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- Marvelous Book on the Maya
- Shows just why they're called the Magnicent Mayans...
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Maya: Divine Kings of the Rain Forest (Cultural Studies Photography)
Nikolai Grube
Manufacturer: Konemann
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ASIN: 3829041500 |
Customer Reviews:
Marvelous Book on the Maya.......2007-01-05
This is by far the best and most beautiful book on the Maya for the general reader that I have come across. I have traveled extensively throughout the Maya Area, and own several books on the subject, including classics such as "A Forest of Kings", "The Blood of Kings", Coe's "The Maya", and Henderson's "The World of the Ancient Maya". However, none of these volumes come close to Grube's massive, lavishly-illustrated tome in terms of spectacular photographs, wealth of topics, and breadth of scholarship.
Edited by N. Grube, a renowned Maya scholar, the book is a collection of articles by several experts on the Maya, each a specialist in some aspect of the civilization. The range of articles is wide enough to form a comprehensive general introduction to the Maya and their achievements. In addition, there are articles that discuss unusual topics covered only briefly, if at all, in the other books. Alongside the usual material on Maya history throughout the Pre-Classic, Classic, and Post-Classic, you will find delightful chapters on the role of caves in Maya religion, intoxication and ecstacy, war and prisoners, court dwarves, the meaning of the Bonampak murals, Puuc architecture, Tikal architecture and its influence, astronomy and mathematics, grave robbers, Maya Gods, cacao, obsidian, the Teotihuacan connection, the Spanish Conquest, and the Maya in the Colonial and Present Eras. Your reading will be greatly enhanced by the dozens of beautiful illustrations, many of them unique to this volume. Where else, for example, will you see large color photographs of the Rio Bec and Tonina ruins, of chicle gathering and looted sites in the Peten jungle?
While "Divine Kings of the Rain Forest" certainly does some justice to the divinity of its subject matter, it is relatively expensive. Moreover, since it is out of print, you might even have to pay more than the list price to obtain a nice copy. However, it will be worth every penny. It is truly a pity that this book is out of print. (Try used book stores in large cities, where you might be fortunate enough to get a good copy at half price, as I did.) This is definitely a volume to display, treasure, and savor repeatedly.
Shows just why they're called the Magnicent Mayans..........2004-03-13
This is the best book I have ever come across on Mayan culture. It is a oversized coffee table volume, some 450 deluxe pages, each of which is covered with maps, illustrations and many, many photographs. Each period in Mayan development is covered in the chapters and the illustrations correspond neatly with the text. The text also does not veer off into the author's own opinions as these books frequently do. The first evidence of humans in the Mayan planes date to around ten thousand b.c., the book starts there and continues to the current Mayans (yes, their descendents alive in the world today, and that, too, is an interesting look). For anyone who thinks that civilization began in the Mediterranean, this book is clear evidence that it began on the other side of the world at the same time, if not earlier. It's a shame that the price and the fact that this book is out of print makes it less accessible to readers. For Mayan historians, this book is a must, but even someone with only a casual interest in the subject would find much of interest here.
Book Description
In the second volume of the acclaimed "Gas, Food, Lodging" trilogy, authors John Jakle, Keith Sculle, and Jefferson Rogers take an informative, entertaining, and comprehensive look at the history of the motel. From the introduction of roadside tent camps and motor cabins in the 1910s to the wonderfully kitschy motels of the 1950s that line older roads and today's comfortable but anonymous chains that lure drivers off the interstate, Americans and their cars have found places to stay on their travels. Motels were more than just places to sleep, however. They were the places where many Americans saw their first color television, used their first coffee maker, and walked on their first shag carpet.
Illustrated with more than 230 photographs, postcards, maps, and drawings, The Motel in America details the development of the motel as a commercial enterprise, its imaginative architectural expressions, and its evolution within the place-product-packaging concept along America's highways. As an integral part of America's landscape and culture, the motel finally receives the in-depth attention it deserves.
Customer Reviews:
Motel Mania My Goodness.......2004-10-03
This book is not a big coffee table picture book. It is not a book to take to the beach. But I could see taking this book on vacation - that is if you were driving the old state highways that may still have some of the kewl vintage motels and stuff. This book covers a lot of ground and it would be of interest to those who enjoy funky motels and stuff. The writing style is not a fun as I would like - perhaps this book started out as a college thesis. But the info and pictures make it a good buy for the money.
Fascinating pictures and very interesting documentary.......1999-07-09
Upon completion of this book, the reader will have a complete history of the growth of today's hotel industry from the days of tourist camps, through motor courts, motels, and now motor inns. It is well researched, very quick reading, and gives an excellent history of this major form of commerce during the earlier part of the 20th century. The only thing missing might be a pictoral diagram showing the evolution of early chains into today's major lodging chains. I would also suggest a little more detail on the circumstances of some of the chain's that went out of business. Either way, a great piece for anyone interested in travel history and highway evolution.
Amazon.com
The most significant features of our landscape are often invisible to us. For example: how often have you wondered about the evolution of the gas station? How many gas stations are there in the U.S.? Are gas stations increasing or decreasing in number? What do Bauhaus and feminism have to do with gas station architecture?
Whether or not these questions have kept you awake at night (or been asked of you during job interviews), this delightful hybrid between architectural history, economics, pop-culture studies, and geography will give you unexpected insights into one of the more important components of the American landscape. Illustrated with more than 150 maps, photos, and drawings, and highly recommended.
Book Description
In the first volume of their celebrated "Gas, Food, Lodging" trilogy, John Jakle and Keith Sculle offer a comprehensive history of the American gas station, exploring every aspect of this roadside icon, including its evolving architectural identity; its place in both the American landscape and popular culture; the corporate decisions that determined its look and location; its metamorphosis into the mini-mart; and its role as the most visible manifestation of one of the world's largest industries. From the quaint curbside filling stations of the 1910s to the novelty designs of the 1920s (when stations were built to resemble English cottages, Greek temples, Dutch windmills, and Spanish missions) to the Bauhaus-inspired stations of the 1930s to today's nationwide chains of brightly lit look-alikes, The Gas Station in America is the definitive book on the subject. Richly illustrated with more than 150 images--postcards of gas stations, vintage ads, maps, and other memorabilia--this book bears witness to an economic and cultural phenomenon that continues to be a defining part of the American experience.
Customer Reviews:
Gas Stations of the past to the present.......2000-03-31
I think that this book really is a great resource to people who are interested in American history and how an industry can evolve over the decades. The information regarding the retail petroleum industry itself was a little bit thin. I would have liked to see how the industry boomed when cars became a necessity to Americans and how the gas station industry handled that. The pictures in the book make the book very likable even to the everyday person picking up the book off of a coffee table. It takes older American's back to their younger days of $.05 gas and younger American's to a time when gas wasn't over $2.00 a gallon. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to a person who is interested in the industry of retail petroleum and the evolution of the gas station we all use!
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Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place across America (Creating the North American Landscape)
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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ASIN: 0801867002 |
Book Description
What does it mean to be from somewhere? If most people in the United States are "from some place else" what is an American homeland? In answering these questions, the contributors to Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place across America offer a geographical vision of territory and the formation of discrete communities in the U.S. today. Homelands discusses groups such as the Yankees in New England, Old Order Amish in Ohio, African Americans in the plantation South, Navajos in the Southwest, Russians in California, and several other peoples and places.
Homelands explores the connection of people and place by showing how aspects of several different North American groups found their niche and created a homeland. A collection of fifteen essays, Homelands is an innovative look at geographical concepts in community settings. It is also an exploration of the academic work taking place about homelands and their people, of how factors such as culture, settlement, and cartographic concepts come together in American sociology. There is much not only to study but also to celebrate about American homelands. As the editors state, "Underlying today's pluralistic society are homelands -- large and small, strong and weak -- that endure in some way. The mosaic of homelands to which people bonded in greater or lesser degrees, affirms in a holistic way America's diversity, its pluralistic society."
The authors depict the cultural effects of immigrant settlement. The conviction that people need to participate in the life of the homeland to achieve their own self realization, within the traditions and comforts of that community. Homelands gives us a new map of the United States, a map drawn with people's lives and the land that is their home.
Book Description
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Rhys Isaac describes and analyzes the dramatic confrontations—primarily religious and political—that transformed Virginia in the second half of the eighteenth century. Making use of the observational techniques of the cultural anthropologist, Isaac vividly recreates and painstakingly dissects a society in the turmoil of profound inner change.
Customer Reviews:
A riveting account of a double revolution in early America.......2007-08-14
Eighteenth-century Virginian gentry had established a society, complete with imported styles and articles of British dress and life, which set them a part from commoners, but, which never quite equaled life in England. Within 50 years, more egalitarian religious upsurges and a political revolution challenged the great-family society and altered its social functioning. Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia ,1740-1790, chronicles and analyzes the legal, religious, and cultural battles for societal control between members of the Virginian plantation elites and those popularizing forces that, in the end, dislodged many of the institutions--minus slavery--that reinforced exclusive dominance within in eighteenth-century Virginia.
The indispensable contribution of The Transformation of Virginia is its suggestion of a "double revolution in religious and political thought and feeling" (5). The work begins with a discussion of the gentry dominating all levels of society. Middlings and members of the lower class deferred to more elite members of society. The first part of the book introduces the reader to natural and physical structures of the elites' dominance. The great house, the county courthouse, and the church, served as emblems of plantation power. The great men conducted business at each of these brick structures that endorsed their control.
The Anglican Church reinforced for the deferential system and provided a hallowed venue to display the social hierarchy. Isaac calls upon the physical construction and layout of church structures as evidence of their support for the gentry's control. The rich talked business before church; they processed into and recessed out of church while others gazed from their seats; and they sat in special seating, while the Anglican liturgy "asserted the hierarchical nature of things" (64). The Anglican system gave local vestrymen power over clergy, who came from outside, and it empowered them to regulate parish life. Clashes between clergy and vestries and confrontations between Anglicans and Presbyterians over preachers' licenses led to legislatives battles and anticlericism in the 1740s and 1750s.
The New Light Separatist Baptists descended upon Virginia in the 1760s from New England. They brought with them an austere lifestyle, and offered commoners "a close, supportive, and orderly community" (164). When describing the beginnings of Baptist life in Virginia, Isaac employs terms like "respect," "equality," "fellowship," and "faith," in contrast to descriptions of Anglican Virginia with words like with "formal distance," "hierarchy," and "ranked". Not only were Baptist members "poor and unlearned," and in some cases slaves, but the ministers who started these groups were often "men of little learning". The Virginia Baptists and their leadership possessed similarities in class and education levels with post-Revolutionary Baptists and other denominations who would later use what Nathan O. Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity terms "religious populism" to spread Christianity across America. Despite the gentry's attacks of being "poor and illiterate," the Baptists' effectiveness to draw to themselves all sections of society, including some gentry, threatened the traditional community structure. Isaac underscores that "the cohesive brotherhood of the Baptists must be understood as an explicit rejection of the formalism of traditional community organization" (166).
The rise of the Baptist popularity in Virginia coincided with a general crisis of British authority throughout the American colonies, particularly highlighted by colonial responses to the Stamp Act of 1765. The Methodist movement took hold in Virginia during the 1770s at the climax of patriot fervor. The religious and political movements shared similarities in gaining support: "the use of popular assemblies for arousing collective emotions and for intensifying the involvement of plain folk" (264). A major distinction, however, existed. "Where evangelism began as a rejection and inversion of customary practices, the patriot movement initially tended toward a revitalization of ancient forms of community" (265). During this revolutionary period, Virginian gentry, who had long viewed themselves as models of England, found themselves impelled to defy British authority by popular forces from within communities they once dominated.
Isaac's book is a brilliant account of how religious dissenters and political patriots changed the social landscape and structures within eighteenth-century colony Virginia. However, these promoters of religious equality and political liberty could not break the bonds Virginian slavery. Antislavery movements increased following the Revolution; yet, "republicanism worked to formalize a deep division by excluding the slaves to whom its membership and its promises did not extend" (321).
Despite the book's at times awkward and disjointed flow--the result of tying together collected essays published as a monograph--The Transformation of Virginia provides the scholar, undergraduate, and general reader a riveting display of changes that occurred during fifty crucial years in the life of the Commonwealth--and the nation.
Excellent Book.......2004-12-30
Rhys Isaac richly deserved his Pulitzer Prize for this excellent history of Colonial Virginia society. He shows how the coming of non-Anglican Protestant faiths (namely, Presbyterians and Baptists) to Virginia helped transform the society from one of deference to superiors to a society that began to see all white men as social equals (women, American Indians, and slaves would not receive this until much later). The book also provides excellent insight into the conditions that would lead some of the Founding Fathers to champion the doctrine of religious freedom.
Transformation of Virginia.......2002-02-12
I first encountered this book in graduate school, where it was assigned to our class. Many of us debated the merits of the book and concluded it really failed to deliver any type of lasting impression. Yet it won a Pulitzer Prize.
All through the book I kept waiting for Virginia to "transform" as the title indicates it did. While Isaac presnts a lot of detailed information, it never really deliverd a convincing argument. "Stillborn" is one term that comes to mind. In comparison to Edmund S. Morgan's "American Freedom American Slavery" (or vise versa) Isaac book misses the mark. Morgan's work shows a definite transformation in how Virginia became a principal player in the establishment of slavery.
Isaac's book is not a total waste, as it does cover a shorter period of time in greater detail than Morgan, but Morgan remains a master historian while Isaac has more work to do.
What I thought of this book.......2000-10-20
I read this book because it won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1983. It is, I believe, the least intersting and most esoteric book I have ever read. It reminded me of my reading of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981, and which I long wanted to read and then when I read it I found it a chore to read, and greatly welcomed the last page. The last chapter of Transformation made no sense for me at all, and reading this book's only significance is that I have read another Pulitzer Prize winner in history. I thought I should warn persons who might be overly influenced by the other 3 reviews and might think this would be a great book to read.
Tremendous.......2000-08-06
As you would expect from a book that captured the Pulitzer Prize in History, this is an outstanding book. The writing is clear and cogent. As the other reviewers stated, it brings Colonial Virginia to life for the reader. It's going a bit far to suggest that it explains Colonial "America," though, since each colony was disparate. The New England experience does not parallel that of Virginia at all, for example. The book's best contribution is the use of non-written sources to bring to life the world of the unliterate, both free and slave.
Book Description
Society and Space traces the historical construction of contemporary social space in Sri Lanka. Utilizing a world-systems perspective, landscape interpretation, and theories of colonial architecture and urbanism, Nihal Perera looks at colonized, decolonized, and postcolonial Sri Lanka through the lens of successive spatial transformations. Writing from a position in the "postcolonial periphery," the author argues that the politics governing the construction of space of primary importance for those seeking to understand a particular society and culture.
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Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar
Manufacturer: University Alabama Press
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Mississippian Communities and Households
ASIN: 0817309470 |
Book Description
Familiar landmarks in hundreds of American towns, Carnegie libraries today seem far from controversial. In Free to All, however, Abigail A. Van Slyck shows that the classical façades and symmetrical plans of these buildings often mask a complex and contentious history.
"The whole story is told here in this book. Carnegie's wishes, the conflicts among local groups, the architecture, development of female librarians. It's a rich and marvelous story, lovingly told."—Alicia Browne, Journal of American Culture
"This well-written and extensively researched work is a welcome addition to the history of architecture, librarianship, and philanthropy."—Joanne Passet, Journal of American History
"Van Slyck's book is a tremendous contribution for its keenness of scholarship and good writing and also for its perceptive look at a familiar but misunderstood icon of the American townscape."—Howard Wight Marshall, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
"[Van Slyck's] reading of the cultural coding implicit in the architectural design of the library makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the limitations of the doctrine 'free to all.'"—Virginia Quarterly Review
Customer Reviews:
A step in the history of the American public library.......2000-04-12
I had to read this book in library school a few years ago. It not only discusses Carnegie's motives but a number of the different Carnegie libraries across the country and the politics behind building these structures. While I'm not involved in public libraries myself, I feel that this book would be worthwhile reading for most if not all information/library students (because it IS a historical aspect of the information profession) and anyone who truly enjoys their own public library. The Carnegie structures are a legacy that links this effort across the country. If you grew up in a city with a Carnegie library, it's exciting to travel someplace else and look at its sibling; another library that wasn't just built but was developed under an intended global initiative. This book is a no-frills, excellent, easy to read description of this attempt.
Book Description
"Evans has meticulously researched his subject and writes in an elegant and clear prose style that makes his book a pleasure to read.... In short, this is an outstanding scholarly book that should be of interest to Mayanists, art historians, and students of American literature and history."
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The Americas
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Romancing the Maya will be required (and enjoyable) reading for students of the Maya. And its careful analysis of visual expositions—including the subjective uses of photography—makes it especially appropriate for the undergraduate classroom."
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The Journal of Latin American Anthropology
"This work will appeal to general readers because of its subject: ancient Mexico and its first investigators. The archaeologists treated here are some of the most fascinating and rakish in the history of the field. Some were real Indiana Jones types."
—Khristaan Villela, Director, Thaw Art History Center, College of Santa Fe
During Mexico's first century of independence, European and American explorers rediscovered its pre-Hispanic past. Finding the jungle-covered ruins of lost cities and artifacts inscribed with unintelligible hieroglyphs—and having no idea of the age, authorship, or purpose of these antiquities—amateur archaeologists, artists, photographers, and religious writers set about claiming Mexico's pre-Hispanic patrimony as a rightful part of the United States' cultural heritage.
In this insightful work, Tripp Evans explores why nineteenth-century Americans felt entitled to appropriate Mexico's cultural heritage as the United States' own. He focuses in particular on five well-known figures—American writer and amateur archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens, British architect Frederick Catherwood, Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the French émigré photographers Désiré Charnay and Augustus Le Plongeon. Setting these figures in historical and cultural context, Evans uncovers their varying motives, including the Manifest Destiny-inspired desire to create a national museum of American antiquities in New York City, the attempt to identify the ancient Maya as part of the Lost Tribes of Israel (and so substantiate the Book of Mormon), and the hope of proving that ancient Mesoamerica was the cradle of North American and even Northern European civilization. Fascinating stories in themselves, these accounts of the first explorers also add an important new chapter to the early history of Mesoamerican archaeology.
Book Description
The Royal Courts of the Maya is a fascinating look at the pre-Hispanic Maya in the Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic periods of their history. Houston and Inomata's anthology is an interdisciplinary study of the administrative functions, internal dynamics, and symbolic roles of rulers and their royal retinues. Though the core of the book is archaeological in focus, it also encompasses elements of epigraphy (glyph reading), iconography, and ethnohistory, resulting in a truly comprehensive portrait of this sophisticated culture. The book ranges from more theoretical examinations of subjects like ritual and ideology to specific archaeological case studies of major Maya sites and regions. Broad in scope but rich in detail, The Royal Courts of the Maya is a valuable resource for Maya scholars everywhere.
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