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The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft
by Ulrich Boser“Boser cracks the cold case of the art world’s greatest unsolved mystery.”— Vanity FairOne museum, two thieves, and the Boston underworld: the riveting story of the 1990 Gardner Museum robbery, the largest unsolved art theft in history. Perfect for fans of the Netflix series This is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist!Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed the largest art heist in history. They stole a dozen masterpieces, including one Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and five Degas. But after thousands of leads, hundreds of interviews, and a $5 million reward, not a single painting has been recovered. Worth as much as $500 million, the missing masterpieces have become the Holy Grail of the art world and their theft one of the nation’s most extraordinary unsolved mysteries.Art detective Harold Smith worked the theft for years, and after his death, reporter Ulrich Boser decided to pick up where he left off. Traveling deep into the art underworld, Boser explores Smith’s unfinished leads and comes across a remarkable cast of characters, including a brilliant rock ‘n’ roll art thief and a golden-boy gangster who professes his innocence in rhyming verse. A tale of art and greed, of obsession and loss, The Gardner Heist is as compelling as the stolen masterpieces themselves.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up
by Russell Brand“A child’s garden of vices, My Booky Wook is also a relentless ride with a comic mind clearly at the wheel.... The bloke can write. He rhapsodizes about heroin better than anyone since Jim Carroll. With the flick of his enviable pen, he can summarize childhood thus: ‘My very first utterance in life was not a single word, but a sentence. It was, ‘Don’t do that.’... Russell Brand has a compelling story." — New York Times Book ReviewThe gleeful and candid New York Times bestselling autobiography of addiction, recovery, and rise to fame from Russell Brand, star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and one of the biggest personalities in comedy today.
Artists in Exile
by Joseph HorowitzDuring the first half of the twentieth century--decades of war and revolution in Europe--an "intellectual migration" relocated thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States, including some of Europe's supreme performing artists, filmmakers, playwrights, and choreographers. For them, America proved to be both a strange and opportune destination. A "foreign homeland" (Thomas Mann), it would frustrate and confuse, yet afford a clarity of understanding unencumbered by native habit and bias. However inadvertently, the condition of cultural exile would promote acute inquiries into the American experience. What impact did these famous newcomers have on American culture, and how did America affect them? George Balanchine, in collaboration with Stravinsky, famously created an Americanized version of Russian classical ballet. Kurt Weill, schooled in Berlin jazz, composed a Broadway opera. Rouben Mamoulian's revolutionary Broadway productions of Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma! drew upon Russian "total theater." An army of German filmmakers--among them F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder--made Hollywood more edgy and cosmopolitan. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich redefined film sexuality. Erich Korngold upholstered the sound of the movies. Rudolf Serkin inspirationally inculcated dour Germanic canons of musical interpretation. An obscure British organist reinvented himself as "Leopold Stokowski." However, most of these gifted émigrés to the New World found that the freedoms they enjoyed in America diluted rather than amplified their high creative ambitions.A central theme of Joseph Horowitz's study is that Russians uprooted from St. Petersburg became "Americans"--they adapted. Representatives of Germanic culture, by comparison, preached a German cultural bible--they colonized. "The polar extremes," he writes, "were Balanchine, who shed Petipa to invent a New World template for ballet, and the conductor George Szell, who treated his American players as New World Calibans to be taught Mozart and Beethoven." A symbiotic relationship to African American culture is another ongoing motif emerging from Horowitz's survey: the immigrants "bonded with blacks from a shared experience of marginality"; they proved immune to "the growing pains of a young high culture separating from parents and former slaves alike."
Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Invention of the Gothic
by Philip Ball“A lively, open-ended study of the building of Chartres Cathedral. . . . Ball puts the fun back in medieval scholasticism.” —Los Angeles TimesChartres Cathedral, south of Paris, is revered as one of the most beautiful and profound works of art in the Western canon. But what did it mean to those who constructed it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—and why was it built at such immense height and with such glorious play of light, in the soaring manner we now call Gothic?In this eminently fascinating work, author Philip Ball makes sense of the visual and emotional power of Chartres and brilliantly explores how its construction—and the creation of other Gothic cathedrals—represented a profound and dramatic shift in the way medieval thinkers perceived their relationship with their world.Beautifully illustrated and written, filled with astonishing insight, Universe of Stone embeds the magnificent cathedral in the culture of the twelfth century—its schools of philosophy and science, its trades and technologies, its politics and religious debates—enabling us to view this ancient architectural marvel with fresh eyes.
The Man Behind the Nose: Assassins, Astronauts, Cannibals, and Other Stupendous Yarns
by Larry HarmonThe Man Behind the Nose is the autobiography of the man who was Bozo. For 50 years Larry Harmon was the face—and the nose—of Bozo the Clown, the most well-known, beloved clown of them all, the precursor for every successful modern-day harlequin to come, from Ronald McDonald to Krusty. A warm, surprising, and endlessly entertaining life story filled to the brim with “Assassins, Astronauts, Cannibals, and Other Stupendous Tales,” The Man Behind the Nose is a rollicking ride through the world of a true American icon in greasepaint.
Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made
by Michael Adams"Michael Adams's book is great fun! No one intends to make a truly bad movie, but when they do, Michael Adams will be there to watch it...and make it entertaining!" —John Landis, director of Trading Places and The Blues Brothers In Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies, film critic Michael Adams embarks on a year-long odyssey to discover the worst movie ever made, which Mystery Science Theater 3000 star, writer, and director Kevin Murphy calls "disturbingly comprehensive, joyously critical, and the best of its kind." From all-time cult classics such as Reefer Madness and Plan 9 from Outer Space to new entries to the pantheon such as Gigli and Baby Geniuses, no genre, star, or director is safe from Adams’s acerbic wit and hilarious observations. In the vein of A.J. Jacobs’s New York Times bestselling book The Know-It-All, and with the snarky sarcasm of television’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 and The Soup, Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies leaves no stone unturned. With a foreword by cult director George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead).
George Lucas's Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success
by Alex Ben Block Lucy Autrey WilsonA comprehensive look at 300 of the most financially and/or critically successful motion pictures of all time—many made despite seemingly insurmountable economic, cultural, and political challenges—set against the prevailing production, distribution, exhibition, marketing, and technology trends of each decade in movie business history.
Why I Fight: The Belt Is Just an Accessory
by B.J. Penn Dave WeintraubClaiming that “the belt is just an accessory,” Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Lightweight Champion B.J. Penn explains Why I Fight in this honest, intimate, and fascinating memoir. Written with David Weintraub, Why I Fight is an unforgettable portrait of one of the top and most recognizable mixed martial artists in the UFC and an up-close look at one of the most exciting and fastest growing sports in the world. UFC and Jiu-Jitsu aficionados—and fans of Iceman, A Fighter’s Heart, and Bruce Lee’s classic The Tao of Jeet Kun Do—will want to explore Why I Fight.
Satiristas: Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs & Vulgarians
by Paul Provenza Dan DionFeaturing our greatest comedic minds on the nature of humor, its relevance in society—and why sometimes you just need a good dirty joke to cleanse the palate—Satiristas is a hilarious multi-voiced manifesto on satire and comedy presented by Paul Provenza, co-creator of The Aristocrats.
In Search of My Homeland
by Er Tai GaoThe memoir of Er Tai Gao, a Chinese artist, art critic, and intellectual who spent twenty years in and out of China's gulag until his escape to freedom in Hong Kong in 1992 and his defection to America in 1993 In 1957, twenty-two-year-old art teacher Er Tai Gao came to the attention of the Communist Chinese authorities with his groundbreaking essay "On Beauty," in which he argued that the nature of what is beautiful is both subjective and individual-a position in direct opposition to government policy. Labeled a "rightist" by the Mao regime, Gao was sent to a labor camp in China's harsh western desert, where in just three years 90 percent of his fellow prisoners died. It would be the first of the scholar's three convictions for subversive thought and behavior. After his last imprisonment, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests, Gao and his wife, Maya, escaped to Hong Kong, and in 1993 were offered political asylum by the United States. Epic in scope, reaching from the depths of work ditches in the Gobi Desert to the heights of the Buddhist heavens depicted on the Dunhuang cave ceilings, In Search of My Homeland is a striking portrayal of Gao's experiences of political persecution, of prisoners pushed to the limits of human endurance, and ultimately of the power of hope. Gao's enormous skill as a writer and insightful observer offers a unique, thoughtful perspective on China in the second half of the twentieth century. Powerful and elegantly written, Gao's work teaches us that freedom is the most important political stand for an artist, to be able to dissent from the dominant ideology--thereby making beauty, both its creation and perception, its ultimate symbol.
I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey
by Paul RudnickI Shudder is a side-splittingly funny collection of essays from Paul Rudnick, one of America’s preeminent humorists. Rudnick, who writes for The New Yorker and has written the screenplays for the films In and Out, Sister Act, and Addams Family Values, shares his hilarious observations on life in New York City and New Jersey, the perils of show business, and dealing with one’s family, however crazy they may be. As David Sedaris says, “There’s no book wiser or half as funny as I Shudder.”
Green Porno: A Book and Short Films by Isabella Rossellini
by Isabella RosselliniFrom the beloved actress Isabella Rossellini comes Green Porno, a strange and enlightening visual exploration of the sex lives of insects and sea creatures, based on the wildly popular short videos of the same name. Co-director Jody Shapiro has taken 125 arresting film stills of Isabella dressed in animal costumes which are the centerpiece of Green Porno and will appear alongside narrative text describing the “love making” process of each animal. Each chapter will also include a quirky, surprising facts about each species.
The Theft & the Miracle
by Rebecca WadeOn a cold, rainy day, ordinary Hannah Price stumbles into the cathedral and does something extraordinary-almost in a trance, she makes a perfect drawing of an antique carving of the Virgin and Child, capturing their every detail. The next day the statue of the Child is taken from the Virgin's arms, and a few days later Hannah is interviewed by the police. Soon, strange things start happening to her. An odd man keeps appearing. The portrait she painted of her best friend, Sam, is vandalized. Is it all related to the theft? Hannah is determined to find the statue, even if it will take a miracle. Rebecca Wade has crafted a thriller that will puzzle and provoke every reader until its stunning conclusion.
The Girls of Lighthouse Lane: Katherine's Story (Girls of Lighthouse Lane #1)
by Thomas Kinkade Erika TamarMeet The Girls of Lighthouse Lane. . . Katherine is the daughter of the lighthouse keeper. She dreams of becoming a painter. But in 1905, a girl can't grow up to be a famous artist -- can she? Rose just moved to the town of Cape Light. She wants to fit in with her new friends, but Rose has a secret she can't share with anyone. . . . Lizabeth is Kat's rich cousin who always gets what she wants. But Lizabeth soon finds out that money can't keep her from losing the most precious thing of all. . . . Amanda's mother passed away, and now Amanda keeps house for her minister father. When she meets a very special young man, can she find the courage to be friends with him in spite of her father's disapproval? The quiet New England town of Cape Light never seems to change. But in the year 1905, the lives of these four friends will be transformed in ways they never could have imagined. . . .
The Other Hollywood
by Jennifer Osborne Legs Mcneil Peter PaviaA raucous and revealing oral history of the birth of the adult film industry, The Other Hollywood peels back the candy coating to let the true story be told -- by the stars, movie makers, and other industry players who lived it. And what a story it is: Through hundreds of original interviews, contemporary newspaper accounts, police reports, court testimony, and more, Legs McNeil and coauthors Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia trace today's billion-dollar industry from its makeshift, mob-connected origins to the Internet age. Along the way we encounter porn stars such as Linda Lovelace, John Holmes, Traci Lords, and Savannah -- along with countless mainstream stars, politicians, FBI agents, and more. Epic, hilarious, and moving, The Other Hollywood contributes to the porn industry the one thing missing in all previous accounts: a vivid, tragicomic, irresistible humanity.
Words to Live By
by C. S. LewisC. S. Lewis is a beloved writer and thinker and arguably the most important Christian intellectual of the twentieth century. His groundbreaking children's series The Chronicles of Narnia, lucid nonfiction titles such as Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, and thought-provoking fiction, including The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, have become trusted companions for millions of readers. Here Lewis breathes new life into words and concepts that have dulled through time and familiarity, and his writings inevitably provoke deep thought and surprising revelations. Words to Live By contains an unprecedented selection of Lewis's writings, drawing from his most popular works, but also from his volumes of letters and his lesser-known essays and poems. His works are presented in accessible selections covering subjects from A to Z, including beauty, character, confession, doubt, family, holiness, and religion. Both a wonderful introduction to Lewis's thinking and a wise and insightful guide to key topics in the Christian life, these are truly words to live by.
What Christians Believe
by C. S. LewisThe Essentials Explained Master storyteller and essayist C. S. Lewis here tackles the central questions of the Christian faith: Who was Jesus? What did he accomplish? What does it mean for me? In these classic essays, which began as talks on the BBC during World War II, Lewis creatively and simply explains the basic tenets of Christianity. Taken from the core section of Mere Christianity, the selection in this gift edition provides an accessible way for more people to discover these timeless truths. For those looking to remind themselves of the things they hold true, or those looking for a snapshot of Christianity, this book is a wonderful introduction to the faith.
Virtue and Vice
by C. S. LewisA Pocket Guide to Goodness Few writers have inspired more readers than author C. S. Lewis -- both through the enchanting volumes of his children's series and through his captivating adult classics such as Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and numerous others. Drawn from many works, this volume collects dictionary-like entries of Lewis's keenest observations and best advice on how to live a truly good life. From ambition to charity, despair to duty, hope to humility, Lewis delivers clear, illuminating definitions to live by.
Paved with Good Intentions
by C. S. LewisTemptation and Deception Made Easy The demon Wormwood first became famous through his correspondence with his uncle Screwtape, published in The Screwtape Letters. We are now privileged to peruse his field notebook from that demonic training session, complete with scribbles, notes, and excerpts from his uncle's letters. Wormwood's instructions, mission statements, and maxims for special occasions create a "best of Screwtape" that offers witty and cutting strategies for how best to corrupt a brand new Christian and steal him from the "Enemy" -- God. If the best defense is to know your opponent's game book, this is a must read for all those who want to retain their souls.
Miracles
by C. S. LewisIn the classic Miracles, C.S. Lewis, the most important Christian writer of the 20th century, argues that a Christian must not only accept but rejoice in miracles as a testimony of the unique personal involvement of God in his creation.
Yours, Jack
by C. S. LewisC. S. Lewis spent a good portion of each day corresponding with people via handwritten letters. Over his lifetime he wrote thousands of letters in which he offered his friends and acquaintances advice on the Christian life, giving away a bit of himself to each of these correspondents as he signed his notes with a heartfelt and familiar, "yours, Jack." Most of these letters are currently only available in their entirety-a collection consisting of three hefty tomes. Yours, Jack features the best inspirational readings and sage counsel culled from C. S. Lewis's letters, offering an accessible look at this great author's personal vision for the spiritual life. This thematic selection from his letters offers the freshest presentation of Lewis's writings since his death in 1963. Yours, Jack will showcase Lewis's remarkable teachings and vision for a new generation.
A Grief Observed (Faber Paperbacks Ser.)
by C. S. LewisWritten after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moment," A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: "Nothing will shake a man -- or at any rate a man like me -- out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself." This is a beautiful and unflinchingly homest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.
George MacDonald (Collected Letters Of C. S. Lewis Ser.)
by C. S. LewisIn this collection selected by C. S. Lewis are 365 selections from MacDonald's inspiring and challenging writings.
The Screwtape Letters: Letters From A Senior To A Junior Devil
by C. S. LewisIn this humorous and perceptive exchange between two devils, C. S. Lewis delves into moral questions about good vs. evil, temptation, repentance, and grace. Through this wonderful tale, the reader emerges with a better understanding of what it means to live a faithful life.
Rock 'n' Roll Soldier: A Memoir
by Dean Ellis Kohler Susan VanHecke"During a time when none of us knew for sure if we would live or die, I came to know the true power of music."Dean Kohler is about to make it big—he's finally scored a national record deal! But his dreams are abruptly put on hold by the arrival of his draft notice. Now he's in Qui Nhon, Vietnam, serving as a military policeman. He keeps telling himself he's a musician, not a killer, and that he's lucky he's not fighting on the front lines. When Captain orders him to form a rock band, it's up to Dean to find instruments and players, pronto. Ingenuity and perseverance pay off and soon the band is traveling through treacherous jungle terrain to perform for troops in desperate need of an escape—even if it's only for three sets. And for Dean—who lives with death, violence, and the fear that anyone could be a potential spy (even his Vietnamese girlfriend)—the band becomes the one thing that gets him through the day. During one of the most controversial wars in recent American history, this incredible true story is about music and camaraderie in the midst of chaos.