San Antonio College Library

Fat. Such a little word evokes big responses. While "fat" describes the size and shape of bodies -- their appearance -- our negative reactions to corpulence also depend on something tangible and tactile. As this book argues, there is more to fat than meets the eye. Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life offers reflections on how fat has been perceived and imagined in the West since antiquity. Featuring fascinating historical accounts as well...

History of the Hour presents the first sustained and reliable treatment of how mechanical clocks functioned in cities and dispels many myths associated with the clock's history. For example, Dohrn-van Rossum argues that, in their race to display the grandest clocks, monarchs and princes were more responsible than merchants for introducing clocks into urban environments. This work also questions what is generally believed regarding the clock's invention,...

"This collection explores the various forms of narrative, semiotic, and technological mediation that shape the experience of place. From the East End of London to Navajo lands to Ground Zero, Lived Topographies examines the great effect of language, mass media, surveillance, and other incursions of the contemporary world on topographical experience and description. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi have assembled a wide array of scholars to provide an...

"Although American cultural and literary criticism often explores how difference and identity operate in politicized constructions of the body such as gender, race, and sexuality, the figure of the physically disabled individual has been either overlooked or treated as a personal misfortune or a medical problem. As the first major critical study to examine literary and cultural representations of physical disability, Extraordinary Bodies situates...

"Considering a dazzling range of subjects, Willinsky discusses how the discovery of the New World inspired European culture with "the desire to take hold of the world . . . to enumerate, order, identify, and differentiate." Willinsky reveals how this "will to know" became a foundation of the apparatus of imperialism, as shown in phenomena ranging from zoos to the British Museum to National Geographic. Through analyses of colonial schooling, anthropology,...

For the first time, an anthropologist has managed to gain the confianza and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods in the United States - East Harlem. For four years, the author had completely free rein to observe, tape-record, and photograph every facet of the lives of some two dozen Puerto Rican crack dealers. By presenting their crack-house conversations in context, he conveys in their own...