- The Alhambra
- Robert Irwin
- The Alhambra is the only Muslim palace to have survived since the Middle Ages and has long been a byword for exotic and melancholy beauty. In his absorbing new book, Irwin, Arabist and novelist, examines its history and allure.
- Hardcover 2004
- Beijing Time
- Michael Dutton
- Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo
- Dong Dong Wu
- Deeply immersed in the culture, everyday and otherworldly, this anthropological tour, from ancient cosmology to Communist kitsch, allows us to see as never before how the people of Beijing—and China—work and live.
- Hardcover 2008
- Breaking Barriers
- Constantine Nomikos Vaporis
- Constantine Vaporis challenges the notion that an elaborate and restrictive system of travel regulations in Tokugawa Japan prevented widespread travel, maintaining instead that a "culture of movement" developed in that era.
- Hardcover
- City Between Worlds
- Leo Ou-fan Lee
- Hong Kong is perched on the fault line between China and the West, a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. Lee offers an insider’s view of Hong Kong, capturing the history and culture that make his densely packed home city so different from its generic neighbors.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Colosseum
- Keith Hopkins
- Mary Beard
- The history of the Colosseum--chockfull of romantic but erroneous myths--is, in reality, much stranger than the legend. In this engaging book, we learn the details of how the arena was built and at what cost; we are introduced to the emperors who sometimes fought in gladiatorial games staged at the Colosseum; and we take measure of the audience who reveled in, or opposed, these games. The authors also trace the strange afterlife of the monument--as fortress, shrine of martyrs, church, and glue factory.
- Hardcover 2005
- The Forbidden City
- Geremie R. Barmé
- The Forbidden City (Zijin Cheng) lying at the heart of Beijing formed the hub of the Celestial Empire for five centuries. Over the past century it has been celebrated and excoriated as a symbol of all that was magnificent and terrible in dynastic China’s legacy. In this book, Barmé provides a new and original history of the culture, politics, and architecture of the Forbidden City.
- Hardcover 2008
- From the Outer World
- Oscar Handlin, Editor
- Lillian Handlin, Editor
- Oscar and Lilian Handlin show how the new voyagers in the twentieth century--from Asia, Africa, Australia, and Latin America--record their experiences in the United States. Many accounts are newly translated from Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Spanish, and include such authors as Rabindranath Tagore, V. S. Naipaul and Octavio Paz.
- Paperback 1997 / Hardcover
- The Great Wall Revisited
- William Lindesay
- A journey along the Great Wall in the past and present, this landmark volume offers an extraordinary portrait of perhaps the world’s most famous structure.
- Hardcover 2008
- Jerusalem
- Simon Goldhill
- Jerusalem is more than a tourist site—it is a city where every square mile is layered with historical significance, religious intensity, and extraordinary stories. It is a past marked by three great forces: religion, war, and monumentality. In this book, Goldhill takes on this peculiar archaeology of human imagination, hope, and disaster to provide a tour through the history of this most image-filled and ideology-laden city.
- Hardcover 2008
- Mean and Lowly Things
- Kate Jackson
- In 2005 Jackson ventured into the remote swamp forests of the northern Congo to collect reptiles and amphibians. This book is Jackson’s unvarnished account of her research on the front lines of the global biodiversity crisis—coping with interminable delays in obtaining permits, learning to outrun advancing army ants, subsisting on a diet of Spam and manioc, and ultimately falling in love with the strangely beautiful flooded forest.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Parthenon
- Mary Beard
- At once an entrancing cultural history and a congenial guide for tourists, armchair travelers, and amateur archaeologists alike, this book conducts readers through the storied past and towering presence of the most famous building in the world. Who built the Parthenon, and for what purpose? How are we to understand its sculpture? Why is it such a compelling monument? The classicist and historian Mary Beard offers readers the ultimate tour of the marvelous history and present state of this glory of the Acropolis, and of the world.
- Hardcover 2003
- Rome from the Ground Up
- James H. S. McGregor
- Rome is not one city but many, each with its own history unfolding from a different center. Beginning with the very shaping of the ground on which Rome first rose, this book conjures all these cities, past and present, conducting the reader through time and space to the complex and shifting realities--architectural, historical, political, and social--that constitute Rome.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
- The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt
- John Ray
- The Rosetta Stone is one of the world's great wonders, attracting awed pilgrims by the tens of thousands each year. This book tells the Stone's story, from its discovery by Napoleon's expedition to Egypt to its current--and controversial-- status as the single most visited object on display in the British Museum.
- Hardcover 2007
- St. Peter's
- Keith Miller
- Built by the decree of Constantine, rebuilt by some of the most distinguished architects in Renaissance Italy, emulated by Hitler's architect in his vision for Germania, immortalized on film by Fellini, and fictionalized by a modern American bestseller, St. Peter's is the most recognizable church in the world. This book covers the social, political, and architectural history of the church from the fourth century to the present.
- Hardcover 2007
- Stonehenge
- Rosemary Hill
- Hill guides the reader on a tour of Stonehenge in all its cultural contexts, as a monument to many things—to Renaissance Humanism, Romantic despair, Victorian enterprise, and English Radicalism.
- Hardcover 2008
- Taj Mahal
- Giles Tillotson
- The meaning of the Taj Mahal, the perceptions and responses it prompts, ideas about the building and the history that shape them: these form the subject of Tillotson’s book. More than a richly illustrated history, this book is an eloquent meditation on the place of the Taj Mahal in the cultural imagination of India and the wider world.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Temple of Jerusalem
- Simon Goldhill
- It was destroyed nearly 2000 years ago, and yet the Temple of Jerusalem--cultural memory, symbol, and site--remains one of the most powerful, and most contested, buildings in the world. This glorious structure, imagined and re-imagined, reconsidered and reinterpreted again and again over two millennia, emerges in all its historical, cultural, and religious significance in Simon Goldhill's account.
- Hardcover 2005
- The Tomb of Agamemnon
- Cathy Gere
- Mycenae, the fabled city of Homer's King Agamemnon, leapt into the headlines in the late nineteenth century when Heinrich Schliemann announced that he had opened the Tomb of Agamemnon and found the body of the hero smothered in gold treasure. In this book, historian of science Cathy Gere tells the story of these extraordinary ruins.
- Hardcover 2006
- Venice from the Ground Up
- James H. S. McGregor
- Venice came to life on mudflats at the edge of the habitable world. Protected in a tidal estuary from invaders and Byzantine overlords, the fishermen and traders who settled there crafted a way of life unlike anything the Roman Empire had ever known. In an astonishing feat of narrative history, James H. S. McGregor recreates this world, with its waterways rather than roads and its livelihood harvested from the sea. The narrative follows both a chronological and geographical organization, so that readers can trace the city's evolution by chapter and visitors can explore it by district on foot and by boat.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
- Visions of Persia
- Elio Brancaforte
- This work examines the travel account of a German baroque author who journeyed in search of silk from Northern Germany, through Muscovy, to the court of Shah Safi in Isfahan. Adam Olearius introduced Persian literature, history, and arts to the German-speaking public; his frank appraisal of Persian customs foreshadows the enlightened spirit of the eighteenth century (influencing Montesquieu's Persian Letters as well as Goethe's West-Eastern Divan) and prepares the way for German Romanticism's infatuation with Persian poetry.
- Paperback 2004 / Hardcover 2004
- Washington from the Ground Up
- James H. S. McGregor
- At the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, President Washington chose a diamond-shaped site for the city that would bear his name, along with the burdens and blessings of democracy. Moving chronologically and geographically throughout the District, McGregor tells a tale of two cities: official Washington, whose stately neoclassical buildings expressed the government's power and global reach; and DC, whose minority communities, especially African Americans, lived in the shadows of poverty.
- Hardcover 2007
- Westminster Abbey
- Richard Jenkyns
- Westminster Abbey is the most complex church in existence. This is both an appreciation of an architectural masterpiece and an exploration of the building's shifting meanings. We hear the voices of those who have described its forms, moods, and ceremonies, from Shakespeare and Voltaire to Dickens and Henry James; we see how rulers have made use of it, from medieval kings to modern prime ministers.
- Hardcover 2005