Berg Publishers

Artists for the Reich; culture and race from Weimar to Nazi Germany.

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the German Art Society, which was a group founded in 1920, and consisting of artists, writers, and right-wing activists who actively embraced Nazism. Clinefelder (history, U. of Northern Colorado) explains that these artists worked to preserve what they considered to be the German cultural tradition, and argues that they were instrumental in shaping Nazi cultural policies. He examines the Society's founder Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder, the origins of the Society, Weimar culture, National Socialism, and the German Art Society's role in the Third Reich. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Cinema; the archeology of film and the memory of a century.

This dialog between the experimental film director Jean-Luc Godard and the art historian and cinephile Youssef Ishaghpour allows Godard to provide a partial exegesis of his difficult film Histoire(s) du cinéma. In its meander through the history of cinema, the conversation touches on philosophies of history, archeology, the Holocaust, Christianity and cinematography. The dialog is supplemented with Ishaghpour's essay on Godard's genealogy as a modern artist. Ishaghpour writes about the poetic in Godard's work and underlines Godard's insistence on an equality between image and text. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

City of panic.

French architect and urban planner Verilio continues his cultural criticism beginning with a journey across and then beneath Paris. He points out evidence of how cities everywhere are being reconstructed through a campaign of panic: gated communities, policed shopping malls, the net of surveillance, and the media fabrication of a world of fear. Must all cities be war zones, he asks, must they all be the same? No data is provided for the publication of Ville panique. Rose is an award winning freelance translator. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Clothing as material culture.

The principle purpose of the anthology is to demonstrate how contemporary material culture studies transcend the often antagonistic divide between researcher who study textile conservation, design, and museum collections, and those who study the social life of clothing. Anthropologists, most from Britain, explore such topics as the material culture of new fibers, Maori cloaks from New Zealand, and why there are quilts in Polynesia. Only names are indexed. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The culture of death.

By culture of death, Noys (English, U. College Chichester) is not referring to the shrill political debates in the US — one side citing war and execution and the other abortion and euthanasia. Rather he looks at the cultural trappings of death, investigating whether there is anything distinctive about it in contemporary Western society. He draws on a range of theorists and writers about modern death, and both high and popular art, literature, and film. His topics include the space of death, politicizing death, bioethics, and transgressive death. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Empire of the senses; the sensual culture reader.

This intriguing collection posits that the senses are the gateways of knowledge as well as instruments of power. The contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Alain Corbin and others place sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The essays take the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston homeless shelter. The volume includes a bibliography for "fifty ways to come to your senses," listing 50 books representing current sensory research in the humanities, social sciences and the arts. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Fashion zeitgeist; trends and cycles in the fashion system.

Why is it that just after you muck out your closet everything you threw away hits the runways? Vinkin (U. of Zurich) goes beyond what we used to know about fashion cycles as symptoms of economic or social trends and looks at it as pure adornment, an adult pleasure and fascination, and a form of self-expression she dubs "postfashion." She finds within trends of the twentieth century signs that dictating style from above has actually long been gone, and that fashion has advanced to a political statement or expression of identity at a very personal level, complete with an personal interpretation of time and space. Vinkin includes a number of illustrations dating from the 1870s to the 1990s. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Gender and Spanish cinema.

In introducing 13 readings of gender in modern Spanish cinema, Marsh (U. of South Carolina) and Nair (U. of London) discuss how film and gender studies intersect with national identity and sexual politics — straight and gay. Scholars present film synopses and explore themes in films made early in the Franco regime, by Madrid Film School film-makers (e.g. anti-Franco horror master Jesse Franco), and more recently, by acclaimed director Pedro Almodóvar. Includes a filmography. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Industrial ruins; spaces, aesthetics and materiality.

Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan U., UK) is critical of the tendency to consign industrial ruins to the category of "wasteland," devoid of positive social, material, or aesthetic qualities. Instead, he wishes to reclaim them from their official and common sense negative depictions and "highlight the possibilities, effects and experiences which they can provide." He provides chapters that seek to detail their social uses (for accommodation, play, ecological practice, etc.), look at ruins as spaces of disorder that serve as a critique of highly regulated urban space, examine ways in which ruins can assist in questioning normative materialities of what is assigned as waste, and explore ruins as involuntary allegories of memory that stand in contrast to commodified and codified memory such as that found in the production of heritage. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Italian cinema.

Wood (Birkbeck College, U. of London, UK) presents a wide-ranging introduction to Italian cinema. Taking into account the history of Italian film production from its beginnings to the dawn of the 21st century, she offers chapters on the history of Italian film, the epic and historical film, realism and neorealism, auteur cinema, treatments of political history and social reality, representations of gender and gender politics, and visual style and the use of cinematic space. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The Latin American fashion reader.

Twenty academics from the U.S., Brazil, and Argentina whose research focuses on the interrelationship between dress, body and culture contribute 17 chapters examining the history and significance of Latin American fashion. Coverage includes Latin America's colonial history and the power of dress; the alteration of "traditional" indigenous dress for sale in the modern/tourist/global marketplace; the cultural imaginary, and the articulations of dress within and beyond the parameters of urban and national spaces; cultural mediation and consumption of fashionable Latin(o) American identities; and the status of fashion amidst economic and political change in Latin America. Distributed in the U.S. by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Mallarmé on fashion; a translation of the fashion magazine, La dernière mode, with commentary.

In 1874, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé published a fashion magazine called La Dernière Mode. This volume is a reproduction of the eight issues of that work, translated into English, along with commentary by Furbank (Open University) and Cain (formerly of the National Library of Scotland). Beginning with a "pre-history" of the magazine, the editors then present the eight issues, complete with facsimiles and commentary, and a concluding analysis of the social and historical context of the magazine by Cain. The editors omit short stories and poems printed in the magazine. There is no index, although some names and places within the magazine are in boldface. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Man appeal; advertising, modernism and men's wear.

In this study Jobling (U. of Brighton, UK) examines the history of men's fashion advertising in print in the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the themes explored include the transition from practical to "atmospheric" appeals, the impact of market research, and the display of the male body in underwear advertising. The volume is illustrated with b&w reproductions of ads for men's wear. Distributed in the U.S. by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Mixed emotions; anthropological studies of feeling.

In this collection of 11 essays, contributors describe their most recent work in the anthropology of emotions, an interdisciplinary field which is becoming increasingly popular in its commentary about the natural or cultural nature of emotions, their contributions to the political, cultural and social, and their relationship to fieldwork and memory. General topics include feelings and human ecology, Darwin on the expression of emotions, imagination in anthropological studies, resentment in a sense of self, theories in religious rituals, art and resolution, the negotiation of fear in Northern Ireland, subjectivity in landscapes, grief amongst Spanish Gitanos, cross-species emotional affinity in Japan, and the memories, emotions and identities of the expelled. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Nazi chic?; fashioning women in the Third Reich.

Within the larger history of fashion, especially for women, in Nazi Germany, Guenthor (history, Houston Community College, Texas) finds smaller stories of economic greed and political machinations; of ideological hyperboles, cultural contestations, and the manufacture of illusion; of gender fashioning and class conflict; of high fashion salons and Jewish ghettos; and of world war, home fronts, and concentration camps. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Representing East Germany since unification; from colonization to nostalgia.

Cooke (German studies, U. of Leeds, UK) traces cultural representations in Germany of the former communist German Democratic Republic in the years following its collapse. He first discusses the political ramifications of state-led attempts to come to terms with the GDR as represented by the Enquete Commission and literary representation of the GDR's State Security Service (the Stasi) that challenged the view put forth in forums such as the Enquete Commission. He then turns his attention to films such as 2003's Good Bye, Lenin, the "Ostalgie" (combining the "nostalgia" and the German word for "east") craze manifested in subsequent television shows, and representations of the GDR on the World Wide Web. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Sexing la mode; gender, fashion and commercial culture in old regime France.

Jones (history, Rutgers U.) examines how various classes of women in 18th-century France perceived the connections between their personal identity, their public performance as representatives of their estate in life, and their way of decorating their bodies in the clothes they wore. She shows how court costume reflected identity, how the middle classes understood the use of la mode but not how to change it, and how the social theorists of various stripes found it distasteful that working women found power in selling la mode to their betters. The book is distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The taste culture reader; experiencing food and drink.

A wide range of social and natural sciences and humanities, and as wide a range of cultures and historical periods, are represented in these 37 essays on the sense of taste. They cover the physiology and circumstance of taste; gustation in history; eloquent flavors; body and soul; taste and aesthetic discrimination; fine discernments and the cultivation of taste; taste, emotion, and memory; and artifice and authenticity. Among specific topics are the chemical senses taste and smell, culinary culture in Asia and Europe, salt as the edible rock, D. T. Suzuki on Zen and the art of tea, David Hume on the standard of taste, tasting problems and errors of perception, the breast of Aphrodite, and frozen food and meals in The Matrix. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Tattoo; an anthropology.

Kuwahara (anthropology, U. of London) examines the significance of tattooing in contemporary French Polynesian society. Unlike previous studies that have focused on tradition and ethnic identity, this scholarly volume addresses the discontinuity of the Tahitian tattooing tradition (which was suppressed in the 1830s and revived in the 1980s), as well as the spatiality of tattooing. After providing a history of Tahitian tattooing and an introduction to the practice and form of tattooing, the book looks at tattooing in terms of social relationships, ownership & transmission, festivals, identities, and the practice inside a prison. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Twentieth-century American fashion.

Highlighting the effects of leading cultural elements, this volume traces the development of fashion in twentieth-century America. Eleven contributions from Welters (textiles, fashion merchandising, and design, U. of Rhode Island), Cunningham (consumer sciences, Ohio State U.) and other scholars discuss such topics as how Greenwich Village bohemians influenced 1920s flapper fashions; the Onondaga Silk Company's "American Artist Print Series" of 1947; and the "dressing for success" books of the 1970s. Distributed in the U.S. by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Uniforms exposed; from conformity to transgression.

Craik (creative communication, U. of Canberra) looks at uniforms and their cultural significance for everyone from fascists to fashionistas. Tracing the troubling connections among religious orders, the military, schools and fetish clubs, she illuminates the ways uniforms alternately control bodies and enable subversion. Craik considers the reasons that certain professions require uniforms and whether uniforms direct their wearers how to act and others how to respond. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)