Books published by University of California Press

These essays by a team of researchers illuminate the causes of anxiety and reasons for hope in China today. They vividly describe the moral dilemmas experienced in contemporary family life, the rituals of happiness performed in modern weddings, the practices of conviviality carried out in shared meals, the professional tensions confronted by social workers, and the hopes and frustrations shared by political reformers.

Through her lifelong experimentations with wire, especially its capacity to balance open and closed forms, Asawa invented a powerful new vocabulary that contributed a unique perspective to the field of twentieth-century abstract sculpture. Working in a variety of nontraditional media, Asawa performed a series of remarkable metamorphoses, leading viewers into a deeper awareness of natural forms by revealing their structural properties. Through her art, Asawa transfigured the commonplace into metaphors for life processes themselves. The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa establishes the importance of Asawa's work within a larger cultural context of artists who redefined art as a way of thinking and acting in the world, rather than as merely a stylistic practice.

A catalogue produced by Tacoma Art Museum for the traveling exhibition of thesame name co-organized by the Booth Western Art Museum, the National Cowboy &Western Heritage Museum, and Tacoma Art Museum.

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California, organized by the Crocker Art Museum"--Copyright page.

"Looking at a unique and intriguing set of 'hybrid media, ' Kris Fallon convincingly makes a claim about a change in the form of new media, one linking politics, aesthetics, and technology."--Alexandra Juhasz, Chair and Professor of Film, Brooklyn College, CUNY "Where Truth Lies does the difficult and much-needed work of unpacking how the documentary impulse is shifting in the digital age, both through the profound influence of digital aesthetics and computational thinking on traditional documentary and through the ways traditional documentary is infusing digital expression. The trend--as Fallon so sharply identifies it--is about not just a change in tools, but an accompanying change in thinking."--Jennifer Malkowski, author of Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary

"Geoffrey S. Smith's innovative new book offers a major contribution: a complete anthology of sources attributed to the second-century Egyptian teacher Valentinus and his Christian followers, who revered him as a spiritual master, poet, and visionary--before later generations of church leaders denounced him as a dangerous heretic. Valentinian Christianity invites readers to decide for themselves!" --Elaine Pagels, Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion, Princeton University "Finally, a convenient, expertly edited text-and-translation volume of primary sources for the Valentinians. What the Loeb series did for classical texts, Smith has now done for this important strand of early Christianity. An ideal tool both for desk reference and for teaching." --Matthew V. Novenson, Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Christian Origins, University of Edinburgh

"Adventures of a Jazz Age Lawyer rescues a key figure in early twentieth-century popular culture from (relative) obscurity and tells his fascinating story with insight and style. I don't know of anyone who writes about popular music more knowledgeably, penetratingly, and elegantly than Gary Rosen."--Ben Yagoda, author of About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made and The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song "Gary Rosen is a born storyteller. This is both a first-rate story and a previously untold one."--Peter Jaszi, Professor Emeritus, American University Law School "With its engaging characters and intriguing plot, this book reads like a literary novel. Without trying to 'analyze' Nathan Burkan, Gary Rosen gives a clear and moving picture of his character, both his flaws and virtues. In the course of tracing Burkan's career, Rosen provides fascinating historical background peopled with such colorful characters as Victor Herbert, Charlie Chaplin, and Gloria Vanderbilt."--Philip Furia, author of The Poets of Tin Pan Alley "A lively, in-depth, and unprecedented portrait of Nathan Burkan, one of the most famous American lawyers of the twentieth century and a pioneer of intellectual property law. Gary Rosen presents Burkan as situated at the eye of a legal and cultural storm created by the advent of entertainment culture. Burkan--with his legal brilliance and panache--would do so much to shape that culture. This book is both a biography of an important legal figure and a history of jazz-age popular culture and entertainment law, all in one."--Robert Spoo, author of Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain "While Nathan Burkan is a lawyer you've probably never heard of, his courtroom battles on behalf of popular entertainers like Charlie Chaplin and Mae West were often filled with salacious tales of the rich and famous, and the trials involving gangsters like Frank Costello and Arnold Rothstein are an enduring part of American social history. This book is a great read!"--Howard Suber, coauthor of Creativity and Copyright: Legal Essentials for Screenwriters and Creative Artists "Known to legal scholars as the 'Moses of American copyright law, ' Nathan Burkan was much more. Burkan represented an A-list of celebrity clients in causes ranging from copyright infringement and criminal defense, to high-society divorce and custody battles, touching nearly every legal cause célèbre in the first third of the Twentieth Century. Rosen brings Burkan's story to vivid life in a meticulously researched, well-paced biography."--Kevin Parks, author of Music & Copyright in America: Toward the Celestial Jukebox "This is a wonderful book―fast-paced, lively writing, a fascinating subject. Captures the spirit of that (alas!) long-gone age and paints a truly engaging portrait of a quite remarkable man."--Paul Goldstein, author of Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox

A fresh, contemporary, problem-oriented survey of sociolegal studies that focuses on significant historical and political changes of the last two decades, including neoliberalism, migration, multiculturalism, and the dominance of economics in law teaching, policy debates, and judicial decision-making.

Addressing students' experience of education before expanding to larger sociological conversations, this volume helps readers understand the many roles that education plays in contemporary societies and engage with the topics covered, including peer groups, gender and identity, social class, and more.

"This volume of translations has no English predecessor or foreign equal. B.P. Reardon has miraculously resurrected serious study of this oddly neglected literature."--Choice "The translations, done by a variety of experts, aim at readability, and their effect is uniformly pleasing."--The Classical World "This is the first collection in English of the various Greek novels. These collected translations, together with the scholarly introductions, form a most eloquent invitation to join the increasing group of students of the ancient Greek novels, and will be an indispensable tool for students as well as teachers."--Mnemosyne "The value of this collection as a teaching tool cannot be underestimated. It is to be hoped that the existence of all the ancient novels in competent modern translations will make possible the fuller study of these fascinating texts by theorists of the (modern) novel."--Phoenix

Studies of the pivotal historic place of the Mediterranean have long been dominated by specialists of its northern shores, that is, by European historians. In this groundbreaking volume, seven leading authors challenge views of Mediterranean space as shaped by European trajectories and so problematize our comfortable notions. Drawing perspectives from the south--from its Arab and African shores--the book asks anew: What is the Mediterranean? What are its borders and defining characteristics? What forces of nature, politics, culture, or economics have made the Mediterranean, and how long have they endured? How long will they? Covering the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, this timely volume brings the early modern world into conversation with the modern world in new ways, making clear that only recently have the northern and southern been differentiated into separate cultural and political zones. The Making of the Modern Mediterranean offers a blueprint for a new generation of readers to rethink the world we thought we knew.

The author presents a cultural study of the phenomenon of Asian American taiko, the thundering, athletic drumming tradition that originated in Japan. Through her participatory ethnographic work, she reveals a complicated story embedded in memories of Japanese American internment and legacies of imperialism, Asian American identity and politics, a desire to be seen and heard, and the intersection of culture and global capitalism.

Violence and war have raged between Zionists and Palestinians for over a century, ever since Zionists, trying to establish a nation-state in Palestine, were forced to confront the fact that the country was already populated. Covering every conflict in Israel's history, War over Peace reveals that Israeli nationalism was born ethnic and militaristic and has embraced these characteristics to this day. In his sweeping and original synthesis, Uri Ben-Eliezer shows that this militaristic nationalism systematically drives Israel to solve its national problems by military means, based on the idea that the homeland is sacred and the territory is indivisible. When Israelis opposed to this ideology brought about change during a period that led to the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, cultural and political forces, reinforced by religious and messianic elements, prevented the implementation of the agreements, which brought violence back in the form of "new wars." War over Peace is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the role of ethnic nationalism and militarism in Israel as well as throughout the world.

Tracing the origins of the Hawaiians and other Polynesians back to the shores of the South China Sea, archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch follows their voyages of discovery across the Pacific in this fascinating history of Hawaiian culture from about one thousand years ago. Combining more than four decades of his own research with Native Hawaiian oral traditions and the evidence of archaeology, Kirch puts a human face on the gradual rise to power of the Hawaiian god-kings, who by the late eighteenth century were locked in a series of wars for ultimate control of the entire archipelago.This lively, accessible chronicle works back from Captain James Cook's encounter with the pristine kingdom in 1778, when the British explorers encountered an island civilization governed by rulers who could not be gazed upon by common people. Interweaving anecdotes from his own widespread travel and extensive archaeological investigations into the broader historical narrative, Kirch shows how the early Polynesian settlers of Hawai'i adapted to this new island landscape and created highly productive agricultural systems.