Books published by University of California Press

"Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life is a vital text that compellingly argues for a reassessment of digital culture's pervasive impacts. At the heart of Kraynak's investigation is a critique of techno-fetishism and digital utopianism, both of which have failed to acknowledge how new technologies have contributed to the erosion of democracy."--Derek Conrad Murray, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz "This volume is essential reading for anyone aware of a waning public sphere and diminishing returns for art's historic institutions and legacy of critique. By astutely unveiling how social exchange online, disguised in the disruptive tropes of the historical avant-garde, uniquely empowered antidemocratic forces, Kraynak underlines how such developments force a reevaluation of participatory and networked artistic practices today."--Tim Griffin, Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen

"A lively read. . . . the book will have wide appeal for the classroom, as students will engage with vivid examples of human experience rather than plow their way through a tome."--Diane Wolff, author of Batu, Khan of the Golden Horde: The Mongol Khans Conquer Russia "Using Chinese and Islamic primary sources, this book shows the extraordinary ethnic diversity and geographical mobility of those who served the thirteenth-century Mongol conquerors. It will prove of immense interest and value to scholars and students working on a landmark period in global history."--Peter Jackson, author of The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion "This volume is the very best example of what the new 'Global Middle Ages' can produce. These biographies capture the complexity of the Mongol Empire, painting vibrant portraits of travelers and those who facilitated others' travel. This book will transform the way Mongol history is taught."--Monica H. Green, editor of Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death

"A highly important reconsideration. Nobody before has properly addressed the intensity of Fauré's engagement with literature and poetry, particularly in terms of showing how it operates musically."--Roy Howat, author of The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier "This book offers an excellent, at times brilliant, contribution to the understanding of Fauré as a singularly inventive composer of song cycles, and a sophisticated compositional 'reader' of poetry."--David J. Code, Reader in Music, University of Glasgow

"Beyond Gender Binaries is the gender and communication textbook for this millennium. It challenges tacit, taken-for-granted constructions by centering an understanding of gender as multiple, diverse, and open to self-definition and transformation. Cindy Griffin tackles the most important topics in gender and communication studies today and does so with attention to the way that people of diverse identities and experiences are impacted and are responding to make their social worlds more livable."--Sara L. McKinnon, author of Gendered Asylum: Race and Violence in U.S. Law and Politics "Cindy Griffin invites readers to consider the complexities of our intersectional identities, how we communicate through and about them, and how we might practice more ethical symbolic modes of sharing our lives with others. This textbook's commitment to intersectional theories and examples provides a strong foundation upon which instructors can create their own unique courses in communication and gender."--Isaac West, Professor of Communication Studies, Vanderbilt University

"This is an extremely well-conceived volume on the crucial topic of conversion, composed of enthralling selections all translated and annotated by top specialists. The field of Islamic history lacks good sourcebooks, so this volume fills a large void and opens up new vistas for both teaching and research."--Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Professor of History, University of Maryland "Any reader interested in interreligious relations and conversions will take great pleasure in discovering this diverse collection of texts, many translated into English for the first time from various languages. There is no doubt that this work, edited by renowned historians, will quickly become a standard reference."--Anne-Marie Eddé, Professor of Medieval Islamic History, Panthéon-Sorbonne University

"This is a book written with love, for scientists and by scientists. A compendium of extraordinary knowledge, produced over more than thirty years of investigation, it continues a long tradition of protecting the Sierra Nevada. John Muir did it with words and persuasion; the authors of the present volume do so with painstakingly collected scientific information."--Jill Baron, editor of Rocky Mountain Futures: An Ecological Perspective "This study, covering several decades and conducted by researchers with long experience in the Sierras, is a lesson in thorough scholarship. Investigating some of North America's most vulnerable lakes, it belongs on the very small bookshelf of limnological classics."--David W. Schindler, Killam Memorial Chair and Professor of Ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta "This unique and comprehensive volume lays the scientific foundation for understanding and predicting how mountain lake ecosystems have responded--and will respond--to climate change. The first of its sort, this book will be an excellent reference for ecologists and natural resource managers."--Rolf Vinebrooke, Professor of Biology at the University of Alberta "This is the first comprehensive book that tackles, in a definitive manner, what we know about the Sierra Nevada's lakes and watersheds. It is well conceived and timely, and will be a must-have reference book."--Sudeep Chandra, Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Nevada "Whether the reader's interest is in nutrients, or acidification, or snow hydrology, or climate change, this book provides a thorough summary of what the accumulated research demonstrates for Sierra lakes."--John Stoddard, Research Life Scientist, Office of Research and Development, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

"This book offers an exciting and productive way of thinking about cinema, allowing the reader to become acquainted with a large range of important declarations on film and on its mission from across its history. This is a volume that every film scholar will want to have."> "Embracing the entire history of cinema, this work maps in detail territory barely explored hitherto, and is fully contextualized through historically informed and theoretically informative commentary that places the manifesto at the heart of film history and film culture. A hugely impressive achievement." --Annette Kuhn, co-author of the Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies "This is a galvanizing collection of hundreds of calls to arms for the cinema. It's an inspiring affirmation of the core vitality of this most important art across decades and throughout the world." --Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary, 2nd edition, and Engaging Cinema

Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas-cultural, social, and personal-associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back.

"A remarkably wide-ranging progressive field guide to the Bay Area, from famous movements like Critical Mass, the leaderless bike ride that has spread to 350 cities around the world, to little-known sites like the Ghadar Memorial, a house in a quiet San Francisco neighborhood where Indian expat revolutionaries in the early twentieth century planned to overthrow British colonial rule, to still-active subcultural spaces like Berkeley's 924 Gilman, a punk/underground/youth oasis for a quarter of a century. A People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area offers an alternative, bottom-up perspective on the contested history and geography of this region that's thought provoking, informative, and often surprising."--Gary Kamiya, author of Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco "The People's Guide is literally a tour de force of the Bay Area that opens a window to unseen landscapes of popular struggle, heartbreaking loss, and inspiring victories from the grassroots. In place of the usual glorification of big business and builders, this book is witness to the way everyday people shape the city from the ground up."--Richard Walker, author of Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area "This fascinating book takes you to Bay Area spots you may have walked by every day and reveals their untold stories--from thousand year-old Ohlone shellmounds, to the Oakland headquarters of the first Black-led AFL-CIO union, to a San Francisco hillside where Sandinistas jogged to train for the Nicaraguan revolution. With sparkling prose and vivid photos, Brahinsky and Tarr provide a fresh, richly layered perspective on the region for newcomers and residents alike. I'm going to carry it with me everywhere I go!"--Elaine Elinson, coauthor of the prize-winning Wherever There's a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California

Gary Paul Nabhan takes the reader on a vivid and far-ranging journey across time and space in this fascinating look at the relationship between the spice trade and culinary imperialism. Drawing on his own family's history as spice traders, as well as travel narratives, historical accounts, and his expertise as an ethnobotanist, Nabhan describes the critical roles that Semitic peoples and desert floras had in setting the stage for globalized spice trade. Traveling along four prominent trade routes-the Silk Road, the Frankincense Trail, the Spice Route, and the Camino Real (for chiles and chocolate)-Nabhan follows the caravans of itinerant spice merchants from the frankincense-gathering grounds and ancient harbors of the Arabian Peninsula to the port of Zayton on the China Sea to Santa Fe in the southwest United States. His stories, recipes, and linguistic analyses of cultural diffusion routes reveal the extent to which aromatics such as cumin, cinnamon, saffron, and peppers became adopted worldwide as signature ingredients of diverse cuisines. Cumin, Camels, and Caravans demonstrates that two particular desert cultures often depicted in constant conflict-Arabs and Jews-have spent much of their history collaborating in the spice trade and suggests how a more virtuous multicultural globalized society may be achieved in the future.

The Final Pagan Generation recounts the fascinating story of the lives and fortunes of the last Romans born before the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Edward J. Watts traces their experiences of living through the fourth century's dramatic religious and political changes, when heated confrontations saw the Christian establishment legislate against pagan practices as mobs attacked pagan holy sites and temples. The emperors who issued these laws, the imperial officials charged with implementing them, and the Christian perpetrators of religious violence were almost exclusively young men whose attitudes and actions contrasted markedly with those of the earlier generation, who shared neither their juniors' interest in creating sharply defined religious identities nor their propensity for violent conflict. Watts examines why the "e;final pagan generation"e;-born to the old ways and the old world in which it seemed to everyone that religious practices would continue as they had for the past two thousand years-proved both unable to anticipate the changes that imperially sponsored Christianity produced and unwilling to resist them. A compelling and provocative read, suitable for the general reader as well as students and scholars of the ancient world.

After living in San Francisco for 15 years, journalist Gordon Young found himself yearning for his Rust Belt hometown: Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors and "e;star"e; of the Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me. Hoping to rediscover and help a place that once boasted one of the world's highest per capita income levels, but is now one of the country's most impoverished and dangerous cities, he returned to Flint with the intention of buying a house. What he found was a place of stark contrasts and dramatic stories, where an exotic dancer can afford a lavish mansion, speculators scoop up cheap houses by the dozen on eBay, and arson is often the quickest route to neighborhood beautification. Skillfully blending personal memoir, historical inquiry, and interviews with Flint residents, Young constructs a vibrant tale of a once-thriving city still fighting-despite overwhelming odds-to rise from the ashes. He befriends a rag-tag collection of urban homesteaders and die-hard locals who refuse to give up as they try to transform Flint into a smaller, greener town that offers lessons for cities all over the world. Hard-hitting, insightful, and often painfully funny, Teardown reminds us that cities are ultimately defined by people, not politics or economics.

It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japan's emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by the distinctly hybrid institution-at once museum, laboratory, and prison-of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japan's first modern zoo, Tokyo's Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan's rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world. As the first zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple attraction in the nation's capital-an institutional marker of national accomplishment-but also as a site for the propagation of a new "e;natural"e; order that was scientifically verifiable and evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of Imperial Japan's unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japan's most frequently visited places. But instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks us to question our exploitation of the planet's resources.

Many of the findings in the book . . . are classics of ecology. . . . A rare and delightful insight into timely science.Jane Lubchenco,NatureEstess refreshing narrative deftly weaves rigorous science with personal reflection to create an absorbing and introspective read that is equal parts memoir, ecological textbook, and motivational guidebook for young ecologists.Science To newly minted biologist James Estes, the sea otters he was studying in the leafy kelp forests off the coast of Alaska appeared to have an unbalanced relationship with their greater environment. Gorging themselves on the sea urchins that grazed among the kelp, these small charismatic mammals seemed to give little back in return. But as Estes dug deeper, he unearthed a far more complex relationship between the otter and its underwater environment, discovering that otters play a critical role in driving positive ecosystem dynamics. While teasing out the connective threads, he began to question our assumptions about ecological relationships. These questions would ultimately inspire a lifelong quest to better understand the surprising complexity of our natural world and the unexpected ways we discover it. Serendipity tells the story of James Estes's life as a naturalist and the concepts that have driven his interest in researching the ecological role of top-level predators. Using the relationships between sea otters, kelp, and sea urchins as a touchstone, Estes retraces his investigations of numerous other species, ecosystems, and ecological processes in an attempt to discover why ecologists can learn so many details about the systems in which they work and yet understand so little about the broader processes that influence these systems. Part memoir, part natural history, and deeply inquisitive,Serendipity will entertain and inform readers as it raises thoughtful questions about our relationship with the natural world.