The definitive guide to the most interesting, amusing, and surprising collections in America.

With listings that leave no source unexplored, this clever directory is the first in-depth popular guide to more than 1,000 small museums. Its listing of archives ranging from the utterly informal to the most diligently organized, labeled, and catalogued, from displays of celebrity shoes to the work of visionary artists, provides a picture of the American landscape that is rich in quirky details.

In Little Museums, you will find the listings that tourist literature does not provide, including the Barbie Hall of Fame in Palo Alto, California, the Dog Mushing Museum in Fairbanks, Alaska; the Museum of Ordinary People in Hurtsboro, Alabama; the 24Hour Church of Elvis in Portland, Arizona; and the last freak show left in America—at Coney Island's Sideshows by the Seashore. A virtual museums listing means you don't even have to leave home to visit a little museum, and a category index makes finding museums devoted to your favorite subjects even easier. Little Museums is for anyone who hates to miss a unique opportunity along the byways and urban centers of America.

The news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865, just days after Confederate surrender, astounded the war-weary nation. Massive crowds turned out for services and ceremonies. Countless expressions of grief and dismay were printed in newspapers and preached in sermons. Public responses to the assassination have been well chronicled, but this book is the first to delve into the personal and intimate responses of everyday people—northerners and southerners, soldiers and civilians, black people and white, men and women, rich and poor.
 
Through deep and thoughtful exploration of diaries, letters, and other personal writings penned during the spring and summer of 1865, Martha Hodes, one of our finest historians, captures the full range of reactions to the president’s death—far more diverse than public expressions would suggest. She tells a story of shock, glee, sorrow, anger, blame, and fear. “’Tis the saddest day in our history,” wrote a mournful man. It was “an electric shock to my soul,” wrote a woman who had escaped from slavery. “Glorious News!” a Lincoln enemy exulted. “Old Lincoln is dead, and I will kill the goddamned Negroes now,” an angry white southerner ranted. For the black soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, it was all “too overwhelming, too lamentable, too distressing” to absorb.
 
There are many surprises in the story Hodes tells, not least the way in which even those utterly devastated by Lincoln’s demise easily interrupted their mourning rituals to attend to the most mundane aspects of everyday life. There is also the unexpected and unabated virulence of Lincoln’s northern critics, and the way Confederates simultaneously celebrated Lincoln’s death and instantly—on the very day he died—cast him as a fallen friend to the defeated white South.
 
Hodes brings to life a key moment of national uncertainty and confusion, when competing visions of America’s future proved irreconcilable and hopes for racial justice in the aftermath of the Civil War slipped from the nation’s grasp. Hodes masterfully brings the tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination alive in human terms—terms that continue to stagger and rivet us one hundred and fifty years after the event they so strikingly describe.

One of the most popular and influential children's book ever written, this time-honored tale — sure to produce lots of giggles — describes the gruesome consequences that befall children who torment animals, play with matches, suck their thumbs, refuse to eat, and fidget at meals. A collector's item, written in rhyming couplets and illustrated by the author.

In the '80s, when author/photographer Kurt Hollander lived in New York and published The Portable Lower East, life there was particularly rough, and cops often drove yellow cabs as a method to surprise and roust its residents. Before the decade ended, Hollander moved to the equally rough climes of Mexico City, making his living writing and photographing for The Guardian, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and many other publications.

Hollander's visual and textual extravaganza, Several Ways to Die in Mexico City, provides a perspective of this extraordinary city that could only have been caught by an observant outsider who lived in all its nooks and crannies for over two decades.

Crammed with caustic but fair observations of the city's history, food, cults, drugs, and buildings, Hollander proves that he can love a city and culture that also kills its inhabitants softly. The book contains dozens of extraordinary photographs.

While living high in Mexico City, Kurt Hollander edited poliester, the renowned bilingual art magazine about the Americas. He also directed the feature film Carambola and wrote a successful series of children's books. Grove Press published the Portable Lower East Side anthology in 1994.

2009 is a double jubilee for Charles Darwin (1809-1882). The world celebrates his 200th birthday and also the 150th anniversary of the first edition of his epoch-making title ?On the Origin of Species?. This book revolutionized the knowledge of biology and led to hot debates between scientists around the world. The present work for the first time documents the influence of Darwinism to the fine arts. The famous Frankfurt museum Schirn presents 150 paintings, drawings and lithographs as well as rare and ex?ceptional documentations. The exhibition includes works by Frederic Church, Franti?ek Kupka, Odilon Redon, George Frederic Watts, Arnold Bcklin, Max Ernst and many more thus covering a period from 1859 to the middle of the 20th century.

The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (sôma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature.

By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances hidden inside the person. Imagining a daemonic space inside the person but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of the self.

The Symptom and the Subject highlights with fresh importance how classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential ways of thinking about the human subject.

Classic study by noted scholar ranges over 2,000 years of alchemy: ancient Greek and Chinese alchemy, alchemical apparatus, Islamic and early Western alchemy; signs, symbols, and secret terms; Paracelsus, English and Scottish alchemists, and more. Erudite coverage of philosophical, religious, mystical overtones; replacement of alchemy by scientific method, more. Illustrated.

A consummate guide to color, this indispensable, spiralbound volume displays 80 color schemes — drawn from a variety of different mediums, from architecture and apparel to paintings and pottery, across a range of historical periods — each individually presented, described, and illustrated in a handy, gatefold format, with representative four-color images and actual printed chips for matching against the project at hand. From the dominant reds of ancient Egyptian ochers to the psychedelic palettes of the sixties, Living Colors will inspire professionals and laypeople alike in choosing colors for a multitude of uses.

What a fascinating book. copyright 2009 290 pages