Search results for ""Author Adam Gopnik""

The Table Comes First is at once a celebration of the rituals of eating - the scene of families, friends, lovers coming together, or breaking apart, the core of our memories - and an exploration of the extraordinary transformations that our notion of what makes food 'good' has undergone. Taking the reader from the birth of the restaurant in 18th century France to the molecular Meccas of Barcelona The Table Comes First is the delightful beginning of a new conversation about the way we eat now.

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'Adam Gopnik has taken a coincidence and turned it into a theory of everything, or at least of everything important ... Outstanding' - Andrew MarrOn February 12th, 1809, two men were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country estate. Each would see his life's work transform mankind's understanding of itself. In this bicentennial twin portrait, Adam Gopnik shows how these two giants, who never met, changed the way we think about the very nature of existence, and that their great achievements proceeded from the same source: argument from reason. The revolutions they effected shaped the world we live in, while the intellectual heritage and method that informed their parallel lives has profound implications for our present age. Filled with little-known stories and unfamiliar characters, Angels and Ages reveals these men in a new, shared light, and provides a fascinating insight into the origins of our modern vision and liberal values.

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On every page of this delicious book you will meet characters and situations that tell you this could only be New York. The parents who are determined to get their children literally to fly at the school production of Peter Pan - the Cambodian cashier at the local deli who is more Jewish than Gopnik's grandfather - his gloriously peculiar analyst who argues that a name can be damaging to the human psyche, saying Adam's name is very ugly - the birder who takes Adam to see the huge flock of feral parrots that have taken over Flatbush. No one knows how they got there or how they survive the brutal winters, but they do. And flourish on it. 'These birds are so bold. They are real New Yorkers. They have so much attitude'. Through the Children's Gate is written with Gopnik's signature mix of mind and heart, elegantly and exultantly alert to the minute miracles that bring a place to life.

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'WITTY, HUMANE, LEARNED' NEW YORK TIMESThe New York Times-bestselling author offers a stirring defence of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our timeNot since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought.A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history--and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.

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'A dazzling talent' Malcolm GladwellWhen Adam Gopnik and his soon-to-be-wife, Martha, left the comforts of home in Montreal for New York, the city then, much like today, was a pilgrimage site for the young, the arty, and the ambitious. But it was also becoming a city of greed, where both life's consolations and its necessities were increasingly going to the highest bidder. At the Strangers' Gate builds a portrait of this particular moment in New York through the story of this couple's journey--from their excited arrival as aspiring artists to their eventual growth into a New York family. Gopnik transports us to his tiny basement room on the Upper East Side, and later to SoHo, where he captures a unicorn: an affordable New York loft. He takes us through his professional meanderings, from graduate student-cum-library-clerk to the corridors of Conde Nast and the galleries of MoMA. Between tender and humorous reminiscences, including affectionate portraits of Richard Avedon, Robert Hughes, and Jeff Koons, among many others, Gopnik discusses the ethics of ambition, the economy of creative capital, and the peculiar anthropology of art and aspiration in New York, then and now.

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In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York for the urbane glamour of Paris. Charmed by the beauties of the city, Gopnik set out to experience for himself the spirit and romance that has so captivated American writers throughout the twentieth century. In the grand tradition of Stein and Hemingway, Gopnik planned to walk the paths of the Tuilleries, to enjoy philosophical discussion in cafes - in short, to lead the fabled life of an American in Paris. Of course, there was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with everyday, not-so-fabled life.

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Bestselling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik embarks on a wildly creative inquiry into perhaps the oldest question: how do we learn a new skill? For decades, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a fundamental matter: how did the people he was writing about learn their outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf? In The Real Work-the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick-Gopnik apprentices himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor (from the DMV), among others, trying his late-middle-age hand at things he assumed were beyond him. He finds that mastering a skill is a process of methodically breaking down and building up, piece by piece-and that true mastery, in any field, requires mastering other people''s minds. Exuberant and profo

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For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental matter, one he had often meditated on in The New Yorker: How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it? In The Real Work—the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick—Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and building up—of identifying and perfecting the small constituent parts of a skill and the combining them for an overall effect greater than the sum of those parts. For another, mastery almost always involves intentional imperfection—as in music, where vibrato, a way of not quite landing on the right note, carries maximum expressiveness. Gopnik’s simplest and most invigorating lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery. Far from rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from the parent who can whip up a professional strudel to the social worker who—in one of the most personally revealing passages Gopnik has ever written—helps him master his own demons. Spirited and profound, The Real Work will help you understand how mastery can happen in your own life—and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place.

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Winter takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists and thinkers who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. We learn how literature heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a blank space. Offering a kaleidoscopic take on the season, Winter is a homage to an idea of a season and a journey through the modern imagination.

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In 2005 photographer Mark Perrott learned that Pittsburgh’s Western Penitentiary, located just downriver from the city center, was about to close. He requested permission to visit the 1885 Gothic sandstone structure, and ended up touring the site with a former Pennsylvania Department of Corrections administrator. They walked through spaces of confinement and institutional organization like the Mess Hall, Laundry, Commissary, Chapel, Death Row, and the cellblocks. Mark recalls, "None of this prepared me for the experience of E Block - the row of cells dedicated to the housing of newly-arrived prisoners. Prisoners spent three days to two weeks on E Block, until the system `classified’ them and moved them along to other cellblocks, or to other institutions. Each cell had whitewashed walls, most often covered with graffiti. I read every square inch of each wall. These were the unfiltered voices of men in their first days of separation and incarceration. As I moved from cell to cell, these voices became a chorus of shame, rage, bravado, advice, hate, humor, confession, and contrition. Over the next year I wrote down each word and photographed every surface."

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Explore the treasures of The Frick Collection through the eyes of a diverse group of contemporary writers, artists and other cultural figures, from George Condo, Lydia Davis and Julie Mehretu to Abbi Jacobson and Edmund White A cultural haven for museumgoers in New York and beyond, The Frick Collection holds masterpieces by some of the most celebrated artists in the Western tradition—among them Bellini, Gainsborough, Goya, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Whistler—installed in a Gilded Age mansion on Fifth Avenue. This book includes 61 reflections on the Frick’s preeminent collection, with the contributors writing about an artwork that has personal significance, sharing how it has moved, challenged, puzzled or inspired them. Each text is accompanied by an illustration of the artwork. For example, writer Jonathan Lethem tells how he started going to the Frick as a teenager, to gaze at Hans Holbein’s portraits of Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More. Historian Simon Schama revels in Turner’s Mortlake Terrace: Early Summer Morning, which reminds him of his own childhood growing up next to the River Thames. This engaging anthology attests to the inspirational power of art and reminds us that there is no one way to look. Authors include: André Aciman, Ida Applebroog, Firelei Báez, Victoria Beckham, Tom Bianchi, Carter Brey, Rosanne Cash, Jerome Charyn, Roz Chast, George Condo, Gregory Crewdson, Joan K. Davidson, Lydia Davis, Edmund de Waal, Rineke Dijkstra, Mark Doty, Lena Dunham, Stephen Ellcock, Donald Fagen, Rachel Feinstein and John Currin, Teresita Fernández, Bryan Ferry, Michael Frank, Moeko Fujii, Adam Gopnik, Vivian Gornick, Agnes Gund, Carolina Herrera, Alexandra Horowitz, Abbi Jacobson, Bill T. Jones, Maira Kalman, Nina Katchadourian, Susanna Kaysen, Jonathan Lethem, Kate D. Levin, David Masello, Julie Mehretu, Daniel Mendelsohn, Rick Meyerowitz, Duane Michals, Susan Minot, Mark Morris, Nico Muhly, Vik Muniz, Wangechi Mutu, Catherine Opie, Jed Perl, Taylor M. Polites, Diana Rigg, Jenny Saville, Simon Schama, Lloyd Schwartz, Annabelle Selldorf, Arlene Shechet, Judith Thurman, Colm Tóibín, Chris Ware, Darren Waterston, Edmund White and Robert Wilson.

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Winner of the Louis Gottschalk PrizeWinner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize“Witty and full of fascinating details.”—Los Angeles TimesWhy are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a quasi-medicinal bouillon not unlike the bone broths of today.This is a book about the French revolution in taste—about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, changing the social life of the world in the process. We see how over the course of the Revolution, restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In the early nineteenth century, the new genre of gastronomic literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic state to transform restaurants yet again, this time conferring star status upon oysters and champagne.“An ambitious, thought-changing book…Rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories.”—Adam Gopnik, New Yorker“[A] pleasingly spiced history of the restaurant.”—New York Times“A lively, engrossing, authoritative account of how the restaurant as we know it developed…Spang is…as generous in her helpings of historical detail as any glutton could wish.”—The Times

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"What is abstract art good for? What's the use--for us as individuals, or for any society--of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the last five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in Art and Illusion, another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death. With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works.

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The Lost Estate is Robin Buss's translation of Henri Alain-Fournier's poignant study of lost love, Le Grand Meaulnes.'I read it for the first time when I was seventeen and loved every page. I find its depiction of a golden time and place just as poignant now as I did then' Nick Hornby When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. But when Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a mysterious house - and his love for the beautiful girl hidden within it, Yvonne de Galais - his life has been changed forever. In his restless search for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there, Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losing everything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries the reader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence. Robin Buss's translation of Le Grand Meaulnes sensitively and accurately renders Alain-Fournier's poetically charged, expressive and deceptively simple style. In his introduction, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik discusses the life of Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the First World War after writing this, his only novel.If you liked Le Grand Meaulnes, you might enjoy Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education, also available in Penguin Classics.

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