What happens when we look at a painting? What do we think about? What do we imagine? How can we explain, even to ourselves, what we see or think we see? And how can art historians interpret with any seriousness what they observe? In six engaging, short narrative "fictions," each richly illustrated in color, Daniel Arasse, one of the most brilliant art historians of our time, cl...(展开全部)

Closer: Photographs by Elinor Carucci is the first monograph by this recipient of the prestigious International Center for Photography’s 2001 Infinity Award for Best Young Photographer. Carucci is renowned for sensuous portraits of her family and herself, and Closer reveals the breadth of her work, from the erotic to the ethereal-exposing an emotionally honest world flooded wit...(展开全部)

Since its first appearance fifteen years ago, Why Parties? has become essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the nature of American political parties. In the interim, the party system has undergone some radical changes. In this landmark book, now rewritten for the new millennium, John H. Aldrich goes beyond the clamor of arguments over whether American political par...(展开全部)

An early work by the author of the bestselling Love's Executioner and the pseudonymous patient that he treated. "A riveting story of people whose strengths and weaknesses are mutually shared."--Alex Comfort

"Anellia" is a young student who, though gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, she falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. But she is tested most severely by a figure out of her past she'd long believed dead. </p> Astonishingly intimate and unsparing, and piti...(展开全部)

Which of us, when finding ourselves in the presence of a painting, has not sensed that we lack the keys to decipher it? We feel an emotional response, but the work still seems to evade our understanding. Francoise Barbe-Gall combines a nuanced understanding of the way viewers respond to paintings with a rich knowledge of their context and circumstances of their creation. The re...(展开全部)

In Symbiotic Planet Lynn Margulis shows that symbiosis, which simply means members of different species living in physical contact with one another, is crucial to the origins of evolutionary novelty. Ranging from bacteria to the living Earth itself, Margulis explains the symbiotic origins of many of evolution’s most important innovations. Along the way, Margulis describes her i...(展开全部)

In a few decades, a torrent of new evidence and ideas about human evolution has allowed scientists to piece together a more detailed understanding of what went on thousands and even millions of years ago. We now know much more about the problems our ancestors faced, the solutions they found, and the trade-offs they made. The drama of their experiences led to the humans we are t...(展开全部)

In The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff develops a comparative de-colonial framework for visual culture studies, a field that he has helped to create and shape. Casting modernity as an ongoing contest between visuality and counter-visuality, or "the right to look," he explains how visuality sutures authority to power and renders the association natural. An early-nineteenth-cent...(展开全部)