- Table View
- List View
Garsington Revisited: The Legend of Lady Ottoline Morrell Brought Up-to-Date
by Sandra Jobson DarrochLady Ottoline Morrell was the foremost host of the Bloomsbury set, offering sustenance and friendship to Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Duncan Grant and her lover Bertrand Russell, to name but a few. This book is a revised and updated edition of the author's original biography of Ottoline first published in 1975 worldwide. It has been updated, with vignettes about her sources, including lunch at ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" / Charleston with Duncan Grant, and a ship's tumbler of sherry with David Garnett as a prelude to discussing "skeletons in Ottoline's cupboard"). Her sources in Texas where she read more than 8,000 letters to Ottoline including 2,500 letters from Bertrand Russell, can now be located in new footnotes. Darroch remains as impressed as ever by Ottoline's courage and determination to forgo the comfortable life of an aristocrat to mix with – and champion – some of the 20th century's leading artists and writers. The definitive biography.
Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary: A Radical's Struggle to Remake America
by Kevin R. Gutzman"In this lively and clearly written book, Kevin Gutzman makes a compelling case for the broad range and radical ambitions of Thomas Jefferson's commitment to human equality." - Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize winning author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804Though remembered chiefly as author of the Declaration of Independence and the president under whom the Louisiana Purchase was effected, Thomas Jefferson was a true revolutionary in the way he thought about the size and reach of government, which Americans who were full citizens and the role of education in the new country. In his new book, Kevin Gutzman gives readers a new view of Jefferson—a revolutionary who effected radical change in a growing country.Jefferson’s philosophy about the size and power of the federal system almost completely undergirded the Jeffersonian Republican Party. His forceful advocacy of religious freedom was not far behind, as were attempts to incorporate Native Americans into American society. His establishment of the University of Virginia might be one of the most important markers of the man’s abilities and character.He was not without flaws. While he argued for the assimilation of Native Americans into society, he did not assume the same for Africans being held in slavery while—at the same time—insisting that slavery should cease to exist. Many still accuse Jefferson of hypocrisy on the ground that he both held that “all men are created equal” and held men as slaves. Jefferson’s true character, though, is more complex than that as Kevin Gutzman shows in his new book about Jefferson, a revolutionary whose accomplishments went far beyond the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.
Raw Cake: Beautiful, Nutritious and Indulgent Raw Desserts, Treats, Smoothies and Elixirs
by Daisy Kristiansen Leah Garwood-GowersLong-time friends Leah and Daisy set up raw superfood confectionery company The Hardihood in early 2015 to prove that eating healthy desserts does not mean compromising taste or beauty. Their range of handcrafted desserts comprise all-natural ingredients and are completely free from refined sugar, gluten, wheat, dairy, and soy. They’re also raw, which means the ingredients are not altered by heat and thus maintain their nutritional value and integrity.Raw Cake is about making beautiful, raw desserts that appeal to everyone. Using key healthy ingredients like nuts, coconut oil, dates, rice malt, and powdered super foods, these unique flavor combinations will delight your taste buds. You’ll find bite-sized raw treats like Caramel Crunch and Carrot Cupcakes, as well as crowd-pleasers such as Pineapple Sorbet, Chocolate Orange Cake, and Banoffee Pie. Complete with 100 recipes, nutritional breakdowns, and food styling techniques, Raw Cake will help you to create sensational-looking and healthy cakes.
At the Altar of the Appellate Gods: Arguing before the US Supreme Court, A Memoir
by Lisa Sarnoff GochmanHave you ever wondered what it's like to argue before the Supreme Court of the United States?In this poignant and compelling memoir, Lisa Sarnoff Gochmancaptures the terror, wonder, and joy of preparing for and arguing a landmark criminal case before the nine justices of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC. At the Altar of the Appellate Gods traces the arc of a violent, racially motivated crime by white supremacist Charles C. Apprendi Jr. in rural Vineland, New Jersey, through the New Jersey state court system, and all the way up to the Supreme Court, where Gochman defended the constitutionality of New Jersey's Hate Crime Statute before a very hot bench. Gochman went head-to-head with Justice Antonin Scalia, fielded tough questions from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and strolled down memory lane with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Told with grace and humor, At the Altar of the Appellate Gods will interest anyone who is curious about the inner workings of our court system and what it is really like to bring a case before the highest court in the country.
Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall
by Will Ellsworth-JonesWhile hiding from the limelight, Banksy has made himself into one of the world's best-known living artists. His pieces have fetched millions of dollars at prestigious auction houses. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his film Exit Through the Gift Shop. Once viewed as vandalism, his work is now venerated; fans have gone so far as to dismantle the walls that he has painted on for collection and sale.But as famous as Banksy is, he is also utterly unknown—he conceals his real name, hides his face, distorts his voice, and reveals his identity to only a select few. Who is this man that has captivated millions? How did a graffiti artist from Bristol, England, find himself at the center of an artistic movement? How has someone who goes to such great lengths to keep himself hidden achieved such great notoriety? And is his anonymity a necessity to continue his vandalism—or a marketing tool to make him ever more famous?Now, in the first ever full-scale investigation of the artist, reporter Will Ellsworth-Jones pieces together the story of Banksy, building up a picture of the man and the world in which he operates. He talks to his friends and enemies, those who knew him in his early, unnoticed days, and those who have watched him try to come to terms with his newfound fame and success. And he explores the contradictions of a champion of renegade art going to greater and greater lengths to control his image and his work.Banksy offers a revealing glimpse at an enigmatic figure and a riveting account of how a self-professed vandal became an international icon—and turned the art world upside down in the process.
The Widow's Walk: A Novel
by Robert BarclayIn the spirit of The Notebook and The Time Traveler’s Wife comes Robert Barclay’s haunting and romantic novel of passion, destiny, loss and an eternal love that will bring two people together across time.His name was Garrett Richmond and he had always wanted to live by the ocean. So when the opportunity to buy—and renovate—the old home known as Seaside arrived, he leapt at the chance. Never mind that his friends and family thought he was crazy, he knew he could return this lonely mansion, worn by time, wind, and neglect, to its former beauty. But Seaside was more than just a project; it was spot that had called to him his entire life.And then one night he saw her . . .Her name is Constance Elizabeth Canfield and she tells him Seaside has been her home for over 150 years. But Constance is no ghost; rather, she claims that she has been somehow magically trapped between this life and the next. At first, Garrett can’t believe her crazy story—the woman had to be lying! And yet, there was something about Constance that was from another time . . .Soon this mysterious woman and flesh and blood man share a closeness they cannot deny. But just as their love begins to bloom, Constance’s presence starts mysteriously fading away, soon to be gone forever. Is their love doomed—or is it strong enough to transcend time, and even death itself?
I'll Be Back Right After This: My Memoir
by Pat O'BrienA New York Times Best seller!Pat O'Brien was a skinny South Dakota kid with long hair, a rock and roll band, divorced parents and an alcoholic father. In all the familiar ways, he was on the road to nowhere until a professor, who envisioned his future as the household name he would soon become, dramatically changed his life.From that day forward Pat's life took turns that were both spectacular and destructive: from the Huntley-Brinkley Report and afternoons at Bobby Kennedy's living room with Muhammad Ali to conversations with six Presidents. He did acid with Timothy Leary, drank with Mickey Mantle, and over the course of a remarkable career up close and personal with the Beatles, The Stones, The Kennedy's, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and virtually every star in Hollywood. In I'LL BE BACK RIGHT AFTER THIS, Pat reveals the highs and lows of the life of a radio and TV broadcaster, spent sharing the mic with the world's rich and famous while battling an infamous public scandal and demons that nearly killed him. With laughter, tears and miracles he reveals how he learned to accept his mistakes, find redemption and become the father he never had, proving there really are second and even third acts in life.
Run the World: My 3,500-Mile Journey through Running Cultures around the Globe
by Becky WadeFrom elite marathoner and Olympic hopeful Becky Wade comes the story of her year-long exploration of diverse global running communities from England to Ethiopia—9 countries, 72 host families, and over 3,500 miles of running—investigating unique cultural approaches to the sport and revealing the secrets to the success of runners all over the world.Fresh off a successful collegiate running career—with multiple NCAA All-American honors and two Olympic Trials qualifying marks to her name—Becky Wade was no stranger to international competition. But after years spent safely sticking to the training methods she knew, Becky was curious about how her counterparts in other countries approached the sport to which she’d dedicated over half of her life. So in 2012, as a recipient of the Watson Fellowship, she packed four pairs of running shoes, cleared her schedule for the year, and took off on a journey to infiltrate diverse running communities around the world. What she encountered far exceeded her expectations and changed her outlook into the sport she loved.Over the next twelve months—visiting 9 countries with unique and storied running histories, logging over 3,500 miles running over trails, tracks, sidewalks, and dirt roads—Becky explored the varied approaches of runners across the globe. Whether riding shotgun around the streets of London with Olympic champion sprinter Usain Bolt, climbing for an hour at daybreak to the top of Ethiopia’s Mount Entoto just to start her daily run, or getting lost jogging through the bustling streets of Tokyo, Becky’s unexpected adventures, keen insights, and landscape descriptions take the reader into the heartbeat of distance running around the world.Upon her return to the United States, she incorporated elements of the training styles she’d sampled into her own program, and her competitive career skyrocketed. When she made her marathon debut in 2013, winning the race in a blazing 2:30, she became the third-fastest woman marathoner under the age of 25 in U.S. history, qualifying for the 2016 Olympic Trials and landing a professional sponsorship from Asics.From the feel-based approach to running that she learned from the Kenyans, to the grueling uphill workouts she adopted from the Swiss, to the injury-recovery methods she learned from the Japanese, Becky shares the secrets to success from runners and coaches around the world. The story of one athlete’s fascinating journey, Run the World is also a call to change the way we approach the world’s most natural and inclusive sport.
Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (The Copenhagen Trilogy #1)
by David A. Bell"In his lucid and bracing history, [David] Bell helps us better understand how [a] charismatic grifter came to occupy the most powerful office in the world . . . Bell’s description of our predicament makes for essential reading." —Robert Zaretsky, Los Angeles Review of BooksAn immersive examination of why the age of democratic revolutions was also a time of hero worship and strongmenIn Men on Horseback, the Princeton University historian David A. Bell offers a dramatic new interpretation of modern politics, arguing that the history of democracy is inextricable from the history of charisma, its shadow self. Bell begins with Corsica’s Pasquale Paoli, an icon of republican virtue whose exploits were once renowned throughout the Atlantic World. Paoli would become a signal influence in both George Washington’s America and Napoleon Bonaparte’s France. In turn, Bonaparte would exalt Washington even as he fashioned an entirely different form of leadership. In the same period, Toussaint Louverture sought to make French Revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality a reality for the formerly enslaved people of what would become Haiti, only to be betrayed by Napoleon himself. Simon Bolivar witnessed the coronation of Napoleon and later sought refuge in newly independent Haiti as he fought to liberate Latin America from Spanish rule. Tracing these stories and their interconnections, Bell weaves a spellbinding tale of power and its ability to mesmerize. Ultimately, Bell tells the crucial and neglected story of how political leadership was reinvented for a revolutionary world that wanted to do without kings and queens. If leaders no longer rule by divine right, what underlies their authority? Military valor? The consent of the people? Their own Godlike qualities? Bell’s subjects all struggled with this question, learning from each other’s example as they did so. They were men on horseback who sought to be men of the people—as Bell shows, modern democracy, militarism, and the cult of the strongman all emerged together. Today, with democracy’s appeal and durability under threat around the world, Bell’s account of its dark twin is timely and revelatory. For all its dangers, charisma cannot be dispensed with; in the end, Bell offers a stirring injunction to reimagine it as an animating force for good in the politics of our time.
The Silence: A Gary Goodhew Mystery (The Gary Goodhew Mysteries #4)
by Alison BruceA rash of unexplained suicides. An old woman’s baffling illness. A brutal murder. Detective Gary Goodhew must figure out what's connecting them—or die trying . . .The esteemed Detective Gary Goodhew must solve a disturbing puzzle when he stumbles upon a circle of friends who seem to be afflicted by a plague of teenage suicides. Poor Charlotte Stone . . . her whole life she has been burdened by grief. First her terminally ill mother dies and then, just weeks later two of her childhood friends take their own lives. Detective Goodhew begins to realize that this web of tragedy is not woven by coincidence. In his search for the link between this series of deaths, Goodhew is forced to recall deeply buried memories of a murder investigation that went cold years ago—memories that lead him to Charlotte Stone. Together they must stop the course of events set in motion years ago . . .In this unforgettable novel, Alison Bruce twists a shocking tale that will thrill fans of Deborah Crombie and Tana French.
Super Smutty Sign Language
by Kristin HensonLearn more than 200 dirty, explicit, and downright disgusting ASL words and phrases in this book from the creator of YouTube’s Dirty Signs with Kristin.There are plenty of books and Websites that teach you basic sign language phrases like “Hello,” “Thank you,” and “I love you.” Some even dip into crass vocabulary with “asshole,” or “bite me,” but Super Smutty Sign Language is the only book that delivers truly obscene and offensive insults, sex terms, and pop culture phrases including “Suck a bag of dicks,” “Bitch, please!” “You motorboating son of a bitch!” and “Blumpkin”. Whether you want to tell someone off or pick someone up, Super Smutty Sign Language gives you a comprehensive crash course in getting foul in ASL. Now you can say:- Cum dumpster- I lost my virginity, can I have yours?- There’s a party in my pants, and you’re invited- Gargle my balls- You cum-guzzling ass-pirate!- Let’s play leap-frog naked!-And more!
Nothing I See Means Anything: Quantum Questions, Quantum Answers
by David ParrishA Freudian psychoanalyst draws on mysticism, philosophy, and quantum physics to shed light on the power and potential of consciousness.In Nothing I See Means Anything, Dr. David Parrish takes readers on an enlightening journey of the mind. Bringing clarity to a diverse range of complex concepts, he reveals fascinating insights into the nature of consciousness. Closing the gap between mind, matter, and cosmic intelligence, Parrish elegantly identifies the pathways to highest consciousness—a place we all are but don’t know it.
The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint
by Francesca Fiorani“Insightful and beautiful. . . . A wonderful study of how Leonardo’s art and science are interwoven.” —Walter Isaacson, author of Leonardo Da VinciA New York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceShortly after Leonardo da Vinci’s death, his peers and rivals created the myth of the two Leonardos: there was Leonardo the artist and then, later in life, Leonardo the scientist. In this pathbreaking biographical interpretation, the art historian Francesca Fiorani tells a very different and much more interesting story.Taking a fresh look at Leonardo’s celebrated but challenging notebooks and other sources, Fiorani shows that Leonardo became fluent in science when he was still young man. As an apprentice in a Florence studio, he was especially interested in the science of optics. He aspired to use this knowledge to capture—as no artist before him had ever done—the interior lives of his subjects, to paint the human soul in its smallest, tenderest motions and vicissitudes. And then he hoped to take one further step: to gather his scientific knowledge together in a book that would be even more important than his paintings. In The Shadow Drawing, Fiorani revises our understanding of Leonardo the artist’s most renowned paintings and reconstructs the wisdom Leonardo the author hoped to impart. The result is both a stirring biography and a bold reconsideration of how the Renaissance understood science and art—and of what was lost when the two were sundered.“Fiorani’s lively intellectual adventure gives us new understanding and appreciation of Leonardo’s cross-fertilization of art and science. It is a perceptive biography of Leonardo exploring the frontiers of science but also a brilliantly informative guide to his paintings.” —Ross King, author of Brunelleschi’s Dome, Leonardo and the Last Supper, and Mad Enchantment
Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei
by Barnaby MartinThe gripping story of post-Mao China and the harrowing fate of the artist and activist Ai WeiweiIn October 2010, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds appeared in the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern. In April 2011, he was arrested and held for more than two months in terrible conditions. The most famous living Chinese artist and activist, Weiwei is a figure of extraordinary talent, courage, and integrity. From the beginning of his career, he has spoken out against the world's most powerful totalitarian regime, in part by creating some of the most beautiful and mysterious artworks of our age, works which have touched millions around the world.Just after Ai Weiwei's release from illegal detention, Barnaby Martin flew to Beijing to interview him about his imprisonment and to learn more about what is really going on behind the scenes in the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party. Based on these interviews and Martin's own intimate connections with China, Hanging Man is an exploration of Weiwei's life, art, and activism and also a meditation on the creative process, and on the history of art in modern China. It is a rich picture of the man and his milieu, of what he is trying to communicate with his art, and of the growing campaign for democracy and accountability in China. It is a book about courage and hope found in the absence of freedom and justice.
The Race to the New World: Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, and a Lost History of Discovery
by Douglas HunterThe final decade of the fifteenth century was a turning point in world history. The Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus sailed westward on the Atlantic Ocean in 1492, famously determined to discover for Spain a shorter and more direct route to the riches of the Indies. Meanwhile, a fellow Italian explorer for hire, John Cabot, set off on his own journey, under England's flag. Here, Douglas Hunter tells the fascinating tale of how, during this expedition, Columbus gained a rival. In the space of a few critical years, these two men engaged in a high-stakes race that threatened the precarious diplomatic balance of Europe-to exploit what they believed was a shortcut to staggering wealth. Instead, they found a New World that neither was looking for. Hunter provides a revelatory look at how the lives of Columbus and Cabot were interconnected, and how neither explorer can be understood properly without understanding both. Together, Cabot and Columbus provide a novel and important perspective on the first years of European experience of the New World.
The Queen's Mare: Michael Rhineheart, P. I. (Michael Rhineheart, P. I. Ser.)
by John BirkettAll bets are off when it comes to kidnap, mayhem, and murder …When the "Grand Dame of Kentucky Racing" enlists private eye Michael Rhineheart to deliver the ransom for a kidnapped broodmare and her foal, Rhineheart thinks it will be a speedy transaction.But what should have been a simple mission turns into a deadly double-cross, and soon Rhineheart is on the hunt for the horses … and a ruthless killer.Fans of Dick Francis will love Birkett's hardboiled gumshoe and his Kentucky bluegrass flavor.
Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel
by Ntozake Shange Ifa BayezaGroundbreaking and heartbreaking, this triumphant novel by two of America's most acclaimed storytellers follows a family of women from enslavement to the dawn of the twenty-first century.From Reconstruction to both world wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam, from spirituals and arias to torch songs and the blues, Some Sing, Some Cry brings to life the monumental story of one American family's journey from slavery into freedom, from country into city, from the past to the future, bright and blazing ahead. Real-life sisters, Ntozake Shange, award-winning author of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Ifa Bayeza, award-winning playwright of The Ballad of Emmett Till, achieve nothing less than a modern classic in this story of seven generations of women, and the men and music in their lives. Opening dramatically at a sprawling plantation just off the South Carolina coast, recently emancipated slave Bette Mayfield quickly says her goodbyes before fleeing for Charleston with her granddaughter, Eudora, in tow. She and Eudora carve out lives for themselves in the bustling port city as seamstress and fortune-teller. Eudora marries, the Mayfield lines grows and becomes an incredibly strong, musically gifted family, a family that is led, protected, and inspired by its women. Some Sing, Some Cry chronicles their astonishing passage through the watershed events of American history.
Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020
by Anjuli Fatima KolbTerrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in order to contain its political energies. In Epidemic Empire, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb shows that this trope began in responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and tracks its tenacious hold through 9/11 and beyond. The result is the first book-length study to approach the global War on Terror from a postcolonial literary perspective. Raza Kolb assembles a diverse archive from colonial India, imperial Britain, French and independent Algeria, the postcolonial Islamic diaspora, and the neoimperial United States. Anchoring her book are studies of four major writers in the colonial-postcolonial canon: Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Albert Camus, and Salman Rushdie. Across these sources, she reveals the tendency to imagine anticolonial rebellion, and Muslim insurgency specifically, as a virulent form of social contagion. Exposing the long history of this broken but persistent narrative, Epidemic Empire is a major contribution to the rhetorical history of our present moment.
Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny
by Debora L. SparA crucial guide to life before—and after—Tinder, IVF, and robots.What will happen to our notions of marriage and parenthood as reproductive technologies increasingly allow for newfangled ways of creating babies? What will happen to our understanding of gender as medical advances enable individuals to transition from one set of sexual characteristics to another, or to remain happily perched in between? What will happen to love and sex and romance as our relationships migrate from the real world to the Internet? Can people fall in love with robots? Will they? In short, what will happen to our most basic notions of humanity as we entangle our lives and emotions with the machines we have created?In Work Mate Marry Love, Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and sex. Now, as we enter an era of artificial intelligence and robots, how will our deepest feelings and attachments evolve? In the past, the prevailing modes of production produced a world dominated by heterosexual, mostly-monogamous, two-parent families. In the future, however, these patterns are almost certain to be reshaped, creating entirely new norms for sex and romance, and for the construction of families and the raising of children. Steering clear of both techno-euphoria and alarmism, Spar offers a bold and inclusive vision of how our lives might be changed for the better.
The United States of Beer: A Freewheeling History of the All-American Drink
by Dane HuckelbridgeFrom the author of Bourbon, “the definitive history” (Sacramento Bee), comes the rollicking and revealing story of beer in America, in the spirit of Salt or Cod.In The United States of Beer, Dane Huckelbridge, the author of Bourbon: A History of the American Spirit—a Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance bestseller—charts the surprisingly fascinating history of Americans’ relationship with their most popular alcoholic beverage. Huckelbridge shows how beer has evolved along with the country—from a local and regional product (once upon a time every American city has its own brewery and iconic beer brand) to the rise of global mega-brands like Budweiser and Miller that are synonymous with U.S. capitalism.We learn of George Washington’s failed attempt to brew beer at Mount Vernon with molasses instead of barley, of the 19th century “Beer Barons” like Captain Frederick Pabst, Adolphus Busch, and Joseph Schlitz who revolutionized commercial brewing and built lucrative empires—and the American immigrant experience—and of the advances in brewing and bottling technology that allowed beer to flow in the saloons of the Wild West. Throughout, Huckelbridge draws connections between seemingly remote fragments of the American past, and shares his reports from the frontlines of today’s craft-brewing revolution.
The Lure of the East: A Curator's Fascinating Journey
by Marilyn Jenkins-MadinaThe remarkable journey of one of the first women to become a curator of Islamic art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and an internationally recognized scholar in the field. As a girl growing up in Frenchtown, New Jersey, Marilyn Jenkins-Madina recalls first learning about the Egyptian pyramids in sixth grade. That discovery opened her mind to the possibility of not only learning more about worlds far removed from her small-town existence, but of actually experiencing them and living them. Throughout her life, opportunities to follow uncharted roads have presented themselves in ways that she has not dismissed. It has been the driving force in her career and her life. She became a curator of Islamic art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and an internationally recognized scholar in the field. She took more than 50 international trips, most of which were to the Middle East, at times and in locations where women were not exactly respected or welcomed in a capacity of authority. She came to enjoy an enduring friendship with Kuwaiti royalty. And, last but certainly not least, she became the wife and partner-in-adventure of a wonderful gentleman from Damascus who was a professor at Columbia University and also a Kurdish agha. From the banks of the Delaware to the shores of the Arabian Gulf and beyond, The Lure of the East: A Curator's Fascinating Journey is the story of her remarkable journey. Dr. Jenkins-Madina began her long curatorial career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1964. Having received her B.A. from Brown University in 1962, she continued to pursue her education while working at The Metropolitan Museum, earning both her M.A. and Ph.D. during this time. From her initial appointment as Curatorial Assistant, she rose through the ranks during her forty-year tenure as curator in the Department of Islamic Art and was named Curator Emerita upon her retirement in 2004. This memoir is meant to inspire others to dare to take their own road less traveled.
The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life
by Karin RoffmanThe first biography of an American masterThe Songs We Know Best, the first comprehensive biography of the early life of John Ashbery—the winner of nearly every major American literary award—reveals the unusual ways he drew on the details of his youth to populate the poems that made him one of the most original and unpredictable forces of the last century in arts and letters.Drawing on unpublished correspondence, juvenilia, and childhood diaries as well as more than one hundred hours of conversation with the poet, Karin Roffman offers an insightful portrayal of Ashbery during the twenty-eight years that led up to his stunning debut, Some Trees, chosen by W. H. Auden for the 1955 Yale Younger Poets Prize. Roffman shows how Ashbery’s poetry arose from his early lessons both on the family farm and in 1950s New York City—a bohemian existence that teemed with artistic fervor and radical innovations inspired by Dada and surrealism as well as lifelong friendships with painters and writers such as Frank O’Hara, Jane Freilicher, Nell Blaine, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Willem de Kooning. Ashbery has a reputation for being enigmatic and playfully elusive, but Roffman’s biography reveals his deft mining of his early life for the flint and tinder from which his provocative later poems grew, producing a body of work that he calls “the experience of experience,” an intertwining of life and art in extraordinarily intimate ways.
Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories
by Kanishk TharoorNamed a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian and NPR“A writer who is gifted not just with extraordinary talent but also with a subtle, original, and probing mind.” —Amitav GhoshIn one of the singularly imaginative stories from Kanishk Tharoor’s Swimmer Among the Stars, despondent diplomats entertain themselves by playing table tennis in zero gravity—for after rising seas destroy Manhattan, the United Nations moves to an orbiting space hotel. In other tales, a team of anthropologists treks to a remote village to record a language’s last surviving speaker intoning her native tongue; an elephant and his driver cross the ocean to meet the whims of a Moroccan princess; and Genghis Khan’s marauding army steadily approaches an unnamed city’s walls.With exuberant originality and startling vision, Tharoor cuts against the grain of literary convention, drawing equally from ancient history and current events. His world-spanning stories speak to contemporary challenges of environmental collapse and cultural appropriation, but also to the workings of legend and their timeless human truths. Whether refashioning the romances of Alexander the Great or confronting the plight of today’s refugees, Tharoor writes with distinctive insight and remarkable assurance. Swimmer Among the Stars announces the arrival of a vital, enchanting talent.
Leaving Before It's Over: A Novel (Promo E-bks.)
by Jean Reynolds PageA deeply compelling novel that explores the true meaning of family, Leaving Before It’s Over is masterful and provocative fiction from Jean Reynolds Page, the author of The Space Between Before and After and The Last Summer of Her Other Life. Fans of Jodi Picoult and Jacquelyn Mitchard will be moved and enthralled by Page’s Leaving Before It’s Over, as a 1970s family is thrown into turmoil when a previously unknown son and brother is brought into the fold.
Mind Reader: Unlocking the Power of Your Mind to Get What You Want
by Lior SuchardRenowned mentalist Lior Suchard has mystified audiences all over the world with demonstrations of his phenomenal gifts of mind reading, thought influencing, and telekinesis. In Mind Reader, Suchard celebrates the extraordinary capacity of the mind and shares secrets from his own performances and life stories, as well as from psychological studies. His creativity-boosting techniques enable readers to embrace their inner mentalist—and harness untapped mental powers to create positive change in their day-to-day life. Filled with illusions, riddles, puzzles, and practical tips, Mind Reader will help you unlock the hidden powers of your own mind.