Paul C. (1976). Apalache. Berkeley, Calif., Turtle Island Foundation.
After a brief stint at Harvard University, Metcalf set out to develop his own authentic style. Inspired by the use of varied sources in Ezra Pound's Cantos and William Carlos Williams' Paterson; influenced by his life-long friend, Josef Alberts, whom he met at Black Mountain College, Metcalf began to incorporate historical and cultural matter, fiction, and other comments into his books. The result is an innovative and unique presentation and interpretation of our American heritage, a treasure of the literary community and incredibly intentive reading. "Apalache is a highly individual vision of America. Nothing could have prepared me for this astonishingly original work." - Carll Tucker, The Village Voice

Meyer, David N. (1998). A Girl and a Gun: The Complete Guide to Film Noir on Video. New York, Avon Books.
A traversal of the dark world of film noir that is blessedly free of film school jargon. Meyer's writing is witty and accessible, and he has a way of codifying the film noir sensibility that makes the appeal of this genre immediately understandable. The book takes its title from a comment by Jean Luc Godard: "All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun."

Meyerhold, V. E. and Edward Braun (1969). Meyerhold on Theatre. London, Methuen.
This was the first collection of Meyerhold's writings and utterances to appear in English and covers his entire career as a director from 1902 to 1939. These are supplemented by a critical commentary, relating Meyerhold to his period and containing descriptions, based on eye-witness accounts, of all his major productions.

Michaeli, Ethan (2016)). The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America. From the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
With meticulous attention to detail and in immensely readable prose, Ethan Michaeli, who once worked for the paper, tells The Chicago Defender's story and, through it, that of African Americans in the twentieth century. It is a masterful work that goes a long way toward explaining why we are where we are now. --Jessica B.Harris, Professor of English, Queens College/ CUNY

Miéville, China (2017). October: The Story of the Russian Revolution. London; Brooklyn, NY, Verso.
On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, China Miéville tells the extraordinary story of this pivotal moment in history.

In February of 1917 Russia was a backwards, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining to be at the vanguard of global revolution. How did this unimaginable transformation take place?

In a panoramic sweep, stretching from St. Petersburg and Moscow to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire, Miéville uncovers the catastrophes, intrigues and inspirations of 1917, in all their passion, drama and strangeness. Intervening in long-standing historical debates, but told with the reader new to the topic especially in mind, here is a breathtaking story of humanity at its greatest and most desperate; of a turning point for civilisation that still resonates loudly today.

Miéville, China (2001). Perdido Street Station. New York, Del Rey.
King Rat (1999), Mieville's much-praised first novel of urban fantasy/horror, was just a palate-teaser for this appetizing, if extravagant, stew of genre themes. Its setting, New Crobuzon, is an audaciously imagined milieu: a city with the dimensions of a world, home to a polyglot civilization of wildly varied species and overlapping and interpenetrating cultures. Seeking to prove his unified energy theory as it relates to organic and mechanical forms, rogue scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin tries to restore the power of flight to Yagharek, a member of the garuda race cruelly shorn of its wings. Isaac's lover, Lin, unconsciously mimics his scientific pursuits when she takes on the seemingly impossible commission of sculpting a patron whose body is a riot of grotesquely mutated and spliced appendages. Their social life is one huge, postgraduate bull session with friends and associates--until a nightmare-inducing grub escapes from Isaac's lab and transforms into a flying monster that imperils the city. This accident precipitates a political crisis, initiates an action-packed manhunt for Isaac and introduces hordes of vividly imagined beings who inhabit the twilight zone between science and sorcery. Mieville's canvas is so breathtakingly broad that the details of individual subplots and characters sometime lose their definition. But it is also generous enough to accommodate large dollops of aesthetics, scientific discussion and quest fantasy in an impressive and ultimately pleasing epic.

Miéville, China (2002). The Scar. London, Macmillan.
In the third book in an astounding, genre-breaking run, China Mieville expands the horizon beyond the boundaries of New Crobuzon, setting sail on the high seas of his ever-growing world of Bas Lag.

The Scar begins with Mieville's frantic heroine, Bellis Coldwine, fleeing her beloved New Crobuzon in the peripheral wake of events relayed in Perdidio Street Station. But her voyage to the colony of Nova Esperium is cut short when she is shanghaied and stranded on Armada, a legendary floating pirate city. Bellis becomes the reader's unbelieving eyes as she reluctantly learns to live on the gargantuan flotilla of stolen ships populated by a rabble of pirates, mercenaries, and press-ganged refugees. Meanwhile, Armada and Bellis's future is skippered by the "Lovers," an enigmatic couple whose mirror-image scarring belies the twisted depth of their passion. To give up any more of Mieville's masterful plot here would only ruin the voyage through dangerous straits, political uprisings, watery nightmares, mutinous revenge, monstrous power plays, and grand aspirations.

Milford, Nancy (2001). Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York, Random House.
Milford hit the New York Times bestseller list 30 years ago with her acclaimed biography of Zelda Fitzgerald; she now seems poised to do it again with this outstanding biography of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like Fitzgerald, Millay (1892-1950) was a Jazz Age phenomenon, causing a sensation wherever she went; lines from her brief poem, "First Fig" ("I burn my candle at both ends/ It will not last the night.") would become the rallying cry of a generation. She was notorious for her sexual unconventionality and (as Edmund Wilson put it) "her intoxicating effect on people of all ages and both sexes." How a lyric poet could have achieved such celebrity is the conundrum at the heart of Savage Beauty. Millay, as Milford depicts her, was a troubled genius who used her prodigious gift to propel herself out of rural poverty and into the center of her age. She carefully cultivated the reporters and patrons who took the "fragile girl-child" under their wing. But her delicate image masked a force of nature whose incendiary wit and insatiable ambition took the public by storm. Milford deftly links the lyric intensity of Millay's work with her ravenous appetite for life. Whether tracing her ghoulishly close relationship to her mother and sisters, her years at the center of cosmopolitan life or her morphine addiction and untimely death, this account offers its readers a haunting drama of artistic fame.

Miller, Arthur (1976). The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts. Harmondsworth, Eng.; New York, Penguin Books.
The Crucible, a historical play based on events of the Salem witchcraft trials, takes place in the small Puritan village in the colony of Massachusetts in 1692. The witchcraft trials, as Miller explains in a prose prologue to the play, grew out of the particular moral system of the Puritans, which promoted interference in others' affairs as well as a repressive code of conduct that frowned on any diversion from norms of behavior.

Miller, Arthur (1977). A View from the Bridge: A Play in Two Acts with a New Introduction. New York, Penguin Books.
Italian-American immigrant life in the 1950's textures this searing drama of love and revenge. Longshoreman Eddie Carbone is devoted to his wife, Beatrice, and to his niece, Catherine. When Beatrice's impoverished Sicilian cousins enter the U.S. illegally in the hope of finding work, Eddie gives them a helping hand. But when Catherine and one of the cousins fall in love, Eddie's affection for his niece turns into obsession.

Miller, Arthur (1980). After the Fall: A Play in Two Acts. New York, Penguin Books.
"After the Fall" presents the riveting struggle of a man attempting to make peace with history - his own and the world's - in order to go forward with his life. Haunted by this relationship with a needy sex symbol [Maggie - the veiled symbol for Marilyn Monroe], Quentin's remarks to an unseen listener spark a relentless exploration of the past motives and compromises that still shape his present.

Miller, Arthur and Gerald Clifford Weales (1977). Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman, Text and Criticism. New York, Penguin Books.
Arthur Miller seemed to capture the sometimes tragic plight of the common man with his Death of a Salesman. Bloom suggests the strength of the play is puzzling but beyond dispute, lying more in its presentation on stage than its written form. The play's continued vitality is unquestioned.

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, part of Chelsea House Publishers' Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Arthur Miller, a chronology of the author's life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.

Miller, Arthur I. (2001). Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and Beauty That Causes Havoc. New York, Basic Books.
The common wellsprings of human creativity in art and in science are explored through the lives of Einstein and Picasso. The most important scientist of the twentieth century, and its most important artist, had their periods of greatest creativity almost simultaneously and in remarkably similar circumstances. This fascinating parallel biography of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso as young men examines their greatest works -- Einstein's special theory of relativity and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the painting that brought art into the twentieth century. Miller shows how these breakthroughs arose not only from within their respective fields but from larger currents in the intellectual culture of the times: specifically, the rise of photography for Picasso, various well-known practical problems in the design of electric dynamos and the regularization of railroad timetables for Einstein, and for both the increasingly sophisticated ideas of space, time, and invisible forces that made up the cutting-edge science of the day. Ultimately, Miller shows how Einstein and Picasso, in a deep and important sense, were both working on the same problem.

Miller, Frank, Lynn Varley, et al. (2002). Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again. New York, NY, DC Comics.
This revision of an iconic character, the sequel to Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, has been one of comics publishing's most anticipated events. As installments of the DK2 comic appeared, controversy mounted. Much sloppier and gaudier, the strip didn't really resemble Miller's earlier book, and in the wake of September 11, Miller's in-your-face confrontation with authority figures upset some readers. The collected book edition makes it easier to appreciate why he'd take such risks. Miller sees Batman as an extremist, pushed to the verge of insanity because he can't compromise his beliefs. In this continuation, he's convinced today's world is controlled by powers even crazier and more ego driven than he is. And he's right. Lex Luthor and Brainiac have imprisoned, enlisted or intimidated Earth's superheroes; but the only one they can't control is the hero with no super powers, just furious moral rage. Superman, the ultimate voice of reason, tries to calm Batman. Instead, all hell breaks loose, in pages full of bursting shapes, digitized Day-Glo colors and jagged continuity. Intense as the reading experience is, it's less disturbing than Batman's assault on the masters of America and their accomplices. Miller peppers the book with caricatures of current politicians and pundits rubbing shoulders with outrageously cartoonish goons as they defend a computer-generated president and the Freedom From Information Act. If the masters of power are engaging in terrorism, this work suggests, why shouldn't rebels use terror in return? But how does a successful rebel avoid becoming a fascist leader himself? These are the questions Miller asks in this serious, important comic, a work that's intentionally disturbing in many ways and on many levels.

Miller, Frank, Klaus Janson, et al. (2002). Batman, the Dark Knight Returns. New York, DC Comics.
If any comic has a claim to have truly reinvigorated the genre, then The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller--known also for his excellent Sin City series and his superb rendering of the blind superhero Daredevil--is probably the top contender. Batman represented all that was wrong in comics and Miller set himself a tough task taking on the camp crusader and turning this laughable, innocuous children's cartoon character into a hero for our times. The great Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, the arguably peerless Watchmen) argued that only someone of Miller's stature could have done this. Batman is a character known well beyond the confines of the comic world (as are his retinue) and so reinventing him, while keeping his limiting core essentials intact, was a huge task.

Miller went far beyond the call of duty. The Dark Knight is a success on every level. Firstly it does keep the core elements of the Batman myth intact, with Robin, Alfred the butler, Commissioner Gordon, and the old roster of villains, present yet brilliantly subverted. Secondly the artwork is fantastic--detailed, sometimes claustrophobic, psychotic. Lastly it's a great story: Gotham City is a hell on earth, street gangs roam but there are no heroes. Decay is ubiquitous. Where is a hero to save Gotham? It is 10 years since the last recorded sighting of the Batman. And things have got worse than ever. Bruce Wayne is close to being a broken man but something is keeping him sane: the need to see change and the belief that he can orchestrate some of that change. Batman is back. 'The Dark Knight' has returned.

Miller, Frank and Roger McKenzie, David Michelinie, authors; Klaus Janson, illustrator (2016). Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Jason Omnibus. New York, Marvel.
A classic Marvel hero redefined by one of comics' greatest visionaries. Frank Miller's spellbinding scripts and pulse-pounding pencils mark one of Daredevil's greatest eras - but will the Kingpin and Bullseye's efforts rob the Man Without Fear of everything he holds dear? Featuring the first appearances of Elektra, Stick and the Hand. The daring discovery that drew Ben Urich into Daredevil's domain of darkness. And such forgotten-yet-formidable foes as Death-Stalker and the Gladiator.

Miller, Frank; Bill Sienkiewicz and Lynn Varley, illustrators (2016). Elektra by Frank Miller Omnibus. New York, Marvel.
Elektra is a ninja, a martial arts master, and a highly paid assassin. Once Matt Murdock's college girlfriend, her service as the Kingpin's personal bodyguard put her in brutal conflict with her former lover, nearly killing Daredevil in the process. Now, fan-favorite creator Frank Miller ushers his awesome assassin through good and evil and life and death and rebirth and more, in this defi nitive collection of the character's most memorable solo adventures. First, following a fatal duel with Bullseye, Elektra is seemingly dead and buried. Collecting: 'Elektra: Assassin 1-8,' 'Elektra Lives Again,' 'Bizarre Adventures 28,' 'What If? 35'.

Miller, Henry (1957). Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. New York, New Directions.
Tells the story of Henry Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for fifteen years.

Miller, Henry (1958). The Colossus of Maroussi. New York, New Directions.
Probably unlike anything else ever written about Greece before. Miller is a natural born writer, and he sees things as nobody else sees them." - Edmund Wilson

Miller, Judith, Stephen Engelberg, et al. (2001). Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. New York, Simon & Schuster.
Featuring an inside look at how germ warfare has been waged throughout history and what form its future might take (and in whose hands), Germs reads like a gripping detective story told by fascinating key figures: American and Soviet medical specialists who once made germ weapons but now fight their spread, FBI agents who track Islamic radicals, the Iraqis who built Saddam Hussein's secret arsenal, spies who travel the world collecting lethal microbes, and scientists who see ominous developments on the horizon.

Miller, John and Tim Smith (1995). San Francisco Thrillers: True Crimes and Dark Mysteries from the City by the Bay. San Francisco, CA, Chronicle Books.
This eclectic collection of fact, fiction, and drama is linked by a San Francisco setting and the capacity to spook readers. Among the writers are such notables as Bill Pronzini, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, Joe Gores, and Marcia Muller. Highlights include Oscar Lewis' true-crime piece "The Phosphorescent Bridal," which details the city's most spectacular and controversial trial of the late 1800s. Film buffs will enthuse over the inclusion of a selection from Alfred Hitchcock's screenplay for Vertigo. The Thompson selection, "Ironside," is typically dark and brooding and seems to have been the basis for the old Raymond Burr television series of the same name. The reprint of Pronzini's 1968 short "It's a Lousy World" marked the first appearance of "Nameless," his still vital series detective.

Miller, Robert Parsons (1977). Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds. New York, Oxford University Press.

Miller, Ron (2014). The Art of Space: The History of Space Art, from the Earliest Visions to the Graphics of the Modern Era. London, Zenith Press.
Miller presents over 350 high-quality and often photorealistic images that chart how artists throughout history, working with the knowledge and research available during their time, have endeavored to construct realistic images of visions throughout the universe. Beginning with depictions of space ships, unmanned probes, and space stations, Miller moves through collections that also illustrate the planets, moons, galaxies, and stars; cities, colonies, and space habitats; and possible alien life. The artwork presented here has been created in a variety of media, from the woodcuts and oil paintings of the Victorian and Edwardian eras to the digitally enhanced work of contemporary artists. Each chapter also includes two special features: one profile of an artist or group of artists of particular influence and one sidebar discussion of general cultural topics, such as the use of space art for propaganda purposes during the Cold War or the impact of the digital revolution on the resources available to artists. A fascinating study on the intersection of science and the artistic imagination, The Art of Space shows how astronomy and space travel has been reflected in popular art and public perception over the past two centuries.

Miller, Todd (2014). Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security. San Francisco, City Lights Publishers.
Armed authorities watch from a military-grade surveillance tower as lines of people stream toward the security checkpoint, tickets in hand, anxious and excited to get through the gate. Few seem to notice or care that the US Border Patrol is monitoring the Super Bowl, as they have for years, one of the many ways that forces created to police the borders are now being used, in an increasingly militarized fashion, to survey and monitor the whole of American society.In fast-paced prose, Todd Miller sounds an alarm as he chronicles the changing landscape. Traveling the country-and beyond-to speak with the people most involved with and impacted by the Border Patrol, he combines these first-hand encounters with careful research to expose a vast and booming industry for high-end technology, weapons, surveillance, and prisons. While politicians and corporations reap substantial profits, the experiences of millions of men, women, and children point to staggering humanitarian consequences. Border Patrol Nation shows us in stark relief how the entire country has become a militarized border zone, with consequences that affect us all.

Mills, Tom (2016). The BBC: Myth of a Public Service. London; New York, Verso.
The BBC is one of the most important institutions in Britain; it is also one of the most misunderstood. Despite its claim to be independent and impartial, and the constant accusations of a liberal bias, the BBC has always sided with the elite. As Tom Mills demonstrates, we are only getting the news that the Establishment wants aired in public.

Throughout its existence, the BBC has been in thrall to those in power. This was true in 1926 when it stood against the workers during the General Strike, and since then the Corporation has continued to mute the voices of those who oppose the status quo: miners in 1984; anti-war protesters in 2003; those who offer alternatives to austerity economics since 2008. From the outset much of its activity has been scrutinised by the secret services at the invitation of those in charge. Since the 1990s the BBC has been integrated into the market, while its independence from government and big business has been steadily eroded. The BBC is an important and timely examination of a crucial public institution that is constantly under threat.

Milton, John and John T. Shawcross (1971). The Complete Poetry of John Milton. Garden City, N.Y., Anchor Books.
The first complete annotated edition of Milton's poetry available in a one-volume paperback. The text is established from original sources, with collations of all known manuscripts, chronology and verbal variants recorded. Works in Latin, Greek and Italian are included with new literal translations.

Mitchell, Richard P. (1993). The Society of the Muslim Brothers. New York, Oxford University Press.
First published in 1969 as part of a series edited by renowned Islamic scholar Albert Hourani, this book has been the standard source for the history of the revivalist Egyptian movement--the Muslim Brethren up to the time of Nasser. The Muslim Brethren are now well-recognized for their foundational role in the Islamic revival which has now taken on new, and perhaps dangerous, life in recent times. After having been out of print for over a decade, this reissue of the classic work makes it accessible to a new generation of scholars and students interested in the Muslim revival--a group whose numbers have increased dramatically in the past decade. The new paperback edition has a foreword by John Voll, a leading American Islamic scholar, discussing the subsequent history and continued significance of the Muslim Brethren.

Mitford, Jessica (1998). The American Way of Death Revisited. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
At the time of her death in 1996, Mitford had nearly completed this revision of her 1963 bestseller, a scathing critique of the U.S. funeral industry. Extensively revised, with subsequent additions by her husband, lawyer Robert Treuhaft, Lisa Carlson, an activist in the funeral-reform movement, and research assistant Karen Leonard, Mitford's mordant look at the excesses of the high-pressure salesmanship and lapses of taste of the "death-care industry" still rings true, and the book will evoke readers' ire. Mitford identifies disturbing new trends: cremation, once a low-cost option, has become increasingly expensive as mortuaries pressure the bereaved to buy a "traditional" funeral with all the accoutrements. Monopolistic companies have moved into the field and now account for 20% of the nation's funerals. Furthermore, she charges, the Federal Trade Commission's lax enforcement of its 1984 rule banning morticians' deceptive practices has contributed to an upward spiral of prices and profits. Other developments of the 1990s perceptively analyzed here include the refusal of many funeral directors to embalm AIDS victims and the growing popularity of low-cost funeral and memorial service organizations, which are listed in an appendix.

Mitford, Jessica and Peter Y. Sussman (2006). Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Best known for her classic funeral-industry expose, The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford (1917- 1996) was fifth of the famous Mitford sisters, but rebelled against her privileged English roots to become a member of the American Communist Party and union organizer, a civil rights activist and a celebrated investigative journalist. Sussman, a former longtime editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, has gathered an array of letters that capture Mitford's legendary wit, warmth and self-deprecating humor: decades of exuberant - and sometimes sparring - correspondence with friends, including civil rights activists Virginia and Clifford Durr, publisher Katharine Graham, journalist Shana Alexander, writers Kay Boyle and Maya Angelou. Mitford's prickly relations with her aristocratic clan are much in evidence, as is her estrangement from its fascist members; writing to Winston Churchill in 1943, she unswervingly protests the release from prison of her sister Diana Mosley and Diana's husband, the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley. Relating her bold emigration to the United States with her cousin and first husband, Communist journalist Esmond Romilly; her resilience as a war widow in a foreign country with an infant daughter; and the evident happiness of her 50-year marriage to her second husband, radical labor attorney Robert Treuhaft, Mitford's letters crackle with wit and mordant observations.

Mitton, Jacqueline (1991). A Concise Dictionary of Astronomy. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
Astronomy is expanding almost as rapidly as the universe itself, and the proliferating scientific jargon can sometimes baffle even the most dedicated amateur. Now, in some 2,400 concise, up-to-date entries, this dictionary cuts a clear path through the maze of complex technical language, offering full, clear definitions drawn from all aspects of classical and modern astronomy. It has been compiled by Jacqueline Mitton, an officer of the Royal Astronomical Society, who has devoted much of her time in recent years to works which convey the excitement of astronomy to general readers.

Here are the names of planets, moons, asteroids, stars, constellations, and galaxies. Mitton includes the types of stars (Red Giants, Blue Stragglers, Brown Dwarfs), the most common scientific terms used in modern astrophysics and cosmology (for instance, butterfly diagram) as well as relevant terms from physics and other fields. Entries on telescopes and other measuring devices, observatories, and space missions show how astronomers have explored the universe. The Dictionary also explains abbreviations and acronyms, and it examines a wide range of fascinating phenomena, from blazers and black holes to runaway stars and the Hawking effect.

From Betelgeuse to the Big Bang, and from spiral galaxies to solar waves, A Concise Dictionary of Astronomy opens a window on the universe for amateur astronomers everywhere.

Mochulsky, Konstantin (1967). Dostoevsky: His Life and Work. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.
One of the most complete single volume Dostoevsky biographies available.

Modisane, Bloke (1990). Blame Me on History. New York, Simon & Schuster.
First published (and quickly banned) in South Africa in 1963, Modisane's account of life as a black in South Africa remains a biting indictment of apartheid even today, filled with thoughtful observations and written in a simple, eloquent prose. Modisane recalls a youth in which two siblings died of starvation and his father was killed in a fight. In a society where "the law is white and justice casual," the assailant received a six-month sentence. The author learns survival tactics, literal and psychological, such as adopting an obsequious pose to clear a police block, or the ironic display of humor, as when he notes that the South African police force may be the only employer that actually requires a modicum of intelligence.

Moebius aka Jean Giraud (2018). Moebius Library: The Art of Edena. Milwaukie, OR, Dark Horse Books.
A companion volume to the critically acclaimed and New York Times best-selling World of Edena graphic novel, Moebius Library: The Art of Edena collects four fantastic Edena-related short stories and a motherlode of Moebius illustrations. A celebration of the imagery and creative enthusiasm Moebius held for his Edena universe and his characters Stel and Atan, the short stories Seeing Naples, Another Planet, The Repairmen, and Dying to See Naples are collected here, as Moebius explores his imagination with two of his favorite characters. Working closely with Moebius Production in France, Dark Horse presents the second volume in the Moebius Library series.

Moebius aka Jean Giraud (2016). Moebius Library: The World of Edena. Milwaukie, OR, Dark Horse Books.
Stel and Atan are interstellar investigators trying to find a lost space station and its crew. When they discover the mythical paradise planet Edena, their lives are changed forever. The long out-of-print Edena Cycle from Moebius gets a deluxe hardcover treatment. Moebius's World of Edena story arc is comprised of five chapters--Upon a Star, Gardens of Edena, The Goddess, Stel, and Sra--which are all collected here.

A storyboard artist and designer (Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element, among many others) as well as comic book master, Moebius's work has influenced creators in countless fields.

Moffat, Alistair (2009). Tuscany: A History. Edinburgh, Birlinn.
What is it that makes this exquisite part of Italy so seductive? To answer this question Alistair Moffat embarks on a journey into Tuscany's past. From the flowering of the Etruscan civilization in the seventh century BC through the rise of the powerful medieval communes of Arezzo, Luca, Pisa and Florence, and the role the area played as the birthplace of the Renaissance, he underlines both the area's regional uniqueness as well as the vital role it has played in the history of the whole of Italy. Insightful, readable and imbued with the author's own enthusiasm for Tuscany, this book includes a wealth of information not found in tourist guides, and is the only modern history of the area available in English.

Moggridge, D. E. (1992). Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography. London; New York, Routledge.
In a single volume, Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography, Canadian scholar D.E. Moggridge offers a sound, analytical, carefully researched account of the man who invented deficit spending. He sets forth the facts and issues with precision and sharp intelligence.

Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo (1973). Painting, Photography, Film. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
This translation of the original 1925-27 Moholy-Nagy book presents his innovative Rayographs made without a camera, the creative X-rays, super-wide-angle fisheye pictures, double prints, collages, montages, and the Bauhaus artist's thoughts on the interrelationship of type, audio, and visual perception.

Moldea, Dan E. (2014). Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football. New York, Open Road Media.
A shocking expose of widespread corruption and mob influence throughout the National Football League-on the field, in the owners' boxes, and in the corporate suites.

According to investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, for decades the National Football League has had a strong and unspoken understanding with a dangerous institution: organized crime. In his classic expose, Interference, Moldea bares the dark, sordid underbelly of America's favorite professional team sport, revealing a nest of corruption that the league has largely ignored since its inception.

Molière, John Wood, et al. (2000). The Misanthrope and Other Plays. London, England; New York, N.Y., USA, Penguin Books.
The Misanthrope, Moliere's richly sophisticated comic drama is accompanied in this volume by The Would--be Gentleman, another tale of a dangerously deluded and obsessive hero. Tartuffe dares to take on the subject of religious hypocrisy. Also included are Such Foolish Affected Ladies and Those Learned Ladies, both newly translated for this edition. Finally, The Doctor Despite Himself is a hilarious example of Moliere's long-standing vendetta against the medical profession.

Moliterno, Gino (2000)). Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture. London; New York, Routledge.
This rigorously compiled A-Z volume offers rich, readable coverage of the diverse forms of post-1945 Italian culture. With over 900 entries by international contributors, this volume is genuinely interdisciplinary in character, treating traditional political, economic, and legal concerns, with a particular emphasis on neglected areas of popular culture. Entries range from short definitions, histories or biographies to longer overviews covering themes, movements, institutions and personalities, from advertising to fascism, and Pirelli to Zeffirelli.

Monaco, James (2000). How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia: Language, History, Theory. New York, Oxford University Press.
Richard Gilman referred to How to Read a Film as simply "the best single work of its kind." Janet Maslin of The New York Times Book Review marveled at James Monaco's ability to collect "an enormous amount of useful information and assemble it in an exhilaratingly simple and systematic way." And Richard Roud, Director of the New York Film Festival stated, "Anyone who writes about film, who is interested in film seriously, just has to have it." Clearly, few books on film have met with such critical acclaim as How to Read a Film. Since its original publication in 1977, this hugely popular book has become the definitive source on film and media. Now, James Monaco offers a completely revised and rewritten third edition that brings every major aspect of this dynamic medium right up to the present day. Looking at film from many vantage points, Monaco discusses the elements necessary to understand how a film conveys its meaning, and, more importantly, how the audience can best discern all that a film is attempting to communicate. He begins by setting movies in the context of the more traditional arts such as the novel, painting, photography, theater--even music--demonstrating that film as a narrative technique is directly comparable to these older mediums. He points out that much of what we see and experience in film can be traced directly back to other art forms. Accordingly, as film is a technology as well as an art, he examines the intriguing science of cinema and follows the development of the electronic media and its parallel growth with film during this century.

Monaco, James (2002). New Wave, The: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. New York, Harbor Electronic Publishing.
"The most complete book I know on the five most important directors of the New Wave." - Costa-Gavras. This thirtieth anniversary edition includes a new afterword by the author.

Monbiot, George (2007). Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Cambridge, Mass., South End Press.
Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning marks an important moment in our civilization's thinking about global warming. The question is no longer Is climate change actually happening? but What do we do about it? George Monbiot offers an ambitious and far-reaching program to cut our carbon dioxide emissions to the point where the environmental scales start tipping back-away from catastrophe.

Though writing with a "spirit of optimism," Monbiot does not pretend it will be easy. The only way to avoid further devastation, he argues, is a 90% cut in CO2 emissions in the rich nations of the world by 2030. In other words, our response will have to be immediate, and it will have to be decisive.

In every case he supports his proposals with a rigorous investigation into what works, what doesn't, how much it costs, and what the problems might be. He wages war on bad ideas as energetically as he promotes good ones. And he is not afraid to attack anyone-friend or foe-whose claims are false or whose figures have been fudged. After all, there is no time to waste. As Monbiot has said himself, "we are the last generation that can make this happen, and this is the last possible moment at which we can make it happen."

Mondlin, Marvin, Roy Meador, et al. (2004). Book Row: An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade. New York; [Berkeley, Calif.], Carroll & Graf Publishers.
Between 1890 and the 1960s, a bustling trade in used and rare books flourished in New York City along Fourth Avenue, between Union Square and Astor Place. Although the stores that once prospered on this little stretch of street have long since closed, the memories of the halcyon days of the bookselling trade in the city still live in the minds of former customers and store employees. Drawing on interviews and on seminal articles published in the early- and mid-20th century, Mondlin (estate buyer at the Strand) and book collector Meador vividly re-create the passion, wonder and adventure of the book trade as it developed along Book Row. The authors paint portraits of the booksellers who established the Row and who secured its reputation among book lovers. There is George D. Smith, the shrewd but gentlemanly book collector who helped Henry E. Huntington build his own library. Called by many "the greatest American bookdealer," Smith provided an example of the persistence and keen insight into the value of books that became the hallmark of the stores on Book Row. The authors also chronicle other dealers such as Eleanor Lowenstein, whose Corner Book Shop specialized in cookbooks; David Kirschenbaum, who developed a stellar collection of Walt Whitman that formed the foundation of the Library of Congress's collection; and Harry Gold, whose Aberdeen Book Company was the first among the antiquarian stores on Book Row to feature paperbacks, in the 1920s. The authors reminisce about favorite stores, such as Albert F. Goldsmith's 'At the Sign of the Sparrow,' which specialized in theater memorabilia and which very likely provided the setting for mystery writer Carolyn Wells's Murder in the Bookshop.

Mondrian, Piet and Hans Ludwig C. Jaffe (1985). Piet Mondrian. New York, Abrams.
This book presents a comprehensive survey of the work of Piet Mondrian, an artist who has exercised a vast influence on the art of our time - and not only on painting and architecture, but also on the minor arts: interior decoration, furniture design, advertising displays, typography, and book design. Though for many years he was regarded as the most ultra-refined of twentieth-century artists, Mondrian's pervasive presence can now be discerned in innumerable contexts - among them the pages of popular household magazines, the lobbies of apartment houses, and even women's fashions.

Born in Holland in 1872, Piet Mondrian began his career as a talented academic painter. Soon, however, his landscapes depicting the Dutch countryside became suffused with subtle overtones of uniquely original linear patterns, effects of light, and gradations of color. Finally - as he sought to bring out the essence of things - his paintings of trees, sand dunes, church towers, and windmills became progressively more refined until he had ultimately distilled their contours and planes into his well-known areas of primary colors and horizontal and vertical black lines.

Montagne, Prosper, Joël Robuchon, et al. (2001). Larousse Gastronomique. New York, Clarkson Potter.
For decades, the definitive reference book for chefs and anyone else devoted to the world of good food and cooking has been Larousse Gastronomique. The last English-language edition of this venerable French publication appeared in 1988, so the arrival of the 2001 edition comes onto the scene at just the right time to refresh reference collections. A translation of the French edition of 2000, this new work shifts the book's traditional focus more definitively to world cuisine, even though coverage still emphasizes the triumphs of European gastronomy in general and French cooking in particular. Although by no means comprehensive, articles on national schools of cooking are especially helpful to distinguish each country's or region's salient cooking ingredients and methods. Recipes abound, but they are designed as exemplars, and only skilled cooks will derive real direction from their abridged instructions.

Montaigne, Michel de and M. A. Screech (1993). The Complete Essays. London, England; New York, N.Y., USA, Penguin Books.
A collection of a large number of short subjective treatments of various topics. Montaigne's stated goal is to describe man, and especially himself, with utter frankness. He finds the great variety and volatility of human nature to be its most basic features. He describes his own poor memory, his ability to solve problems and mediate conflicts without truly getting emotionally involved, his disdain for man's pursuit of lasting fame, and his attempts to detach himself from worldly things to prepare for death.

He writes about his disgust with the religious conflicts of his time, his belief that humans are not able to attain true certainty (skepticism), and even alludes to cultural relativitism, all rather modern notions.

Montaigne considered marriage necessary for the raising of children, but disliked the strong feelings of romantic love as being detrimental to true freedom. In education, he favored concrete examples and experience over the teaching of abstract knowledge that has to be accepted uncritically.

Montale, Eugenio and Jonathan Galassi (1982). The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale. New York, Ecco Press.
Eugenio Montale, perhaps the greatest Italian poet of this century, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. To most Americans the selection of this unknown supplied further evidence of the eccentricity of the judges. In fact, Montale was an all-round man of letters, not only a poet but the music and literary critic of Corriere della Sera of Milan, as well as a leading intellectual opponent of Fascism, and a penetrating cultural commentator.

Montale's poetry has for the most part been available in English. Finding it, however, requires an effort. (Ploughshares, the Cambridge literary magazine, in 1975 published Jonathan Galassi's translation of the Xenia poems, dedicated to Montale's wife.) There is no complete English Montale, so the appearance of Jonathan Galassi's exemplary translation and selection is particularly welcome. The volume is scrupulously footnoted, admirably translated and highly attractive, though for the non-Italian, attribution of such specialized figures as Virgilio Giotti, the Triestine dialect poet; Alfredo Oriani, Mussolini's ideal novelist; and Adolfo De Bosis, the Italian translator of Shelley, may still leave one unaware of the context.

These are interesting occasional pieces and a superb eyewitness account of the Venetian premiere of Stravinsky's opera, "The Rake's Progress," but the most significant bulk of the collection addresses subjects of a specifically Italian character: Dante, Croce, the relations of the art of poetry and fascism (in which Montale brings up the concept of "neo-barbarism" which he employs frequently). Especially relevant are two articles on Italo Svevo, Ettore Schmitz, the superb Triestine novelist whose career was crucially and favorably influenced by Montale's criticism. (Svevo was a businessman who continually urged Montale to abandon poetry for prose; but Montale recognized Svevo's genius to the extent that every funeral with an indifferent train of mourners made Montale recall the scene in "The Confessions of Zeno" where Zeno suddenly discovers that he has joined the wrong funeral.)

Moorcock, Michael (2001). The Cornelius Quartet. New York. [Berkeley, CA], Four Walls Eight Windows; Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.
Jerry Cornelius is an English assassin, physicist, rock star, and messiah to the Age of Science. Written between 1965 and 1967, this sequence of four novels relating Cornelius's adventures has been credited with inspiring dozens of writers and artists to rethink the genre of science fiction. Acclaimed British author Michael Moorcock's time-tripping antihero is one of the great achievements in modern fantastic literature. This is the first U.S. publication of one of the most influential sagas in postmodern sci-fi.

Moore, Marianne (1982). The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. New York, Macmillian: Penguin Books.
This definitive edition brings together all the works that Pulitzer Prize-winning Marianne Moore wished to preserve, covering more than sixty years of writing, and incorporating the final revisions she made to the texts. The poems demonstrate Moore's wide range of interests, moving from witty images of animals, sporting events, and social institutions, to thoughtful meditations on human nature. In entertaining, informative notes, Moore reveals the inspiration for complete poems and individual lines within them.

Moorehead, Caroline (2004). Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life. New York, Holt Paperbacks.
Martha Gellhorn's heroic career as a reporter brought her to the front lines of virtually every significant international conflict between the Spanish Civil War and the end of the cold war; her wartime dispatches rank among the best of the century. From her birth in St. Louis in 1908 to her death in London in 1998, Gellhorn passed through Africa, Cuba, Panama, and most of the great cities of Europe. She made friends easily-among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, and H. G. Wells-but happiness often eluded her despite her professional success: both of her marriages ended badly, the first, to Ernest Hemingway, dramatically and publicly so.

Drawn from extensive interviews and exclusive access to Gellhorn's papers and correspondence, this seminal biography spans half the globe and almost an entire century to offer an exhilarating, intimate portrait of one of the defining women of our times.

Moravia, Alberto (1999). Boredom. New York, New York Review Books.
Moravia's 1960 novel was embraced by critics as one of his finest. It relates the story of a failed artist who becomes infatuated with a young model. Typical of his fiction, this book examines humankind's relationship to power, sex, and money with cold displacement.

Moravia, Alberto (1999). Contempt. New York, New York Review Books.
Molteni, the narrator, aspires to be a man of letters, but has taken a job as a screenwriter in order to support his beautiful wife, Emilia. Frustrated by his work, he becomes convinced that Emilia no longer loves him - that in fact she despises him - and as he relentlessly interrogates her about the true nature of her feelings, he makes his deepest fear (or secret desire) come true. Contempt is a picture, frightening in its familiarity, of how, in an irremediable instant, love can turn to hate.

Morehead, Albert H. (1996). Official Rules of Card Games. New York, Fawcett Columbine.
With complete rules on more than 300 popular card games, including the new international laws of contract bridge, this comprehensive book also includes special sections on: choosing games for particular occasions, teaching card games to children, the etiquette of card games, technical terms used in card games, and more.

Morgan, Bill (2011). Beat Atlas: A State-by-State Guide to the Beat Generation in America. San Francisco, CA, City Lights Books.
A decade ago, Beat Generation chronicler Morgan created a walking tour guide to Jack Kerouac's New York City. A couple of years later he did the same for San Francisco, tracking the haunts of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and their associates. With this new guide, Morgan has gone national, listing where the Beats lived, worked and traveled. That they managed to hit all the 48 contiguous states is no surprise, but some of the places are. Lincoln makes the list for Ginsberg's 1960s poetry reading visit, and Omaha, Grand Island and North Platte were all part of Kerouac's cross-country journeys recorded in On The Road. For Beat aficionados, it's fascinating and fun.

Morgan, Edmund Sears (2002). Benjamin Franklin. New Haven, Yale University Press.
This wonderful biography of an extraordinary man results from a perfect marriage of subject and scholar. Among the most senior of our senior historians, Yale professor emeritus Morgan (American Slavery, American Freedom, etc.) proves himself still at the height of his powers. While Franklin remains, as Morgan writes, elusive and hard to know because "it is so hard to distinguish his natural impulses from his principles," the author probably comes as close to understanding him as anyone can. Rather than focusing on Franklin's role as classic, representative American, Morgan instead gives us a portrait of his public life, almost a third of it spent abroad, in England and France, more than any comparable figure of his generation. In Morgan's hands, Franklin therefore turns out to be more cosmopolitan than provincial, more worldly than Pennsylvanian. He also shines in this biography as someone deeply committed to his fellow Americans and the nation they were creating. Many previous biographers have sought to explain how Franklin helped lay the foundations for a distinctive American mind and personality. Morgan instead takes us more into Franklin's thinking and activities as diplomat and politician and into the way his winning personality served his country so well at the moment it needed him.

Morley, John (1886). Diderot and the Encyclopædists (2 volumes). London, Macmillan and Company.
An examination of the life, the work, and the influence of “the most encyclopædic head that ever existed” (as Grimm termed Diderot), and his fellow-workers. Of all the literary preparation for the French Revolution the ‘Encyclopédie’ was the symbol: it spread through the world a set of ideas that entered into vigorous conflict with the ancient scheme of authority. Diderot, as the head of the movement, d’Alembert his coadjutor. Voltaire, J. J. Rousseau, Buffon, Helvétius, Holbach, Raynal, etc., with other famous persons of the day, as Goethe, Garrick, the Empress Catherine II.,—are here vividly depicted, with wide knowledge of books and of life, great skill in reading character, facility in disentangling causes and results, and broad philosophical perception of the historic position of the age.

Morris, Benny (2001). Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001. New York, Vintage Books.
Like Avi Shlaim, Morris is a revisionist historian working to deflate the heroic-romantic Zionist view of Israeli history. A professor of history at Israel's Ben-Gurion University, Morris (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem) offers readers a more scholarly, rigorous book than either Shlaim or the authors of The Fifty Years War. He also takes a longer and a deeper view, detailing relations between Israel and the Arabs since the beginning of the modern Zionist movement in the late 19th century and digging beneath politics and diplomacy to get at the broader social and cultural history of Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews. One of his central points is that the very success of Israel as a state has allowed the Palestinians to appropriate the identity of history's victims - an identity once central to Israelis' view of themselves. Morris makes very clear how Israel's military and economic successes have slowly forced most of the Arab world to accept a Jewish state. At the same time, he notes the irony that the triumph of Zionism helped create a distinct Palestinian national identity that didn't previously exist. His view of Zionism is almost detached as he documents its successes. He has no trouble calling Zionism a "colonizing" movement, but he doesn't strongly condemn it for being so. His harsh judgment that a "fragmented, venal political elite" retarded the Palestinian cause does not make him deny the merits of the cause.

Morris, Benny (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press.
Morris' earlier work exposed the realities of how 700,000 Palestinians became refugees during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. While the focus of this edition remains the war and exodus, new archival material considers what happened in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa, and how these events led to the collapse of urban Palestine. Revealing battles and atrocities that contributed to the disintegration of rural communities, the story is harrowing. The refugees now number four million and their cause remains a major obstacle to regional peace.

Morris, Edmund (2001). The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York, Modern Library.
A sweeping narrative of the outward man and a shrewd examination of his character.

Morris, Jan (1997). Fifty Years of Europe: An Album. London; New York, N.Y., Viking.
After a half-century of traversing Europe, which for her stretches from Iceland to the former Yugoslavia, travel writer and historian Morris offers a chatty, nostalgic guided tour. Her book consists of hundreds of loosely organized, bite-sized recollections of people and places: sacred stones and rivers, tram lines and steamships?anything that defines part of European culture. Morris is especially interested in details that sharply illustrate changes between 1946 and 1996: the Channel tunnel (Chunnel), the opening of an Irish pub in Estonia, the growth of the European Union. Her fluid, leisurely wit shows no trace of condescension, for she finds something to like everywhere, even fondly remembering Soviet-style hotels in Lithuania. A sincere love of Europe's diversity radiates throughout.

Morris, William and William Morris (2004). News from Nowhere, or, an Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance. Mineola, N.Y., Dover Publications.
The book, a Utopian fantasy, tells the story of a man who falls asleep after an evening at a Socialist League meeting. He wakes in the future to find England transformed into a communist paradise where men and women are free, healthy, and equal. Money, prisons, schools and government have been abolished and the industrial squalor of England in the 1880s has disappeared. At the close of the book, the man has returned to the present, but has been inspired by what he has seen and his determined to work for a socialist future.

Morton, Desmond (2007). A Military History of Canada, 5th Edition. Toronto, McClelland & Stewart.
From the shrewd tactics of Canada’s First Nations to its troubled involvement in Somalia, from the Plains of Abraham to the deserts of Afghanistan, Morton examines Canada's centuries-old relationship to war and its consequences. This updated edition also includes a new chapter on Canada’s place in the war on terrorism.

Morton, Desmond (2017). A Short History of Canada, 7th Edition. Toronto, McCelland & Stewart.
From the First Nations before the arrival of the Europeans, to Confederation, to Stephen Harper's prime ministership, to Justin Trudeau's victory in the 2015 election, to Morton's acute observations on the Diefenbaker era, the effects of the post-war influx of immigrants, the Trudeau years and the constitutional crisis, the Quebec referendum, the rise of the Canadian Alliance, and Canada under Harper's governance. An invaluable background to understanding the way Canada works today and its direction in years to come.

Motherwell, Robert and Jean Arp (1989). The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
The single most instructive book on Dada. The items collected are readable, pungent, and representative. It is one of those "essential works" on twentieth-century art. - T. J. Clark

The Dada Painters and Poets offers the authentic answer to the question "What is Dada?" This incomparable collection of essays, manifestos, and illustrations was prepared by Robert Motherwell with the collaboration of some of the major Dada figures: Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, and Max Ernst among others. Here in their own words and art, the principals of the movement create a composite picture of Dada--its convictions, antics, and spirit.

First published in 1951, this treasure trove remains, as Jack Flam states in his foreword to the second edition, the most comprehensive anthology of Dada writings in any language. It contains every major text on the Dada movement, including retrospective studies, personal memoirs, and prime examples. The illustrations range from photos of participants, in characteristic Dadaist attitudes, to facsimiles of their productions.

Motz, Lloyd and Jefferson Hane Weaver (1988). The Concepts of Science from Newton to Einstein. New York, Plenum Press.

Moure, Gloria (1988). Marcel Duchamp. New York, Rizzoli.

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus and Lorenzo Da Ponte (1983). Così Fan Tutte. London; New York, Calder; Riverrun Press.
Opera guide and libretto.

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus and Lorenzo Da Ponte (1983). Don Giovanni. London; New York, J. Calder; Riverrun Press.
Opera guide and libretto.

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, Lorenzo Da Ponte, et al. (1983). The Marriage of Figaro = Le Nozze Di Figaro. London; New York, J. Calder; Riverrun Press.
Opera guide and libretto.

Mr. Fish. (2020). Nobody Left. Seattle, Fantagraphics Books.
The fearsome political cartoonist Mr. Fish investigates the meaning of progressive politics in the 21st century by comparing the New Left with the Newer Left and interrogating public intellectuals, comedians, writers, and politicians who have been part of the liberal cause from the 1950s to the present day.

Nobody Left includes interviews with and essays about Norman Mailer, Christopher Hitchens, Howard Zinn, Lily Tomlin, Graham Nash, Joan Baez, Dennis Kucinich, Tariq Ali, Calvin Trillin, Mort Sahl, Robert Scheer, Paul Krassner, Jon Stewart, and others. Mr. Fish sets out to answer the burning question: Is nobody LEFT any more?

Muir, John (1997). Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, the Mountains of California, Stickeen, Selected Essays. New York, N.Y., Library of America: distributed to the trade in the U.S. by Penguin Books USA.
This volume presents the texts of four books by John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Mountains of California (1894), and Stickeen (1909), followed by a selection of 18 essays, 16 of which were published between 1871 and 1912 and two of which were published posthumously.

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is a memoir of the years 1838 to 1863. Muir was persuaded to dictate his recollections to a stenographer while visiting with his friend Edward H. Harriman in August 1908, and several years later he drew on the resulting typescript to compose his memoir. It was published by Houghton Mifflin Company in March 1913. Portions of the memoir appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (Nov. 1912-Feb. 1913), and before the book came out Muir received a letter from a childhood friend who objected to a passage concerning the cruelty of his father. To spare his friend's feelings, Muir revised the section; the changes were not received by Houghton Mifflin in time for the first printing but were made in all subsequent ones. This volume presents the text of the 1913 first printing; Muir's revisions are shown in the notes.

My First Summer in the Sierra is an account of Muir's 1869 stay in the Yosemite and its environs. Muir used part of his 1869 journal as the basis for the book, but he significantly revised and rearranged it, adding episodes that occurred in later years. It was published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1911. The text printed here is of the Houghton Mifflin first edition.

In writing The Mountains of California, his first book, Muir drew on 18 essays published between 1875 and 1882. He revised and wove together the essays, adding new material primarily for Chapters I and XII. Chapter II is based on "Living Glaciers of California" (Harper's Monthly Magazine, Nov. 1875); Chapter III on "Snow Banners of the California Alps" (Harper's Monthly Magazine, July 1877); Chapter IV on "In the Heart of the California Alps" (Scribner's Monthly, July 1880); Chapter V on "The Passes of the Sierra" (Scribner's Monthly, Feb. 1879); Chapter VI on "The Mountain Lakes of California" (Scribner's Monthly, Jan. 1879); Chapter VII on "The Glacier Meadows of the Sierra" (Scribner's Monthly, Feb. 1879); Chapter VIII on "On the Post-Glacial History of Sequoia Gigantea" (Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Salem, Mass., May 1877), "The New Sequoia Forests of California" (Harper's Monthly Magazine, Nov. 1878), and "Coniferous Forests of the Sierra Nevada" (Scribner's Monthly, Sept.-Oct. 1881); Chapter IX on "The Douglass Squirrel of California," (Scribner's Monthly, Dec. 1878); Chapter X on "A Wind-Storm in the Forests of the Yuba" (Scribner's Monthly, Nov. 1878); Chapter XI on "Flood-Storm in the Sierra" (The Overland Monthly, June 1875); Chapter XIII on "The Humming-Bird of the California Water-Falls" (Scribner's Monthly, Feb. 1878); Chapter XVI on "Wild Sheep of the Sierra," (Scribner's Monthly, May 1881); Chapter XV on "Summering in the Sierra: Ancient River Channels" (San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, July 26, 1876) and "Summering in the Sierra: A Sierra Cave" (San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Aug. 12, 1876); and Chapter XVI on "The Bee-Pastures of California" (The Century Magazine, June-July 1882). The book was published by The Century Company in 1894. The text printed here is that of the first Century Company edition.

Stickeen is the story of Muir's experiences with a dog in 1880 at Taylor Bay, Alaska. He wrote about the dog Stickeen in his journal in August 1880 and in subsequent years often recounted the incident and made notes for a story about it. He continued to refine and enlarge the story after his first version appeared in The Century Magazine as "An Adventure With a Dog And a Glacier" (Sept. 1897). Stickeen was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1909 and became Muir's most popular book. The text printed here is of the first Houghton Mifflin edition.

The texts of the 18 essays included in this volume are arranged in the order of their initial appearances and are taken from their first publications, with some exceptions.

Muller, Eddie (1998). Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. New York, St. Martin's Griffin.
"Dark City is a thoroughly enjoyable companion to the unique, sometimes twisted pleasures of film noir, from acknowledged classics like Out of the Past to lesser-known gems like Born to Kill and The Chase. In a genre where some see mostly fatalism and social critique, Eddie Muller also finds humor, eroticism, and the unfettered inventiveness of an extraordinary generation of directors and actors." - Geoffrey O'Brien, author of The Phantom Empire

Mumford, Lewis (1955). The Brown Decades; a Study of the Arts in America 1865-1895. New York, Dover Publications.
In this famous appraisal of our "buried Renaissance," Mumford shows that the period between 1865 and 1895 contained within it the beginnings of a new integrity and power in American art. He discovers in it the foundation of modern architecture in the conceptions of Richardson, Root, Sullivan, and Roebling; the improvement of the landscape through the work of Marsh, Olmstead, and Eliot; and the development of the graphic arts in paintings of Winslow Homer, Eakins, and Ryder.

Mumford, Lewis (1972). Roots of Contemporary American Architecture; a Series of Thirty-Seven Essays Dating from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present. New York, Dover Publications.
When this book was first published in 1952, it filled a gap that was a disgrace to American scholarship in architectural history. Largely by the use of original documents, it revealed the long period of intellectual germination that had preceded the emer-gence of indigenous modern forms in the eighteen-eighties, and their re-emergence, partly by importation from abroad, at the end of the nineteen - twenties. Though no one would try to write a history of Renaissance architecture without doing justice to the treatises on classic architecture that preceded it and accom-panied it - Alberti, Palladio, Vitruvius - the long development of modern forms in our country had been minimized, and the role of a few original talents, like Louis Sullivan's, had been exag-gerated, precisely because the ideological preparation had been neglected.

What this anthology sought to show was that modern architecture, in our own day a broad busy highway linking up every part of the country, could first be identified by old wagon tracks traced by the original pioneers. So far from being a mere revolt against academicism and historicism, it had a continuous history of its own, in thought and constructive experiment: indeed, it was nothing less than an attempt, in the words of the great English scholar, W. R. Lethaby, to give form to our new civilization. In creating that tradition, Greenough and Emerson, Thoreau and Jarves, Olmsted and Downing, were as well worth considering as the masters of early skyscraper architecture in Chicago; and these in turn had something to say about their basic beliefs and purposes that powerfully supplemented, if it did not go beyond, what they had concretely expressed in their buildings. If this book had done nothing more than call attention to the architectural reflections of John Wellborn Root and Joseph Warren Yost, it might well have justified its existence; while in bringing forth specimens of the robust architectural criticisms of Montgomery Schuyler, it not merely revealed the kind of intellectual encourage-ment that great pioneers like Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright had met with, but demolished the notion that original works of architecture were doomed to languish in the cultural desert of the genteel eighteen-nineties, withered by indifference, misunder-standing, and lack of patronage.

Mumford, Lewis (1974). The Pentagon of Power. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
In this concluding volume of The Myth of the Machine, Mumford brings to a head his radical revisions of the stale popular conceptions of human and technological progress. Far from being an attack on science and technics, The Pentagon of Power seeks to establish a more organic social order based on technological resources.

Mungo, Paul and Bryan Clough (1992). Approaching Zero: The Extraordinary Underworld of Hackers, Phreakers, Virus Writers, and Keyboard Criminals. New York, Random House.
Mungo, a newspaper and magazine feature writer, and Clough, an English accountant specializing in computer security, have put together another portrait of the world of computer hackers from the early days of the phone "phreaks" to the Eastern European efforts to commission targeted hacking and virus development.

Murphy, Bruce (1996). Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia. New York, HarperCollinsPublishers.
With nearly 1500 new entries, this work expands and updates the Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, edited by Max Herzberg (Crowell, 1962). The editors, along with 130 noted scholars, have compiled a comprehensive, encyclopedic reference work that covers the literary movements, genres of fiction and nonfiction, and social, political, and religious influences on literature throughout North and South America. This work reflects the same quality and professional standard as Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia (HarperCollins, 1987) . Added features, such as genealogies of famous literary families, extended essays on all facets of American literature, and biographies on women and ethnic minority writers, make this single-volume work a valuable asset to any reference shelf.

Murphy, Gerald, Sara Murphy, et al. (2002). Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends. Gainesville, University Press of Florida.
The letters collected here, written from 1920 to the mid-'60s, suggest that the Murphys were much more than rich Americans abroad who hosted famous fellow expatriates in France during the '20s and '30s. The couple and their three children, in fact, provided essential support for writer friends who left indelible marks on modern literature, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker among them. The literati's letters reveal hitherto unknown sides--witty and sometimes acrimonious, they are always full of love and admiration when addressed to Gerald and Sara. Great depths of feeling are conveyed in messages about the deaths of the Murphys' two young sons, which foreshadowed other heartbreaks endured by the group: Zelda's psychosis, Scott's demise, Hemingway's suicide. A welcome reminder of those promising decades, the collection is an invaluable source of literary history.

Murrant, Jim (1991). The Boating Bible: An Essential Handbook for Every Sailor. Dobbs Ferry, NY, Sheridan House.
The Boating Bible contains all the essential information sailors need in one easy-to-use volume. The book instructs the reader in all the skills necessary to be able to sail competently, starting with a basic explanation of the structure of a sailing boat and the best way to set up a boat for sailing followed by a detailed discussion of the theory and practice of sailing. The practical side of sailing is emphasized.

Murray, John A. and Sierra Club. (1993). A Thousand Leagues of Blue: The Sierra Club Book of the Pacific: A Literary Voyage. San Francisco, Sierra Club Books.
Distinguished anthologist John Murray has here compiled a captivating literary itinerary of sites around the Pacific Ocean, by collecting the best writings on Oceania from the last three centuries. This wide-ranging sourcebook and armchair travelogue combines classic and contemporary selections exploring the lore, mystery, natural history, and present-day realities of this endlessly fascinating region. Readers will explore the wilds of New Guinea with Edward O. Wilson, climb the volcanoes of Hawaii with Rick Bass, and venture deep into the backcountry of Borneo with Alfred Russel Wallace. They will make mid-19th-century visits to Tahiti with Charles Darwin, and to the Marquesas Islands with Herman Melville, and, a century earlier, to Easter Island with Captain James Cook. There are portraits of nature sanctuaries in Japan and wild Antarctica, and accounts by literary immortals such as Jack London and modern masters such as Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, and David Rains Wallace.

A Thousand Leagues of Blue is more than a collection of fine writing. It is a testament to an incomparably vast and diverse region, one that has suffered so many ill effects of industrial civilization, and yet still holds so many ways to remind us of the diversity and richness of life on Earth.

Murray, Peter (1986). The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance. New York, Schocken Books.
From Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Palladio, and Brunelleschi to St. Peter's in Rome, the palaces of Venice, and the Medici Chapel in Florence, Peter Murray's lavishly illustrated book tells readers everything they need to know about the architectural life of Italy from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries.

Murray, Peter and Linda Murray (1985). The Art of the Renaissance. New York, N.Y., Thames and Hudson.
The Renaissance began in Italy, but it was not a purely Italian phenomenon. It grew out of Eukropean civilization, with roots in Antiquity, in Christian dogma, and in Byzantium. 251 illustrations, 51 in color.

Museum Ludwig. (1996). 20th Century Photography, Museum Ludwig Cologne. Koln, Taschen.
278 photographers are covered, including: Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lucien Clergue, Harold Edgerton, Alfred Eisenstadt, Peter H. Furst, Phillippe Halsman, Heinz Held, Fritz Henle, David Octavius Hill, Horst P. Horst, Walde Huth, Alfred Cheney Johnston, Yousuf Karsh, Dorothea Lange, Angus McBean, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Man Ray, Bettina Rheims, August Sander, Karl Hugo Schmolz, Edward Streichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston. Sketches for each phtogapher include a brief biography, perspectives on the photographer's career, quotes from the photographer, style, techniques used, artistic associations, and key career events.

Museum of Modern Art (New York N.Y.) and Sam Hunter (1984). The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The History and the Collection. New York, N.Y., H.N. Abrams in association with the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
To choose 1,000 works to represent a museum whose total collection exceeds 100,000--now that's curating. Imagine the restraint required to compile a catalog of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York--the first museum exclusively dedicated to art of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the first to recognize modern-art disciplines (photography, film, industrial design, installation). The collection is carefully and tastefully represented in this 600-page tome. Multiple frontispieces representing each of the museum's departments welcome the reader, followed by a thorough and illustrated introduction to the museum's directors, exhibitions, donors, acquisitions, and architecture.

Then comes the good stuff: 1,000 works from the museum's six curatorial departments: Painting and Sculpture, Drawings, Prints and Illustrated Books, Architecture and Design, Photography, and Film and Video, each section introduced by an essay explaining the development of the particular collection. Clear, large, color illustrations of Cezanne's The Bather, Munch's Madonna, Wyeth's Christina's World, and sculpture by Oldenburg, Serra, Morris, and Beuys leave a reader gasping, "They have that? "

Musil, Robert (1995). The Man without Qualities. New York, A.A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, this great novel of ideas tells the story of Ulrich, ex-soldier and scientist, seducer and skeptic, who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. This new translation--published in two elegant volumes--is the first to present Musil's complete text, including material that remained unpublished during his lifetime.

Myers, Steven Lee (2015). The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin. London, Simon & Schuster UK.
Myers retraces familiar ground: Putin's childhood, KGB service in East Germany, entry into Leningrad politics, ascent in Moscow, and consolidation of power, and the various twists and dramas of his time in power, including the ongoing Ukrainian conflict. What Myers adds to this oft-told tale are revealing details, texture, and nuance made possible by the seven years he spent reporting from Russia for The New York Times. For readers looking for a full, highly readable account of Putin and the era he has shaped, this is the book.

Myers, Walter Dean (1993). Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary: A Biography. New York, Scholastic.
Myers organizes Malcolm X's life into four stages: his childhood; his adolescence; his period of working under Elijah Mohammad; and his life after breaking with the Nation of Islam. Throughout, his experiences and actions are presented in a broader social context, from the beliefs of Marcus Garvey, who exerted such an influence upon Malcolm's parents, to the culture of adolescent black males in the 1930s and 1940s, to the contrasts between the Nation of Islam's views and those of Martin Luther King, Jr, with all the shadings in between. The author discusses the evolution in Malcolm's character, as his belief in Islam gradually taught him that not all whites were the enemies of African-Americans. He strikes a good balance between his subject's personal life and broader social issues and movements. Myers does not judge whether or not Malcolm X's views were better than those of King, but rather shows how both appealed to specific audiences and contributed to the struggles of the 1960s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This webpage last updated on Wednesday, March 27, 2024 6:45 AM.
© 2001-2024 by Kirk W. Smith.