Collection: Adult

The deepest dive yet into the heart and soul, secret affairs, unexplored alliances, and bitter feuds of a generally worshipped, intermittently reviled American icon.

Perhaps no founding father is as mysterious as Thomas Jefferson. The author of the Declaration of Independence was both a gifted wordsmith and a bundle of nerves. His superior knowledge of the human heart is captured in the impassioned appeal he brought to the Declaration. But as a champion of the common man who lived a life of privilege on a mountaintop plantation of his own design, he has eluded biographers who have sought to make sense of his inner life. In Being Thomas Jefferson, acclaimed Jefferson scholar Andrew Burstein peels away layers of obfuscation, taking us past the veneer of the animated letter-writer to describe a confused lover and a misguided humanist, too timid to embrace antislavery.

Jefferson was a soft-spoken man who recoiled from direct conflict, yet a master puppeteer in politics. Whenever he left Monticello, where he could control his environment, he suffered debilitating headaches that plagued him for decades, until he finally retired from public life. So, what did it feel like to be Thomas Jefferson? Burstein explains the decision to take as his mistress Sally Hemings, the enslaved half-sister of his late wife, who bore him six children, none of whom he acknowledged. Presenting a society that encouraged separation between public and private, appearance and essence, Burstein paints a dramatic picture of early American culture and brings us closer to Jefferson's life and thought than ever before.

Bring the vibrant joy of your garden inside with this essential guide to growing and arranging cut flowers from Sunday Times bestselling author Sarah Raven.

I'll take you through the year and show you everything I've learnt about growing cut flowers over three decades, but most of all why having home-grown cut flowers in one's house is an easy life transformer.

In this latest book from gardening expert Sarah Raven, you'll learn what to grow when (sow calendula in September!), how best to harvest (cut lower for a longer stem!), tips on combining color for a successful display, and much, much more. With this information up your sleeve, you'll have a house full of flowers and a garden that looks better-always jam-packed with color-because of your harvest.

Billy Showell is a well-respected botanical watercolour artist, and her exceptional eye for detail and ability to re-create the form, texture, colour and patterning of a wide range of plants have earned her a formidable reputation worldwide. Her compositions are given a contemporary, sometimes playful twist, while retaining all the beauty and accuracy of traditional botanical paintings. In this inspiring and indispensable guide for botanical artists, she reveals the materials, methods and techniques she uses to attain her stunningly beautiful portraits of flowers, fruit and vegetables. There is expert guidance on tools and materials, working from life, observation, and drawing and painting techniques, as well as detailed sections on pattern, texture, and colour and colour mixing. With numerous step-by-step studies, close-up photographs and examples of Billy's exquisite paintings, this book is not only packed full of invaluable advice and information but also a visually stunning showcase for the work of this amazing artist.

A richly illustrated volume accompanying the first retrospective of Black and Indigenous American sculptor Edmonia Lewis.

Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907) broke international, racial, and gender barriers as a young artist who traveled to Rome in 1866 to join the leading American sculptors of her generation. She created acclaimed figurative works in marble and achieved great success, but her status as a Black woman of Indigenous (Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation) descent complicated the critical reception of her oeuvre. After her death, her contribution to American sculpture was largely overlooked.

Accompanying the first monographic retrospective of the artist, this lavishly illustrated volume reproduces examples of all Lewis's known works and shares new discoveries that illuminate her artistic vision of community, reform, and resilience. Essays place her sculptures in conversation with abolitionist and feminist movements and consider the themes Lewis's art addressed, including Indigenous artistry, social and political reformers, and religious and mythological subjects.

'The inestimable Tom Hodgkinson once again contributes to our collective calm with this perfectly judged collection of philosophy.' Emma Thompson

'A great guide to philosophy and big ideas... it made me laugh out loud. It's such a cheerful book, I read it in one go (well... two) and emerged refreshed and nourished.' Dominic West

'He knows that play is one of the best teachers, and this treatise on Stoicism is illuminating, engaging, informative and highly accessible' Irvine Welsh

There's more to Stoicism than shrugging your shoulders and getting on with it, as Tom Hodgkinson discovers in this witty and enlightening book.

Stoicism is an enduring and ancient philosophy that can help you with everything from love and politics to money and spirituality. The Stoics were celebrated by the Romans, they influenced Christianity and even Shakespeare admired them. Today, both therapists and politicians will profess adherence to the Stoic creed. The "serenity prayer" is a Stoic statement. The Beatles' "Let it Be" is a Stoic song.

Tom Hodgkinson, author of bestselling How to Be Idle, goes back to the original philosophical texts and looks at the greatest Stoics in history - including Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and St Augustine - to see if they can help us find fulfilment. He discovers that Stoicism is much stranger and more radical than you'd think.

With witty reflections on everything from ethics, grammar, rhetoric, education, friendship and the importance of occasionally letting your hair down, Tom Hodgkinson shares his genuinely funny and brilliant guide to the Stoic life.

The surprising story of how corporate scandals - from Enron to the Facebook privacy scandal - change the way the world works for the better.

Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee draw on a decade of research on policymaking and public opinion to show us how scandals can ignite a public with few political outlets for their discontent. Scandals don't simply dominate news cycles: they can provoke us to demand better policy, spurring governments to adopt rules that protect us from massive corporations run amok.

Today it is giant companies, not governments, who run the world. They launch rockets into space, control satellite communication and develop era-defining AI technologies. But around the globe, these corporate titans are facing increasing public hostility.

Tech giants are seen as promoting misinformation, undermining democracy and violating our privacy. Big banks, reeling since the financial crisis of 2008, continue to be racked with major scandals. Drawing on real-life examples such as the powdered milk scandal that rocked France, the VW scandal in Germany, the Goldman Sachs scandal in the United States, Cambridge Analytica in Britain and Samsung in South Korea - the authors show that these scandals are not just symptoms of a careless corporate elite, they are opportunities for real political change.

Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee reveal how the shared anger of citizens can be channelled into a backlash that has the potential to reinvigorate our failing democracies. One corporate scandal at a time.

From supply chains to surveillance, how logistics drives modern power--and its consequences.

Movement is the lifeblood of capital, even more so than growth. If goods, people, and information don't flow, then profits don't either. Ensuring that laborers, shipping containers, media, commercially valuable data, and much else are in the right place at the right time demands a subtle choreography. Enter logistics.

Susan Zieger argues that logistics is the foundation of power in our time. Blending detailed historical research with real-life stories that crystallize the human and ecological consequences of supply chains, Logistics and Power shows how the pursuit of efficient movement has come to organize economies while disordering societies and selves. Logistics emerges as the key to consumerism and the experience of work. It justifies corporate and police surveillance, illuminates patterns of migration and exploitation, and explains why the oceans are clotted with plastic. It is in the sphere of logistics that capitalist motives are most dramatically in tension with planetary needs.

A headfirst encounter with the obscure forces subordinating all goals below those of capital, Logistics and Power points the way to an alternative: a mindful and politically attentive kind of movement compatible with human thriving.

A rich history of cross-racial coalitions and alliances of the Sixties' freedom movement, acclaimed historian Alice Echols's Black Power, White Heat reshapes our understanding of the entire era.

One of the most divisive issues in recent progressive politics has been what role, if any, allies might legitimately play in other people's movements. Despite the significance of this debate, it has taken place in a historical vacuum.

In Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic, the Sixties historian Alice Echols explores what happened some sixty years ago when whites and Blacks came together in the fight against racism. She tells this story by focusing on two Black-led organizations that bookend the Sixties: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party. In SNCC, whites were, in part, meant to generate a "white heat" so searing it would accelerate change. Results were mixed, and white activists formed new movements, from women's liberation to draft resistance.

By 1967, the Black Panther Party was advancing its own unique brand of "revolutionary nationalism", and seeking out white supporters. Partnering with whites brought the group visibility and resources, but it also put the Panthers at odds with other Black radicals, with unfortunate consequences.

Black Power, White Heat explains how solidarity lost credibility, and not just from within the movement. Here, the FBI played a key role, and so did the discourse of "radical chic", advanced most effectively by the journalist Tom Wolfe. Still, even as Black-white solidarity lost steam, it was not entirely played out. In some of the era's most important political trials, even courtrooms became sites of solidarity as predominantly white juries returned verdicts that suggested they trusted Black Panther defendants more than the District Attorneys prosecuting them. Clear-eyed about the difficulties of solidarity, Black Power, White Heat nonetheless emphasizes the achievements and considerable promise of uniting across difference, and in ways that will inform and deepen current debates roiling progressive politics.

Baroque masterpieces from the Art Gallery of Ontario resonate throughout Mockrin's new oil paintings full of unsettling, uncanny drama

Published with Art Gallery of Ontario.

Philadelphia-based artist Jesse Mockrin (born 1981) studies the past to make art for the present. Drawing upon Old Master works, specifically from the 17th century, Mockrin's dynamic and active large-scale oil paintings focus on moments of tension and intensity in their baroque compositions. This publication features a series of new paintings by Mockrin based on works in the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) collection, including Luca Giordano's Bathsheba Bathing (c. 1660), Nicolas Tournier's Judgment of Solomon (c. 1620) and Georges de la Tour's Saint Anne with the Infant Jesus (c. 1640). This synthesis is not merely a demonstration of the importance of historical art; rather, it is a statement about how these pieces remain relevant and acquire new meanings in our present day. Mockrin's first museum publication, the catalog features an interview with the artist in conversation with Adam Harris Levine, Associate Curator, European Art at the AGO.

A memoir of basketball, dedication, and longevity from Boston Celtics legend Robert Parish

Growing up in the heart of Louisiana, Robert Parish and his three younger siblings played baseball, football, and tennis--but never basketball. Still, by seventh grade, Parish stood 6'6" and couldn't escape the attention of Coleman Kidd, the junior high basketball coach who saw potential before Parish could see it in himself. And though he was the worst player on the team that first season--handed the last jersey left, No. 00--it would become the number that now hangs in the Boston Garden rafters.

In The Chief, the famously reserved Parish opens up for the first time about the full scope of his life--from attending a predominantly white high school during the uneasy years of integration to becoming the anchor of one of the greatest teams in NBA history. With honesty, humility, and plenty of dry humor, Parish reflects on his start with the Golden State Warriors and his trade to Boston, the years alongside Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, the Celtics' epic rivalries of the 1980s, and the later years with the Charlotte Hornets and Chicago Bulls, finally walking away from the game on his own terms.

Insightful, introspective, and powerful, The Chief is a rare look into the life of an NBA giant who always let his game do the talking--until now.

A thousand years of English history, encapsulating invasions, the rise and fall of kings, and religious events

Among the vernacular historical writings of early medieval England, the Old English Chronicle holds a prominent place, providing not only a backbone of English history from the fifth through the twelfth centuries but also a record of language development and geography. The seven texts in the Chronicle, known as manuscripts A through G, offer a brief year-by-year summary of important national events.

The Old English Chronicle: The A-Text to 1001 is the earliest and most interesting of these manuscripts. It covers more than a thousand years, with entries written throughout the tenth century by different scribes. Although many entries are spare, noting only the death of a king or church official, others offer detailed accounts and interpretations of events such as the movement of viking armies against King Alfred or the narrative of treachery, retribution, and loyalty widely known today as "Cynewulf and Cyneheard." In addition to the A-Text, this edition contains two highly political poems, The Death of Alfred and The Death of Edward, as well as The Battle of Maldon, a brilliant verse rendering of a defeat against Scandinavian invaders in 991.

The Old English Chronicle, Volume I contains newly edited Old English texts and expert translations of key works of medieval historical writing.

An immersive look inside 12 colorful alphabet albums used by 19th- and early 20th-century French sign painters

Beginning in the 19th century, sign painters adorned the streets and storefronts of French cities with eye-catching letters in styles ranging from the elegant to the eccentric. Large chromolithographic portfolios supplied these artisans with an array of dazzling model alphabets for use as inspiration, teaching aids and shows of technical skill. Lettres Décoratives offers a definitive collection of plates from these portfolios originally published from the mid-1800s through the 1930s.
More than 150 large-scale reproductions of stunning alphabets, most reproduced for the first time ever, provide a wealth of inspiration and insight into sign painting styles and techniques. An extensively researched historical essay by expert sign painter and author Morgane Côme tells the fascinating story of French sign painting and explores the significance of its chromolithographic alphabet albums. Sumptuously designed for Letterform Archive by the French studio Violaine & Jérémy, the book features an impressive format (useful for aspiring sign painters) and original cover art. Complete with a selection of rarely seen historical photography of shop signs in 19th-century Paris, this volume constructs a rich panorama of the age of la peinture en lettres.

In The Permanent Problem, Brink Lindsey reshapes our understanding of the vital but complex relationship between material prosperity and human flourishing.

The advanced capitalist democracies of the 21st century are the richest, freest, healthiest, best educated, and best governed societies in history. Why then does it seem like everything is falling apart? Economic stagnation is spreading, class divisions are deepening, birth rates are collapsing, mental health problems are on the rise, faith in democracy is in decline, and pessimism about the future abounds.

In The Permanent Problem, Brink Lindsey argues that these gathering difficulties reflect the stresses and strains of a great and uncompleted historical transition-from mass material prosperity to mass human flourishing. Capitalism's immense productive powers have raised our expectations of what life can be, but for most of us reality is coming up short. What's more, the arrival of mass prosperity has pushed both economic and cultural change in directions that make the transition to mass flourishing much harder to achieve.

According to Lindsey, 21st century capitalism is in the grip of three interrelated crises: a crisis of inclusion, as vital social ties and personal connections are breaking down; a crisis of dynamism, as capitalism's engines of innovation and wealth creation have begun to sputter and seize; and a crisis of politics, as the mechanisms for collective decision-making needed to address capitalism's growing problems have been degraded by the very same dynamics that underlie those problems.

A much brighter future is possible, and Lindsey charts an intriguing path to get there. There is no need to concoct a radical new social system. Instead, capitalism needs to be refocused on its core mission of extending the technological frontier, and rebalanced through the revitalization of face-to-face communities. Weaving together insights from history, economics, sociology, and philosophy, The Permanent Problem offers a synoptic overview of our fateful present moment and a provocative glimpse at what may lie ahead.

In February 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the secretary of war to remove 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and corral them into inland concentration camps. To be considered for release, they were required to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked the inmates--who had been imprisoned without cause by the US military--whether they were willing to serve in combat for the US military. Question 28 asked them--many of whom American citizens who had never visited Japan--to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Answering these questions caused volatile divisions within the camps, tore families and friends apart, and had lasting repercussions in the decades postwar.

Questions 27 & 28 reaches backward and forward from the time of the questionnaire, chronicling the individuals who arrived in the US from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants who lived in its aftermath. Yamashita mixes fact with fiction and layers genres from James Bond movies to haiku to oral history, transfiguring an enormity of archival research into a chorus of stories. With her signature wit and aplomb, she gives voice to laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community.

After the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905, what made examinations a trusted method of selection in China and Taiwan? Reinventing Examination and the State traces the ideological evolution of civil service and state-organized educational examinations in twentieth-century China and Taiwan. In the making of the modern Chinese civil service, the concept of examination as a basic power of government was institutionalized as the Examination Yuan in the 1930s and was written into the 1947 Constitution of the Republic of China, which remains in effect in Taiwan today. Meanwhile, two models of educational examination, one of gatekeeping school graduates and the other of mobilizing human resources, emerged during WWII and constituted a repertoire of educational policies shared by the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China after the 1949 divide. The authority of examination, Shiuon Chu argues, was by no means a natural development from the long history of imperial China but was in fact contingent on specific political maneuverings over the course of the twentieth century. Unlike the imperial examinations, which heavily rewarded participants with titles and fame, modern examinations shaped new concepts about the responsibility of the individual vis-à-vis the state, and this shift contributed to the resilience of the state during times of significant political and social change.

A rich examination of the role of portrait photography in the construction of Africa as a political idea

At a moment of profound change marked by decolonization and the civil rights period of the mid-20th century, photographers across Africa and the African diaspora used the photographic portrait in order to fuel incipient ideas of Africa. Published in conjunction with a groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination charts international histories of resistance and liberation up to the present day in order to contend with the construction of Africa as a political idea, and the tools that artists used to forge it.
Featuring more than 100 photographs by renowned artists of the time, such as Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Jean Depara, and by contemporary artists of African descent, such as Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi and Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, this richly illustrated publication explores modes of Pan-African possibility in powerful images of everyday people, where the personal was undeniably political. With an introduction by curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, excerpts from landmark texts by V.Y. Mudimbe and Brent Hayes Edwards, and a conversation between Yasmina Price and Momtaza Mehri, Ideas of Africa highlights the potential of the photographic portrait as both a creative endeavor and political mechanism.