4 minute read
Social History
A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life
Christopher E. Forth
“Why do we in the West have such an intense aversion to fat? Was fatness really celebrated as a sign of health, prosperity, status, and beauty at some point in the distant past? Forth explores these questions in his lively, ambitious book Fat. Taking a longue durée approach, from the prehistoric to the present day, he resoundingly demonstrates that there really is more to fat than meets the eye. . . . An impressive, lively study and an enjoyable read.” —Literary Review
Distributed for Reaktion Books
2019 352 p. 61/4 x 91/4 60 halftones 97 Cloth ISBN: 978-1-78914-062-0 $32.00
Your Price: $10.00
Of Beards and Men
The Revealing History of Facial Hair
Christopher Oldstone-Moore
“For everyone with a hirsute family member, a bearded patriarch, a fuzzy metro-sexual, here’s a great gift, a not-entirely-serious account of why and when men grow facial hair.”—NPR Weekend
“A great book for anyone who’s ever pondered why Jesus is portrayed with a beard, wondered about the origin of Hitler’s and Stalin’s mustaches, speculated why the Amish grow beards but shave their moustaches, or realized that no US presidential candidate has sported facial hair since Dewey lost to Truman.”—Publishers Weekly
2015 352 p. 6 x 9 58 halftones 98 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-226-28400-2 $30.00
Your Price: $10.00
A Brief History of Death
W. M. Spellman
“After the spate of near-death and out-of-the-body experience books comes this refreshing step back to examine the nature of the death experience culturally, historically, psychologically, and personally. . . . Recommended reading as an antidote to modern life.”—Fortean Times
Distributed for Reaktion Books
2014 256 p. 51/2 x 81/2 99 Paper ISBN: 978-1-78023-504-2 $20.00
Your Price: $7.00
Is the Cemetery Dead?
David Charles Sloane
“A fascinating glimpse of new and evolving mourning rituals in American culture. As the son of cemetery managers, Sloane brings personal experience and knowledge to an otherwise academic history of burial methods, mourning, and memorials. . . . This is a great overview of mourning rituals in modern American culture.”—Publishers Weekly
Erik Butler
“[Butler] is to be congratulated on writing a shrewd and sometimes sardonic study on the origins of an ancient mystery, which in the past decade has been reduced to 50 shades of comic strip. . . . For those with a taste of the supernatural, this is an excellent guidebook. Dracula probably would have enjoyed it.” —Washington Times
Distributed for Reaktion Books
2013 178 p. 51/2 x 81/2 17 halftones 101 Paper ISBN: 978-1-78023-532-5 $16.00
Your Price: $7.00
Zombies
A Cultural History
Roger Luckhurst
“From their emergence in the 1920s Western imagination to their position today as the go-to trope for a generation ‘flatlined by the alienating tedium of modern life,’ zombies have proved remarkably flexible metaphors. They have come to embody the Other, the economic zeitgeist, and even ourselves. This entertaining study begins in Haiti, with nineteenth-century America’s fears about vodou.” —Sunday Telegraph
Distributed for Reaktion Books
2015 224 p. 51/2 x 81/2 60 halftones 102 Cloth ISBN: 978-1-78023-528-8 $25.00
Your Price: $9.00
Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur
Mythology and Geology of the Underworld
Salomon Kroonenberg
“Kroonenberg interleaves science, history and autobiography with a light touch, blending lively accounts of classical scholarship with superb descriptions of Earth’s interior and how geologists have come to know it. Virgil may no longer be available to accompany us through Hell, but Salomon Kroonenberg proves a witty and erudite guide for the 21st century.”—Times Literary Supplement
Distributed for Reaktion Books
2013 352 p. 6 x 9 40 color plates, 60 halftones 103 Cloth ISBN: 978-1-78023-045-0 $38.00
Your Price: $9.00
Wood, Whiskey and Wine
A History of Barrels
Henry H. Work
“A thorough and entertaining journey from amphorae, barrels’ predecessors, through their period of domination, to their relative demise due to replacement with such as plastic and metal containers. . . . There is much to interest both the general reader and the beer enthusiast in this well-written history of a container that has been with humanity for so long.” —London Drinker
The Legendary Detective
The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction
John Walton
“Over nearly a century, a symbiotic relationship developed between detective practices and the popular culture industry that depicted them. The Legendary Detective is a masterly analysis of private detective work within the context of popular culture, revealing their interweaving and mutual influence. . . . Walton’s analysis is brilliant.”—Robert Weiss, SUNY
2015 232 p. 6 x 9 28 halftones 105 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-226-30826-5 $25.00
Your Price: $9.00
Bigfoot
The Life and Times of a Legend
Joshua Blu Buhs
“In his witty account, the American scholar and sceptic Joshua Blu Buhs sets out in search of an animal variously claimed as America’s only remaining ape, an extant Neanderthal, or an even older hominid such as Gigantophithecus. . . . In his postmodern attempt to pin down Bigfoot, Buhs’s focus is on the hunters, rather than the hunted; this is not so much a book about Bigfoot as the belief in him.”—The Telegraph
2009 296 p. 6 x 9 35 halftones 106 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-226-07979-0 $31.00
Your Price: $10.00
107 Paper ISBN: 978-0-226-07980-6 $18.00
Your Price: $7.00
Packaged Pleasures
How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire
Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor
“While networked technologies are reconfiguring associations between the senses, space and society—with work emails checked on holiday, selfies taken at funerals and 3D objects printed locally from a CAD file stored in the ‘cloud’—Packaged Pleasures offers a timely reminder of the longer history of the relationship between technology, industry and the self.”—New Scientist
2014 336 p. 6 x 9 37 halftones, 5 line drawings, 1 table 108 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-226-12127-7 $35.00
