UC Press - New Titles

Birds of the Sierra Nevada: Their Natural History, Status, and Distribution by Ted Beedy, Ed Pandolfino

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

This beautifully illustrated and user-friendly book presents the most up-to-date information available about the natural histories of birds of the Sierra Nevada, the origins of their names, the habitats they prefer, how they communicate and interact with one another, their relative abundance, and where they occur within the region. Each species account features original illustrations by Keith Hansen. In addition to characterizing individual species, Birds of the Sierra Nevada also describes ecological zones and bird habitats, recent trends in populations and ranges, conservation efforts, and more than 160 rare species....
Buy Now

Creating a Common Polity: Religion, Economy, and Politics in the Making of the Greek Koinon by Emily Mackil

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In the ancient Greece of Pericles and Plato, the polis, or city-state, reigned supreme, but by the time of Alexander, nearly half of the mainland Greek city-states had surrendered part of their autonomy to join the larger political entities called koina. In the first book in fifty years to tackle the rise of these so-called Greek federal states, Emily Mackil charts a complex, fascinating map of how shared religious practices and long-standing economic interactions faciliated political cooperation and the emergence of a new kind of state....
Buy Now

American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn by Scott MacDonald

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary is a critical history of American filmmakers crucial to the development of ethnographic film and personal documentary. The Boston and Cambridge area is notable for nurturing these approaches to documentary film via institutions such as the MIT Film Section and the Film Study Center, the Carpenter Center and the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard. Scott MacDonald uses pragmatism's focus on empirical experience as a basis for measuring the groundbreaking achievements of such influential filmmakers as John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, Ed Pincus, Miriam Weinstein, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Nina Davenport, Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, Michel Negroponte, John Gianvito, Alexander Olch, Amie Siegel, Ilisa Barbash, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor....
Buy Now

Ain't No Trust: How Bosses, Boyfriends, and Bureaucrats Fail Low-Income Mothers and Why It Matters by Judith Levine

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Ain't No Trust explores issues of trust and distrust among low-income women in the U.S.--at work, around childcare, in their relationships, and with caseworkers--and presents richly detailed evidence from in-depth interviews about our welfare system and why it's failing the very people it is designed to help. By comparing low-income mothers' experiences before and after welfare reform, Judith A. Levine probes women's struggles to gain or keep jobs while they simultaneously care for their children, often as single mothers....
Buy Now

God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet by Nathan Schneider

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In this tour of the history of arguments for and against the existence of God, Nathan Schneider embarks on a remarkable intellectual, historical, and theological journey through the centuries of believers and unbelievers--from ancient Greeks, to medieval Arabs, to today's most eminent philosophers and the New Atheists. Framed by an account of Schneider's own unique journey, God in Proof illuminates the great minds who wrestled with one of history's biggest questions together with their arguments, bringing them to life in their time, and our own....
Buy Now

Down by the Bay: San Francisco's History between the Tides by Matthew Booker

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

San Francisco Bay is the largest and most productive estuary on the Pacific Coast of North America. It is also home to the oldest and densest urban settlements in the American West. Focusing on human inhabitation of the Bay since Ohlone times, Down By The Bay reveals the ongoing role of nature in shaping that history. From birds to oyster pirates, from gold miners to farmers, from salt ponds to ports, this is the first history of the San Francisco Bay and Delta as both a human and natural landscape....
Buy Now

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, With a Foreword by Philippe Bourgois by Seth Holmes

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

This book is an ethnographic witness to the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants. Based on five years of research in the field (including berry-picking and traveling with migrants back and forth from Oaxaca up the West Coast), Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, uncovers how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes' material is visceral and powerful--for instance, he trekked with his informants illegally through the desert border into Arizona, where they were apprehended and jailed by the Border Patrol....
Buy Now

The Musical Legacy of Wartime France by Leslie A. Sprout

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

For the three forces competing for political authority in France during World War II, music became the site of a cultural battle that reflected the war itself. German occupying authorities promoted German music at the expense of French, while the Vichy administration pursued projects of national renewal through culture. Meanwhile, Resistance networks gradually formed to combat German propaganda while eyeing Vichy's efforts with suspicion. In The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, Leslie A. Sprout explores how each of these forces influenced the composition, performance, and reception of five well-known works: the secret Resistance songs of Francis Poulenc and those of Arthur Honegger; Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, composed in a German prisoner of war camp; Maurice Duruflé's Requiem, one of sixty-five pieces commissioned by Vichy between 1940 and 1944; and Igor Stravinsky's Danses concertantes, which was met at its 1945 Paris premiere with protests that prefigured the aesthetic debates of the early Cold War....
Buy Now

Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture by Dennis Stanford, Bruce Bradley

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. Distinctive stone tools belonging to the Clovis culture established the presence of these early New World people. But are the Clovis tools Asian in origin? Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge the old narrative and, in the process, counter traditional--and often subjective--approaches to archaeological testing for historical relatedness....
Buy Now

The Hellenistic Settlements in the East from Armenia and Mesopotamia to Bactria and India by Getzel M. Cohen

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

This is the third volume of Getzel Cohen's important work on the Hellenistic settlements in the ancient world. Through the conquests of Alexander the Great, his successors and others, Greek and Macedonian culture spread deep into Asia, with colonists settling as far away as Bactria and India. In this book, Cohen provides historical narratives, detailed references, citations, and commentaries on all the Graeco-Macedonian settlements founded (or refounded) in the East. Organized geographically, Cohen pulls together discoveries and debates from dozens of widely scattered archaeological and epigraphic projects, making a distinct contribution to ongoing questions and opening new avenues of inquiry.
Buy Now

Ecology of North American Freshwater Fishes by Stephen T. Ross Ph. D.

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The North American freshwater fish fauna is the most diverse and thoroughly researched temperate fish fauna in the world. Ecology of North American Freshwater Fishes is the only textbook to provide advanced undergraduate and graduate students and researchers with an up-to-date and integrated view of the ecological and evolutionary concepts, principles, and processes involved in the formation and maintenance of this fauna. Ecology of North American Freshwater Fishes provides readers with a broad understanding of why specific species and assemblages occur in particular places....
Buy Now

The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village by Henrietta Harrison

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The Missionary's Curse tells the story of a Chinese village that has been Catholic since the seventeenth century, drawing direct connections between its history, the globalizing church, and the nation. Harrison recounts the popular folk tales of merchants and peasants who once adopted Catholic rituals and teachings for their own purposes, only to find themselves in conflict with the orthodoxy of Franciscan missionaries arriving from Italy. The village's long religious history, combined with the similarities between Chinese folk religion and Italian Catholicism, forces us to rethink the extreme violence committed in the area during the Boxer Uprising....
Buy Now

Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City by Kathryn Edin, Timothy J. Nelson

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Across the political spectrum, unwed fatherhood is denounced as one of the leading social problems of today. Doing the Best I Can is a strikingly rich, paradigm-shifting look at fatherhood among inner-city men often dismissed as deadbeat dads. Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson examine how couples in challenging straits come together and get pregnant so quickly--without planning. The authors chronicle the high hopes for forging lasting family bonds that pregnancy inspires, and pinpoint the fatal flaws that often lead to the relationship's demise....
Buy Now

To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767 by J. Michelle Molina

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

To Overcome Oneself offers a novel retelling of the emergence of the Western concept of modern self, demonstrating how the struggle to forge a self was enmeshed in early modern Catholic missionary expansion. Examining the practices of Catholics in Europe and New Spain from the 1520s through the 1760s, the book treats Jesuit techniques of self-formation, namely spiritual exercises and confessional practices, and the relationships between spiritual directors and their subjects. Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic were folded into a dynamic that shaped new concepts of self and, in the process, fueled the global Catholic missionary movement....
Buy Now

Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660-1950 by Fabian Drixler

Wed, 29 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

This book tells the story of a society reversing deeply held worldviews and revolutionizing its demography. In parts of eighteenth-century Japan, couples raised only two or three children. As villages shrank and domain headcounts dwindled, posters of child-murdering she-devils began to appear, and governments offered to pay their subjects to have more children. In these pages, the long conflict over the meaning of infanticide comes to life once again. Those who killed babies saw themselves as responsible parents to their chosen children....
Buy Now

The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.

Tue, 28 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Bud Powell was not only one of the greatest bebop pianists of all time, he stands as one of the twentieth century's most dynamic and fiercely adventurous musical minds. His expansive musicianship, riveting performances, and inventive compositions expanded the bebop idiom and pushed jazz musicians of all stripes to higher standards of performance. Yet Powell remains one of American music's most misunderstood figures, and the story of his exceptional talent is often overshadowed by his history of alcohol abuse, mental instability, and brutalization at the hands of white authorities....
Buy Now

After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California by Peter Alagona

Tue, 28 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Thoroughly researched and finely crafted, After the Grizzly traces the history of endangered species and habitat in California, from the time of the Gold Rush to the present. Peter S. Alagona shows how scientists and conservationists came to view the fates of endangered species as inextricable from ecological conditions and human activities in the places where those species lived. Focusing on the stories of four high-profile endangered species--the California condor, desert tortoise, Delta smelt, and San Joaquin kit fox--Alagona offers an absorbing account of how Americans developed a political system capable of producing and sustaining debates in which imperiled species serve as proxies for broader conflicts about the politics of place....
Buy Now

Mingus Speaks by John Goodman

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Charles Mingus is among jazz's greatest composers and perhaps its most talented bass player. He was blunt and outspoken about the place of jazz in music history and American culture, about which performers were the real thing (or not), and much more. These in-depth interviews, conducted several years before Mingus died, capture the composer's spirit and voice, revealing how he saw himself as composer and performer, how he viewed his peers and predecessors, how he created his extraordinary music, and how he looked at race....
Buy Now

Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti by Elizabeth C. Childs

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In the late nineteenth century Tahiti embodied Western ideas of an earthly Paradise, a primitive utopia distant geographically and culturally from the Gilded Age or Belle Epoque. Stimulated by fin de siècle longings for the exotic, a few adventurous artists sought out this Eden on the South Seas--but what they found did not always live up to the Eden of their imagination. Bringing three of these figures together in comparative perspective for the first time, Vanishing Paradise offers a fresh take on the modernist primitivism of the French painter Paul Gauguin, the nostalgic exoticism of the American John LaFarge, and the elite tourism of the American writer Henry Adams....
Buy Now

Plant and Animal Endemism in California by Susan Harrison

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

California is globally renowned for its biological diversity, including its wealth of unique, or endemic, species. Many reasons have been cited to explain this abundance: the complex geology and topography of its landscape, the special powers of its Mediterranean-type climate, and the historic and modern barriers to the wider dispersal of its flora and fauna. Plant and Animal Endemism in California compiles and synthesizes a wealth of data on this singular subject, providing new and updated lists of native species, comparing patterns and causes of both plant and animal endemism, and interrogating the classic explanations proposed for the state's special significance in light of new molecular evidence....
Buy Now

Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression, Updated Edition with a New Preface and Afterword by Dale Maharidge

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In Someplace Like America, writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life--through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis--the deepening crises of poverty and homelessness. The story begins in 1980, when the authors joined forces to cover the America being ignored by the mainstream media--people living on the margins and losing their jobs as a result of deindustrialization....
Buy Now

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, Revised and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition by Marion Nestle

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing exposé, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States--enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over--has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more--more food, more often, and in larger portions--no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being....
Buy Now

Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, With a new Foreword by Sinan Antoon by Mahmoud Darwish

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

One of the Arab world's greatest poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day).Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory....
Buy Now

The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History by Edward Casey

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, The Fate of Place is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of space from the seventh century A....
Buy Now

Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art by Philip Ursprung

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

This innovative study of two of the most important artists of the twentieth century links the art practices of Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in their attempts to test the limits of art--both what it is and where it is. Ursprung provides a sophisticated yet accessible analysis, placing the two artists firmly in the art world of the 1960s as well as in the art historical discourse of the following decades. Although their practices were quite different, they both extended the studio and gallery into desert landscapes, abandoned warehouses, industrial sites, train stations, and other spaces....
Buy Now

Rifle Reports: A Story of Indonesian Independence by Mary Margaret Steedly

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

On August 17, 1945, Indonesia proclaimed its independence from Dutch colonial rule. Five years later, the Republic of Indonesia was recognized as a unified, sovereign state. The period in between was a time of aspiration, mobilization, and violence, in which nationalists fought to expel the Dutch while also trying to come to grips with the meaning of independence. Rifle Reports is an ethnographic history of this extraordinary time as it was experienced on the outskirts of the nation among Karo Batak villagers in the rural highlands of North Sumatra....
Buy Now

Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany by Matthew Head

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization. Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-looking critics who argued for music as a fine art, a component of modern, polite, and commercial culture, rather than a symbol of institutional power. In the eyes of such critics, femininity--a newly emerging and primarily bourgeois ideal--linked women and music under the valorized signs of refinement, sensibility, virtue, patriotism, luxury, and, above all, beauty....
Buy Now

Surfaces: A History by Joseph A. Amato

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Human beings are surrounded by surfaces: from our skin to faces, to the walls and streets of our homes and cities, to the images, books, and screens of our cultures and civilizations, to the natural world and what we imagine beyond. In this thought-provoking and richly textured book, Joseph A. Amato traces the human relationship with surfaces from the deep history of human evolution, which unfolded across millennia, up to the contemporary world. Fusing his work on Dust and On Foot, he shows how, in the last two centuries, our understanding, creation, control, and manipulation of surfaces has become truly revolutionary--in both scale and volume....
Buy Now

Trailblazer: A Biography of Jerry Brown by Chuck McFadden

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In this first biography of Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. in more than thirty years, Chuck McFadden explores the unique persona of one of the most idiosyncratic politicians in California history. Son of California political royalty who forged his own political style against the tumultuous backdrop of a huge, balkanized state--and shoved to and fro by complex currents--Jerry Brown plumbed his visionary impulses as well as his grandiose ambitions. 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....
Buy Now

Wayward Shamans: The Prehistory of an Idea by Silvia Tomaskova

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Wayward Shamans tells the story of an idea that humanity's first expression of art, religion and creativity found form in the figure of a proto-priest known as a shaman. Tracing this classic category of the history of anthropology back to the emergence of the term in Siberia, the work follows the trajectory of European knowledge about the continent's eastern frontier. The ethnographic record left by German natural historians engaged in the Russian colonial expansion project in the 18th century includes a range of shamanic practitioners, varied by gender and age....
Buy Now

Jews in the Los Angeles Mosaic by Edited by Karen Wilson

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Influenced by popular notions that the West is a place of vanishing Jews and disappearing Judaism, most people draw a blank at the words Los Angeles Jew. Yet, the region is home to the second largest number of Jews in North America, and boasts the fourth largest Jewish population in the world, behind only Tel Aviv, New York City, and Jerusalem. This book, and its companion exhibition at the Autry National Center, reveals how Los Angeles has shaped Jewish identities and how Jewish Angelenos have shaped the metropolis....
Buy Now

Rough-Hewn Land: A Geologic Journey from California to the Rocky Mountains by Keith Meldahl

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Unfold a map of North America, Keith Heyer Meldahl writes, and the first thing to grab your eye is the bold shift between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. In this absorbing book, Meldahl takes readers on a 1000-mile-long field trip back through more than 100 million years of deep time to explore America's most spectacular and scientifically intriguing landscapes. He places us on the outcrops, rock hammer in hand, to examine the evidence for how these rough-hewn lands came to be. We see California and its gold assembled from pieces of old ocean floor and the relentless movements of the Earth's tectonic plates....
Buy Now

To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation by Paul Farmer, Jonathan L. Weigel

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Here, for the first time, is a collection of short speeches by the charismatic doctor and social activist Paul Farmer. One of the most passionate and influential voices for global health equity and social justice, Farmer encourages young people to tackle the greatest challenges of our times. Engaging, often humorous, and always inspiring, these speeches bring to light the brilliance and force of Farmer's vision in a single, accessible volume.A must-read for graduates, students, and everyone seeking to help bend the arc of history toward justice, To Repair the World:• Challenges readers to counter failures of imagination that keep billions of people without access to health care, safe drinking water, decent schools, and other basic human rights; • Champions the power of partnership against global poverty, climate change, and other pressing problems today; • Overturns common assumptions about health disparities around the globe by considering the large-scale social forces that determine who gets sick and who has access to health care;• Discusses how hope, solidarity, faith, and hardbitten analysis have animated Farmer's service to the poor in Haiti, Peru, Rwanda, Russia, and elsewhere;• Leaves the reader with an uplifting vision: that with creativity, passion, teamwork, and determination, the next generations can make the world a safer and more humane place.
Buy Now

Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children by Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In this incisive examination of lead poisoning during the past half century, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner focus on one of the most contentious and bitter battles in the history of public health. Lead Wars details how the nature of the epidemic has changed and highlights the dilemmas public health agencies face today in terms of prevention strategies and chronic illness linked to low levels of toxic exposure. The authors use the opinion by Maryland's Court of Appeals--which considered whether researchers at Johns Hopkins University's prestigious Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) engaged in unethical research on 108 African-American children--as a springboard to ask fundamental questions about the practice and future of public health....
Buy Now

The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s by Mitchell Morris

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

How can we account for the persistent appeal of glossy commercial pop music? Why do certain performers have such emotional power, even though their music is considered vulgar or second rate? In The Persistence of Sentiment, Mitchell Morris gives a critical account of a group of American popular music performers who have dedicated fan bases and considerable commercial success despite the critical disdain they have endured. Morris examines the specific musical features of some exemplary pop songs and draws attention to the social contexts that contributed to their popularity as well as their dismissal....
Buy Now

California in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the Golden State by Federal Writers Project of the Works Pro

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Alive with the exuberance, contradictions, and variety of the Golden State, this Depression-era guide to California is more than 700 pages of information that is, as David Kipen writes in his spirited introduction, anecdotal, opinionated, and altogether habit-forming. Describing the history, culture, and roadside attractions of the 1930s, the WPA Guide to California features some of the very best anonymous literature of its era, with writing by luminaries such as San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, composer-writer- hobo Harry Partch, and authors Tillie Olsen and Kenneth Patchen.
Buy Now

Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers by R. Kent Rasmussen

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

A voracious pack-rat, Mark Twain hoarded his readers' letters as did few of his contemporaries. Dear Mark Twain collects 200 of these letters written by a diverse cross-section of correspondents from around the world--children, farmers, schoolteachers, businessmen, preachers, railroad clerks, inmates of mental institutions, con artists, and even a former president. It is a unique and groundbreaking book--the first published collection of reader letters to any writer of Mark Twain's time. Its contents afford a rare and exhilarating glimpse into the sensibilities of nineteenth-century people while revealing the impact Samuel L....
Buy Now