Neal Ascherson is the most unusual political essayist writing in Britain today.

Games With Shadows

History

Ascherson, Neal

Europe

Radius Books

The politics of illusion: Republicanism and socialism in modern Ireland (Radius Books)

This is the first comprehensive study of the IRA's attempts to create a "social republicanism," a marriage between militant nationalism and the politics of the left. From agitation among the peasantry in the 1920s to efforts in the 1990s to add a political dimension to purist nationalism in the form of Sinn Fein's "peace process," Henry Patterson analyzes the various failed attempts to marry two fundamentally incompatible ideologies. Friend and foe have described the IRA as "socialists," "Marxists" and "fascists" or simply as militaristic and murderous thugs. In this highly praised work the author steers us through the complex, schismatic and inevitably secretive history of both the Provisional and Official IRA, Sinn Fein and the various organizations with which they have been associated. He teases out the meaning and significance of the twists and turns in republican policy, which at different periods have involved working with trade unions, collaboration with Nazi Germany, support for tenants fighting for better housing, hunger strikes, and, of course, both urban and rural guerrilla warfare. This fully revised and updated new edition takes the history of Irish republicanism beyond Sinn Fein's best ever performance in the 1997 elections in both the Republic of Ireland and the UK to the IRA's renewed ceasefire. Henry Patterson's conclusion is that "physical force" or militarist nationalism and the politics of the left make uneasy and, when the rhetoric is cleared away, self-deluding and illusory bed-fellows.

The Politics of Illusion: Republicanism and Socialism in Modern Ireland

Patterson, Henry

A devotional paraphrase and commentary on the book of Romans

The Romance of Romans: God's Big God-Story

Sullivant, Michael

Religion & Spirituality

The first appraisal of modern Native American abstraction, merging abstract expressionism, color field and hard-edge painting with Native American art 
The volume features paintings and works on paper from the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts’ (MoCNA) collection, created in the 1960s and 1970s. These artists challenged stereotypical expectations of Indian art by experimenting with New York School abstraction combined with art influences from their own cultural heritage. This departure, supported by the groundbreaking art education philosophy at IAIA, revolutionized the Native American art world.Artists include: Ray Aguilar, Ralph Aragon, Sammy Begay, Larry (Littlebird) Bird, Earl Biss, Bennet Brien, Bennie Buffalo, George Burdeau, T.C. Cannon, Art Chischilly, Joseph L. Concha, Larry Desjarlais, Joe Dudley, Earl Eder, Mary Eder, Kirby Feathers, Anita (Luttrell) Fields, Phyllis Fife, Herman Fragua, Henry (Hank) Gobin, John Gritts, Harvey Herman, Patrick Swazo Hinds, John Hoover, Michael Jenkins, Peter B. Jones, Ralph Robert Kniffen, Delores Lee, Alice Loiselle, Linda Lomaheftawa, Linda Lucero, Edna Massey and more.

Action Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art: 1940s to 1970s

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Mark Klett has been photographing the deserts of the American West, in particular the beauties of the Sonoran landscape--a desert that sprawls across southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Along with coyotes and tumbleweeds, saguaro cacti are one of the most recognizable (and stereotypical) features of this region. Klett's portraits of these giant desert plants are straightforward and frontal. Klett is known for teasing out the implications of man's presence in the environment: here, vital young saguaros, middle-aged contenders with gunshot wounds and wizened elders are treated as worthy inhabitants. This beautifully produced volume, featuring 40 deluxe tritone images, presents a selection of Klett's most evocative portraits with an essay by acclaimed writer Gregory McNamee.

Mark Klett: Saguaros

McNamee, Gregory

Individual Artists

Johnnie Winona Ross's quiet, contemplative and painstakingly produced paintings have created a stir in the contemporary art world. Often compared with Agnes Martin for both his Minimalist sensibility and his connection to New Mexico, Ross's reputation has grown swiftly in recent years. The paintings are reductive, but evidently process-oriented in their layering. Ross begins by pouring thin rivulets of paint down tilted canvases with the streams of paint branching out as they flow towards the bottom to create organic forms. He then scrapes away most of the pigment, leaving faint traces of color, so that sometimes as many as 30 sanded and repainted layers will accrue. Ross's paintings convey a spacious and tranquil palette grounded in these highly worked surfaces. This first major publication on Ross's work also features an essay by Carter Ratcliff.

Johnnie Winona Ross

Judy Tuwaletstiwa combines paint and canvas with sand, clay, fiber and sticks--materials particular to the Black Mesa in Northern Arizona, where she lived for several years on a Hopi reservation. In Mapping Water, Tuwaletstiwa investigates the embrace of uncharted terrains. The first section begins with a definition of the word "genesis," alongside small paintings that relate (and don't relate) to various parts of the text, evoking thoughts on the "genesis" of ideas. Subsequent sections continue this exploration with content that varies from an iconic photograph from the Holocaust to a series of images of a dead crow that Tuwaletstiwa dissected and reassembled with curious results. Tuwaletstiwa writes, "This desert landscape opens the unconscious to me. In my work, whether writing or painting, I seek a language that embodies the elusive and mysterious images that resonate from the deep strata of the unknown." In addition to Ms. Tuwaletstiwa's international reputation as a painter, she is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Literary Residency in Marfa, Texas for The Canyon Poem, a limited-edition book published in 1999.

Judy Tuwaletstiwa: Mapping Water

The Dutch saying "a Jan Steen household" originated in the seventeenth century and has come to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, are the direct inspiration behind the layered domestic scenes of Julie Blackmon's photographic work. Raised as the oldest of nine children, and the mother of three herself, Blackmon takes an approach to her work that is at once autobiographical and fictional. According to Anne Wilkes Tucker of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Blackmon has "taken a subject that is ripe for cliché--mother photographing children--and through the subtle, digital manipulations, the use of color and highly graphic images, she's given it humor and edge and taken the subject somewhere fresh."

Julie Blackmon: Domestic Vacations

According to essayist Lilly Wei, “Light, created out of increasingly subtle modulations of color and contained within an imagined space…[is] Joan Watts’ primary subject…. Although Watts’ work is reductive, part of the Modernist legacy and often considered Minimalist, she insists it is not. Premised as it is on the immaterial and transcendent, in intention, it has greater affinities to the paintings and statements of Agnes Martin, the installations of James Turrell and other artists of light and space, to Buddhist teachings and the spiritual.” This substantial new volume presents a comprehensive overview of Watts’ spare but deeply resonant paintings, made over the course of the last 60 years. Joan Watts has lived in New York City and Hawaii, and has made her home near Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the past 20 years. She is represented by Lemmons Contemporary, New York, and Charlotte Jackson Fine Art in Santa Fe.

Joan Watts

One evening in 1956 our friend Andrew Wolf burst into our house in Rochester with the startling news that he had bought a weekly suburban paper,The Brighton-Pittsford Post. He explained that he planned to report local news and publish columns on a variety of subjects, such as reviews of the theater, concerts, motion pictures and cooking. "You’ll be the food editor," he told me! "What! I can’t do that!" "Why not? I know you can write because I like to read it. You can cook well, because I like to eat it."--Beaumont Newhall, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography, 1993. Often referred to as the “Father of Photographic History,” the legendary curator and critic Beaumont Newhall was known by his intimate circle--which included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among many others--as a great chef and a gracious host. This beautifully designed volume, with images printed in deluxe duotones, contains a key selection of articles and recipes culled from "Epicure Corner," Newhall’s weekly column for The Brighton-Pittsford Post, which appeared in the Rochester, New York, newspaper from 1956 to 1969. The columns are accompanied by a selection of photographs by the “Newhall Circle”--including Adams, Weston and Cartier-Bresson, among many other twentieth-century photographic luminaries. Beaumont Newhall (1908-1993) was an influential curator, art historian, writer and photographer. His classic The History of Photography, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1949, remains one of the most significant books in the field. In 1940, Newhall became the first director of MoMA’s Photography Department. He served as Curator of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House from 1948 to 1958, then as its Director from 1958 to 1971. While at the Eastman House, Newhall was responsible for amassing one of the greatest photographic collections in the world.

Beaumont's Kitchen: Lessons on Food, Life and Photography with Beaumont Newhall

Photography & Video

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