Sodom Laurel Album

"Richly evocative images are interlaced with stories of the people of Sodom Laurel and with Amberg's own candid journals, which reveal his gradually growing understanding of this world he entered as a stranger.

Though artistic and ambitious, Paul Kwilecki (1928-2009) chose to remain in Bainbridge, Georgia, the small Decatur County town where he was born, raised, and ran the family's hardware store. He had always been interested in photography and taught himself how to use a camera. Over four decades, he documented life in his community, making hundreds of masterful and intimate black-and-white prints. Kwilecki developed his visual ideas in series of photographs of high school proms, prison hog killings, shade-tree tobacco farming, factory work, church life, the courthouse. He also wrote eloquently about the people and places he so poignantly depicted, and in this book his unique knowledge is powerfully articulated in more than 200 photographs and selected prose. Paul Kwilecki worked alone, his correspondence with important photographers his only link to the larger art world. Despite this isolation, Kwilecki's work became widely known. "Decatur County is home," he said, "and I know it from my special warp, having been both nourished and wounded by it."

The most significant of the more than 175 varieties of Japanese ornamental trees featured, along with a discussion of Japanese garden design, and cultivation tips for home gardeners.

Michael Walker’s Laurel Canyon presents the inside story of the once hottest rock and roll neighborhood in LA. In the late sixties and early seventies, an impromptu collection of musicians colonized a eucalyptus-scented canyon deep in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and melded folk, rock, and savvy American pop into a sound that conquered the world as thoroughly as the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had before them. Thirty years later, the music made in Laurel Canyon continues to pour from radios, iPods, and concert stages around the world. During the canyon's golden era, the musicians who lived and worked there scored dozens of landmark hits, from "California Dreamin'" to "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" to "It's Too Late," selling tens of millions of records and resetting the thermostat of pop culture. In Laurel Canyon, veteran journalist Michael Walker tells the inside story of this unprecedented gathering of some of the baby boomer's leading musical lights—including Joni Mitchell; Jim Morrison; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; John Mayall; the Mamas and the Papas; Carole King; the Eagles; and Frank Zappa, to name just a few—who turned Los Angeles into the music capital of the world and forever changed the way popular music is recorded, marketed, and consumed.

Temperate broadleaved trees grow in very different ecosystems in the northern and southern hemispheres, but are also found extensively in many tropical and subtropical mountain areas. A wide range of non-wood products are derived from temperate broadleaved trees, and their description is organized in this volume according to the part of the tree from which they are obtained (whole tree, foliage, flowers, etc.). This information is presented in order to raise awareness on, and assist in identifying, opportunities for the management and production of non-wood products from temperate broadleaved trees. The intended audience of this publication ranges from interest groups in the forest, agriculture and rural development sectors to conservation agencies in developed and developing countries.

This book celebrates the plants of the Old Testament and New Testament, including the Apocrypha, and of the Quran. From acacia, the wood of the tabernacle, to wormwood, whose bitter leaves cured intestinal worms, 81 fascinating chapters—covering every plant that has a true botanical counterpart—tell the stories of the fruits and grains, grasses and trees, flowers and fragrances of ancient lore. The descriptions include the plants' botanical characteristics, habitat, uses, and literary context. With evocative quotations and revelatory interpretations, this information is all the more critical today as the traditional agrarian societies that knew the plants intimately become urbanized. The unusually broad geographic range of this volume extends beyond Israel to encompass the Holy Land's biblical neighbors from southern Turkey to central Sudan and from Cyprus to the Iraq border. Richly illustrated with extensive color photography and with a foreword by the incomparable Garrison Keillor, this delightful ecumenical botany offers the welcome tonic of a deep look into an enduring, shared natural heritage.

Collected interviews featuring the Nebula Award–winning author and his thoughts on topics like literary criticism, comic books, race, and sexuality. For nearly three decades, Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction has transported millions of readers to the fringes of time, technology, and outer space. Now Delany surveys the realms of his own experience as a writer, critic, theorist, and gay Black man in this collection of written interviews, a type of guided essay. Because the written interview avoids the “mutual presence positioned at the semantic core” of traditional interview, Delany explains, “a kind of cut remains between the participants—a fissure in which the truths there may be more malleable, less rigid.” Within that fissure Delany pursues the breadth and depth of his ideas on language and theory, the politics of literary composition, the experience of marginality, and the philosophical, commercial, and personal contexts of writing today. Gathered from sources as diverse as Diacritics and The Comics Journal, these interviews reveal the broad range of Delany’s thought and interests. “Delany has a unique place in late twentieth century letters. A lifelong inhabitant of the margins, both social and literary, he has used his marginalized status as a lens to focus his astute observations of American literature and society. From these interviews his voice emerges, provocative, precise, and engaging.” —Kathleen Spencer, University of Nebraska “Samuel R. Delany never shies away from contestable positions or provocative opinions. In his fiction, Delany can write like quicksilver, and in lectures or panel discussions, he is easily SF’s most articulate spokesperson in academia. . . . There is much here that is not covered in Delany’s critical or autobiographical writings, and much that anyone seriously interested in SF—or many of Delany’s other favorite topics—ought to consider.” —Locus “Delany is fascinating whether discussing SF, comics, or his experiences as a Black American, and this collection . . . is as entertaining as it is informative.” —Science Fiction Chronicle “Yevgeny Zamyatin? Stanislaw Lem? Forget it! Delany is both, with a lot of Borges and Bruno Schultz thrown in.” —Village Voice

Explores the nature, the meaning, and the very history of the idea of beauty in Western culture; illustrated with abundant examples of painting and sculpture and lengthy quotations from writers and philosophers. Demonstrates how every historical era has had its own ideas about eye-appeal.

Throughout history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers, and filmmakers have recorded and tried to make sense of boxing. From Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In her encyclopedic investigation of the shifting social, political, and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, Kasia Boddy throws new light on an elemental struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boddy explores the ways in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media. Boddy pulls no punches, looking to the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding and Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin and Philip Roth, James Joyce and Mae West, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Dickens in an all-encompassing study that tells us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.