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originally: $30.00 The short, violent life of Michelangelo Merisi, sometimes called simply M. and known to us as Caravaggio, changed art forever. In the words of Robert Hughes, "There was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same." M. threw out accepted technique and dogma to paint from life with dazzling clarity. In the process he laid bare his own sexual longings and the brutal realities of life with shocking frankness. Peter Robb evokes the seething and dangerous world of Italy at the end of the sixteenth century. Caravaggio is seen as a provocateur to a culture riven by the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation, a background of ideological cold war against which, despite all odds, and at great cost to their creators, brilliant feats of art and science were achieved.
originally: $27.50 Manuel Puig (1932-1990), Argentine author of Kiss of the Spider Woman and pioneer of high camp, stands alone in the pantheon of contemporary Latin American literature. Strongly influenced by Hollywood films of the thirties and forties, his many-layered novels and plays integrate serious fiction and popular culture, mixing political and sexual themes with B-movie scenarios. When his first two novels were published in the late sixties, they delighted the public but were dismissed as frivolous by the leftist intellectuals of the period; his third novel was banned by the Peronist government for irreverence. Puig's way of life was as unconventional as his fiction: he spoke of himself in the female form in Spanish, renamed his friends after his favorite movie stars, referred to his young male devotees as "daughters," and, as a perennial expatriate, lived (often with his mother) everywhere from Rome to Rio de Janeiro. Suzanne Jill Levine, his principal English translator, draws upon years of friendship as well as copious research and interviews in her remarkable book, the first biography of this inimitable writer.
originally: $26.00 Invited to dinner by the boorish local landowner, Martin Clay, an easily distracted philosopher, and his scrupulous art-historian wife find themselves enlisted to assess the value of three dusty paintings moldering in the freezing breakfast room. But blocking the soot from the chimney is nothing less, Martin believes, than one of the world's lost treasures, camouflaged by misattribution and the grime of centuries. So begins a wild trail of lies and concealments, soaring hopes and sudden panics as Martin embarks on an obsessive quest to prove his hunch, win his wife, separate the painting from its owner, and resolve one of the great mysteries of European art. Writing with biting wit and a perfect eye for the lessons of art and the shifting shapes of self-deception, Michael Frayn has given us entertainment of the highest order, a supremely wise, and wickedly funny, portrait of the human condition.
originally: $11.00 Samuel Beckett, recipient of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the greatest writers of our century, first published these ten short stories in 1934; they originally formed part of an unfinished novel. They trace the career of the first of Beckett's antiheroes, Belacqua Shuah. Belacqua is a student, a philanderer , and a failure, and Beckett portrays the various aspects of his troubled existence: He studies Dante, attempts an ill-fated courtship, witnesses grotesque incidents in the streets of Dublin, attends vapid parties, endures his marriage, and meets his accidental death. These early stories point to the qualities of precision, restraint, satire, and poetry found in Beckett's mature works, and reveal the beginning stages of Beckett's underlying theme of bewilderment in the face of suffering.
originally: $24.00 Meet Evers Wheeling of Norton, North Carolina. A semidissolute judge, undistracted by children, hobbies, or a fulfilling marriage, he's moving down the road to nowhere at a furious clip; until the morning he's confronted by Ruth Esther English, an attractive young woman whose dim-witted brother happens to be up on drug charges. Within days, Evers is the Englishes' reluctant coconspirator, abetted by his pothead brother Pascal (he of the double-wide trailer) and Pascal's faux-white-trash cohorts. And his suddenly outlandish life includes an interstate treasure hunt, a terrible act of marital vengeance, a sleazy antiques dealer, twice-stolen money, a mysteriously valuable letter, a baffling murder trial, and a love-interest attorney who considers him the poster boy for the sexist and racist legal establishment. Combining high comedy and existential, even spiritual compulsion, Martin Clark has converted every risk he's taken into high-test storytelling that's as fresh as the infant century.
originally: $45.00 In the first half of the twentieth century, the US served as home to an avant garde that existed in contradiction to the consumer culture identified with modern industrial capitalism. Composed of a remarkable group of musicians, writers, and artists, these intellectuals used their talents to express a profound alienation from their culture and a belief that, through the integration of art and life, a new consciousness could be created and American culture thereby transformed. Yet by 1966, the composer Virgil Thomson would write, "Truth is, there is no avant-garde today. Dada has won; all is convention: choose your own. What mostly gets chosenŠis that which can be packed and shipped.. for a conditioned public." How did the avant garde dissolve, and why? In this thought-provoking work, Stuart D. Hobbs traces the avant garde from its origins to its eventual appropriation by a conservative political agenda, consumer culture, and the institutional world of art. He synthesizes the work of literary, art, and music historians with a fresh examination of primary source materials, giving the reader a unique perspective on the intellectual and cultural history of this country.
originally: $26.00 In this innovative study of Ralph Waldo Emerson's conception of the scholar, Merton Sealts sheds new light on Emerson's attainment of his influential position in nineteenth-century intellectual, cultural, and literary history. Sealts is the first author to go beyond Henry Nash Smith's statement, "The Scholar is the hero of Emerson's unwritten Prelude"; the protagonist of his spiritual autobiography; by systematically examining the development and testing of the scholar as Emerson's idealized self-image. Following the course of Emerson's intellectual life in terms of his chosen angle of vision as a scholar, Emerson on the Scholar leads to a new understanding and appreciation of Emerson and his thought in relation to American life, then and now.
originally: $23.00 Plato and the Greeks called it "daimon," the Romans "genius," the Christians "guardian angel"; today we use terms such as "heart," "spirit," and "soul." For James Hillman it is the central and guiding force of his utterly unique and compelling "acorn theory," which proposes that each life is formed by a particular image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny, just as the mighty oak's destiny is written in the tiny acorn. It is theory that offers a liberating vision of childhood troubles and an exciting approach to themes such as fate and fatalism, character and desire, family influence and freedom, and, most of all calling; that invisible mystery at the center of every life that speaks to the fundamental question "What is it, in my heart, that I must do, be, and have? And why?" As the author states, "We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives." His book offers a highly accessible and imaginative approach to life, not only a new way of seeing but, in addition, a way to "resurrect the unaccountable" and thereby recover what has been lost of our intrinsic selves.
originally: $32.00 The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desrt have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin land has been a political football, tossed back and forth between Israel and Egypt at least five times. In her moving firsthand account, anthropologist Smadar Lavie asks how the South Sinai Mzeina have adapted to constant military rule. Knowing that open confrontation with the occupier could mean beatings, jail, even death, these Bedouin have created their own form of resistance in which the author sees "the poetics of military occupation." A handful of charismatic individuals allegorize, by means of ritualistic story-telling performances, the paradoxes and absurdities of their life under foreign rule.
originally: $24.00 Almost one million Cubans have fled to the United States since the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power. This migration is one of the most fascinating and unusual in American history; it involves a population of largely first-generation immigrants who have adapted economically and politically to American life while maintaining a distinct cultural identity. Maria Cristina Garcia; a Cuban refugee herself, who was raised in the cuban community of Miami and experienced firsthand many of the developments she describes; has written the most comprehensive and revealing account of post revolutionary Cuban migration to date.
originally: $25.00 In Paradigms Regained, noted mathematician and researcher John Casti tackles the Big Questions of science and sets our sights on a new millennium of astounding discovery. With the same sharp wit and penetrating insight of his earlier book Paradigms Lost, Casti explores the extraordinary "what ifs" of the natural world; the origins of life, the existence of extraterrestrials, our genetic destiny, the roots of language and learning, the limits of knowledge; and debates the competing theories that exist today. Where Paradigms Lost drew on previously reported findings, Paradigms Regained probes deeper, reexamining the same issues against a decade's worth of new evidence from the top minds in science. |
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originally: $13.00 Using the Millennial Clock; a supremely slow computer that will keep perfect time for the next 10,000 years; as a paradigm for the Long Now, Stewart Brand, called "the least recognized most influential thinker in America," offers a practical manual that introduces us to the concept of long-term responsibility. "In the 1960s, Mr. Brand was one of the first to see the power that pictures of the whole earth from space would have. Now he hopes the vistas of deep time will have a similar impact on the way people think about culture and the world's slow rhythms of change. Whether this happens or not, though, any record of serious attempts to deal with deep time will send one important message to the future: that the people of the early 21st century aspired to do more than just scribbling their names in the margins of eternity. They had something to say." -- The Economist
originally: $24.00 The Catastrophist is a brilliant, highly acclaimed novel of love, passion, violence, and desire, set in the Belgian Congo in 1959. While expatriates loll about their pools in a colonial paradise soon to erupt into chaos, huge crowds are drawn to the charismatic Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba; and his even more dangerous rivals. One Man sees the cracks appearing around him and struggles to hold on to his lover, his sanity, and ultimately, his life. Gillespie, the outsider, a journalist, is in Leopoldville for the beautiful Italian, Ines. He is desperate for her love, while she is obsessed with the unfolding drama, caught up in history, ideology and hero worship. It is Ines who defines Gillespie as a catastrofista, an Italian word for somebody for whom "no problem is small. Nothing can be fixed; it is always the end." The Catastrophist is a bold, courageous novel, at once a searing love story and a terrifying political thriller, in the tradition of such books as Graham Greene's The Comedians or such postcolonial classics as The Year of Living Dangerously; an erotic Heart of Darkness for the twentieth century.
originally: $14.95 This first collection of Robert Lowell's prose begins with eighteen lucid and dazzling essays on the life and work of some of his contemporaries, among them Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, Andrej Voznesensky, and Sylvia Plath. In the second group of writings the poet, with characteristic verve, takes up such wideranging subjects as art and evil, the Iliad, Ovid's Metamorphosis, Hawthorne, English metrics, and New England. The third section illuminates Lowell's brilliant and intuitive approach to translation and concludes with fragments from an autobiography he was writing. In the words of Robert Giroux, who arranged and edited this collection, "This book demonstrates that Lowell exercised his own brand of literary appreciation with the freedom of a highly individual poet."
originally: $15.00 Robert Lowell's poetry radically altered the American literary landscape, combining as it did family drama and an pocalyptic view of the history of our times. He won three Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards for poetry. Married three times, always to writers, he had his dark side, suffering from crippling bouts of manic depression and alcoholism. Using hundreds of Lowell's unpublished manuscripts and letters, and dozens of interviews, Paul Mariani has given us a balanced, passionate, and readable life, capturing the man, his age, and his place in literary history.
originally: $28.00 Eugene Dubois was born on January 28, 1858, an interesting between-time in science. It was some eighteen months after the first Neanderthal skeleton was found in Germany and a little more than a year before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in England. Believing that a powerful truth must lie in Darwin's deceptively simple ideas, Dubois; a brilliant young Dutch physician and anatomist; vowed to discover it. There is a link, he declared, between apes and Man, and finding it would be the greatest scientific discovery ever. Dubois willfully abandoned his home and promising career at the University of Amsterdam to drag his wife and baby daughter halfway around the world to search the Dutch East Indies for the legendary missing link. After five years, Dubois' excavations yielded a form he called Pithecanthropus erectus, a heavily fossilized skullcap, tooth, and femur of an ape-man the like of which the world had never seen. It takes a brilliant writer to elucidate a brilliant mind, and Pat Shipman; long hailed as a stellar narrator of the drama of scientific understanding; here shines as never before, The Man Who Found the Missing Link is an irresistible tale of adventure, scientific daring, tragic disappointments, and a strange and enduring love; and it is true.
originally: $19.95 In this book, the well-known philosopher Philip Kitcher sets a new agenda for the philosophy of science and for other "science studies" disciplines, offering a detailed and original picture of the advancement of science. Kitcher mediates between the idealizations of traditional philosophy of science and the overreactions of the numerous historians, sociologists, and philosophers who decry any talk of scientific objectivity. Recognizing that science is done not by omniscient subjects working in isolation, but by people with a variety of personal and social interests, he argues that we may still conceive the growth of science as a process which improves both our vision of nature and our methods of learning about nature.
originally: $15.95 What is natural, Elbow asks, in learning and teaching? Not tidiness or coherence, he asserts, but rather a rich messiness of paradox and contradiction Elbow argues that we need to adjust our picture of how people actually learn, and as a consequence, how teachers should teach and grade. Though not writing autobiography, he continually seeks to demonstrate how his conclusions derive from his own perplexities as a student and as a teacher. This collection includes four sections on the processes of learning, teaching, and evaluation, and on the nature of inquiry. At once theoretical and down-to-earth, this book will appeal not only to teachers, administrators and students, but to anyone with a love of learning.
originally: $25.00 Is any amount of animal distress justified to save or enhance human life? Is it ethically permissible to use animals for research; whether to test new drugs, for organ transplants, or as genetically altered suppliers of spare parts for human beings? In this sweeping history of animal research and protection, Deborah Rudacille shows how such questions, and the answers provided by both scientists and antivivisectionists over the past 150 years, have shaped contemporary society. From Pasteur's experiments with anthrax and rabies to Wilmut and Campbell's cloning of Dolly, Rudacille describes a remarkable trajectory of scientific progress, one that has been accompanied by vocal, if not virulent, opposition. Brilliantly written, far-ranging in its research, and remarkable for balancing; with empathy and insight; radically opposed viewpoints, The Scalpel and the Butterfly stands as a first-rate work of investigative science journalism.
originally: $13.00 In this outstanding new history, Edward Countryman shows how American identity has been forged from the diverse ethnic elements; African, Indian, European and others; of its peoples. At the collision of their separate histories 500 years ago, American history was born. This gripping narrative account leads from the early settlements along the atlantic seaboard to the Centennial celebrations of 1876; from the first struggles between native tribes and French traders and English settlers to the "opening of the West"; from the enslaved Africans' arrival in chains to the battle for their freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War. This is a scintillating account of the American peoples, their history and sense of nationality, and will engage both general readers and students of history.
originally: $17.00 In the second volume of his three-part history, a monumental trilogy that began with Parting the Waters, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Taylor Branch portrays the Civil Rights Movement at its zenith, recounting the climactic struggles as they commanded the national stage. "Branch wonderfully brings alive the times and the tensions. Pillar of Fire is an important detailed work of history that describes one of the most crucial periods of American history since the Civil War. Branch movingly captures a time when people felt compelled to take risks and take action. It is a book that should be read." -- Deirdre Donahue, USA Today.
originally: $22.00 David Mamet has said that if he hadn't found a life in the theater, it is very likely he would have become a criminal. In Jafsie and John Henry the master improviser takes on a range of roles and personae in a lively and personal way. Though older and wiser than when he first shocked theatergoers with the play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Mamet remains one of the most provocative and iconoclastic voices in American writing today, with an idiom so distinct, so American, that it defies comparison. Mamet in this diverse collection turns his unique lens on subjects ranging from houses to Hollywood producers. As the writer turns fifty, he not only shares his reflections on the nature of creativity and the challenges and rewards of aging but delves into his most intimate obsessions. From a description of the labyrinthine psychology of poker to sharp sallies on moviemaking gibberish and the meaning of macho, Jafsie and John Henry is knit together by Mamet's unique perspective and inimitably spare wit. |
M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio
Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman
Headlong
More Pricks Than Kicks
The Many aspects of Mobile Home Living
End of the American Avant Garde
Emerson on the Scholar
The Soul's Code
The Poetics of Military Occupation
Havana USA
Paradigms Regained
The Clock of the Long Now
The Catastrophist
Robert Lowell, Collected Prose
Lost Puritan, A Life of Robert Lowell
The Man Who Found the Missing Link
The Advancement of Science
Embracing Contraries
The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection
Americans: A Collision of Histories
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65
Jafsie and John Henry: EssaysFor questions about these titles, contact remainders@harvardsquarebookstore.com.
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