Guinea pigs are one of the world’s most popular pets—small, friendly, easy to care for, and unbearably cute. We have felt this way for a long time: guinea pigs were first domesticated in 5000 B.C.E. Since then they have inspired historical figures ranging from the scientist William Harvey to the artists Jan Brueghel and Beatrix Potter. In this book, Dorothy Yamamoto offers the first in-depth treatment of this cuddly little creature over the several millennia it has been a part of our lives.
           
Yamamoto examines the role guinea pigs have today—as pets—but also looks back to less loving times when guinea pigs were put to more direct use. She discusses them as a crucial sacrificial offering to Incan gods, as the entrée in the Cusco Cathedral’s painting of The Last Supper, and as a highly favored experimental subject—for which they have become the quintessential metaphor for anyone in the same unfortunate circumstance. Threading her account with examples from the guinea pig’s many appearances in literature and art, Yamamoto reveals the personality and cultural importance of an animal we have always wanted to keep nearby, providing a fun and unique book for any animal lover. 

 

Published in Association with the Science Museum, London

Ancestors of domestic pigs, wild boars are tough, resourceful omnivores that have presented humans since prehistoric times with a tricky situation: they make for a delicious food source, but they are formidable animals with long tusks that can inflict serious harm. Wild Boar traces the interaction of humans and boars in fascinating detail, showing how our relationship has evolved over time and how it can be seen today as fundamentally representative of the questions at the heart of ecological preservation and restoration.
          
Dorothy Yamamoto takes us from the dense streets of Tokyo to the Forest of Dean in England to show how wild boars have survived in a variety of settings. She also explores the ways that they have figured in our imaginations, whether as the iconic Calydonian Boar from Ancient Greece, the White Boar of Richard III, or any of the other forms it has taken in mythology and lore. As she shows, the boar has been an especially prominent figure in hunting culture, and as such it has often been construed as a larger-than-life monster that only the most heroic of us can take down, a misperception that has threatened the boar’s survival in many parts of the world. With an illuminating combination of natural with cultural history, this book paints a vibrant portrait of a unique and often misunderstood animal. 

So long as humans have been raising animals, they have been eating lamb. In this engaging history, Brian Yarvin tells the story of how we’ve raised, cooked, and eaten lamb over the centuries and the place it’s established in a wide range of cuisines and cultures worldwide.
           
Starting with the earliest days of lamb and sheep farming in the ancient Middle East, Yarvin traces the spread of lamb to cooks in ancient Rome and Greece. He details the earliest recorded meals involving lamb in the Zagros Mountains of Iraq and Iran, explores its role in Renaissance banquets in Italy, and follows its path to China, India, and even Navajo tribes in America. Taking his story up to the present, Yarvin considers the growing locavore movement, one that has found in lamb a manageable, sustainable source of healthy—and tasty—protein. Richly illustrated and peppered with recipes, Lamb will be the perfect accompaniment to your next grilled chop or braised shank.

Street art and graffiti are a familiar sight in all our cities. Giant murals commemorate historical events or proclaim the culture of a neighborhood, while tagged walls can function simultaneously as a claim to territory and a backdrop for an urban fashion shoot. Street Art World examines these divergent forms and functions of street art. This strikingly illustrated book explores every aspect of street art, from those who spray it into being to those who revel in it on Instagram, from its place under highway overpasses to one on the austere walls of high art museums.
            What exactly is street art? Is it the same as graffiti, or do they have different histories, meanings, and practitioners? Who makes it? Who buys it? Can it be exhibited at all, or does it always have to appear unsanctioned?  Talking with artists, collectors, sellers, and buyers, author Alison Young reveals an energetic world of self-made artists who are simultaneously passionate about an authentic form of expression and ambivalent about the prospects of selling it to make a living—even a fabulously good one.
Drawing on over twenty years of research, she juxtaposes the rise and fall of art markets against the vibrancy of the street and urban life, providing a rich history and new ways of contextualizing the words and images—some breathtakingly beautiful—that seem to appear overnight in cities around the world.
 

Botanical, a new series from Reaktion, is the first to integrate horticultural writing with a broader account of the cultural and social impact of plants. Oak, one of the first two books in the series, narrates the biography of the tree that since time immemorial has been a symbol of loyalty, strength, generosity, and renewal. Peter Young explores how the oak, native to the northern hemisphere and found in locations as diverse as the Americas and tropical Asia, has played an important role in state-building, art, folk tales, poems, and songs.

 

Starting with the pagan societies that venerated the oak, Young examines how the tree was used in other religions, revealing how it was believed to be a gateway between worlds in Celtic mythology and later became sacred to Thor in Norse mythology. He follows the oak as it was adopted by many Western European countries as a national symbol, including England, France, and Germany. The United States Congress designated the oak as America’s national tree in 2004, and it is the state tree of Iowa, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and Georgia. Individual oak trees have also gained historical importance, such as the Charter Oak in Hartford, Connecticut, which became a symbol of American independence. In addition to tracing the history of the tree itself, Young investigates oak as a wood used to make furniture, bridges, wine casks, homes, ships, weapons, and even the electric chair, and he describes how the tree has been used as a food source—its fruit, the acorn, was eaten in ancient Greece, ancient Iberia, and Korea, and it was a traditional food of Native Americans.

 

Packed with information and beautiful illustrations, Oak tells the fascinating tale of this stately, durable member of the natural world.

Tortoise is the first cultural history of these long-lived and intriguing creatures, which have existed for more than 200 million years. The book covers tortoises worldwide, in evolution, myth and reality, ranging across paleontology, natural history, myth, folklore, art forms, literature, veterinary medicine and trade regulations.

The tortoise has been seen as an Atlas-like creature supporting the world, as the origin of music and as a philosophical paradox. Peter Young examines the tortoise in all these guises, as well as a military tactical formation, its exploitation by mariners and others for food, as ornament (in tortoiseshell), as a motif in art, and in space research. He looks at the movement away from exploitation to conservation and even the uses of the tortoise in advertising. As well as examples of species, illustrations from around the world include monuments, sculptures, coins, stamps, objets d’art, drawings, cartoons, advertisements and X-rays.

The book will appeal not only to tortoise lovers but also to readers of cultural histories around the world.

"Peter Young’s Tortoise, on the other claw, can be warmly recommended."—Jonathan Bate, The Times