Reaktion Books imprint: 753 books
Faith and Sword
A Short History of Christian–Muslim Conflict, Second Expanded Edition
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2016
With the recent surge in terrorist acts and military confrontations, as well as ever-strengthening fundamentalist ideologies, the Christian–Muslim divide is perhaps more visible than ever—but it is not new. Alan G. Jamieson explores here the long and bloody history of the Christian–Muslim conflict,...
Paul Gauguin
The Mysterious Centre of Thought
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2014
French artist Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) once reproached the Impressionists for searching “around the eye and not at the mysterious centre of thought.” But what did he mean by this enigmatic phrase? In this innovative investigation into Gauguin’s art and thought, Dario Gamboni...
Dragon
Fear and Power
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2018
From the fire-breathing beasts of North European myth and legend to the Book of Revelation’s Great Red Dragon of Hell, from those supernatural agencies of imperial authority in ancient China to the so-called dragon-women who threaten male authority, dragons are a global phenomenon, one that has...
The Making of a Man
Notes on Transsexuality
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2015
In the autumn of 2012, Maxim Februari—known until then as writer and philosopher Marjolijn Februari—announced his intention to live as a man. The news was greeted with a diversity of reactions, from curiosity to unease. These responses made it absolutely clear to Februari that most of us don’t...
The Barbarians
Lost Civilizations
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2017
We often think of the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome as discrete incubators of Western culture, places where ideas about everything from government to art to philosophy were free to develop and then be distributed outward into the wider Mediterranean world. But as Peter Bogucki reminds us...
Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur
Mythology and Geology of the Underworld
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2013
When people go looking for hell, they go underground. Dante, Aeneas, and Odysseus all journeyed beneath the earth to find the underworld, a place where the dead are tortured according to their sins. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had to deal with a huge underground pit infested with demons below her high...
Empire of Tea
The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2015
Although tea had been known and consumed in China and Japan for centuries, it was only in the seventeenth century that Londoners first began drinking it. Over the next two hundred years, its stimulating properties seduced all of British society, as tea found its way into cottages and castles alike....
Animals in Religion
Devotion, Symbol and Ritual
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2016
Animals in Religion explores the role of animals within a wide range of religious traditions. Exploring countless stories and myths passed down orally and in many religious texts, Barbara Allen—herself a practicing minister—offers a fascinating history of the ways animals have figured in our spiritual...
Zen Landscapes
Perspectives on Japanese Gardens and Ceramics
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2013
The essential elements of a dry Japanese garden are few: rocks, gravel, moss. Simultaneously a sensual matrix, a symbolic form, and a memory theater, these gardens exhibit beautiful miniaturization and precise craftsmanship. But their apparent minimalism belies a true complexity. In Zen Landscapes,...
The Desert
Lands of Lost Borders
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2014
From endless sand dunes and prickly cacti to shimmering mirages and green oases, deserts evoke contradictory images in us. They are lands of desolation, but also of romance, of blistering Mojave heat and biting Gobi cold. Covering a quarter of the earth’s land mass and providing a home to half a...
Drive
Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2013
“The open road”—it’s a phrase that calls to mind a sense of freedom, adventure, and new possibilities that make driving one of our most liberating activities. In Drive, Iain Borden explores the way driving allows us to encounter landscapes and cities around the world. He takes particular notice...
by Ezra Shales
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2017
Today when we hear the word “craft,” a whole host of things come immediately to mind: microbreweries, artisanal cheeses, and an array of handmade objects. Craft has become so overused, that it can grate on our ears as pretentious and strain our credulity. But its overuse also reveals just how...
Rocks, Ice and Dirty Stones
Diamond Histories
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2017
The king of stones, valued since antiquity for their unrivalled hardness, diamonds today are both desired and deplored. Once faceted and polished they glitter on the fingers of brides-to-be and in the ornaments of the super-rich, but their extraction from some of the world’s poorest countries remains...
by Ian D. Whyte
Language: English
Release Date: March 3, 2004
Language: English
Release Date: March 3, 2004
Landscape and History explores a complex relationship over the past five centuries. The book is international and interdisciplinary in scope, drawing on material from social, economic and cultural history as well as from geography, archaeology, cultural geography, planning and landscape history.
In...