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Title: Lovis Corinth 
Author: Uhr, Horst 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Art | Art History
Publisher's Description: This splendid and generously illustrated monograph by Horst Uhr is the first comprehensive study of one of the great individualists in the history of art. Lovis Corinth (1858-1925) has long been recognized as a major figure in German painting, along with Emile Nolde and Max Beckmann. Spanning a tremendously fertile period in European painting, his astonishingly productive career touched on major currents of art in his time, from the nineteenth-century academic tradition to Naturalism, Impressionism, and Expressionism. Corinth was accomplished in several media, including painting, drawing, and watercolor. After his death in 1925 virtually every major German city held its own memorial exhibition.Professor Uhr draws on the artist's own diaries and letters, observations by his family, and writings by contemporaries to construct a detailed narrative which places Corinth's deeply autobiographical and personal work in the context of turn-of-the-century art politics in Munich and Berlin. Corinth is seen in relation both to contemporary cultural figures, such as artists, critics, and dealers, and to the theater, the Jugendstil movement, the Berlin Secession, and the Nietzsche cult in Germany. Corinth's themes in combination with powerful use of color and bold application of paint distinguish him as a modern master.   [brief]
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Title: Black African cinema
Author: Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa.Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering "francophone" films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in "anglophone" regions. Ukadike gives special attention to the growth of independent production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist tendencies of "lusophone" filmmakers. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture. And, by contrasting "new" African films with those based on the traditional paradigm, he explores the trends emerging from the eighties and nineties.Clearly written and accessible to specialist and general reader alike, Black African Cinema 's analysis of key films and issues - the most comprehensive in English - is unique. The book's pan-Africanist vision heralds important new strategies for appraising a cinema that increasingly attracts the attention of film students and Africanists.   [brief]
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Title: Adventures of a mathematician
Author: Ulam, Stanislaw M
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | History and Philosophy of Science | Mathematics | United States History
Publisher's Description: The autobiography of mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, one of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century, tells a story rich with amazingly prophetic speculations and peppered with lively anecdotes. As a member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1944 on, Ulam helped to precipitate some of the most dramatic changes of the postwar world. He was among the first to use and advocate computers for scientific research, originated ideas for the nuclear propulsion of space vehicles, and made fundamental contributions to many of today's most challenging mathematical projects.With his wide-ranging interests, Ulam never emphasized the importance of his contributions to the research that resulted in the hydrogen bomb. Now Daniel Hirsch and William Mathews reveal the true story of Ulam's pivotal role in the making of the "Super," in their historical introduction to this behind-the-scenes look at the minds and ideas that ushered in the nuclear age. An epilogue by Françoise Ulam and Jan Mycielski sheds new light on Ulam's character and mathematical originality.   [brief]
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Title: Analogies between analogies: the mathematical reports of S.M. Ulam and his Los Alamos collaborators 
Author: Ulam, Stanislaw M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Science | Mathematics | Physical Sciences
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Title: Sex seen: the emergence of modern sexuality in America
Author: Ullman, Sharon R 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Gender Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: Sex Seen provides a complex and intriguing account of the changes that have taken place in the social construction of sexuality during the past century. Focusing on Sacramento, California, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Sharon Ullman juxtaposes early cinema, vaudeville performances, and popular newspapers and magazines with insights drawn from close interpretations of transcripts from Sacramento court cases. She demonstrates how attitudes that emerged in the popular discourse - ideas about gender roles, female desire, prostitution, divorce, and homosexuality - often found complex and contradictory expression in the courts. As judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and juries all weighed in with differing opinions, the courtroom itself became a site of multiple discourses that attempted to make sense of a growing sexual chaos. In tracing the birth of modern sexuality, Ullman chronicles the dynamics of social change during a unique cultural moment and explains the shifts in the sexual ethos of turn-of-the-century America. Instead of telling the familiar story of steadily increasing liberation of sexual urges, Ullman chronicles the complex confusions and negotiations of an increasingly public sexual discourse. She relates how laws against cross-dressing gained force at the same time that female impersonation became popular in vaudeville acts, how images of prostitutes were changed by the commercialization of the female body in advertising and film, and how visible expression of female desire was submerged in rape and divorce proceedings. Ullman blends social history, textual analysis, and film and performance criticism to explain how sexuality and desire became an essential part of personal identity in this century. Her keen, accessible account of a community on the brink of the modern era offers a provocative interpretation of the seeds of our sexual present.   [brief]
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Title: Latin American vanguards: the art of contentious encounters 
Author: Unruh, Vicky
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Latin American Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: In this first comprehensive study of Latin America's literary vanguards of the 1920s and 1930s, Vicky Unruh explores the movement's provocative and polemic nature. Latin American vanguardism - a precursor to the widely acclaimed work of contemporary Latin American writers - was stimulated by the European avant-garde movements of the World War I era. But as Unruh's wide-ranging study attests, the vanguards of Latin America - emerging from the continent's own historical circumstances - developed a very distinct character and voice.Through manifestos, experimental texts, and ribald public performance, the vanguardists' work intertwined art, culture, and the politics of the day to produce a powerful brand of aesthetic activism, one that sparked an entire rethinking of the meaning of art and culture throughout Latin America.   [brief]
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Title: Huang Di nei jing su wen: nature, knowledge, imagery in an ancient Chinese medical text, with an appendix, The doctrine of the five periods and six qi in the Huang Di nei jing su wen
Author: Unschuld, Paul U. (Paul Ulrich) 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Medical Anthropology | China | History of Medicine
Publisher's Description: The Huang Di nei jing su wen, known familiarly as the Su wen, is a seminal text of ancient Chinese medicine, yet until now there has been no comprehensive, detailed analysis of its development and contents. At last Paul U. Unschuld offers entry into this still-vital artifact of China's cultural and intellectual past. Unschuld traces the history of the Su wen to its origins in the final centuries B.C.E., when numerous authors wrote short medical essays to explain the foundations of human health and illness on the basis of the newly developed vessel theory. He examines the meaning of the title and the way the work has been received throughout Chinese medical history, both before and after the eleventh century when the text as it is known today emerged. Unschuld's survey of the contents includes illuminating discussions of the yin-yang and five-agents doctrines, the perception of the human body and its organs, qi and blood, pathogenic agents, concepts of disease and diagnosis, and a variety of therapies, including the new technique of acupuncture. An extensive appendix, furthermore, offers a detailed introduction to the complicated climatological theories of Wu yun liu qi ("five periods and six qi"), which were added to the Su wen by Wang Bing in the Tang era. In an epilogue, Unschuld writes about the break with tradition and innovative style of thought represented by the Su wen. For the first time, health care took the form of "medicine," in that it focused on environmental conditions, climatic agents, and behavior as causal in the emergence of disease and on the importance of natural laws in explaining illness. Unschuld points out that much of what we surmise about the human organism is simply a projection, reflecting dominant values and social goals, and he constructs a hypothesis to explain the formation and acceptance of basic notions of health and disease in a given society. Reading the Su wen, he says, not only offers a better understanding of the roots of Chinese medicine as an integrated aspect of Chinese civilization; it also provides a much needed starting point for discussions of the differences and parallels between European and Chinese ways of dealing with illness and the risk of early death.   [brief]
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Title: Tantra: sex, secrecy politics, and power in the study of religions
Author: Urban, Hugh B
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Religion | South Asia | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life - Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first "discovery" of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely Other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be. Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.   [brief]
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Title: Religion and society in a Cotswold vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780-1865 
Author: Urdank, Albion M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History
Publisher's Description: During the English Industrial Revolution, the Vale of Nailsworth was a rural-industrial settlement and a center of evangelical Nonconformity. Why did the transition to the factory system bring deindustrialization and social decline rather than long-term advancement? Albion Urdank investigates the modernization of Nailsworth from many perspectives, revealing the experience and the mentalité of ordinary people in their ecological, economic, and social environments. His innovative approach, in the tradition of the Leicester and Annales schools, contributes to the historical literature on popular religion, secularization, local history, and European industrialization, and will appeal to a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary interests.   [brief]
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