"A massive achievement. . . . Toepfer respects the body, wants to understand movement as the primary medium of ideas, and gives women the central role they actually played in this aesthetic and intellectual discourse."Marcia B. Siegel, author of The Shapes of Change"

Empire of Ecstasy offers a novel interpretation of the explosion of German body culture between the two wars—nudism and nude dancing, gymnastics and dance training, dance photography and criticism, and diverse genres of performance from solo dancing to mass movement choirs. Karl Toepfer presents this dynamic subject as a vital and historically unique construction of "modern identity." The modern body, radiating freedom and power, appeared to Weimar artists and intelligentsia to be the source of a transgressive energy, as well as the sign and manifestation of powerful, mysterious "inner" conditions. Toepfer shows how this view of the modern body sought to extend the aesthetic experience beyond the boundaries imposed by rationalized life and to transcend these limits in search of ecstasy. With the help of much unpublished or long-forgotten archival material (including many little-known photographs), he investigates the process of constructing an "empire" of appropriative impulses toward ecstasy. Toepfer presents the work of such well-known figures as Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Oskar Schlemmer, along with less-known but equally fascinating body culture practitioners. His book is certain to become required reading for historians of dance, body culture, and modernism.

Anita Berber (1899-1928) and Sebastian Droste (1892-1927) were the most notorious dancers of Weimar Germany whose works (like their personal lives) were suffused with drugs, decadence and polysexuality. This rare book ... has its origins around a series of dance events performed by the couple in 1922 and consists in part of a number of Expressionist poems related to those evenings ... [and] includes essays, stage designs for projected works and a series of extraordinary photographs commissioned from Madame D'Ora (Dora Kalmus). The finished product should be seen as much as decadent literature as it is a landmark text of dance history and document of Weimar period excess ... --from publisher's web site.

In 1995, after receiving a tip from an informant that a new drug called Ecstasy was being pushed in Manhattan’s nightclubs, DEA agent Robert Gagne embarked on a mission to unravel one of the world’s most lucrative drug-trafficking networks. Chemical Cowboys tracks Gagne as he infiltrates New York’s club scene, uncovering a multimillion-dollar criminal empire that spans continents. At its helm is Oded “Fat Man” Tuito, an Israeli fugitive and elusive drug kingpin who combines Wall Street business savvy with old-fashioned street smarts and a taste for violence. A taut behind-the-scenes glimpse into an international criminal enterprise, Chemical Cowboys is a riveting tale of one man’s obsessive pursuit of justice—and the personal cost of that obsession.

Hempton explores the rise of Methodism from its unpromising origins as a religious society within the Church of England in the 1730s to a major international religious movement by the 1880s.

When Alexander the Great died at the age of thirty-two, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea in the west all the way to modern-day India in the east. In an unusual compromise, his two heirs—a mentally damaged half brother, Philip III, and an infant son, Alexander IV, born after his death—were jointly granted the kingship. But six of Alexander’s Macedonian generals, spurred by their own thirst for power and the legend that Alexander bequeathed his rule “to the strongest,” fought to gain supremacy. Perhaps their most fascinating and conniving adversary was Alexander’s former Greek secretary, Eumenes, now a general himself, who would be the determining factor in the precarious fortunes of the royal family. James Romm, professor of classics at Bard College, brings to life the cutthroat competition and the struggle for control of the Greek world’s greatest empire.

“The role of the critic,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way.” His latest collection exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made him “required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” (The Daily Beast). In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways. Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture’s Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a “Greek DNA” in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the “aesthetics of victimhood” in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence—a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer. This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist’s personal essays, including his “critic’s manifesto” and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics.