Books published by University of California Press

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the city of Florence experienced the most creative period in her entire history. This book offers an analysis of that community, focusing on the years 1380-1450 in an examination of the city's physical character, its economic and social structure and developments, and its political and religious life.

"Although Andre Bazin died shortly before the onset of what we now regard as the modern cinema, our understanding of this cinema wouldn't be the same without him. He's also one of the most scrupulous humanists and polemicists we've had, on a par with George Orwell, and these essays map out the busy highways we're all still navigating."--Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic for the "Chicago Reader"

Examines houses in the small Massachusetts town of Edgartown; in Santa Barbara, California, where a commitment was made to re-create an imaginary Spanish past; and in Sea Ranch, on the northern California coast, where the authors attempt to create a community.

Brings together the various discoveries of microbiology. Of interest to general readers, this book provides a view of evolution as a process based on interdependency and their interconnectedness of life on the planet.

Presents a framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. This book contains a dialectical tension between two reciprocally related orientations: it is both a cross-cultural perspective on the components of clinical care and a clinical perspective on anthropological studies of medicine and psychiatry.

This text contains the essence of Thomas Church's design philosophy, as well as practical advice. It is illustrated by site plans and photographs of some of the 2000 gardens that Church designed during his career.

When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela".

Tells what really happened in history rather than simply what obviously happened.