Books published by University of California Press

"Wine fraud rarely makes the headlines. When it does, the wine world shouts that "something must be done!" and then immediately drops its guard. Rebecca Gibb's lively, engaging book is a good reminder that wine fraud is as old as wine itself, and perhaps less escapable than most of us would care to admit. Gibb expertly examines the evolution of wine regulations and tackles the philosophical interdependence between the authentic and the fake, all while invoking Richard Nixon and The Simpsons. The result is a witty, smart, and enjoyable romp through a subject all of us should be taking more seriously."--Kelli Audrey White, author of Napa Valley, Then and Now, and Director of Education for the Wine Center at Meadowood "Rebecca Gibb's rollicking prose delves into devious practices stretching back to Roman times and the rogue gallery of fraudsters whose stories belong as much in a detective novel as in an absorbing wine book."--Neal Martin, award-winning author of Pomerol

"Through the remarkable life and career of the Morisco polymath Ahmad Al-Hajarī, this book makes the case for an Arabo-Islamic Republic of Letters alongside the European one. In doing so, the author reformulates our understanding of intellectual exchange in the early modern Mediterranean."--Sharon Kinoshita, Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz and co-director of The Mediterranean Seminar. "The extent to which European Orientalism not only depended heavily on collaboration from Muslim intellectuals but was also matched by Muslim writing about the European world is the theme of Zhiri's important book. Deeply researched and clearly written, this book opens up a new world of endeavor and exchange in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."--Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds

"This beautifully written but heartrending book tells what happens when refugees needing rescue from violence come to America. Instead of security, the refugees encounter a resettlement system that leaves the promise of humanitarianism unfulfilled and pushes them into the ranks of the unprotected working poor. An eye-opening, deeply unsettling account."--Roger Waldinger, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles "Sharply analyzed, richly detailed, and intricately humane, We Thought It Would Be Heaven exposes the bewildering maze of rules and regulations that trap refugees in Kafkaesque fashion as they navigate the US bureaucracies charged with their resettlement. Highly recommended for everyone, especially for scholars, policymakers, and anyone who cares about the lives of some of the most vulnerable groups in society today."--Cecilia Menjívar, Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair, University of California, Los Angeles "This extraordinary book exposes how the gap between the American dream and its reality is, for many refugees, filled with administrative burdens. With We Thought It Would Be Heaven, Blair Sackett and Annette Lareau have written a book that is not just exhaustively researched and theoretically rich, but urgent and actionable. It demands both our attention and our capacity to rethink how to ensure that the most vulnerable immigrants are not lost in a bureaucratic maze."--Donald Moynihan, McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University "Fleeing the deadliest wars since World War II, refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo were the top nationality group resettled in the United States from 2014 to 2022. Blair Sackett and Annette Lareau follow forty-four Congolese families who came to America thinking it "would be heaven," but instead have encountered a bare-bones and hollowed-out resettlement infrastructure, not to mention a bewildering and disconnected maze of American financial, educational, social, and legal institutions that, built upon the twin logics of cost-cutting and racialized surveillance, presents hurdle after bureaucratic hurdle to block their progress. Only with the most committed of cultural brokers and institutional advocates do a few of these families manage to get ahead. We Thought It Would Be Heaven is a must-read for anyone looking for an understanding of the dismal state of US refugee admissions and for fresh ideas on what can be done to improve the outcomes."--Helen B. Marrow, Associate Professor of Sociology, Tufts University "As the former leader of one of the bureaucracies that the refugee families in Sackett and Lareau's book traversed, I can only hope that my peers will have the wisdom to read this book. The United States can fulfill its promise of being a beacon to those fleeing persecution only by heeding this book's lessons."--León Rodríguez, Former Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services "We Thought It Would Be Heaven eloquently shows the many challenges and resources needed for refugee families in navigating different institutions in America to start a new life after having spent years surviving in refugee camps and civil wars. Its captivating and often heartbreaking accounts of these families' struggles reveal how American institutions meant to help any family in need can end up hurting families through a series of seemingly innocuous yet endless bureaucratic missteps and hurdles."--Leslie Paik, author of Trapped in a Maze: How Social Control Institutions Drive Family Poverty and Inequality > "This deeply humanist ethnography explains how refugees who fled persecution confront new challenges as they resettle in the United States. We Thought It Would Be Heaven follows four Congolese families as they fight their way through bureaucratic circles of hell to make a new American life."--David Scott FitzGerald, coauthor of The Refugee System: A Sociological Approach "The book is beautifully written, with vivid and richly detailed portraits of refugee families and the bureaucratic challenges they encounter in the United States. It offers fresh insights into how institutions shape refugee resettlement in the U.S."--Nazli Kibria, Boston University

"In China, from the past to the present, ceramics is not just a material but a language. Alex Burchmore has insightfully translated this language and its variations, or accents, in contemporary Chinese art."--Jiang Jiehong, author of The Art of Contemporary China "Rather than simply extracting meanings from the artworks, Alex Burchmore tells us broader stories of China's history, culture, and contemporary social life associated with the making of contemporary ceramic art. These are not aesthetic objects alone; rather, this is a conceptually oriented collective production full of the ambiguity between traditional symbolism and contemporary deconstruction."--Gao Minglu, author of Total Modernity and Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art

"World Socialist Cinema narrates a film history beyond received canons, explicitly decentering and dewesternizing the way that we approach cinema's past. Masha Salazkina's scholarship is breathtaking, using hitherto unexplored archives and primary sources to complicate what we understand by terms like 'world cinema, ' 'global cinema, ' or 'cinemas of solidarity.' I know of nothing comparable."--Peter Limbrick, author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi "Through the prism of the Tashkent Film Festival, this extraordinary study offers a kaleidoscopic view of what Salazkina terms 'world socialist cinema.' Deftly tessellating a dazzling array of institutions, films, languages, and geopolitical, formal, and theoretical questions, World Socialist Cinema is a field-changing book, and a model for future scholarship."--Alice Lovejoy, author of Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military

"Victoria Duckett reveals the innovation and acumen of three turn-of-the-century French actresses, once dismissed as old-fashioned and theatrical, in reshaping both theater and cinema--Bernhardt, Réjane, and Mistinguett. Réjane, a trailblazing comic actress, is a particular revelation. Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema demonstrates the power of transnational history, in all its surprises and contradictions."--Laura Horak, author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 "Theater and cinema history have for too long been separate and even antagonistic. Victoria Duckett has already shown her prowess in navigating both, and in this new study she marshals formidable amounts of evidence to compare the transnational careers of three legendary French actresses who triumphantly crossed from stage to screen by different routes. In doing so, they brought immense prestige to the new medium and to French cinema. Star studies should never be the same."--Ian Christie, author of Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema "Victoria Duckett provides a remarkably detailed analysis of the underappreciated contribution made to early film by three celebrated French performers. Her book conclusively demonstrates how closely intertwined the inherited techniques of nineteenth-century theater and the innovative possibilities of twentieth-century cinema were in practice. This is a major reassessment of a significant moment in transnational culture that casts aside disciplinary boundaries to discover a creative and complicated historical process."--John Stokes, Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature, King's College London "From Belle Époque Paris and Victorian London to cosmopolitan New York, Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema takes us on an exhilarating transatlantic and transdisciplinary voyage. Archival, intertextual, and historiographic, Victoria Duckett's three eloquent case studies dislodge preconceptions to enlarge our vision of the international and intermedial impact of the actress-entrepreneur, from transmedial networks of performance and celebrity culture to emerging film markets and business models, demonstrating theater's vital and intrinsic role in early cinema and culture."--Tami Williams, author of Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations

"What does it mean to 'see' theater? This ambitious and wonderfully engaging book turns the spotlight on the theater spectator, finding the drama hidden away in the very act(s) of watching Greek drama. Weiss's phenomenological approach foregrounds the multisensory nature of theatrical performance. Reading the tragedians--especially Aeschylus and Sophocles--will never feel quite the same again."--Melissa Mueller, author of Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy "Naomi Weiss breaks new ground, powerfully reconceptualizing theatrical visuality on a phenomenological basis. Informed by the fluidity of roles and positions in vase paintings' views of viewing, her fresh, engaging, and sophisticated analyses not just from the genre of tragedy but also from comedy and satyr drama, bring much-needed emphasis to the aesthetic. Seeing Theater is poised to become a classic that will shape performative criticism of ancient Greek drama for many years to come."--Mario Telò, author of Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy "An original and outstanding contribution, Seeing Theater opens up an entirely new approach to ancient drama and related artifacts, yielding conclusions that are of fundamental interest to Greek drama and art."--Eric Csapo, coauthor of A Social and Economic History of the Theatre to 300 BC