Invisible Cities
1972 · 165 pages
Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities that cannot exist to the emperor Kublai Khan, a page or two each, and every one of them is another way of describing Venice.
★ 8.4
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1972
Showing 10 books from 1972
Ways of Seeing
1972 · 166 pages
Oil paintings advertised what their owners owned, Berger argues, and the nude was arranged for a man looking on. Men act and women appear, he writes, and advertising took the habit over intact.
★ 7.2
The Best and the Brightest
1972 · 688 pages
The men who walked America into Vietnam were the most credentialed in Washington, and Halberstam shows how their brilliance became the problem. He reconstructs the meetings and memos that made escalation feel reasonable.
★ 7.0
Augustus
1972 · 305 pages
Rome's first emperor assembled from other people's letters: soldiers, poets, conspirators, and the daughter he sends into exile. Williams shows how a sickly boy became master of the world and what it cost.
★ 6.8
Anti-Oedipus
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
1972 · 432 pages
Desire is not lack but production, and psychoanalysis crushes it into the triangle of daddy, mommy and me. Foucault proposed retitling Deleuze and Guattari's book Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.
★ 6.7
The Boys of Summer
1972 · 474 pages
Two decades after covering the Brooklyn Dodgers for a newspaper, Kahn found the same men in middle age, one paralyzed. What began as a baseball book becomes an elegy for everyone's youth.
★ 6.4
Watership Down
1972 · 476 pages
Fiver the rabbit senses blood covering the field, and others follow him out before the bulldozers come. Adams gives them their own language and mythology, then sets them against a rabbit police state.
★ 6.0
Bless Me, Ultima
1972 · 277 pages
Ultima, a folk healer, joins Antonio's family in wartime New Mexico, and the boy is pulled between his mother's church and his father's plains. Schools have taught it and banned it ever since.
★ 6.0
Fire in the Lake
1972 · 500 pages
Americans in Vietnam were fighting a country they never tried to understand, FitzGerald argues, explaining Confucian village order and the mandate of heaven to readers whose sons were still being sent there.
★ 5.9
The World Turned Upside Down
1972 · 448 pages
While Parliament fought the king, tinkers and soldiers were arguing for common land, free love, and no clergy. Hill recovers the Diggers, Levellers and Ranters, and the revolution that never came off.
★ 5.8