by Dr. Charles W. Hostler
With new and revised chapters
and photos curated by Chinyeh Hostler

A restless newsboy on the cable cars of San Francisco. A young scholar patrolling the streets of Westwood. A fighter pilot cutting arcs across the skies of Europe. A secret agent weaving through the wartime shadows of MI6. An ambassador navigating the delicate geopolitics of the Persian Gulf.

The life of Charles W. Hostler defies easy summary. In Soldier to Ambassador, Hostler recounts a century lived at the very center of history’s turning points — a vivid odyssey of service, discovery, and transformation. Born in 1919 amid the aftershocks of World War I, Hostler came of age in the Great Depression and soon found himself in the cockpit of the U.S. Army Air Corps during the Second World War. Trained in the clandestine arts by the OSS — the forerunner of the CIA — he landed on the beaches of Normandy and worked alongside British intelligence operatives during the Allied advance.

Yet the war was only a beginning. Hostler’s career spanned continents and disciplines: from diplomatic posts to corporate corridors, from secret negotiations in the Middle East to honors from nine foreign governments, culminating in his appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Bahrain during the volatile years of the first Gulf War. Along the way, he earned degrees from Georgetown and the American University of Beirut, and lived as a true citizen of the world.

This special revised edition, enriched with new chapters and over 100 photographs (many in full color), offers readers an unparalleled view into the hidden dramas and unsung victories that shaped the modern era. Part memoir, part history, part adventure tale, Soldier to Ambassador is a testament to the life of a man who moved through the secret currents of global power — and left an indelible mark on them.

... or buy direct, from SDSU Press, with 99¢ shipping!

$17.95 via AMAZON.com


Perversions on Parade: Brazilian Literature of
Transgression and Postmodern Anti-Aesthetics in Glauco Mattoso

This is the first book-length scholarly treatment in English of the Brazilian poet Glauco Mattoso's work, some of which was written during Brazil's most recent dictatorship (1964-85). Steven Butterman highlights Mattoso's themes of homosexuality, fetishism, and symbolic sadomasochism within a context of a comparative examination of transgressive literature in the Western canon (Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine et al) with particular emphasis on Luso-Brazilian literature from the Middle Ages to the present.

ISBN: 1-879691-67-1
2003 | Paper: 84 pp.
48 plates in black & white | $20

ISBN: 1-879691-67-1
2003 | Paper: 84 pp.
48 plates in black & white | $20 list price

Working the Stone is a unique work made up of text and images that takes as its focus an abandoned New England limestone quarry. Placed in an extended chronology of the area's archaeology going back 350 million years, Metcalf's and Saradoff's work moves into an orchestrated oral history of the quarry told by people who remember how the enterprise was set up and run. Waves of immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Italy occupied villages in the area and worked at the quarry and plant, which was eventually acquired by U.S. Gypsum. Mechanization of the work processes replaced men and their laboriously gained expertise. Farnams then became a ghost town, and only recently has the area begun to experience a revival brought about by young professionals eager to return to the land. The story of the plant, quarry, and its people over the generations grows out of a complex weave of lyrical prose, oral histories, drawings, documents, and historical and contemporary photographs all unified in a testament to the enduring human spirit.

click the image for a high resolution reproduction of the special wraparound cover | cover design by Guillermo Nericcio García for memogr@phics designcasa.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ San Diego State University Press
January 1, 2002
Language ‏ : ‎ English Paperback
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0925613371
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0925613370
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.05 pounds
576 pages  | $24.95

Voyage to the End
of the WORD
by Renato Barilli
Translated by Harry Polkinhorn
  and Teresa Fiore
1st edition
San Diego State University Press, 1997
$16.95, ISBN 1879691493

Prepare yourself: Renato Barilli is not here to offer comfort. In Voyage to the End of the Word (Viaggio al termine della parola), this Italian provocateur dismantles language with surgical glee, slicing away meaning until only raw, trembling signifiers remain. This is not just theory—it’s a reckoning. Barilli’s journey tears through poetry, art, and semiotics, refusing to leave anything whole.

In Italy, Alfabeta magazine hailed it as a work that "scompone il significante fino a esaurirne le possibilità"—a demolition job so complete it leaves language gasping for air. Barilli's inspirations (Lora Totino, Spatola, the mad monks of the avant-garde) show up not as polite case studies but as co-conspirators in this ecstatic unmaking of the word.

This first English edition, deftly translated by Harry Polkinhorn and Teresa Fiore, preserves all of Barilli’s mischievous intellect and intellectual danger. It’s a slim but potent volume: half lit match, half manifesto. Perfect for readers who believe books should bite back.

This volume includes the complete journals of Juan Crespí in Spanish and English.
Este tomo incluye los diarios completos de Juan Crespí en español y ingles.

This work makes available for the first time the complete journals of Juan Crespí*, the Franciscan friar who accompanied the first expeditions that established Spanish presence in Alta California. Beginning at the northern edge of the mission frontier of Baja California, the 1769 expedition trekked overland some three hundred miles to establish San Diego. From there,Crespí and the contingent of military personnel and Indian auxiliaries traveled northward on to Monterey and back again. Crespí journals provide the first detailed observations about the new land of Alta California and its peoples. This book is an essential source for the history of Spanish occupation of Alta California and the native Americans inhabiting the land.

This deluxe masterwork of Californiana and American History is the result of some forty years of research by Alan K. Brown, and brings together what Juan Crespí wrote in its entirety.

All other printed and manuscript versions were censored, heavily edited, condensed, and excerpted by Serra, Palou, and othersalterations that dropped out critical detail and valuable information. This edition makes all other printed versions of Crespí's journals obsolete.

Brown has stitched together the complete journals from different manuscript versions in archives in Europe and the Americas. They are presented by the editor in the original Spanish with detailed annotations and comparisons of alternate versions of sections of the text. As well, Brown provides a new English translation of the full texts.

The work includes an extensive introduction by Alan K. Brown that in itself is a valuable contribution to the history of the period and gives a detailed and realistic vision of the life of Crespí. The volume also contains detailed explanatory notes, an index of sites, a general index, and a list of references.

What the experts say:

"Thanks to the erudition and detective work of Alan K. Brown and the high scholarly standards of SDSU Press, we no longer have to depend on a flawed version of this essential account of the founding of Spanish California. This is the definitive edition, in English AND Spanish.

David J. Weber, Dedman Professor of History, Southern Methodist University, and author of The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992) and many other books on the Spanish-Mexican borderlands.

"This work will be an integral part of any collection of basic California historical materials. Researchers in related fields such as anthropology, historical geography, and ethnobotany, along with history buffs and mission aficionados will seize upon it as a Îmust read itemâ and it becomes an instant Îmust possessâ title for any California library reference collection. Alan K. Brown deserves immense credit for his monumental research, editing, and analytical effort that produced this volume.

Harry W. Crosby, author of Antigua California, Mission Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, (1994).

"Alan K. Brown has provided historians, scholars, and researchers with a tremendous gift. His monumental and authoritative translation of Crespí's complete journals will quickly become an indispensable work for all who study the history of California. The introduction to Brown's work is, in and of itself, a masterful piece of research and writing. The extensive and thorough footnotes attest to Brown's careful attention to detail and desire to include the latest scholarship in his work. Brown's translations from the original Spanish texts are superbly done. They remain faithful to the Spanish but are "reader-friendly." Having the Spanish version of the original journals available in the text for comparison purposes greatly increases the value of Brown's contribution to researchers.

Rose Marie Beebe, President, California Mission Studies Association and Professor of Spanish, Santa Clara University

*Crespí, Juan 1721­-82

Spanish explorer in the Southwest, a Franciscan. He came to America in 1749, and in 1767 he went to the peninsula of California in charge of Mission Purísima Concepción. In 1769 he joined the expedition of Gaspar de Portolá to occupy San Diego and Monterey and continued up the coast with Portolá. The following year he founded the Mission San Carlos Borromeo, in the present-day Carmel-by-the-Sea, which became his headquarters. He was chaplain of the expedition to the N Pacific conducted by Juan Pérez in 1774. His diaries, published in H. E. Bolton’s Fray Juan Crespi (1927, repr. 1971), provided valuable records of these expeditions.   The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright © 2001 Columbia University Press.

REVIEW bajacalifornia.com circa 2002:

Review of: A Description of Distant Roads: Original Journals of the First Expedition into California, 1769-1770, by Juan Crespí. Edited and translated by Alan K. Brown. San Diego State University Press, San Diego, 2001. 848 pp. $60.00.

---

For anthropologists, the reports left by the two Portolá land expeditions that traveled from Santa María de los Ángeles to San Diego in the spring and summer of 1769 provide the earliest written view of the native cultures and peoples of Baja California's northwestern interior. The Franciscan missionary Juan Crespí served as a member of the lead party and as a designated chronicler for both groups. Unfortunately, ethnography ran a distant second to geography among Crespí's intellectual interests, but his narratives nonetheless contain a number of valuable notes concerning the local inhabitants who were encountered along the route.

Alan K. Brown's previously published articles and his lengthy (146-page) introduction to this volume make clear the complex process that took place in the development of Crespí's descriptions of the various explorations in which he participated. The missionary first wrote out notes in the field, which in a few cases have survived. These notes he later expanded into full narratives, also making use of the accounts written by other participants, notably Miguel Costansó, the military engineer who accompanied Crespí in the first party, and Crespí's superior, Junípero Serra, who followed some six weeks behind in the second party. Crespí himself subsequently reworked his initial manuscripts into revised and expanded or condensed versions, and several years later his fellow missionary, Francisco Palóu, further edited and revised those accounts for inclusion in the archival "Noticias de la Nueva California".

Crespí's writings are best known to modern readers through Palóu's versions, and Brown was evidently motivated to prepare this new edition primarily by a desire to take us back to Crespí's own words. The result is a scholarly, bilingual tome that appears to have achieved that goal, as far as the circumstances of the surviving manuscripts allow.

Brown himself was probably more fascinated by the editorial minutiae of variations among the versions than will be most of his prospective readers, who will come to the Crespí accounts for the light they may shed on larger historical, anthropological, or geographical issues. The original Crespí versions of the narrative for the northern Baja California portion of his travels do not differ radically from the version previously available through Palóu's editing, but they do supply a few brief additional ethnographic notes, including local references concerning aboriginal agave use, quivers, bodily decoration, and the like. Brown, in purifying the texts and presenting them in a more complete form, has performed a useful service to future researchers.

- Don Laylander (7/02)

This volume is the fourth in the SCERP Monograph Series. It analyzes how the demographic, economic, infrastructure, and environmental characteristics of the border region have changed from the period prior to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement to 2000.

From the Foreword: "U.S.-Mexican Border Communities in the NAFTA Era is the final report carried out by the Network of Border Economics/La Red de la Economía Fronteriza (NOBE/REF), a network of researchers from universities and public institutions in the U.S.-Mexican border regionThe study was supported in part by SCERP and the initial results of the effort were presented at Border Institute II in April 2000 and appear in the third volume of the SCERP Monograph Series, The U.S.-Mexican Border Environment: Economy and Environment for a Sustainable Border Region: Now and in 2020, in the chapter by Norris C. Clement and Sergio Rey, "The U.S.-Mexican Border Economy in the NAFTA Era: Implications for the Environment." We are pleased to publish the present volume in the SCERP mono- graph series. SCERP's central mission addresses the environmental problems of the U.S.-Mexican border region and the consortium clearly understands the fundamental linkage between economy and environment in this region. Improvement of environmental quality and support of sustainable development practices are possible only with a strong economic base. U.S.-Mexican Border Communities in the NAFTA Era is an assessment of the impact of NAFTA in the border region that uses a consistent methodology to better understand the economies and other features of the major Mexican and U.S border communities. The study analyzes how the demographic, economic, infrastructure, and environmental characteristics of the border region have changed from the period prior to the North American Free Trade Agreement to 2000 six years after the implementation of the treaty."

This is the third volume in the SCERP Monograph series. It comprises the papers and deliberations presented at Border Institute II, which upon the discussions during the first Border Institute. Further, the work explores the challenge of reinventing the economy to provide a solid base for achieving development, providing necessary environmental infrastructure, and enhancing quality of life in the border communities.

Edited by Paul Ganster
ISBN 0925613-32-0
2001
paper, 432pp
US$12.50 plus shipping, handling, and applicable taxes
 

Cooperation, Environment, and Sustainability in Border Regions is based on papers presented late in 1999 at the San Diego, California meeting of the Border Regions in Transition (BRIT) group. An international network of border specialists, the BRIT group has also convened in Berlin (1994), Joensuu on the Finnish-Russian border (1997), and in Chandigarh, India, near the Indian-Pakistani border (2000). Key themes of this volume are transborder cooperation, border environmental concerns, and issues of sustainable development in border regions, including the U.S.-Mexican border region, European border regions, the Baltic region, Russian-Finnish border areas, and Asian border regions. Also included are essays on methodological and theoretical approaches to border research.
 

Produced as a cooperative publication of Ballena Press and the Institute for the Regional Studies of the Californias, this book provides a richly detailed ethnography, native toponyms, kin terms, ancient enmities, and traditional material culture of work that has been obscured for over 50 years. It is useful both as a primary source and a compendium of information on the Tiapi/Diegueño communities of Northern Baja California. An accompanying map circa 1950 aids the reader in locating the ethnography in a historical and geographical setting.
A cooperative publication of IRSC, SDSU Press and Ballena Press.

ISBN 0-87919-144-9
$27.50 paper
2001

Edited by Paul Ganster
ISBN 0-925613-28-2
2000
paper, 168 pp
$22.95

The U.S.-Mexican Border Environment: A Road Map to a Sustainable 2020 brings together background papers and ancillary materials prepared for the Border Institute I, held in December 1998. The briefing papers, as presented at Border Institute I and then revised, lay out basic information and analysis about the population, economy, environment, and governance of the border region. They provide the context for discussions of the environmental sustainability of the region over the next twenty years or so. The purpose of Border Institute I was to encourage stakeholders in the region and elsewhere to redirect their focus from immediate and urgent current border environmental issues to the steps that must be taken soon if the region is to arrive at 2020 with a healthy and sustainable environment.  SCERP, and its partners in Border Institute I--the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Border Trade Alliance--will convene additional meetings approximately every year to continue the discussion on key aspects of the environmental sustainability of the border region. Each of these institutes will produce a volume for the SCERP Monograph Series.
 

Tijuana 1964

Una Visión Fotográfica e Histórica
A Photographic and Historic View

ISBN 0-925613-31-2
2000 | paper, 58 pp
42 black-and-white photographs.
12" x 12" | US $39.95 plus shipping, handling & applicable taxes

This bilingual book of 42 black and white photographs and an interpretive essay with two maps provides a view of Tijuana in 1964. It is a time in the city that many people remember, but many never knew. The book portrays Tijuana when it was still a small city of 235,000, with a clearly defined center.  Since that time, rapid population growth, industrialization, and urban sprawl have created the huge and complex city we know today. Tijuana in 1964 was a dual city, with one part oriented toward tourism activities and life north of the border. The other part was a totally Mexican city, with economic, social, and cultural activities oriented toward national life. Tijuana 1964 effectively depicts this dualism. Click on the ancient camera to your right to see a selection of plates from this volume.
 

This bilingual Atlas integrates U.S. and Mexican data to provide a harmonized view of the binational strip of land that serves as an interface between San Diego and Tijuana. The Atlas includes 15 full-color thematic maps of the San Diego-Tijuana border region and 35 black-and-white photographs. Detailed thematic essays by experts provide context and commentary for understanding the maps. Essay topics include: land use, planned land use, water, sewage, transportation infrastructure, population, employment, public facilities, vegetation and land cover, topography and hydrography, and others. The Atlas was produced through the collaboration of San Diego State University's Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias, The SDSU Department of Geography, the Municipal Planning Institute of Tijuana (IMPlan), the City of San Diego, the San Diego Association of Governments and San Diego State University Press.
 

| US $27.50
via AMAZON, sale, $27.95
nota bene -- books purchased using the link above will receive the hardcover edition of this Federman classic. The warehouse with the paperback edition of this book experienced a deluge and those colorful copies have gone the way of the world. Bezos and Amazon will not allow us to update the listing so know that your "paperback" purchase in Bezoslandia will deliver up to you the Federman Recyclopedia Hardcover.

This is a large "casebook" of materials related to the life and work of Raymond Federman. A French Jew and Holocaust survivor, one of the world's leading Beckett scholars, and the author of over twenty books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, Federman has also been one of postmoderism's most radical liteary innovators and most influential theoreticians. Federman A to X-X-X-X is the first major critical study devoted to his work to appear in America. Assembled by editors Larry McCaffery, Thomas Hartl, and Doug Rice, the volume unfolds as a series of several hundred alphabetically arranged entries in double columns forming an elaborate mock-encyclopedia of the sort Borges or Nabokov might have imagined. These entries include over a hundred representative stories, novel excerpts, essays, poems, and letters by Federman, many of which are previously unpublished, and hundreds of other entries by authors, critics, editors, and correspondents analyzing, criticizing, or often collaborating with Federman's works. Also included are individual entries on authors, artists, and books that influenced Federman, samples from a wide range of fiction, poetry, and criticism that illuminate his writing, a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as a generous selection of photographs, drawings, reproductions of paintings, documents, manuscript pages, and other visual materials. Among entries are a number of unpublished essays and commentaries about Federman's work commissioned specifically for this volume by well-known critics and translators including Brian McHale, Richard Martin, Ronald Sukenick, Geoffrey Green, and many others.  Click opposite on the number "10" for a review of this recent FEDERMAN volume. BUY IT NOW!

Modernism Since Postmodernism: Essays on Intermedia completed Dick Higgins' critical trilogy that began with A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts and continued with his Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of Intermedia. A fluxperson, artist, poet, composer and scholar of intermedia, Higgins also authored Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature among numerous other works. He died in October of 1998.

"Of course kitsch can be fun. Already 125 years ago, Rimbaud recognized this when, in the second section of A Season in Hell, he speaks of liking dumb paintings, door panels, stage sets, backdrops for acrobats, street signs, old-time literature and such-like. Who doesn't?... "Kitschspeak" is the term I use...for the fashionable kitsch language about the arts, sometimes delightful for a while, as with Jacques Derrida, for instance, but ultimately locked so closely into fashion and the world of second-rate and derivative art that it is all but impossible to use with major work and thus destined to pass into academia or oblivion once its novelty has passed....There are, of course, many schools of postmodernism--and they are just that, schools--but for a preliminary discussion there is no need to identify all of them. However, it can be argued that most of them are of two sorts: pop-academic, in which the professors cite each other to build up a lattice of assumptions into a polemic that may or may not have any correspondence with the realities of the arts that lie outside what is known in their trade as 'the discussion.' The academic trades are known collectively among participants in such discussions as 'the profession,' much as prostitutes refer to 'the  life.'"

Dick Higgins from the Foreword to Modernism Since Postmodernism

This volume is a collection of essays on issues affecting the political, economic, social, and cultural significance of international borders. It is an undertaking that is particularly timely due to global events that are so rapidly changing our understanding of international relations. The contributors to this book share basic research and practical interests in deepening understanding of the multifarious and often contradictory processes that condition human interaction across international borders. Published jointly by San Diego State University Press and The Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias.

San Diego State University:
A History in Word and Image

by Raymond Starr
ISBN 1-879691-30-2 | 1995
Trade paperback: 262 pages; illustrated
$36 $27.95
Also available in a Special limited hardback edition
ISBN 1-897691-39-6
$100 $69.95

San Diego State University: A History in Word and Image is the definitive portrait of SDSU’s rich legacy, celebrating the institution’s rise from a modest teachers college in downtown San Diego to a nationally recognized public research university with a global reach. Written by noted historian Raymond Starr and inspired by the vision of the late John Adams, whose generosity made the project possible, this profusely illustrated volume captures the story of SDSU through stunning archival photographs and vivid narrative.

From its early days on Park Avenue to its dynamic home on Montezuma Mesa, from wartime resilience to academic innovation, the book charts the university’s growth alongside the story of San Diego itself. Readers will discover the evolution of student life, athletics, research programs, and SDSU’s expanding connections across Mexico, the Pacific Rim, and the world.

A must-have for graduates, alumni, faculty, and anyone passionate about San Diego history, San Diego State University: A History in Word and Image is both a keepsake and an essential record of an institution that continues to shape the future.