REAKTION BOOKS

(H/B) ANOTHER DARKNESS, ANOTHER DAWN
Gypsies, Roma and Travellers are some of the most marginalized and vilified people in society. They are rarely seen as having a place in a country, either geographically or socially, no matter where they live or what they do. Another Darkness, Another Dawn is a new history that charts their movement through time and place: from their roots in the Indian subcontinent, across the Byzantine and Ottoman empires to western Europe and the Americas, to their place in the contemporary world. This history of Romani people demonstrates how their exp...
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(P/B) TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
With an introduction by Hubertus von Amelunxen Media philosopher Vilem Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Flusser showed how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into lei...
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(H/B) THE PERSIANS
During the first and second millennia BC large numbers of nomadic people known as the Aryans migrated outwards into the Eurasian periphery from Central Asia. One particular branch of these Aryans moved south of the Caspian Sea and became known to history as the Persians or Iranians. Their first dwellings were in an unpromisingly arid area, but from there these early settlers would go on to form one of the most powerful empires in history. The Persians tells the captivating story of this beguiling ancient civilization. Drawing on the regio...
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(P/B) PHOTOGRAPHY AND AFRICA
A continent of vast geography and comprising more than 50 nation states, Africa has long been an essential crossroads for photographers. Since the advent of the medium in the first half of the 19th century, a myriad of photographers - indigenous and immigrant, amateur and professional, explorer and colonist - have chronicled the tumultuous transformations of cultural, environmental and political landscape. Photography and Africa investigates the many themes that intertwine photographs with the circumstances of their production. Presenting ...
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(P/B) A SHORT HISTORY OF THE SHADOW
In this investigative tour de force, Victor I. Stoichita untangles the history of one of the most enduring technical and symbolic challenges to beset Western artists - the depiction and meanings of shadows. The representation of shadow, and especially of cast shadow, is as old as art itself, for according to classical writers art was born when the outline of a human shadow thrown onto a wall was first traced out in order to capture it in the form of a silhouette. But the history of the shadow is properly the history of light versus dark, f...
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(H/B) GALAXY
The numbers involved when it comes to discussing stars, galaxies and the inconceivably vast tracts of empty space between them are staggering. With hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, all of varying shapes, sizes and ages - each containing hundreds of billions of suns - at first glance our universe appears frustratingly unknowable, and yet it is captivating to explore. As a species we have only recently come to appreciate that our Milky Way is just one of myriad galaxies spread throughout the universe, with modern...
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(P/B) GUY DEBORD
Guy Debord (1931-94) was one of the most important and intriguing intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Filmmaker and poet, urban critic and political theorist, adventurer and activist extraordinaire during Paris's May 1968 uprisings, Debord was simultaneously behind and ahead of his times. Best-known as guru of the avant-garde revolutionary movement the Situationist International (1957-72), and for a classic indictment of post-war capitalist consumerism The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord's life and work remains fascinati...
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(P/B) ANDREI TARKOVSKY
The films of Andrei Tarkovsky have been revered as ranking on a par with the masterpieces of Russia's novelists and composers. His work, from films such as Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Nostalgia and Sacrifice, has had an enormous influence on the style of contemporary European film, with its open narrative structures and slow, pensive mood; yet Tarkovsky has remained an elusive subject for reflection and analysis. This book is a comprehensive, well-illustrated and much-needed account of Tarkovsky's entire film output. ...
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(P/B) THE EMPIRE OF THE GREAT MUGHALS
The Mughal empire (1526-1857) has long been viewed as a wonderland of unimaginable treasure; it was in fact the mightiest Islamic empire in the history of India. In this comprehensive cultural history, now available in paperback, Annemarie Schimmel describes the political, military and economic rise of the Mughals, their system of rule, the incredible unfolding of their power and splendour, and their gradual collapse, finally supplanted by the British colonial empire in 1857. Beginning with a concise historical overview, she paints a detai...
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(P/B) PHOTOGRAPHY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Photography and anthropology share strikingly parallel histories. Christopher Pinney's provocative and eminently readable account provides a polemical narrative of anthropologists' use of photography from the 1840s to the present. Walter Benjamin suggested that photography 'make[s] the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable,' and Pinney here explores photography as a divinatory practice. Though viewed as modern and rational, this quality of photography in fact propelled anthropologists towards t...
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(P/B) LION
Majestic, noble, brave - lions, with their tawny coats and luminous eyes, have inspired countless stories, traditions and beliefs. Whether we are seduced by their beauty or drawn to danger, we want to be near them. No other animal has had such an enduring symbolic resonance; lions have been painted on wood and canvas, chiselled in stone, cast in metal and featured on the pages of medieval manuscripts. In this lavishly illustrated book, Deirdre Jackson draws on the latest scientific research, folklore, travel literature, lion tamers' memoir...
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(P/B) JEAN GENET
With an introduction by Edmund White This new short biography and critical work cuts directly to the essence of Genet's life, a life of extraordinary spectacle that was always profoundly entangled with his work. Stephen Barber emphasises those elements that made his life particularly inspirational in the 1960s and which continue to make it vital for readers today. Genet's work is a distillation of preoccupations and reinventions of crucial matters - sex, desire, death and revolution - all of which became mediated in the form of his own tra...
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(P/B) THE NEW MUSEOLOGY
Traditionally, museums have concerned themselves with foremost with conservation and classification. But what is conserved, and why? How is it classified? And who does this benefit? Are exhibitions really designed with the visitor in mind? And what qualities of experience are being offered? These are just some of the pressing questions which the authors - museum professionals, historians and critics - raise in this volume. Art collections, museums of childhood, science and photography, theme parks and 'time machines', and the Great Exhibi...
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(P/B) PORTRAITURE (ESSAYS IN ART AND CULTURE)

(H/B) THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM 1750-2000

(P/B) EMPIRE OF GREAT BRIGHTNESS
Empire of Great Brightness is an innovative and accessible history of a high point in Chinese culture, seen through the riches of its images and objects. Not a simple emperor-by-emperor history, it instead introduces the reader to themes that provide stimulating and original points of entry to the culture of China: to ideas of motion and rest; to the position occupied by writing and objects featuring writing; to ideas about pleasure, about violence and about ageing. It challenges notions of Ming China as a culture closed off from the rest ...
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(H/B) FILMING THE MIDDLE AGES
In this groundbreaking account of film history, Bettina Bildhauer shows how, from the earliest silent films to recent blockbusters, medieval topics and plots have played an important but overlooked role in the development of cinema. Filming the Middle Ages is the first book to define medieval films as a group and trace their history from the silent films of Weimar Germany to Hollywood productions and then to recent European co-productions. Bildhauer provides incisive new interpretations of classics like Murnau's Faust and Eisenstein's Ale...
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(H/B) HOT DOG
Served in a fresh soft bun, and adorned with your choice of mustard, ketchup, chilli, sauerkraut, coleslaw, pickles, relish, sliced tomatoes, hot peppers and fried or fresh onion, the hot dog must surely be one of the worlds favourite convenience foods. In Hot Dog well-known food historian Bruce Kraig recounts the history of this popular dish, from the origin of the sausage some 20,000 years ago, to the evolution of the modern form of the hot dog, and its central place in American culture today. Kraig examines the many types of hot dog sau...
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(P/B) A HISTORY OF WRITING
From the earliest scratches on stone and bone to the languages of computers and the internet, A History of Writing offers an investigation into the origin and development of writing throughout the world. Commencing with the first stages of information storage - knot records, tally sticks, pictographic storytelling - the book then focuses on the emergence of complete writing systems in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium bc, and their diffusion to Egypt, the Indus Valley and points east, with special attention given to Semitic writing syst...
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(P/B) REFLECTIONS ON BAROQUE