Books published by University of California Press

"A book of enormous ambition, C. F. B. Miller's Radical Picasso questions the most fundamental assumptions about the achievement of Pablo Picasso. This is absolutely a book to be contended with by anyone approaching this body of artistic production."--Charles Palermo, author of Modernism and Authority: Picasso and His Milieu around 1900 "In Miller's Radical Picasso, 'Picasso' names not a person but a heterogenous body of work--one crucial to the history of modernist art yet also constituting an immanent critique of it. Through a form of close writing cannily matched to the complexities of the work, this book recalls us from the domesticated 'Picasso' to which we have become accustomed to the more radical, disruptive, and disorienting aspects lurking within."--Lisa Florman, Professor of History of Art, Ohio State University

What is fire? How are wildfires ignited? How do California's weather and topography influence fire? How did the California Indians use fire? This book answers these questions, helping the Californians and the millions who live near naturally flammable wildlands, to better understand their own place in the state's landscape.

"Christine Guth offers a brilliant new perspective on early modern Japanese craft. She shatters the myth of unchanging traditions by demonstrating how craft communities were innovative, well networked, and responsive to sustainability. This astute and engaging study shifts the focus from elite patrons to bring clarity to the networks, materials, and processes of craftmakers."--Sherry Fowler, Professor of Japanese Art History, University of Kansas "This is a field-shifting work. It reflects the author's immense expertise in the historical study of Japanese visual and material cultures and gives us a richer and more multivalent and multisensory understanding of the often essentialized category of 'craft.'"--Gregory Levine, Professor of Art History, University of California, Berkeley

"Following the thread of language through the entire course of Lorraine O'Grady's extraordinary career, in this impressive monograph Stephanie Sparling Williams charts a rigorous, thrilling line through the work of one of the most significant artists of our time."--Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem "Insightful and compelling, Sparling Williams's analysis reveals the complex interplay between word and image in the groundbreaking career of artist Lorraine O'Grady. Throughout, Sparling Williams's sustained, nuanced, and layered engagement with the artist's use of language reveals its crucial role in pointing out--and strategically opposing--exclusionary practices in the art world, and beyond."--Rebecca Peabody, author of Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race "It is a rare treat to read a work about an iconic black feminist artist and critic written by an outstanding emerging black feminist artist and critic. Sparling Williams's Speaking Out of Turn offers powerful commentary on, and a breathtaking compendium of, Lorraine O'Grady's incomparable artistry. This book is undoubtedly one for the ages."--Reiland Rabaka, author of The Negritude Movement and Forms of Fanonism

"This is arguably the best of the titles so far in the 'Finest Wines' series and the best book about German wines in English for a generation." --John Winthrop Haeger, author of North American Pinot Noir"The author's voice is consistently engaged and enthusiastic, and his book should appeal to a general readership of wine lovers as well as to anyone with a professional interest in German wine." --David Schildknecht, German wine authority for The Wine Advocate and the Oxford Companion to Wine

"A magisterial piece of work. David Arnold spins an amazing tale of death, ritual, commemoration, and nation-building in which the Raj is the center of the modern death cosmos as well as the universal exemplar of cremation practice in a global context."--Antoinette Burton, author of The Trouble with Empire "A global history of South Asian cremation practices, Burning the Dead demonstrates the extent to which the corpse straddles the complicated regulatory and religious spaces between the personal, the familial, and the state, contributing to debates about biopolitics and necropolitics in colonial India."--Kama Maclean, Professor of History, South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg

"A comprehensive, thoughtful treatment of the time period before the crystallization of the ancient Greek city states."--William A. Parkinson, Curator and Professor, The Field Museum and University of Illinois at Chicago "An important and must-read account. The strength of this book lies in its close analysis of the important different regional characteristics and evolutionary trajectories of Greece as it transforms into the Archaic and, later, the Classical world."--David B. Small, author Ancient Greece: Social Structure and Evolution "This book reconfigures our understanding of early Greece on a regional level, beyond Mycenaean 'palaces' and across temporal boundaries rarely spanned in current scholarship. Knodell's sophisticated arguments enable a fresh reading of the emergence of early Greek polities, revealing the micro-regions that put to the test over-arching 'Mediterranean' models. His detailed study makes a convincing return to a comparative framework, integrating a 'small world' network and its trajectory with the larger picture of ancient complex societies. The last chapter, 'Why Early Greece Matters, ' offers a frank and refreshing look at what we can learn from ancient failures as well as successes, lessons that point us towards becoming better informed global citizens."--Sarah Morris, Steinmetz Professor of Classical Archaeology and Material Culture, University of California, Los Angeles

"An impressive and even revolutionary look at cultic groups. Lalich challenges fundamental assumptions on all sides of the debate about cults. She spent years as a member of the Democratic Workers Party and provides her readers with a revealing insider's view. To this, the author adds a much-needed comparative focus with her treatment of the Heaven's Gate suicides. The result is a theoretical breakthrough in the study of high commitment groups. Lalich's theory of 'bounded choice' is likely to reshape scholarly thinking for years to come about the dynamics of cult involvement and how and why people may act against their own self-interest in pursuit of higher causes."--E. Burke Rochford, Jr., author of Hare Krishna in America"Janja Lalich combines unusual empathy for true believers with broad and balanced scholarship and incisive interpretations of overall cultic behavior. Her work illuminates much that goes on not only in charismatic cults but in larger, destructive movements and extremist governments in our troubled world."--Robert Jay Lifton, author of Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World"At a time when politicized religion is rocking the world in often violent ways, this arresting study of totalizing ideological movements offers a new perspective. It revives the terms 'cult' and 'brainwashing, ' often discarded by social scientists, and gives them new meaning as descriptions of cultures of 'bounded choice.' This intriguing notion is applied to two quite different movements: the suicidal Heaven's Gate group and a radical American organization of young Marxists. This book is timely and certain to be widely discussed. But it cannot be easily dismissed-for its author is not only a sensitive social scientist but also a former member of one of the groups. Hence this book speaks with a voice of both thoughtful reason and gripping experience."--Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence