New Releases by Rebecca Solnit

Describes the displacement of the art and lifestyles of many of San Francisco''s inhabitants by the economic boom and wealthy newcomers.

"A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book. . . . Rebecca Solnit tells this story with the passion and clarity it deserves."—Larry McMurtry "Savage Dreams summons us to the campfires of resistance."—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz "Savage Dreams is about many things: despoliation and restoration, finding a voice between contemporary noise and silence, making friends and enemies. Most of all, though, it may be about a journey into history: about how understanding history and making it are not really very different."—Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces "A wonderful and important book, weaving past and present, politics and spirituality, land and history, pleasure and outrage, esthetics and activism, into a map where we as Americans find ourselves today. Intellectually challenging but beautifully written and eminently readable, Savage Dreams has both heart and teeth." —Lucy Lippard, author of Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory

Ethnicity and nationalism in one of their great mythic sources. A Book of Migrations is a postcolonial revision of conventional travel literature. In her passage through Ireland, Rebecca Solnit portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism and tourism. Travel itself produces its own versions of memory and identity, and travel''s transformation into the information age''s pre-eminent industry - tourism - comes.

The beauty, mystery, and abuse of the American desert are topics explored by Richard Misrach in his breathtaking Desert Cantos series, one of the most ambitious and innovative photographic projects of our time. Evolving over the course of two decades, the series now comprises eighteen numbered and named subseries, or cantos, and a prologue. With subjects as diverse as a military base in Utah, a man-made flood in California, sublime skies in Arizona, and arts happenings in Nevada, Richard Misrach''s images raise probing and compelling questions about contemporary society''s relationship to the desert. Included in this beautifully illustrated book are more than sixty Desert Cantos photographs that have never before been published, as well as some of the artist''s best-known and most-admired images. This monumental publication, the first comprehensive survey of Richard Misrach''s epic work-in-progress, serves as an exhibition catalogue for a major midcareer retrospective organized by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The show will tour in the United States (venues include Tucson, Tacoma, and Chicago).

Secret Exhibition chronicles a vital California art movement, focusing on six artists – Wallace Bergman, Jess, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hendrick, and George Herms – who broke new ground with provocative work, especially in assemblage and...