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Tricia Guild in Town: Contemporary Design for Urban Living In this groundbreaking and stimulating book, Tricia Guild, the most innovative decorator of her age, turns her attention to life in town. The central theme is her town house in London's Holland Park, which superbly illustrates her new definition of modernity. Taking her inspiration form the ever-changing city, in which old and new co-exist in a series of exciting contrasts, she has made this strong urban mixture part of the very fabric of her home. All the familiar hallmarks are here; vibrant color, natural materials, printed fabric, wood, stone, metal and glass; but recast in her own mold. Her radical transformation of a large Victorian house did not entail a ruthless ripping out of its traditional features; nor has it involved a thoughtless veneration of the past. Instead, an exciting tension between old and new runs through the house like an electric current.
1100 Architect For almost fifteen years, David Piscuskas and Juergen Riehm, principals of 1100 Architect, have worked toward a refined architecture that captures the spirit of early modernism and translates traditional sensibilities of harmony, composition, and precision into a contemporary context. The firm's designs do not adhere to any specific stylistic codes but do have a recognizable, yet understated, architectural signature: an elegance of proportion, a subtle mix of colors, a meticulous execution of details and craftsmanship. Each project shown in this volume, the first monograph on the work of 1100, exemplifies that signature. Presented with exquisite color photographs, working drawings, models, and sketches, the designs range from apartments and houses to retail and art-related spaces, including the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, TSE, J. Crew, and Metro Pictures, all in New York.
The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905 This collection of five essays documents and explores the development of the Montmartre cabaret from 1875 to 1905. Montmartre is revealed as the primary promoter, catalyst, and often, site for the collaboration of artists, writers, composers, and performers in the production of illustrated journals, books, dramatic pieces, music, puppet shows, and the protocinema invention of shadow theater. The contributors reveal the essence of Montmartre's artistic, intellectual environment and analyze its inextricable relations with an important, multidisciplinary body of avant-garde, fin-de-siecle art, literature, and music. The Spirit of Montmartre is the story of Paris's earliest, original, avant-garde groups.
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo He was known as "the Leopard," and for the thirty-two years of his reign Mobutu Sese Seko, president of Zaire, showed all the cunning of his namesake, seducing Western powers, buying up the opposition, and dominating his people with a devastating combination of brutality and charm. While the population was pauperized, he plundered the country's copper and diamond resources, downing pink champagne in his jungle palace like some modern-day reincarnation of Joseph Conrad's crazed station manager. Michela Wrong, a correspondent who witnessed firsthand Mobutu's last days, traces the rise and fall of the idealistic young journalist who became the stereotype of an African despot. Engrossing, highly readable, and as funny as it is tragic, her book assesses how Belgium's King Leopold, the CIA, and the World Bank all helped to bring about the disaster that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights In this brilliant and witty investigation, Wise explores the intelligence and abilities of animals across the evolutionary spectrum; from his own son and other intelligent primates to dolphins, elephants, parrots, dogs; even honeybees. The law has criteria for personhood, and by studying and often witnessing the latest research by leading experts in animal intelligence, Wise shows how at least some creatures clearly meet those criteria. Wise's investigations are as fascinating as they are far-reaching in their implications for the legal rights of animals. Drawing the Line is a scientific and legal milestone on the road to legal rights for nonhuman animals.
Critique of the German Intelligentsia This sweeping polemic by a leader of the early modern German avant garde is a highly critical tour through German political, intellectual, and religious history since the Reformation. Hugo Ball places blame for the disaster of World War I on Germany's intellectual heritage and attacks figures such as Luthor, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche for their contributions to a morally bankrupt modern ideology. First published in 1919, Critique of the German Intelligentsia is the consummate performance on an extraordinary career that took Ball from the Munich avant garde to the founding of Dada in Zurich, to theological anarchism and antiwar politics in Bern, and finally to spiritual refuge in Catholicism Ball focuses on the corrupting influence of Germany's intellectual isolation form Western Europe and America and its lack of a democratic ethos to argue that German religion and philosophy conspired with dynastic absolutism and militarism to create the betrayal of 1914. |
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My Sky Blue Trades As a boy growing up in Detroit, Birkerts always felt deeply divided between the claims of his family's Latvian heritage and the seductions of his adopted culture. His struggle to find his own path thrust him up against the myths of his origins; the turbulent lives of his grandparents, whose artistic ambitions played out against a backdrop of revolution and war; as well as into the excesses of the 1960s counterculture. He provides a moving saga of love and loss on the way to finding his own artistic vocation. The chronicle of a writer's painful, and comic, coming-of-age, My Sky Blue Trades is also a vivid portrait of our postwar era, from the tranquilized '50s to the present.
The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue The Argument Culture is about a pervasive warlike atmosphere that makes us approach anything we need to accomplish as a fight between two opposing sides. The argument culture urges us to regard the world, and the people in it, in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done: The best way to explore an idea is to set up a debate; the best way to cover the news is to find spokespeople who express the most extreme, polarized views and present them as "both sides"; the best way to settle disputes is litigation that pits one party against the other; the best way to begin an essay is to oppose someone; and the best way to show you're really thinking is to criticize and attack. Sometimes these approaches work well, but often they create more problems than they solve. Tannen shows how deeply entrenched this cultural tendency is, the forms it takes, and how it affects us every day. In the argument culture, the quality of information we receive is compromised, and our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention.
A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics Few scientists have made lasting contributions to as many fields as Francis Galton. He was an important African explorer, travel writer, and geographer. He was the meteorologist who discovered the anticyclone, a pioneer in using fingerprints to identify individuals, the inventor of regression and correlation analysis in statistics, and the founder of the eugenics movement. Now, Nicholas Gillham paints an engaging portrait of this Victorian polymath. The book traces Galton's ancestry (he was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin and the cousin of Charles Darwin). It recounts in colorful detail Galton's adventures as leader of his own expedition in Namibia. Darwin was always a strong influence on his cousin and a turning point in Galton's life was the publication of The Origin of the Species. Thereafter, Galton devoted most of his life to human heredity, using then novel methods such as pedigree analysis and twin studies to argue that talent and character were inherited and that humans could be selectively bred to enhance these qualities. To this end, he founded the eugenics movement, which rapidly gained momentum early in the last century. After Galton's death, however, eugenics took a more sinister path, as in the United States where by 1913 sixteen states had involuntary sterilization laws, and in Germany, where to goal of racial purity was pushed to its horrific limit in the "final solution." Galton himself, Gillham writes, would have been appalled by the extremes to which eugenics was carried.
To the Hermitage In October 1993 our narrator, a novelist, is invited to go to Stockholm and then to Russia to take part in what is enigmatically referred to as the Diderot Project. While in Stockholm he is joined by various other members of the project, an academic aptly named Verso, known as The Encyclopedia, and a lustful opera-singer. On the journey towards Russia more is revealed about Diderot: the son of a knife-maker in Langres who went to Paris and compiled the Encyclopedia, a book that changed the world. Moving between two dual narratives, one contemporary and one two hundred years earlier, we learn how Diderot could be seen as the godfather of both the modern novel and of the computer, and how there might be an extraordinary amount of missing material in St. Petersburg. Bradbury brilliantly recreates the climate of the eighteenth century and Diderot's journey to Russia to entertain and enlighten the mind of that powerful monarch, Catherine the Great, whose influence would change the path of history.
Sounds of the River: A Memoir Teenager Da Chen gathers soil from the riverbank near his village before he leaves to attend university in Beijing. Those grains bear witness to his past and contain the now silent sounds of the river. Later, spilled onto the dry earth of the North, they will merge two parts of Da's life, as does the second volume of his lyrical trilogy of memoirs. Beginning with his first train ride to Beijing from his farm, we rumble along with him in the overcrowded and disease-ridden car to the university. Here the author faces a host of ghastly challenges, including poor living conditions, lack of food, and suicidal roommates. Undaunted by these hurdles and armed with a dogged determination to learn English and "all things Western," he must compete with every other student to win a chance to study in America, a chance that rests in the shrewd and corrupt hands of the almighty professors. In a richly textured tale, by turns poetic, ribald, hilarious, and heartbreaking, Da keeps his indomitable spirit, but will he be any closer to attaining his goal?
Go To: The Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution In Go To, New York Times correspondent Steve Lohr chronicles the untold history of software and its maverick creators. In the original engineering culture of computing, hardware was the real science, respected and revered. Programming was merely a technician's chore, and programmers were considered the unruly bohemians of the field. Drawing upon original reporting and interviews, Lohr gives us an intimate portrait of the peculiar kind of genius that has always been drawn to this unique blend of art, science, and engineering. With keen analysis and deft storytelling, Steve Lohr shows us how these remarkable creators of software transformed the world, and points to the ways they will change our future. |
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