Offering a visual critique of the American myth of upward mobility, a noted photographer offers a series of images focusing on our car-centered, paved-over society, with evocative studies of the devastated inner cities and the edges of suburbia where sprawl is encroaching upon nature.

Product Description: Road trips to Las Vegas are the occasion for this entertaining meditation on the quintessentially American experience of driving across the desert. William Fox, successively exiled from California, Nevada, and New Mexico, has spent more time than most of us driving to Las Vegas--and he has taken notes on three recent trips, his own way of bringing cohesion to the vast and mind-numbing aspects of the freeway...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A firsthand account of NASA's training exercises on Haughton Crater in the Canadian High Arctic, one of a few analog environments used for anticipated Mars expeditions, describes how two dozen scientists set up camp there every July to interact with its harsh climate, severe geology, and unfamiliar terrain. Original.

Product Description: Poetry published at University of Nevada, Reno

Las Vegas, says William Fox, is a pay-as-you-play paradise that succeeds in satisfying our fantasies of wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption that go with it. In this context, Fox examines how Las Vegas’s culture of spectacle has obscured the boundaries between high art and entertainment extravaganza, nature and fantasy, for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. His purview ranges from casino art galleries—including Steve Wynn’s private collection and a branch of the famed Guggenheim Museum—to the underfunded Las Vegas Art Museum; from spectacular casino animal collections like those of magicians Siegfried and Roy and Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef exhibit to the city’s lack of support for a viable public zoo; from the environmental and psychological impact of lavish water displays in the arid desert to the artistic ambiguities intrinsic to Las Vegas’s floating world of showgirls, lapdancers, and ballet divas. That Las Vegas represents one of the world’s most opulent displays of private material wealth in all its forms, while providing miserly funding for local public amenities like museums and zoos, is no accident, Fox maintains. Nor is it unintentional that the city’s most important collections of art and exotic fauna are presented in the context of casino entertainment, part of the feast of sensation and excitement that seduces millions of visitors each year. Instead, this phenomenon shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our society privileges private benefit over public good. Given that Las Vegas has been a harbinger of national cultural trends, Fox’s commentary offers prescient insight into the increasing commercialization of nature and culture across America.

Product Description: First formed in Charleston, South Carolina, the Southern Jurisdiction of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite is now the largest and oldest group of Freemasons in the world. Its first institutional history provides a useful window on the influence of the Rite on American middle-class culture and the nation's democratic, civic, and moral values...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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The authors examine the language of both traditional and radical social work as forms of power. They argue that the will to help and care for people in distress unintentionally results in new types of dependency, control and domination. This book should be of interest to students and practitioners of social work, social policy, sociology, and women's studies.

Linda Connor's world-renowned photographs are global and sublime. For thirty years she has created distinctively glowing, contemplative images of nature and religious sites around the world using a large-format camera and glass-plate negatives. This career-spanning retrospective collects Connor's haunting photos, including her renowned prints from century-old glass-plate astronomical negatives from Lick Observatory, contextualized by an unprecedented three-way conversation between Linda and two modern luminaries, Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin. Published to coincide with a major touring exhibition, Odyssey is a long overdue celebration of a modern photographic master.

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Product Description: The Textile Series is a micropress and used book seller specializing in literature, poetry and theory. We pride ourselves in shipping our books quickly so that you can start enjoying them as soon as possible. Happy Reading!