Spring 2010 Contents General Interest 1

Recently Published Spring 2010 Contents General Interest 1 Special Interest 31 Paperbacks 73 Distributed Books 94 Gems and Gemstones Great Plains Ordering Timeless Natural Beauty of the America’s Lingering Wild Information 206 Mineral World Michael Forsberg Lance Grande and Allison Augustyn With a Foreword by Ted Kooser Chapter Introductions by David Wishart ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30511-0 and Essays by Dan O’Brien Subject Index 207 Cloth $45.00/£31.00 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-25725-9 Cloth $45.00/£31.00 Author Index 208 Title Index Inside back cover Piracy Gerhard Richter The Intellectual Property Wars A Life in Painting from Gutenberg to Gates Dietmar Elger Adrian Johns Translated by Elizabeth M. Solaro ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40118-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20323-2 Cloth $35.00/£24.00 Cloth $45.00/£31.00 Cover image: Photograph by Phillip Colla/www.oceanlight.com Uncommon Sense Secrets of the Universe Cover design by Alice Reimann Economic Insights, from How We Discovered the Cosmos Catalog design by Alice Reimann and Mary Shanahan Marriage to Terrorism Paul Murdin Gary S. Becker and Richard A. Posner ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55143-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04101-8 Cloth $49.00 Cloth $29.00/£20.00 CUSA ROBert K. ELDer Last Words of the Executed With a Foreword by Studs Terkel Some beg for forgiveness. Others claim innocence. At least three cheer for their favorite football teams. eath waits for us all, but only those sentenced to death know the day and the hour—and only they can be sure that their Dlast words will be recorded for posterity. Last Words of the Executed presents an oral history of American capital punishment, as heard from the gallows, the chair, and the gurney. “This is a dangerous book. Who knows The product of seven years of extensive research by journalist how we will emerge from the encounter? Robert K. Elder, the book explores the cultural value of these final It makes me want to live, use my energies statements and asks what we can learn from them. We hear from both in soul-sized pursuits like justice, like the famous—such as Nathan Hale, Joe Hill, Ted Bundy, and John love. One of the psalms says that God Brown—and the forgotten, and their words give us unprecedented collects our tears in a flask—so too does glimpses into their lives, their crimes, and the world they inhabited. this collection of last words from human Organized by era and method of execution, these final statements beings before they were killed.” range from heartfelt to horrific. Some are calls for peace or cries —Sister Helen Prejean against injustice; others are accepting, confessional, or consoling; still others are venomous, rage-fueled diatribes. Even the chills evoked by May 304 p. 6 x 9 some of these last words are brought on in part by the shared human- ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20268-6 Cloth $22.50/£14.50 ity we can’t ignore, their reminder that we all come to the same end, TRUE CRIME AMERICAN HISTORY regardless of how we arrive there. Last Words of the Executed is not a political book. Rather, Elder simply asks readers to listen closely to these voices that echo history. The result is a riveting, moving testament from the darkest corners of society. Robert K. Elder has written for the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Salon, and many other publications. He teaches journalism at Northwestern University and is the author or editor of several books. general interest 1 MICHAEL KammEN Digging Up the Dead A History of Notable American Reburials funeral closes a life story, and a grave in a cemetery marks its end forever. But what happens when those left behind A don’t agree about the meaning of that story? Or when that disagreement extends all the way to arguments about the final resting place itself? In a surprising number of cases over the years, that’s when people have chosen to grab shovels and start digging. “A master historian and witty storyteller, With Digging Up the Dead, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Michael Michael Kammen fully exploits the in- Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and some- terpretive potential of his unlikely topic. times gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial from throughout Not only wonderfully readable, Digging American history. Taking us to the contested gravesites of such figures up the Dead is rich in social and cultural as Sitting Bull, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and insights.” even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interac- —Paul S. Boyer, editor of The Oxford Companion tions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial prac- to United States History tices led to public and often emotional battles over their final resting places. Grave-robbing, skull-fondling, cases of mistaken identity, and APriL 272 p., 40 halftones 6 x 9 the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as Kammen ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42329-6 Cloth $25.00/£16.00 delves deeply into this little-known—yet surprisingly persistent—aspect AMERICAN HISTORY of American history. Simultaneously insightful and interesting, masterly and macabre, Digging Up the Dead reminds us that the stories of American history don’t always end when the key players pass on. Rather, the battle—over reputations, interpretations, and, last but far from least, possession of the remains themselves—is often just beginning. Michael Kammen is the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture emeritus at Cornell University. He is the author of many books, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization. 2 general interest Edited by OLiver LUBriCH Travels in the Reich, 1933–45 Foreign Authors Report from Germany Translated by Kenneth Northcott, Sonia Wichmann, and Dean Krouk ven now,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Diary of 1933, “I can’t altogether believe that any of this has really hap- Epened.” Three years later, W. E. B. DuBois described Germany as “silent, nervous, suppressed; it speaks in whispers.” In contrast, a young John F. Kennedy, in the journal he kept on a German tour in “No single account of life inside Hitler’s 1937, wrote, “The Germans really are too good—it makes people gang Germany paints a more vivid landscape against them for protection.” than Travels in the Reich. From Samuel Drawing on such published and unpublished accounts from writ- Beckett to Virginia Woolf, the three dozen ers and public figures visiting Germany,Travels in the Reich creates a writers collected in this volume take us chilling composite portrait of the reality of life under Hitler. Com- on a journey that is as compelling as it is posed in the moment by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Isak Dinesen, disturbing. An important addition to the Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, William Shirer, Georges Simenon, history of World War II.” and Albert Camus, the essays, letters, and articles gathered here offer —Rick Atkinson, author of The Day of Battle fascinating insight into the range of responses to Nazi Germany. While some accounts betray a distressing naivete, overall what is striking is ApriL 336 p. 6 x 9 just how clearly many of the travelers understood the true situation— ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49629-0 and the terrors to come. Cloth $30.00/£20.50 EUROPEAN HISTORY Through the eyes of these visitors, Travels in the Reich offers a new perspective on the quotidian—yet so often horrifying—details of life in Nazi Germany, in accounts as compelling as a good novel, but bear- ing all the weight of historical witness. Oliver Lubrich is junior professor of rhetoric at the Institute of General and Comparative Literature at the Free University Berlin. general interest 3 Edited by ROBERT ALLEN Bulletproof Feathers How Science Uses Nature’s Secrets to Design Cutting-Edge Technology MAY 192 p., 120 color plates 82/5 x 82/5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01470-8 Cloth $35.00 SCIENCE CUSA abrics that F are not only stain resistant but actually clean themselves. Airplane wings that change shape in midair to take advantage of shifts in wind currents. Hypodermic needles that use tiny serrations to render injections virtually pain free. Though they may sound like the stuff of science fiction, in fact such inventions represent only the most recent iterations of natural mechanisms that are billions of years old—the focus of the rapidly growing field of biomimetics. Based on the realization that natural selection has for countless eons been conducting trial-and-error experiments with the laws of physics, chemistry, material science, and engineering, biomimetics takes nature as its laboratory, looking to the most successful developments and strategies of an array of plants and animals as a source of technological innovation and ideas. Thus the lotus flower, with its waxy, water-resistant surface, gives us stainproof- ing; the feathers of raptors become transformable airplane wings; and the nerve-deadening serrations on a mosquito’s proboscis are adapted to hypodermics. 4 general interest Ideas and discoveries from the cutting edge of the exciting field of biomimetics With Bulletproof Feathers, Robert Allen brings together some of the greatest minds in the field of biomimetics to provide a fascinating—at times even jaw-dropping—overview of cutting-edge research in the field. In chapters packed with illustra- tions, Steven Vogel explains how architects and building engineers are drawing lessons from prairie dogs, termites, and even sand dollars in order to heat and cool buildings more efficiently; Julian Vincent goes to the very building blocks of nature, revealing

Load more