Holy relics -- the bodily remains of saints and other sacred figures -- were for centuries the most revered objects in the Western world, at center-stage in Europe's great churches and cathedrals. Today some relics have been shunted to side chapels and dark crypts, yet many continue to draw prayerful pilgrims, as they have for centuries, seeking solace, inspiration, and signs of miracles. In Magnificent Corpses, Anneli Rufus recounts her visits to 18 of Europe's most significant relics. With an engaging mix of history and personal narrative, Rufus tells their secret stories and, along the way, revisits with a fresh eye the compelling accounts of the saints whose physical bodies the relics represent.

Anna Halprin is one of the most important innovators in the history of modern dance, performance art, and post-modern dance. Moving Toward Life brings together for the first time her essays, interviews, manifestos, and teaching materials, along with over 100 illustrations, providing a rich account of the work that radicalized an entire generation of performers. Since the late 1950s, Halprin has been at the forefront of experiments in dance, from improvisation and street theatre to dances in the environment and healing dances. A brief overview of Halprin's career shows how her work has prefigured -- and transfigured -- crucial developments in postmodern dance. In the 1960s, Halprin invented the "workshop," and in the wake of the Watts riots, her multiracial company broke boundaries in their confrontational political performances. In the 1970s, she organized "community rituals" to explore how individual creativity feeds positively into group dynamics. These healing social events led to her current work with cancer survivors and people challenging AIDS and their caregivers. Depicting Halprin's deep commitment to social change, Moving Toward Life presents an engaging, critical document of the life of one of the most influential and least known luminaries of American dance. Sally Banes and Janice Ross join Rachel Kaplan in providing introductory essays to sections of the book.

Noh, a slightly eccentric girl whose father is constantly traveling, moves in with her aunt, a teacher at the gothic New Newbridge Academy. The Academy has a strange, storied history but Noh feels right at home there. She’s startled to meet several other kids while investigating an old, burned-out dormitory on the far end of campus, especially since the teachers keep telling her that no students reside at the school during the summer. Soon, Noh discovers that these other students are actually ghosts and that she’s the only "realie" who can see them . . . and, when the ghosts start disappearing, the only one who can save them!

In this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet’s mind, heart, and spirit as Ostriker struggles to love “this wounded / World that we cannot heal, that is our bride.” Whether she probes the meaning of childhood, family, marriage, and motherhood, or art, history, politics, and God; whether she is celebrating sexuality or confronting mortality, the poet includes “whatever I can grasp of human experience within my art—the good and beautiful, the evil and chaotic. I tell my students that they must write what they are afraid to write; and I attempt to do so myself.”

A distinguished photographer portrays the men and women who have made world history over the past four decades

Part memoir, part fashion history, part social commentary, Alexandra Shulman's Sunday Times bestseller explores the meaning of clothes and how we wear them, with a new preface on how recent world events have changed our relationship with clothes 'Warm, thought-provoking and honest.' - Victoria Hislop 'Clever, emotionally intelligent, reveling in style without making us yearn to shop.' - The Times 'Self-deprecating and stylish, this is sure to become a classic.' - Vanity Fair 'It's funny, honest and in typical Shulman style mixes high and low effortlessly. We don't know many people who can write about bras, Donald Tusk and Madeleine Albright all in the same sentence.' - A Little Bird 'Scintillating reading.' - The Spectator 'Alexandra Shulman's style is unaffected, immediate and hilariously dry. She's brilliant at observing everyday feelings in a joy-sparking turn of phrase.' - Helena Bonham Carter - ' Clothes... and other things that matter is a book not only about clothes but about the way we live our lives. From childhood onwards, the way we dress is a result of our personal history. In a mix of memoir, fashion history and social observation I am writing about the person our clothes allows us to be and sometimes the person they turn us into.' - Alexandra Shulman In Clothes... and other things that matter , Alexandra Shulman delves into her own life to look at the emotions, ambitions, expectations and meanings behind the way we dress. From the bra to the bikini, the trench coat to trainers, the slip dress to the suit, she explores their meaning in women's lives and how our wardrobes intersect with the larger world - the career ladder, motherhood, romance, sexual identity, ambition, failure, body image and celebrity. By turns funny, refreshingly self-deprecating and often very moving, this startlingly honest memoir from the ex-Editor of British Vogue will encourage women of all ages to consider what their own clothes mean to them, the life they live in them and the stories they tell.

"A feast for the eyes...bringing alive a long vanished world that's still eerily present."--Daniel Czitrom, New York Post The premiere national Jewish newspaper has opened its never-before-seen archives, revealing a photographic landscape of Jews in the twentieth century and beyond. This extraordinary volume features classic photographs of the history one has learned to associate with the Jewish Daily Forward --Lower East Side pushcarts, Yiddish theater, labor rallies--along with gems no one would expect. The book also features essays by Leon Wieseltier, Roger Kahn, and Deborah Lipstadt, and a rousing introduction by Pete Hamill.

Indispensable history on the cutting edge issue in the battle over gun rights The right to carry a firearm for self-defense.

In his most important book to date, the Sage of Cricklewood lifts his eyes from the navel of the Universe to contemplate matters beyond. Someone has to. If Jeffrey Archer is to become King of Estonia, if Naomi Campbell is to carry off the Nobel Prize, if fat people are to walk effortlessly to Shanghei, if Britain's linoleum is to take its rightful place in the history of civilization and its low-flush suites are to conquer the seven seas, the only man is Alan Coren. Because his position is a bit on the side.

"Until someone tells you, you never know in whose dreams you appear..." - From the prologue of To Catch the Lightning What is the price of our dreams? Beginning in the late 1890s, Edward Sheriff Curtis undertook the seemingly overwhelming odyssey of capturing the past, of documenting and photographing the fading way of life of the American Indian. In To Catch the Lightning , Alan Cheuse has created a remarkable portrait of the man who would become a legend. Drawn on his epic journey by a series of female muses, Curtis turns his lens on a landscape of unparalleled beauty and tradition. Curtis@ desire to complete his destiny as foretold by Chief Joseph, to photograph all of the hundreds of western American Indian tribes, is a haunting tale of the struggle between ambition and duty. The architect of the finest lasting visual record of a culture close to extinction, Curtis stands as a testament to the power of the sacrifices we make for the dreams that compel us. With the ear of a poet and the eye of a historian, Cheuse has crafted a masterwork of American historical fiction. Lyrical, beautifully written, and impressively researched, To Catch the Lightning is a novel of the American spirit. PRAISE FOR TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING: "To Catch the Lightning is a story of loss - of choices made and prices paid, of the future coming fast and the past disappearing faster. Cheuse@s narrative is refracted through multiple voices, each distinct, but each containing its own poetic precision. A wonderful, wonderful book of quiet power and great beauty." - Karen Joy Fowler, author of Wit@s End and The Jane Austen Book Club "To Catch the Lightning tells Curtis@ story vividly and eloquently. It is a great American story, about a life spent preserving and honoring those elements of life which are most respected and beloved. Alan Cheuse is to be congratulated for this vivid novel." - William Kittredge, author of The Willow Field and The Next Rodeo "Bravo to Cheuse for this incarnation of a major and unfairly forgotten American artist, capturing an era so crucial in native American, and therefore American history. I found it immediate and innovative." - Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce and Lulu in Marrakech "The photography and cinema of Edward Curtis exist at the intersection of art, history, anthropology, and technology. He was an essentially American kind of genius, and Alan Cheuse has transformed his life into compelling fiction that digs deep into the mystery and sacrifice and selfishness of creative vision." - Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons "... the narrative brims with keen insight." - Publishers Weekly "Curtis devoted his life to creating the most significant and comprehensive retrospective of American Indian culture, which he viewed as @one of the great races of mankind.@ Curtis correctly predicted that the culture was near extinction ... and much of his work remains the only recorded history of a civilization even then becoming the stuff of legend." - ForeWord Magazine Catch Alan Cheuse in your town: Key West, FL: January - Key West Lit

From 1925 until his death in 1929 the Hamburg-based art and cultural scholar Aby Warburg worked on his Mnemosyne Atlas, a volume of plates that has, in the meanwhile, taken on mythical status in the study of modern art and visual studies. With this project, Warburg created a visual reference system that was far ahead of its time. In cooperation with the Warburg Institute, Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil have now undertaken the task of finding all of the individual pictures from the atlas and displaying these reproductions of artworks from the Middle East, European antiquity, and the Renaissance in the same way that Warburg himself showed them, on panels hung with black fabric. This folio volume and the exhibition in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin succeed in restoring Warburg's vanished legacy something that researchers have long considered impossible. -- ABY WARBURG (1866-1929), scion of a Hamburg banking family, completed his doctorate in 1892 on the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. As a result, he comprehensively studied the interplay of myths, images and rites from different cultural contexts. This lead him to his main subject matter: the afterlife of antiquity in the Renaissance. With his attempt to break down the rigid boundaries of art history, Warburg is regarded as one of the fathers of modern pictorial science

From an obscure family in a small provincial town, Shakespeare had no formal education after the age of thirteen. His surviving handwriting consists of six signatures on legal documents. His will makes no mention of his books or manuscripts. His two daughters were illiterate. There is, in other words, a seemingly enormous gap between the meagreness of Shakespeare's background and his achievements as the greatest and most famous writer in the English language. Over the years, numerous 'candidates' have been proposed as the true author. Often dismissed by the orthodox Shakespeare establishment in Britain and America as crackpots, the Anti-Stratfordians, as they are known, have become increasingly visible and numerous during the past thirty years. Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays? provides a clear, objective guide to the Shakespeare authorship question by examining the strengths and deficiencies of the arguments for all of the candidates: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford; Sir Francis Bacon; Christopher Marlowe; William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby; Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland; Mary Sidney; Sir Henry Neville; and William Shakespeare himself. This book is a fascinating, comprehensive and up-to-date look at one of history's greatest mysteries.

Assesses the 2008 presidential election as one of history's most significant, covering such topics as Bush's second term, the rise of Obama, and the key issues affecting the election.

The sudden and almost bloodless demise of the Soviet Union - and with it, communism - caught everyone by surprise, from the KGB and the Red Army to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the dissidents at home and in the satellite states. In the first full-scale account of this mysterious transformation, historian and journalist David Pryce-Jones is able to provide answers to the crucial questions: Why did Gorbachev not shoot his way out of the crisis in classic Soviet style, as former leaders had done in Hungary and Czechoslovakia? How did an unlikely alliance of nationalist actors, idealistic poets, and political priests unseat the ruling despots of Warsaw, Bucharest, East Berlin, and Prague? What role did the West really play in all this? And what do these remarkable events presage for Russia's future? The result is a vivid account of the Soviet empire's fall, as experienced from the inside - and at the top. Uncompromising in its accuracy and keen in its insight, The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire is the definitive account of one of history's greatest anticlimaxes.

Examines issues in the study of the Russian Revolution and evaluates their coverage in history books

"It is not possible to fully understand contemporary politics between China and the Dalai Lama without understanding what happened in the 1950's. The third volume in Melvyn Goldstein's History of Modern Tibet series, The Calm before the Storm, examines the critical years of 1955 through 1957. During this period, the Preparatory Committee for a Tibet Autonomous Region was inaugurated in Lhasa, and a major Tibetan uprising occurred in Sichuan Province. Jenkhentsisum, a Tibetan anti-communist emigree group, emerged as an important player with secret links to Indian Intelligence, the Dalai Lama's Lord Chamberlain, the United States, and Taiwan. And in Tibet, Fan Ming, the acting head of the CCP's office in Lhasa, launched the "Great Expansion," which recruited many thousands of Han Cadres to Lhasa in preparation for beginning democratic reforms, only to be stopped decisively by Mao Zedong's "Great Contraction" which sent them back to China and ended talk of reforms in Tibet for the foreseeable future. In Volume III, Goldstein draws on never-before seen Chinese government documents, published and unpublished memoirs and diaries, and invaluable in-depth interviews with important Chinese and Tibetan participants (including the Dalai Lama) to offer a new level of insight into the events and principal players of the time. Goldstein corrects factual errors and misleading stereotypes in the history, and uncovers heretofore unknown information on the period to reveal in depth a nuanced portrait of Sino-Tibetan relations that goes far beyond anything previously imagined"--

In The Fantasy of Feminist History , Joan Wallach Scott argues that feminist perspectives on history are enriched by psychoanalytic concepts, particularly fantasy. Tracing the evolution of her thinking about gender over the course of her career, the pioneering historian explains how her search for ways to more forcefully insist on gender as mutable rather than fixed or stable led her to psychoanalytic theory, which posits sexual difference as an insoluble dilemma. Scott suggests that it is the futile struggle to hold meaning in place that makes gender such an interesting historical object, an object that includes not only regimes of truth about sex and sexuality but also fantasies and transgressions that refuse to be regulated or categorized. Fantasy undermines any notion of psychic immutability or fixed identity, infuses rational motives with desire, and contributes to the actions and events that come to be narrated as history. Questioning the standard parameters of historiography and feminist politics, Scott advocates fantasy as a useful, even necessary, concept for feminist historical analysis.

Ashley Hicks has created a mix of manifesto, souvenir album, and confession in this collection of noteworthy rooms featuring his own one-of-a-kind interiors along with rooms that have inspired him. The manifesto aspect is rather limited, since Hicks is not a great believer in aesthetic rules or the value of so-called good taste, but as a souvenir album, it charts Hicks s personal creative journey of the last few years, illustrated with photographs of some favorite historical interiors and objects that represent a mixture of source material and inspiration. The book s twelve chapters reveal Hicks's creative process, how he approaches different themes in his own interiors, furniture designs, and works of art, and how these themes can be applied to the works of others. Such subjects as flowers, color, layers, form, pattern, and memory are presented in the context of actual projects. Historical and recent interiors are discussed for their decorative value notable rooms and architecture, including the Pantheon in Rome; Emperor Maximilian s tomb in Innsbruck; the Royal Pavilion, Brighton; and the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Hicks has created a book for devotees of decorating and the history of interior design.

This collection of essays by Alexander Gerschenkron, who has been called “the doyen of economic history in the United States,” is a companion volume to the author’s highly acclaimed Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. The essays range over a wide variety of subjects, but the major theme, as in Gerschenkron’s previous book, is the conditions of industrial development, particularly in regard to nineteenth-century Europe. The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, Methodology, the essays are: “On the Concept of Continuity in History,” “Some Methodological Problems in Economic History,” and “Reflections on Ideology as a Methodological and Historical Problem.” Part II, Problems in Economic History, deals with “The Typology of Industrial Development as a Tool of Analysis,” “The Industrial Development of Italy: A Debate with Rosario Romeo,” “The Modernization of Entrepreneurship,” “Russia: Agrarian Policies and Industrialization, 1861–1914,” and “City Economies Then and Now.” In Part III, The Political Framework, the essays are: “Reflections on the Economic Aspects of Revolution,” “The Changeability of a Dictatorship,” and “The Stability of Dictatorships.” A series of appendices presents reviews and review articles by Gerschenkron.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas tells the fascinating story of how the Ashanti, Tutsi, Igbo, Zulu, Beta Israel, Maasai, and many other African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern European race narratives over a millennium in which not only were Jews cast as black but black Africans were cast as Jews, Tudor Parfitt reveals a complex history of the interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses. For centuries, colonialists, travelers, and missionaries, in an attempt to explain and understand the strange people they encountered on the colonial frontier, labeled an astonishing array of African tribes, languages, and cultures as Hebrew, Jewish, or Israelite. Africans themselves came to adopt these identities as their own, invoking their shared histories of oppression, imagined blood-lines, and common traditional practices as proof of a racial relationship to Jews. Beginning in the post-slavery era, contacts between black Jews in America and their counterparts in Africa created powerful and ever-growing networks of black Jews who struggled against racism and colonialism. A community whose claims are denied by many, black Jews have developed a strong sense of who they are as a unique people. In Parfitt’s telling, forces of prejudice and the desire for new racial, redemptive identities converge, illuminating Jewish and black history alike in novel and unexplored ways.