Reaktion Books: 753 books

Today most of us enjoy the work of famed Renaissance artist Michelangelo by perusing art books or strolling along the galleries of a museum—and the luckier of us have had a chance to see his extraordinary frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But as Bernadine Barnes shows in this book,...

  He was relatively unknown in his lifetime, but Karl Marx’s theories about society, economics, and politics changed the world, led to the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union and the creation of the People’s Republic of China, and inspired variants from Leninism and...

Few thinkers better encapsulate the two polarities of economic and social thought in the twenty-first century than Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Wrestling with the horrors of world wars, the atrocities of fascist regimes, the hungers of the Great Depression, and the turbulence of political...

What is the kimono? Everyday garment? Art object? Symbol of Japan? As this book shows, the kimono has served all of these roles, its meaning changing across time and with the perspective of the wearer or viewer.             Kimono: A Modern History begins by exposing the seventeenth- and...

Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China is not simply a survey of sixteenth-century images, but rather, a thorough and thoughtful examination of visual culture in China's Ming Dynasty, one that considers images wherever they appeared—not only paintings, but also illustrated books, maps, ceramic...

The life of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) is the quintessential writer’s biography—great works arising from a life of despair, poverty, alcoholism, and a mysterious solitary death. It may seem like a cliché now, but it was Poe who helped shape this idea in the popular imagination. Despite or perhaps...

Herman Melville is hailed as one of the greats—if not the greatest—of American literature. Born in New York in 1819, he first achieved recognition for his daring stylistic innovations, but it was Moby-Dick that would win him global fame. In this new critical biography, Kevin J. Hayes surveys Melville’s...

What is it about Tony Soprano that makes him so amiable? For that matter, how is it that many of us secretly want Scarface to succeed or see Michael Corleone as, ultimately, a hero? What draws us into the otherwise horrifically violent world of the mafia? In The Mafia, Roberto M. Dainotto explores...

From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s writings rank among the most intimidating works of literature. Unfortunately, many of the books that purport to explain Joyce are equally difficult. The Critical Lives series comes to the rescue with this concise yet deep examination of Joyce’s life...

Most books on the history of gardens describe the way that gardens have been created; by contrast, The Afterlife of Gardens examines the way that gardens have been experienced. Using examples from many sites around the world, John Dixon Hunt examines responses to gardens, from Renaissance sites to...

Mr. Pink: "Why can't we pick out our own color?" Joe: "I tried that once, it don't work. You get four guys fighting over who's gonna be Mr. Black." —Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs Men's clothes went black in the nineteenth century. Dickens, Ruskin and...

What do they all mean – the lascivious ape, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs to be found protruding from the edges of medieval buildings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts? Michael Camille explores that riotous...

Günter Grass was Germany’s foremost writer for more than half a century, and his books were and remain best-sellers across the world. The Tin Drum was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1979, and the memoir Peeling the Onion astounded readers by revealing Grass had been drafted into the military...

We all know what it is to dream, but we also know how difficult it is to describe or interpret dreams, or explain what they actually are. To attempt to articulate a dream is to realize how inadequate our words are to describe the experience. Dreams are beyond words, consisting of much more than what...