Reaktion Books: 753 books

Independence has been a contested issue in Scotland since the region was first invaded by England in 1707, and the realm continues to linger between regional status and full sovereignty. The issue of independence has risen to the forefront of Scottish discussion in the past fifty years, and Murray...

The Art of Suicide is a history of the visual representation of suicide from the ancient world to its decriminalization in the 20th century. After looking at instances of voluntary death in ancient Greece, Ron Brown discusses the contrast between the extraordinary absence of such events in early Christianity...

The human tongue has somewhere up to eight thousand taste buds to inform us when something is sweet, salty, sour, or bitter—or as we usually think of it—delicious or revolting. Tastes differ from one region to the next, and no two people’s seem to be the same. But why is it that some people...

Many consider conscience to be one of the most important—if not the fundamental—quality that makes us human, distinguishing us from animals, on one hand, and machines on the other. But what is conscience, exactly? Is it a product of our biological roots, as Darwin thought, or is it a purely social...

How do we decide what is junk? The discarded remnants of our daily lives may no longer be useful to us, yet John Scanlan proposes in On Garbage that our trash is actually a treasure trove of artifacts that reveals intriguing insights into the modern human condition and the evolution of Western culture. On...

It scares—and titillates—in such movies as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Basic Instinct. It violently ended the lives of legendary artists such as Selena and John Lennon, and thousands of people endure it daily in anonymity from ex-lovers and strangers. Stalking has been a fact of human society...

Cairo is a 1,400-year-old metropolis whose streets are inscribed with sagas, a place where the pressures of life test people's equanimity to the very limit. Virtually surrounded by desert, sixteen million Cairenes cling to the Nile and each other, proximities that color and shape lives. Packed with...

Our bodies are not fixed. They expand and contract with variations in diet, exercise, and illness. They also alter as we age, changing over time to be markedly different at the end of our lives from what they were at birth. In a similar way, our attitudes to bodies, and especially posture—how people...

 Since his death in 1974 at the age of twenty-six, singer-songwriter Nick Drake has gained a huge international audience and come to be thought of as the epitome of English romanticism. But while his small body of work has evoked poetic comparisons with Blake and Keats, closer inspection of Drake’s...

What is a truffle? Is it the über-shroom, the highest order of fungal foods? Does it arrive, as some cultures feel, in the moment of a thunderclap? One thing is for sure: despite its unappetizing appearance, the truffle is without a doubt one of the most prized ingredients in the world’s pantry....

 The eighteenth century saw the rise of new and more sympathetic understanding of animals as philosophy, literature, and art argued that animals could feel and therefore possess inalienable rights. This idea gave birth to a diverse movement that affects how we understand our relationship to the natural...

The seventeenth century is considered the Dutch Golden Age, a time when the Dutch were at the forefront of social change, economics, the sciences, and art. In Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, eminent historian J. L. Price goes beyond the standard descriptions of the cultural achievements of the Dutch...

Could a book by any other name smell as sweet? Absolutely not. The rose is the world’s favorite flower—and always has been. It is our greatest floral symbol of love and romance, and it is a bloom that touches our hearts as the flower most often chosen to celebrate significant milestones—weddings,...

This extensively illustrated book examines Greenaway's vision from a number of perspectives and traces a shift of sensibility in his work. David Pascoe examines not only Greenaway's films, but also his paintings, exhibitions and installations. "[Pascoe] tirelessly explicates the numerology...