The first book to highlight the growing number of artists who collaborate with craftsmen and artisans to realize their work.

Using examples from a wide range of media, Michael Petry presents art by more than 115 contemporary artists who have one thing in common: they do not make their own work. Instead, they either employ others to produce it on their behalf or appropriate objects made by someone else. 

But when an artist does not make his or her own work, what does it mean for the nature of art and for the status of the artist? What is the relationship between creativity and production?

The book explores these and other questions about authorship, artistic originality, skill, craftsmanship, and the creative act. Beginning with a historical overview and continuing through the history of modern art, it highlights the vital role that skills from craft and industrial production play in creating some of today's most innovative and highly sought-after works of art.

 "...a lively and highly readable study of the political figures who shaped and then reshaped the city in the 20th century."

--The Boston Globe 

Rogues and Redeemers tells the hidden story of Boston politics -- the cold-blooded ward bosses, the smoke-filled rooms, the larger-than-life pols who became national figures: Honey Fitz, the crafty stage Irishman and grandfather to a president; the pugilistic Rascal King, Michael Curley; the hectored Kevin White who tried to hold the city together during the busing crisis; and Ray Flynn, the Southie charmer who was truly the last hurrah for Irish-American politics in the city.

For almost a century, the Irish dominated Boston politics with their own unique, clannish brand of coercion and shaped its future for good and ill. Former Boston Globe investigative reporter Gerard O'Neill takes the reader through the entire journey from the famine ships arriving in Massachusetts Bay to the wresting of power away from the Brahmins of Beacon Hill to the Title I wars of attrition over housing to the rending of the city over busing to the Boston of today -- which somehow through it all became a modern, revitalized city, albeit with a growing divide between the haves and have-nots.

Sweeping in its history and intimate in its details, Rogues and Redeemers is sure to become a classic, definitive epic of a city.

"With a novelist's flair, he conveys the experiences of ordinary people pitted against powerful and unpredictable nature."

 -The Wall Street Journal

Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier - the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.

Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground-when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.

The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories-like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America's tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.