Reading Room

Offering full text sample excerpts from our newest books in both HTML and Adobe Acrobat (PDF) formats, as well as Slide Shows. Choose from our available sample features:

Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles by Roger E. Bilstein

Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the development of space flight in America and the course of modern technology, this reprint edition includes a new preface by the author providing a 21st-century perspective on the historic importance of the Saturn project.

Read the complete table of contents, preface and an eleven page excerpt from chapter two.

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The Veil Unveiled by Faegheh Shirazi

Illustrated with photographs, drawings, and cartoons gathered from popular culture, this provocative book demonstrates that the veil, the garment known in Islamic cultures as the hijab, holds within its folds a semantic versatility that goes far beyond current clichés and homogenous representations.

Read the complete table of contents and introduction to the book.

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Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal, with a new preface
by Faegheh Shirazi

An irresistible inside look at one of the world’s great dance companies, Winter Season is also a sensitive, intimate, and almost painfully honest account of the emotional and intellectual development of a young woman dedicated to one of the most demanding of all the arts.

Read the complete new 2003 preface to the book.

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Looking at Cuba: Essays on Culture and Civil Society
by Rafael Hernández, translated by Dick Cluster

Rafael Hernández, one of the most visible intellectuals living and writing in Cuba today, addresses such controversies as the current social diversity brought about by socialist policies, the presence of well-educated new generations, and the emergence of growing inequality that accompanied and has followed the crisis of the 1990s.

Read the table of contents and forewords.

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