Books published by University of California Press

Based on years of careful ethnographic fieldwork in Hanoi, this book offers an account of the moral quandaries that accompany innovations in biomedical technology. Arguing for more sustained anthropological attention to human quests for belonging, it addresses existential questions of love and loss that concern us all.

This an interpretation of attitudes and mentalities that informed the Weimar Republic. It is intended by the author to be a cultivated antidote to the heated atmosphere of post-World War Germany, as a way of burying shame and animosity that might otherwise make social contact impossible.

San Francisco Bay is the largest and most productive estuary on the Pacific Coast of North America. Focusing on human inhabitation of the Bay since Ohlone times, this title reveals the ongoing role of nature in shaping that history.

Jacob Lawrence was one of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century. This book renders an assessment of Lawrence's long and productive career. It argues that his complex, cubist-based paintings developed out of a vital connection with a modern Harlem that was filled with artists, writers, musicians, and social activists.

Introduces the readers to 155 national forests across the country. This book describes the natural features, wildernesses, scenic drives, campgrounds and hiking trails of our national forests in Alaska, Nevada, Arizona and Oregon. It includes logistical information about size and location, facilities, attractions and associated wilderness areas.

On March 28, 1979 the worst accident in the history of commercial nuclear power in the United States occurred at Three Mile Island. This is the comprehensive account of the causes, context, and consequences of the Three Mile Island crisis. It captures the high human drama surrounding the accident.

Uses the story of Ruth Barnett, an abortionist in Portland, Oregon, between 1918 and 1968 to demonstrate that it was the law, not so-called back-alley practitioners, that most endangered women's lives in the years before abortion was legal.

Presents an analysis of the rich spiritual and artistic traditions of the Carib-speaking Yekuana Indians of Venezuela, who live in the dense rain forest of the upper Orinoco.

Explores the causes and effects of ice ages that have gripped our planet throughout its history, from earliest known glaciations. Following development of scientific ideas about these dramatic events, the author traces the lives of many brilliant and intriguing characters who have contributed to evolving understanding of how ice ages come about.

Presents information on the natural histories of birds of the Sierra Nevada, the origins of their names, the habitats they prefer, how they communicate and interact with one another, their relative abundance, and where they occur within the region.

Beginning with the founding of profession in late 1920s and continuing into post-September 11 era, this title examines the history of men who joined workplaces customarily identified as female-oriented. It examines various hardships these men faced at work, paying particular attention to conflation of gender-based, and AIDS-based discrimination.

Offers insights into many ways that sex, love, and satisfying relationships prove elusive to the featured young women as they navigate the new emotional landscape of the 21st century. This book discusses the lives of young women who struggle to negotiate the complexities of their contradictory constellation of opportunities and challenges.

Suitable for those interested in contemporary musicology or media history, this title offers translation of the author's pioneering work - at once a journal of his experiments in sound composition and a treatise on the raison d'etre of concrete music.

Animation variously entertains, enchants, and offends, yet there have been no convincing explanations of how these films do so. This book proposes performance as the common touchstone for understanding the principles underlying the construction, execution, and reception of cartoons.

What does it mean for film and video to be experimental? This title features a collection of essays framed by the concept "ex-" - meaning from, outside, and no longer. It explores the aesthetic, technical, and theoretical reverberations of avant-garde film and video.

Provides a fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans survived the war that devastated their country for a decade. This title illuminates a social world based on love, compassionate relationship based on material exchange and nurturing, that transcends romance and binds people together across space.

Explores the way in which Islamic legal thinkers understood Islam as it related to women and gender roles. In seventeenth and eighteenth century Syria and Palestine, Muslim legal thinkers gave considerable attention to women's roles in society, this title shows how fatwas, or legal opinions, greatly influenced these roles.

Tells the story of a dynastic struggle, between the Kurus and Pandavas, for land.

Volcanic dust, climate change, tsunamis, earthquakes - geoscience explores phenomena that profoundly affect our lives. But more than that, the science also provides important clues to the future of the planet. This title gives an overview of Earth's history based on information extracted from rocks, ice cores, and other natural archives.