Bøker utgitt av Reaktion Books

Cocktails are the most American of alcoholic beverages, and at the same time the most international of drinks. This title describes how cocktails have influenced society around the world. It shows how some of our popular drinks were invented and travelled around the globe.

In all his films, Peter Greenaway shows obsessive attention to detail, exaggerating the archaic and fabricating his plots out of an artificial realm of caricature and pastiche. This book examines his vision from a number of perspectives and traces a shift of sensibility in his work.

Focuses on the visual culture of Indian cinema, specifically Bombay-based cinema since 1913. Drawing on a range of sources, this title examines Bombay cinema's unique styles, genres and themes, tracing its roots in early photography, theatre and chromolithography and its development as a visual regime that dominates Indian popular culture.

Rather than being absorbed into a uniform modernity, indigenous people are anticipating alternative futures and appropriating global resources for their own, culturally specific needs. This book argues, controversially, that far from disappearing in the face of global capitalism, indigenous cultures today are as diverse as they ever were.

A wide-ranging exploration of cultural 'garbage'; John Scanlan argues that Western culture has evolved by a process of disposal, not only of material waste but of outmoded ideas and concepts.

Examines the nature of boredom, how it originated, its history, how and why it afflicts us, and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any act of will.

Last Landscapes traces the history of cemeteries throughout Europe and the usa, revealing the artistic and cultural allegiances behind their design, while examining the aesthetic principles of contemporary landscape architecture.

Taking the Dalai Lama's flight from Tibet in 1959 as its starting point, this book offers an interpretation of the ways in which the idea of Tibet has been imagined by Tibetan artists in exile in India and in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.

Although design has become eminently newsworthy among the general public in our society, there is very little understanding to be found of the values and implications that underlie it. This book analyses design's role and status, and discusses what our obsession with it tells us about our own culture.

From Salvador Dali to Walt Disney, animals have been a constant yet little-considered presence in film. This title points out that the mobility of animals presented technical and conceptual challenges to early film-makers and the solutions of which were an important factor in advancing photographic technology.

An illuminating, often provocative examination of urban images in cinema.

Some of the most significant in modern intellectual and cultural history pass by way of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). This title includes essays by Elisabeth Bronfen, Crosbie Smith, Ludmilla Jordanova, Louis James, Michael Fried, Michael Grant, Jasia Reichardt, Robert Olorenshaw and Jean-Louis Schefer.

Taking the triumph of consumerism as an organizing theme, the author charts the rise and fall of the Conservative Party, developments in British society, culture and politics, environmental issues, questions of identity, and changes in economic circumstance and direction.

The history of the ant, a creature whose behaviour and society have fascinated humanity for millennia.

Whales are the largest animals ever to have lived on the earth; a large Blue Whale's tongue alone can weigh more than an elephant. This title recounts the evolutionary and ecological background, as well as the cultural history, of these extraordinary mammals, long persecuted and now celebrated throughout the world.

A thoughtful, philosophical and cultural approach to the perennial question of the search for happiness.

Presents an array of essays on design by the seminal media critic and philosopher Vilem Flusser. This title includes essays on such ordinary 'things' as wheels, carpets, pots, umbrellas and tents, Flusser emphasizes the interrelationships between art and science, theology and technology, and archaeology and architecture.