Böcker utgivna av Reaktion Books

Packed with incident and anecdote Cairo: City of Sand describes the city's given circumstances and people's attitudes of response. Apart from a brisk historical overview, this book focuses on the present moment of one of the world's most illustrious and irreducible cities.

Explores the intriguing and manifold uses of animal imagery in modern and contemporary art.

From Victor Frankenstein to Dr. Moreau to Doc Brown in Back to the Future, the scientist has been a puzzling, fascinating, and threatening presence in popular culture. From films we have learned that scientists are either evil maniacal geniuses or bumbling saviors of society. Mad, Bad and Dangerous? puts this dichotomy to the test, offering a wholly engaging yet not uncritical history of the cinematic portrayal of scientists. Christopher Frayling traces the genealogy of the scientist in film, showing how the scientist has often embodied the predominant anxieties of a particular historical moment. The fear of nuclear holocaust in the 1950s gave rise to a rash of radioactive-mutant horror movies, while the possible dangers of cloning and biotechnology in the 1990s manifested themselves in Jurassic Park. During these eras, the scientist's actions have been viewed through a lens of fascination and fear. In the past few decades, with increased public awareness of environmental issues and of the impact of technology on nature, the scientist has been transformed once again--into a villainous agent of money-hungry corporate powers. Mad, Bad and Dangerous? also examines biographical depictions of actual scientists, illuminating how they are often portrayed as social misfits willing to sacrifice everything to the interests of science. Drawing on such classic and familiar films as Frankenstein, Metropolis, and The Wizard of Oz, Frayling brings social and film history together to paint a much larger picture of the evolving value of science and technology to society. A fascinating study of American culture and film, Mad, Bad and Dangerous? resurrects the scientists of late night movies and drive-in theaters and gives them new life as cultural talismans.

The Mughal empire (1526 1857) has long been viewed as a wonderland of unimaginable treasure; it was in fact the mightiest Islamic empire in the history of India. This book describes the political, military and economic rise of the Mughals, their system of rule, and their gradual collapse, finally supplanted by the British colonial empire in 1857.

Today geraniums can be found throughout the world, their widespread use in food and perfume manufacture as well as floral display exemplifying the global industrialization of plant production. This book details how the amenable geranium remains a plant that many love and others love to hate, but above all it is a flower that is seldom ignored.

More than any other tree, the Oak has been a symbol of strength and durability. The Oak has been adopted by many countries as a national symbol, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. This book examines this magnificent and ubiquitous tree, tracing its biological history in its many manifestations, natural and cultural.

Based on letters, diaries and oral histories, this title explores the impact of the 'war to end all wars' on the male body. It argues that military experiences led to a greater sharing of gender identities between men of different classes and ages.

Eyewitnessing evaluates the worth of images as historical evidence, examining religious, political, advertising and commodified images. Peter Burke challenges the conventional view that images represent specific historical meanings.

Animal is a timely overview of the many ways in which we live with animals. Examining novels such as Charlotte's Web, films such as Old Yeller and Babe, science and advertising, fashion and philosophy, the book evaluates the ways in which we think about animals and challenges a number of the assumptions we hold.

In the early twenty-first century animals are news. This title looks at the cultural and social role of animals from 1800 to the present at the way in which visual images and myths captured the popular imagination and encouraged sympathy for animals and outrage at their exploitation.

Considers the nature of photography, examining the language used in titles, captions and commentaries, particularly as they relate to documentary photography, photojournalism and fashion photography. This book addresses the question of how the photograph communicates its message, with or without the aid of language.

Traces the evolution of the highly integrated global financial system from 1750 to the present. This book examines the corporate form of business organization in the eighteenth century that saw an explosion of growth in the nineteenth, which facilitated the international movement of capital.

'What is history'? From Thucydides to Toynbee, historians and non-historians alike have wondered how to answer this question. This book focuses on developments over the years in historical writing, not least the renewed interest in the status of narrative itself and the presence of the authorial 'voice'.

Icons are among the most elusive subjects in the history of art, but at the same time their study constitutes possibly its fastest expanding field, and with the opening-up of the former Soviet Union many new objects are being discovered, studied and exhibited. This book considers the icon as an integral document of society.

'Race' was essentially a construction of the 18th century, a means by which the Enlightenment could impose rational order on human variety. This title argues that ideas of beauty were from the beginning inseparable from race, as Europeans judged the civility and aesthetic capacity of other races by their appearance.

A new addition to Reaktion's animal series, Parrot is a natural history, as well as a fascinating and innovative account of parrots in culture

This stunning volume is the first comprehensive history of the making and meanings of Russian icons to be released in English. Includes artworks that have never before been published in the Western world.

Shows how stupidity manifests itself in all areas, in everyone, at all times, proposing that stupidity is the foundation of our civilization. This title analyses stupidity on the basis of fairy tales, cartoons, triumphal arches, garden architecture, Baroque ceilings, jokes, flimsy excuses and science fiction.

Traces the psychology, history and theory of the compulsion to collect, focusing on the normative collections of the Western canon. This title includes essays on the Neoclassical architect Sir John Soane, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Schwitters, one of the masters of collage.

This classic text has become essential reading for all those working in the field of museum studies.

Addresses the isolated fragments of films, iconic images or scenes, that fleetingly cross our perceptions and thoughts in the course of everyday life. This title examines a kaleidescope of film fragments drawn from a variety of media, the internet, memory and fantasy.

Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. Based on contemporary Chinese sources, this illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming Dynasty China (1369-1644) in the social and cultural history of the day.

Presenting a study of Nicolas Poussin, one of seventeenth-century Europe's greatest artists, this title offers a series of connected studies that provide ways of interpreting the work and ideas of Poussin.

Traces and explains the proliferation of paintings of mystical visions during the Counter-Reformation.

From the earliest scratches on stone and bone to the languages of computers and the internet, "e;A History of Writing"e; offers an investigation into the origin and development of writing throughout the world. Commencing with the first stages of information storage knot records, tally sticks, pictographic storytelling the book then focuses on the emergence of complete writing systems in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC, and their diffusion to Egypt, the Indus Valley and points east, with special attention given to Semitic writing systems and their eventual spread to the Indian subcontinent. Also documented is the rise of Phoenician and its effect on the Greek alphabet, generating the many alphabetic scripts of the West. Chinese, Korean and Japanese writing systems and scripts are dealt with in depth, as is writing in pre-Colombian America. Also explored are Western Europe's medieval manuscripts and the history of printing, leading to the innovations in technology and spelling rules of the 19th and 20th centuries. Illustrated with numerous examples, this book offers a global overview in a form that everyone can follow.The author also reveals his own discoveries made since the early 1980s, making it a useful reference for both students and specialists as well as the general reader.

A wide-ranging reassessment of Renaissance art that examines the ways in which European culture came to define itself culturally and aesthetically in the years 1450 to 1550.

In their diverse expressions, maps and the representational processes of mapping have constructed the spaces of modernity since the early Renaissance. This title explores what mapping has meant in the past and how its meanings have altered.

War has always been close to the centre of British culture, but never more so than in the period since 1850. This text explores the way in which images of battle, both literary and visual, have been constructed in British fiction and popular culture since this time.

Shows how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.

From cookbooks and family recipes to novels, poems, songs and cartoons, this book tells the story of puddings and how they developed from early savoury, sausage - like mixtures to today's sweet and sticky confections. It traces the development of puddings and explains how advances in kitchen equipment have changed them over time.