University Presses

First updated edition since the Iraq War, incorporating a wide range of world events.

In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples? invaded Egypt. The pharaoh's army and navy defeated them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations. Eric Cline tells the gripping story of how the end was brought about by multiple interconnected failures, ranging from invasion and revolt to earthquakes, drought, famine, and the cutting of international trade routes. Bringing to life a vibrant multicultural world, he draws a sweeping panorama of the empires of the age and shows that it may have been their very interdependence that hastened their dramatic collapse. Now revised and updated, 1177 B.C. sheds light on the complex ties that gave rise to, and eventually destroyed, the flourishing civilizations of the Late Bronze Age?and set the stage for the emergence of classical Greece and, ultimately, our world today.

Over 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication, the uncensored version of his novel appears here for the first time in a paperback edition. This volume restores material, including instances of graphic homosexual content, removed by the novel's first editor, who feared it would be "offensive" to Victorians.

"This is the voice I listen for, when I want to learn the deepest reality about Jews, Zionists, Israelis, and Palestinians. Norman Finkelstein is surely one of the forty honest humans the Scripture alludes to who can save 'Sodom' (our Earth) by pointing out, again and again, the sometimes soul-shriveling but unavoidable Truth. There is no one like him today, but in my bones I know this incredible warrior for Humanity and Justice is an archetype that has always been. And will always be. Small comfort in these dark times, perhaps, but a comfort I am deeply grateful for."—Alice Walker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for The Color Purple

"As a modern-day Sisyphus, rolling the heavy boulder up the hill of disinformation, Norman Finkelstein does not waver in his determination to take it to the crest. Although a non-lawyer, he masters the legal issues, the Geneva Conventions, ICJ advisory opinions, UN resolutions, and commission reports, weaving them into a compelling narrative, an articulate appeal for justice, a protest against the moral cop-out of the international community. Finkelstein refutes the Big Lie and many arcane little lies about Gaza and Palestine. A scholarly manual for every politician and every person concerned with human rights."—Alfred de Zayas, Professor of Law, Geneva School of Diplomacy, and UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order

"Norman Finkelstein, probably the most serious scholar on the conflict in the Middle East, has written an excellent book on Israel’s invasions of Gaza. Its comprehensive examination of both the facts and the law of these assaults provides the most authoritative account of this brutal history."—John Dugard, Emeritus Professor of Public International Law, Leiden University, and former Special Rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Council on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 2001-2008

"No scholar has done more to shed light on Israel’s ruthless treatment of the Palestinians than Norman Finkelstein. In Gaza, he meticulously details Israel’s massacres of the Palestinians in that tiny enclave during Operations Cast Lead and Protective Edge, while demolishing the myths Israel and its supporters have invented to disguise these shocking events.”—John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago

“This is an exceptional, singular work that will stand as a vital contribution to the literature on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Middle East politics, while also securing an essential place in the fields of international and human rights law. Gaza is an indispensable resource for scholars, jurists, policy makers, and diplomats alike. A landmark.”—Sara Roy, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University
"Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom is a powerful call to intensify our campaign to bring about justice for the Palestinian people which has been denied them for so long . . . It is a work of exacting anf thorough scholarship, encyclopaedic in its coverage of the detal of the terrible treatment of the Palestinians of Gaza, and stands both as a reference guide to the suject and an appeal for justice."

The twentieth-anniversary edition of Crush, the passionate and influential poetry collection by Richard Siken

A beautifully illustrated history of Indigenous tattooing practices around the worldTattooing within Indigenous communities is a time-honored practice that binds the tattoo recipient to a deeply felt collective history. More than mere decoration, tattoos embody cultural values, ancestral ties, and spiritual beliefs. Indigenous Tattoo Traditions captures ancient tribal tattooing practices and their contemporary resurgence, highlighting a beautiful aspect of humanity's shared cultural heritage. Transporting readers through history, Lars Krutak explores the art and customs of tattooing across numerous ancestral lands, including Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, the Arctic, Oceania, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Siberia. He illustrates how tattoos function as a form of writing that defines and structures community life, performing as rites of passage, symbols of rank, and signs of marital or religious devotion, among other facets of culture. We are introduced to the heavily tattooed Li women of China's Hainan Island with their elaborate facial and body tattoos, the bold indelible markings of Papua New Guinea's Indigenous peoples, and innovative cultural tattoo practitioners who are rebuilding a skin-marking legacy for future generations to come. With numerous images published for the first time and an illuminating foreword by cultural historian Sean Mallon, Indigenous Tattoo Traditions opens a window onto one of the world's most vibrant yet misunderstood mediums of human expression.

In this gripping sequel to his bestselling 1177 B.C., Eric Cline tells the story of what happened after the Bronze Age collapsed—why some civilizations endured, why some gave way to new ones, and why some disappeared forever

“A landmark book: lucid, deep, and insightful. . . . You cannot understand human civilization and self-organization without studying what happened on, before, and after 1177 B.C.”—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of The Black Swan

At the end of the acclaimed history 1177 B.C., many of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lay in ruins, undone by invasion, revolt, natural disasters, famine, and the demise of international trade. An interconnected world that had boasted major empires and societies, relative peace, robust commerce, and monumental architecture was lost and the so-called First Dark Age had begun. Now, in After 1177 B.C., Eric Cline tells the compelling story of what happened next, over four centuries, across the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean world. It is a story of resilience, transformation, and success, as well as failures, in an age of chaos and reconfiguration.

After 1177 B.C. tells how the collapse of powerful Late Bronze Age civilizations created new circumstances to which people and societies had to adapt. Those that failed to adjust disappeared from the world stage, while others transformed themselves, resulting in a new world order that included Phoenicians, Philistines, Israelites, Neo-Hittites, Neo-Assyrians, and Neo-Babylonians. Taking the story up to the resurgence of Greece marked by the first Olympic Games in 776 B.C., the book also describes how world-changing innovations such as the use of iron and the alphabet emerged amid the chaos.

Filled with lessons for today's world about why some societies survive massive shocks while others do not, After 1177 B.C. reveals why this period, far from being the First Dark Age, was a new age with new inventions and new opportunities."A fascinating and vividly written book with lessons for today."---Jeff Popple, Canberra Daily

This paradigm-shifting book will change the way you think about artificial intelligence. Kate Crawford reveals how AI is an extractive industry that consumes planetary resources, labor, and data?and how it is fueling a shift toward undemocratic systems. An urgent read about the powerful infrastructures remapping our world.

In this widely anticipated book, two leading contemporary art historians present a stunning reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. With intellectual brilliance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood reexamine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts.

Anachronic Renaissance reveals a web of paths traveled by works and artists, a landscape obscured by art history's disciplinary compulsion to anchor its data securely in time. The buildings, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and medals addressed in this book were shaped by concerns about authenticity, about reference to prestigious origins and precedents, and about the implications of transposition from one medium to another. Byzantine icons taken to be early Christian antiquities, the acheiropoeton or image made without hands, the activities of spoliation and citation, differing approaches to art restoration, legends about movable buildings, and forgeries and pastiches: all of these emerge as basic conceptual structures of Renaissance art. The authors show how the complex and layered temporalities of images offered a counterpoint to the linear chronologies that increasingly structured commerce, politics, travel, and everyday life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

While a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication, Nagel and Wood argue that it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a prior artifact or image, even to an origin outside of time, in divinity. The authors conclude with an analysis of Roman episodes and projects of the decades around 1500, culminating in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura. This book is not the story about the Renaissance, nor is it just a story. It imagines the infrastructure of many possible stories. Clearly, Anachronic Renaissance will be essential reading for historians of Western art and all those concerned with the historiography of material culture."The main contribution of Anachronic Renaissance remains its strong challenge to the continued dominance of 'style' in art history, as the evidentiary mark of artist and period alike. In one sense, then, the book is a continuation of the postmodernist critique of 'the author' in the very field where such categories were first made central. But it is also a critique of the new default of the discipline, a social history of art that often lapses into mechanical studies of 'context' with little concern for class and even less for art."---Hal Foster, London Review of Books

Amazons--fierce warrior women dwelling on the fringes of the known world--were the mythic archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Heracles and Achilles displayed their valor in duels with Amazon queens, and the Athenians reveled in their victory over a powerful Amazon army. In historical times, Cyrus of Persia, Alexander the Great, and the Roman general Pompey tangled with Amazons. But just who were these bold barbarian archers on horseback who gloried in fighting, hunting, and sexual freedom? Were Amazons real? In this deeply researched, wide-ranging, and lavishly illustrated book, National Book Award finalist Adrienne Mayor presents the Amazons as they have never been seen before. This is the first comprehensive account of warrior women in myth and history across the ancient world, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Great Wall of China. Driven by a detective's curiosity, Mayor unearths long-buried evidence and sifts fact from fiction to show how flesh-and-blood women of the Eurasian steppes were mythologized as Amazons, the equals of men. The result is likely to become a classic.

What a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world-and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?

A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.

By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth."Finalist for the 2016 Northern California Book Awards in General Nonfiction, Northern California Book Reviewers"