Legends of the Open Road: The History Technology and Future of Automobile Design Edited by GABRIELLA BELLIE

New In Hardcover $100.00 - 10%

Throughout the 20th century, the automobile industry has become a symbol of modernity. These twenty-first century prototypes–such as the Volkswagen Beetle, the Fiat 500, the great sports cars designed by Pininfarina for Ferrari, and the Mini Minor by Issigonis–all had a mix of design and technological innovation that made them marvels of contemporary life. This catalog illustrates the creative life of the most prestigious European and American car manufacturers in history. An in-depth examination of their design process and technological innovations offers an unprecedented look into the well-known names of the automobile age, as well as some of the world’s rarest models. From the creative process to the making of timeless automobile design, this publication presents the automobile culture in all its glory.
The American Home Front: 1941-1942 by ALISTAIR COOKE

New In Paperback $15.00

In nearly three thousand BBC broadcasts over fifty-eight years, Alistair Cooke reported on America, illuminating our country for a global audience. He was one of the most widely read and widely heard chroniclers of America—the Twentieth Century’s de Tocqueville. Cooke died in 2004, but shortly before he passed away a long-forgotten manuscript resurfaced in a closet in his New York apartment. It was a travelogue of America during the early days of World War II that had sat there for sixty years. Published to stellar reviews in 2006, though “somewhat past deadline,” Cooke’s The American Home Front is a “valentine to his adopted country by someone who loved it as well as anyone and knew it better than most” (The Plain Dealer [Cleveland]). It is a unique artifact and a historical gem, “an unexpected and welcome discover in a time capsule.” (Washington Post) A portrait frozen in time, the book offers a charming look at the war through small towns, big cities, and the American landscape as they once were. The American Home Front is also a brilliant piece of reportage, a historical gem that “affirms Cooke’s enduring place as a great twentieth-century reporter”

J.M.W. Turner Edited by IAN WARRELL & FRANKLIN KELLY

New In Hardcover $55.00 - 10%

J.M.W. Turner, accompanying the largest exhibition of his work ever presented in the US, shows how Turner’s revolutionary depictions of light, color and atmospherics in the landscape—combined with his understanding of the sublime in nature—made him among the most acclaimed and keenly studied European artists in the New World. Landscape painting was seen as the art form most closely allied to the identity of the newly independent nation, and Turner’s majestic works served as a model for a new generation of American painters.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 23, 2008–September 21, 2008

Best New Poets 2007: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers Edited by NATASHA TRETHEWAY

New In Paperback $11.95

In just three years Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it’s being practiced today.

The Works: Anatomy of a City by KATE ASCHER

New In Paperback $20.00

The Works contains a section on pretty much every aspect of the Big Apple’s infrastructure. You’ll learn the mystery of the shiny silver tanks that have become a familiar sight on New York streets. (They prevent moisture from damaging underground phone lines.) Ascher explains how the city’s 23 million daily pieces of mail are processed. We also learn about the 27-mile underground pneumatic mail tube that used to carry canisters with 500 letters up to 30 miles per hour around Manhattan. Also interesting: the story of the nine-foot-long, 800-pound robot submarine that city engineers send to probe leaks in the Delaware Aqueduct–which, it might interest you to know, is the world’s longest continuous underground tunnel. And you’ll find out all about Colonel Waring and his “White Wings.” A great coffee table book for New York lovers or anyone with a curiosity bone.

Gandhi on Non-Violence: Selected Texts from Gandhi’s “Non-Violence in Peace and War”

Edited by THOMAS MERTON, with a Preface by MARK KURLANSKY

New In Paperback $13.95

The basic principles of Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence (Ahimsa) and non-violent action (Satyagraha) were chosen by Thomas Merton for this volume in 1965. In his challenging Introduction, “Gandhi and the One-Eyed Giant,” Merton emphasizes the importance of action rather than mere pacifism as a central component of non-violence, and illustrates how the foundations of Gandhi’s universal truths are linked to traditional Hindu Dharma, the Greek philosophers, and the teachings of Christ and Thomas Aquinas.

Educated as a Westerner in South Africa, it was Gandhi’s desire to set aside the caste system as well as his political struggles in India which led him to discover the dynamic power of non-cooperation. But, non-violence for Gandhi “was not simply a political tactic,” as Merton observes: “the spirit of non-violence sprang from an inner realization of spiritual unity in himself.” Gandhi’s politics of spiritual integrity have influenced generations of people around the world, as well as civil rights leaders from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Steve Biko to Václav Havel and Aung San Suu Kyi.

Mark Kurlansky has written an insightful preface for this edition that touches upon the history of non-violence and reflects the core of Gandhi’s spiritual and ethical doctrine in the context of current global conflicts.

Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by STEVE MARTIN

New in Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

At age 10, Steve Martin got a job selling guidebooks at the newly opened Disneyland. In the decade that followed, he worked in Disney’s magic shop, print shop, and theater, and developed his own magic/comedy act. By age 20, studying poetry and philosophy on the side, he was performing a dozen times a week, most often at the Disney rival, Knott’s Berry Farm. Obsession is a substitute for talent, he has said, and Steve Martin’s focus and daring–his sheer tenacity–are truly stunning. He writes about making the very tough decision to sacrifice everything not original in his act, and about lucking into a job writing for The Smothers Brothers Show. He writes about mentors, girlfriends, his complex relationship with his parents and sister, and about some of his great peers in comedy–Dan Ackroyd, Lorne Michaels, Carl Reiner, Johnny Carson. He writes about fear, anxiety and loneliness. And he writes about how he figured out what worked on stage. This book is a memoir, but it is also an illuminating guidebook to stand-up from one of our two or three greatest comedians. Though Martin is reticent about his personal life, he is also stunningly deft, and manages to give readers a feeling of intimacy and candor. Illustrated throughout with black and white photographs collected by Martin, this book is instantly compelling visually and a spectacularly good read.

Lonely Planet 2008 Bluelist

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LONELY PLANET BLUELIST 2008 captures the best in travel - a collection of trends, destinations, journeys and experiences for the year ahead. Drawing on the knowledge, passion and miles travelled by the Lonely Planet community of authors, staff and travellers, this year’s edition is a selection of the best places to go and things to do all around the world right now.

Gomorrah by ROBERTO SAVIANO

New In Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

Saviano has created a perfectly realized, morally compelling journey through the brutal world of contemporary Italian mob life in this ceaselessly violent tale of the Camorra, a network of thugs, exploiters and killers who run Naples and the surrounding countryside. Armed with a police band radio, Saviano visits one crime scene after another, recording the final words and circumstances of the dying and dead. The murders described are savage, cruel and senseless: The head… hadn’t been cut off with a hatchet, a clean blow, but with a metal grinder: the kind of circular saw welders use to polish soldering. The worst possible tool, and thus the most obvious choice. Jewiss’s translation of Saviano’s intense prose flows beautifully from the pestilence and degradation of everyday life in the teeming Neapolitan slums to the futile efforts of the police to control the rich, organic chaos that is the only way the Camorra know how to live. A stunning achievement, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the state of contemporary Europe.
FIRST CHAPTER HERE
Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City by LESLIE DAY

New In Paperback $24.95

In 2002, scientists from the American Museum of Natural History in New York ventured out into the city’s Central Park to poke around its rich and complex layer of leaf litter. They made a big, yet tiny, discovery.
Hidden under the detritus — piles of broken twigs, soil, fungi, decomposing plants and tree leaves — lived what many believe is the smallest centipede in the world, a brand new species that has only been found in this one park. The insect, dubbed Hoffman’s dwarf centipede, is brilliantly golden in color, is less than an inch long and has 41 pairs of legs. Each day, thousands of park goers unknowingly walk right past or over these unique, tiny creatures. The Big Apple — a land of skyscrapers and concrete — holds many such natural wonders, and Leslie Day would like to be your guide. Day, a New York City naturalist, reveals this amazing urban environment in her new book, Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City.

On Deep History and the Brain by DANIEL LORD SMITH

New In Hardcover $21.95

When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that, in the wake of the decade of the brain and the bestselling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories by HERODOTUS

Edited by ROBERT B. STRASSLER, with an Introduction by ROSALIND THOMAS, and Translated by ANDREA PURVIS

New In Hardcover $45.00

Herodotus was a Greek historian living in Ionia during the fifth century BCE. He traveled extensively through the lands of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and collected stories, and then recounted his experiences with the varied people and cultures he encountered. Cicero called him “the father of history,” and his only work, The Histories, is considered the first true piece of historical writing in Western literature. With lucid prose that harks back to the time of oral tradition, Herodotus set a standard for narrative nonfiction that continues to this day.

In The Histories, Herodotus chronicles the rise of the Persian Empire and its dramatic war with the Greek city-states. Within that story he includes rich veins of anthropology, ethnography, geology, and geography, pioneering these fields of study, and explores such universal themes as the nature of freedom, the role of religion, the human costs of war, and the dangers of absolute power.

Ten years in the making, The Landmark Herodotus gives us a new, dazzling translation by Andrea L. Purvis that makes this remarkable work of literature more accessible than ever before. Illustrated, annotated, and filled with maps, this edition also includes an introduction by Rosalind Thomas and twenty-one appendices written by scholars at the top of their fields, covering such topics as Athenian government, Egypt, Scythia, Persian arms and tactics, the Spartan state, oracles, religion, tyranny, and women.

Like The Landmark Thucydides before it, The Landmark Herodotus is destined to be the most readable and comprehensively useful edition of The Histories available.

Torture and Democracy by DARIUS REJALI

New In Hardcover $39.50 - 10%

This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world’s leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe.

As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world’s oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to “clean” techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods.

Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research–conducted in multiple languages and on several continents–begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.

Sons and Other Flammable Objects by POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR

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Khakpour builds her luminously intelligent debut around the travails of an Iranian-American family caught in the feverish and paranoid currents immediately after 9/11. Darius Adam and his wife, Laleh (who, much to Darius’s disgust, Americanizes her name to Lala), flee revolutionary Iran for the alien territory of Southern California, settling in an apartment complex with the allegorically enticing name of Eden Gardens. Son Xerxes grows up with psychological dual citizenship: regular American outside of Eden Gardens, but the son of bitter Darius and clueless Lala inside. Xerxes finds true paradise in watching Barbara Eden, the star of I Dream of Jeannie. For the brilliantly rendered Lala, America is not so bad—it’s a good place to ‘’lose your mind, which is how Lala translates into English her forgetting her unhappy Tehran childhood. Against this background of a parody paradise, Khakpour plays out the events following 9/11, which will, grotesquely, unite the Adam family. By then Xerxes, 26, is an unemployed college grad in a New York airshaft-view apartment, as far from Eden Gardens as possible. Khakpour is an elegant writer, and she imparts a perfect sense of the ironies of being Persian in America, where the blurry collective image of the Middle East alternates between blonde genies in bottles and furrow-browed terrorists in cockpits.

The Graving Dock by GABRIEL COHEN

New in Hardcover $23.95 - 10%

In the chill of winter, a homemade coffin drifts ashore in New York Harbor, containing the body of a boy with the letters “G.I.” written on his forehead. As a detective with Brooklyn South Homicide, Jack Leightner finds that corpses are a part of every working day. But today his attention is riveted on a considerably smaller box, containing an engagement ring for his girlfriend Michelle.…

In his second mystery featuring Detective Jack Leightner, Edgar Award–nominated author Gabriel Cohen vividly captures New York’s most fascinating borough.

The relatively gentle treatment of the victim in Jack’s new case leads him to believe that the boy may have been subject to a strange type of mercy killing. But when a new body appears, it’s clear that no mercy was involved.

Meanwhile, Jack can’t figure out his new partner, Tommy Balfa. The man seems fixated on some mysterious trouble of his own, leaving Jack to find out why the unknown boy was sent adrift. Eventually, Jack is forced to take on a second, unofficial investigation into his own partner’s shady activities. And both cases keep interfering with his attempts to propose to his girlfriend. As all three plots thicken, Jack’s pursuit of the killer takes him on a whirlwind tour of hidden parts of New York Harbor, from the secret world of Governors Island to the dilapidated shipyards of the old Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Red Hook, Cohen’s debut, was called “outstanding” (The New York Times), “accomplished” (Publishers Weekly), and “compelling” (Booklist). The Graving Dock, the eagerly awaited sequel, is a triumph, even richer in atmosphere, action, and the mysteries of the human heart.