Search results for ""yale university press""

A riveting retrospective of the imaginative photographs created by contemporary artist Abelardo Morell Over the past twenty-five years, Abelardo Morell (b. 1948) has earned international praise for his images that use the language of photography to explore visual surprise and wonder. Born in Havana, Cuba, Morell came to the United States as a teenager in 1962 and later studied photography, earning an MFA from Yale University. He gained attention for intimate, black-and-white pictures of domestic objects from a child’s point of view, inspired by the birth of his son in 1986, as well as images in which he turns a room into a giant camera obscura, projecting exterior views onto interior spaces; and photographs of books that revel in their sensory materiality.In more recent years, he has turned to color, exploring the camera obscura with a painterly delight and innovating a tent camera that projects outdoor scenes onto a textured ground. Across his career, Morell has approached photography with remarkable wit and creativity, examining everyday objects with childlike curiosity. The first in-depth treatment in fifteen years, this handsome and important book examines Morell’s career to the present day, including his earlier works in black-and-white and never before published color photographs from the past decade. An essay by Elizabeth Siegel, along with a recent interview with the artist and an illustrated chronology of his life and works, offers a riveting portrait of this contemporary photographer and his ongoing artistic endeavors.Distributed for the Art Institute of ChicagoExhibition Schedule:The Art Institute of Chicago(06/01/13–09/02/13)The J. Paul Getty Museum(10/01/13–01/05/14)High Museum of Art(02/22/14–05/18/14)

Read more less

A melancholy tale of searching—for documents, for truth, for coffee—from the Romanian master A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, an eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high school teacher on “moral grounds,” is investigating his father’s death forty years after the fact, and is drawn into a web of suspicion and black humor. Norman Manea’s enigmatic and artful novel—set against the backdrop of life under the repressive Ceausescu regime—depicts the chaos and deprivation of Tolea’s existence, and his tenuous grip on reality.

Read more less

Russian Full Circle offers a concise but thorough introduction to Russian grammar, foundational vocabulary, and communicative strategies in ten lessons with loose thematic orientations. A rich ancillary Web site provides cultural content and supplemental audiovisual materials. As a single-volume elementary textbook, Russian Full Circle equips students in one year with the essential skills they need to navigate the world of the Russian language and to build upon their language base thanks to the firm grounding in grammar and vocabulary that it supplies.

Read more less

The first comprehensive study of friendship in the Hebrew Bible Friendship, though a topic of considerable humanistic and cross disciplinary interest in contemporary scholarship, has been largely ignored by scholars of the Hebrew Bible, possibly because of its complexity and elusiveness. Filling a significant gap in our knowledge and understanding of biblical texts, Saul M. Olyan provides this original, accessible analysis of a key form of social relationship. In this thorough and compelling assessment, Olyan analyzes a wide range of texts, including prose narratives, prophetic materials, psalms, pre-Hellenistic wisdom collections, and the Hellenistic-era wisdom book Ben Sira. This in-depth, contextually sensitive, and theoretically engaged study explores how the expectations of friends and family members overlap and differ, examining, among other things, characteristics that make the friend a distinct social actor; failed friendship; and friendships in narratives such as those of Ruth and Naomi, and Jonathan and David. Olyan presents a comprehensive look at what constitutes friendship in the Hebrew Bible.

Read more less

Spiders, objects of eternal human fascination, are found in many places: on the ground, in the air, and even under water. Leslie Brunetta and Catherine Craig have teamed up to produce a substantive yet entertaining book for anyone who has ever wondered, as a spider rappelled out of reach on a line of silk, “How do they do that?” The orb web, that iconic wheel-shaped web most of us associate with spiders, contains at least four different silk proteins, each performing a different function and all meshing together to create a fly-catching machine that has amazed and inspired humans through the ages. Brunetta and Craig tell the intriguing story of how spiders evolved over 400 million years to add new silks and new uses for silk to their survival “toolkit” and, in the telling, take readers far beyond the orb. The authors describe the trials and triumphs of spiders as they use silk to negotiate an ever-changing environment, and they show how natural selection acts at the genetic level and as individuals struggle for survival.

Read more less

The French Republic—with its rallying cry for liberty, equality, and fraternity—emerged in 1870, and by 1880 had developed a coherent republican ideology. The regime pursued secular policies and emphasized its commitment to science and technology. Naturalism was an ideal aesthetic match for the republican ideology; it emphasized that art should be drawn from the everyday world, that all subjects were worthy of treatment, and that there should be flexibility in representation to allow for different voices.Art of the Actual examines the use of naturalism in the 19th-century. It explores how pictures by artists such as Roll, Lhermitte, and Friant could be read as egalitarian and republican, assesses how well-known painters including Degas, Monet, and Toulouse-Lautrec situated their painting vis-à-vis the dominant naturalism, and opens up new arguments about caricatural and popular style. By illuminating the role of naturalism in a broad range of imagery in late 19th-century France, Richard Thomson provides a new interpretation of the art of the period.

Read more less

The Art Institute of Chicago is home to one of the world's finest collections of American folk art. For Kith and Kin provides an introduction to that collection through more than sixty of its most outstanding objects. Selected by premier American art scholar Judith A. Barter, the majority of these objects have never before been published.In a groundbreaking opening essay, Barter revisits the earliest days of folk-art collecting in Chicago, beginning in the 1890s. She pays special attention to the passionate individuals who sought out unique and expressive examples of American folk art, building private collections that they later donated to the Art Institute. Including beautiful reproductions and detailed entries for each of the sixty-one objects it features, this book highlights an array of masterworks such as "primitive" New England portraits, a face jug from South Carolina, New Mexican ceramics, a weathervane, and ship figureheads.Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago

Read more less

ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF IRELAND is an authoritative and fully illustrated survey that encompasses the period from the early Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century. The five volumes explore all aspects of Irish art – from high crosses to installation art, from illuminated manuscripts to Georgian houses and Modernist churches, from tapestries and sculptures to oil paintings, photographs and video art. This monumental project provides new insights into every facet of the strength, depth and variety of Ireland’s artistic and architectural heritage. TWENTIETH CENTURY An examination of the works of art created in twentieth-century Ireland and the critical contexts from which they came. Focusing on painting, photography and new media, rather than on sculpture, this volume considers the work of conceptual and digital artists as well as those who have used more traditional approaches. Definitive biographies of many of the key artist of the era are included, and the volume also addresses the main political and social issues that lay behind twentieth century Irish art. Through its many fine illustrations, it recreates the vibrancy of the art world of the period.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with the Royal Irish Academy

Read more less

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), renowned for his role in establishing Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant art movements in the postwar era, is perhaps best known for his masterful and brilliantly colored wall drawings. Throughout his career, however, LeWitt also created many remarkable three-dimensional works suitable for display in outdoor settings. In this handsome publication, which accompanies the first major career survey of LeWitt's "structures," the artist's modular works are traced from their simplest manifestation in a single large-scale cube through multiple variations, with examples from the 1960s through the 1990s. Works from the 1980s onward explore the three-dimensional possibilities of diverse geometric forms, such as stars, and the introduction of new materials, including concrete block and fiberglass, stimulating experimentation with non-geometric, irregular forms on an increasing scale. The book includes essays by Nicholas Baume and Joe Madura that provide curatorial and critical context for the structures. Additional essays by Rachel Haidu, Anna Lovatt, and Kirsten Swenson offer fresh art-historical commentary, ranging from the problematic of site for LeWitt's initial structures to the relationship between abstract conceptual systems, architecture, and urban space. Also included is a never before published conversation among the artist, Baume, and Jonathan Flatley. Stunning color plates record the works on display in Lower Manhattan's City Hall Park, supplemented by archival and historical documentation.Distributed for the Public Art Fund, New York CityExhibition Schedule:City Hall Park, New York(05/24/11-12/02/11)

Read more less

James Stirling (1924-1992) is acclaimed as the most influential and controversial modern British architect. His partnership with James Gowan (b. 1923) between 1956 and 1963 put postwar British architecture on the international map, and their Leicester University Engineering Building became an iconic monument for a new kind of modernism.Mark Crinson's book is the most thoroughly researched study of Stirling and Gowan's partnership to date. Based on extensive interviews and archival research, Crinson argues that their work was the product of two equally creative partners whose different concerns produced a dynamic aesthetic. He gives an in-depth account of their training and early careers, their relation to key architects and movements of the time, and the commissioning, design, and construction of their work. This critical reassessment dispels previous myths and inaccuracies regarding their partnership and analyzes how ideas about mannerism, modernism, nostalgia, community, consumerism, Victorian cities, and institutional typologies influenced their designs. Stirling and Gowan positions their avant-garde creations within a larger context as creative responses to Britain's postwar deindustrialization and the shift from austerity to affluence.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Of all the men who have served the Catholic Church as pope, who were the ten most influential? The Bishops of Rome have been Christianity's most powerful leaders for nearly two millennia, and their influence has extended far beyond the purely spiritual. The popes have played a central role in the history of Europe and the wider world, not only shouldering the spiritual burdens of their ancient office, but also in contending with - and sometimes precipitating - the cultural and political crises of their times. In an acclaimed series of BBC radio broadcasts Eamon Duffy explored the impact of ten popes he judged to be among 'the most influential in history'. With this book, readers may now also enjoy Duffy's portraits of ten exceptional men who shook the world.The book begins with St Peter, the Rock upon whom the Catholic Church was built, and follows with Leo the Great (fifth century), Gregory the Great (sixth century), Gregory VII (eleventh century), Innocent III (thirteenth century), Paul III (sixteenth century), and Pius IX (nineteenth century). Among twentieth-century popes, Duffy examines the lives and contributions of Pius XII, who was elected on the eve of the Second World War, the kindly John XXIII, who captured the world's imagination, and John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 450 years. Each of these ten extraordinary individuals, Duffy shows, shaped their own worlds, and in the process, helped to create ours.

Read more less

The power of Christmas derives from the appeal of its repeated rituals, the presumed antiquity of its traditions, and its ability to adapt to changing cultural conditions. Christmas cards seemed inevitable and ubiquitous, but in recent years the genre has been visibly in decline. It is now evident that the Christmas card was a culturally specific artifact, a distinctive way in which a fundamental human gesture could be expressed within a commercial, materialistic, and rapidly changing society. This stylish book explores the imagery, graphic forms, subject matter, and significance of Christmas cards in their chronological timeframe to reveal an important area of American material culture. There is much to surprise and delight.Distributed for the Bard Graduate CenterExhibition Schedule:Bard Graduate Center(09/28/11-12/30/11)

Read more less

French in Action is widely recognized as a model for multimedia foreign-language instruction. Now revised for a new generation of French learners, the third edition includes new, contemporary illustrations and updated cultural and linguistic information for today's students. In use by hundreds of colleges, universities, and high schools, French in Action is a powerful educational resource. The workbook, Part 2 guides students through the intermediate level of French language acquisition.

Read more less

American artist Walter De Maria is associated with Minimal, conceptual, installation, and land art. He is best known for The Lightning Field, 1977, a long-term installation in western New Mexico made up of four hundred pointed stainless steel poles arranged in a grid over an area measuring one mile by one kilometer. Despite the role he has played in contemporary art over the past fifty years, few books have been dedicated to the artist. Featuring new paintings and sculptures and never before published texts, this volume explores in detail the works in the artist's first major museum exhibition in the United States: "Walter De Maria: Trilogies" at the Menil Collection.In the expansive new work the Bel Air Trilogy, 2000–11, De Maria has combined exacting geometry with the entirely unexpected element of three impeccably restored 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air two-tone hardtops. Each car is pierced by a twelve-foot-long stainless steel rod in the shape of a circle, square, or triangle that runs through the front and rear windshields. The Bel Air Trilogy is joined by De Maria's austere tripartite sculpture with moveable spheres, the Channel Series, 1972, and The Statement Series, 1968/2011. Building upon his large-scale 1968 canvas The Color Men Choose When They Attack The Earth, for The Statement Series, the artist created two additional monochrome paintings with engraved stainless steel plates that complement the original piece. The works in this volume are a testament to De Maria's ongoing investigation of the conceptual, the dramatic, the monumental, the minimal, and the real. Together these three trilogies challenge and broaden our understanding of the artist's work.Distributed for The Menil CollectionExhibition Schedule:The Menil Collection(09/16/11-01/08/12)

Read more less

Buildings inhabit and symbolize time, giving form to history and making public space an index of the past. Photographs are made of time; they are literally projections of past states of their subjects. This visually striking meditation on architecture in photography explores the intersection between these two ways of embodying the past. Photographs of buildings, Joel Smith argues, are simultaneously the agents, vehicles, and cargo of social memory. In The Life and Death of Buildings photographers as canonical as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laura Gilpin, Lewis W. Hine, and William Henry Fox Talbot enter into visual dialogue with amateurs, architects, propagandists, and insurance adjusters. Rather than examine photographers' aims in isolation, Smith considers how their images reflect and inflect the passage of time. Much as a building's shifting function and circumstances substantially alter its significance, a photograph comes to be coauthored by history, growing layers of meaning to which its maker had no access.Distributed for the Princeton University Art MuseumExhibition Schedule:Princeton University Art Museum(07/23/11-11/06/11)

Read more less

True Friendship looks closely at three outstanding poets of the past half-century—Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell—through the lens of their relation to their two predecessors in genius, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The critical attention then finds itself reciprocated, with Eliot and Pound being in their turn contemplated anew through the lenses of their successors. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell are among the most generously alert and discriminating readers, as is borne out not only by their critical prose but (best of all) by their acts of new creation, those poems of theirs that are thanks to Eliot and Pound. “Opposition is true Friendship.” So William Blake believed, or at any rate hoped. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell demonstrate many kinds of friendship with Eliot and Pound: adversarial, artistic, personal. In their creative assent and dissent, the imaginative literary allusions—like other, wider forms of influence—are shown to constitute the most magnanimous of welcomes and of tributes.

Read more less

A new look at Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn"Will certainly make readers think again about what we really know about Henry VIII's most controversial wife—and what we have merely become accustomed to believe we know about her."—Paul Hammer, University of Colorado at Boulder In this groundbreaking new biography, G. W. Bernard offers a fresh portrait of one of England’s most captivating queens. Through a wide-ranging forensic examination of sixteenth-century sources, Bernard reconsiders Boleyn’s girlhood, her experience at the French court, the nature of her relationship with Henry, and the authenticity of her evangelical sympathies.He depicts Anne Boleyn as a captivating, intelligent, and highly sexual woman whose attractions Henry resisted for years until marriage could ensure legitimacy for their offspring. He shows that it was Henry, not Anne, who developed the ideas that led to the break with Rome. And, most radically, he argues that the allegations of adultery that led to Anne’s execution in the Tower could be close to the truth.

Read more less

The first comprehensive study of Knoll's innovative textile designs and the company's role within the history of interior design In 1940, Hans Knoll founded a company in New York that soon earned a reputation for its progressive line of furniture. Florence Schust joined the firm and helped establish its interior design division, the Knoll Planning Unit. In 1947, the year after their marriage, Hans and Florence Knoll added a third division, Knoll Textiles, which brought textile production in line with a modern sensibility that used color and texture as primary design elements. In the early years, the company hired leading proponents of modern design as well as young, untried designers to create textile patterns. The division thrived in the late 1940s through 1960s and, in the following decade, adopted a more international outlook as design direction shifted to Europe. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Knoll tapped fashion designers and architects to bolster its brand. The pioneering use of new materials and a commitment to innovative design have remained Knoll's hallmarks to the present day. With essays by experts, biographies of about eighty designers, and images of textiles, drawings, furniture, and ephemera, Knoll Textiles, 1945-2010 is the first comprehensive study devoted to a leading contributor to modern textile design. Highlighting the individuals and ideas that helped shape Knoll Textiles over the years, this book brings the Knoll brand and the role of textiles in the history of design to the forefront of public attention.Published for the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material CultureExhibition Schedule:The Bard Graduate Center, New York(05/18/11-07/31/11)

Read more less

William Nicholson (1872–1949) is among the most admired and elusive painters in the history of British art. In the first four decades of the 20th century, Nicholson explored the genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life with exceptional inventiveness, wit, and technical skill. His distinctive paintings were neither academic nor modernist, and his aversion to art groups and his reluctance to make public pronouncements about art have made it difficult to place his work within the main narratives of 20th-century art history. The breadth of Nicholson's works in oil is revealed for the first time in this lavishly illustrated catalogue raisonné.Author and scholar Patricia Reed offers detailed entries for each of Nicholson's oil paintings, along with a comprehensive chronology of his life. The art historian Wendy Baron gives a context for Nicholson in British art at the beginning of the 20th century, and the painter and critic Merlin James celebrates the virtuosity and subtlety of Nicholson's painting technique. This magnificent and substantial catalogue brings to the fore Nicholson's vast achievement in oils.Distributed for Modern Art Press, Ltd.

Read more less

Throughout the history of the built environment there has been no more significant endeavor than the construction of houses of worship, which were once the focal point around which civilizations and city-states developed. Constructing the Ineffable is the first book to examine this topic across continents and from the perspective of multiple faiths, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Baha'i. It addresses how sacred buildings such as churches, mosques, synagogues, and memorials are viewed in the context of contemporary architecture and religious practice. Featuring more than a dozen essays by a broad range of leading international architects, historians, and theologians, Constructing the Ineffable offers a fundamental exploration of defining and understanding contemporary sacred spaces. This thought-provoking book also invites readers to consider the powerful influence of religion on civic life and to discuss the role that design and construction play in religious buildings.Distributed for the Yale School of Architecture

Read more less

Robert Boyle ranks with Newton and Einstein as one of the world’s most important scientists. Aristocrat and natural philosopher, he was a remarkably wide-ranging and penetrating thinker—pioneering the modern experimental method, championing a novel mechanical view of nature, and reflecting deeply on philosophical and theological issues related to science. But, as Michael Hunter shows, Boyle was also a complex and contradictory personality, fascinated by alchemy and magic and privately plagued with doubts about faith and conscience, which troubled the rational vision he heralded. This extraordinary work is the first biography of Boyle in a generation, and the culminating achievement of a world-renowned expert on the scientist. Deftly navigating Boyle’s voluminous published works as well as his personal letters and papers, Hunter’s complete and intimate account gives us the man rather than myth, the troubled introvert as well as the public campaigner. Lively, perceptive, and full of original insights, this is the definitive account of a remarkable man and the changing world in which he lived.

Read more less

The discovery of a cache of thousands of letters and dozens of diaries brings to light the untold story of Mrs. Tennant and her glittering social world Gertrude Tennant’s life was remarkable for its length (1819–1918), but even more so for the influence she achieved as an unsurpassed London hostess. The salon she established when widowed in her early fifties attracted legions of celebrities, among them William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Thomas Huxley, John Everett Millais, Henry James, and Robert Browning. In her youth she had a fling with Gustave Flaubert, and in her later years she became the redoubtable mother-in-law to the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. But as a woman in a male-dominated world, Mrs. Tennant has been remembered mainly as a footnote in the lives of eminent men.This book recovers the lost life of Gertrude Tennant, drawing on a treasure trove of recently discovered family papers—thousands of letters, including two dozen original letters from Flaubert to Tennant; dozens of diaries; and many other unpublished documents relating to Stanley and other famous figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. David Waller presents Gertrude Tennant’s life in colorful detail, placing her not only at the heart of a multigenerational, matriarchal family epic but also at the center of European social, literary, and intellectual life for the best part of a century.

Read more less

A fully illustrated, comprehensive record of London’s medieval Charterhouse, from its foundation in the 14th century to the present day, presented by the Survey of London team. It includes original research, new photography, and previously unpublished inventories.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

By looking through the prism of the West's involvement in the breakup of Yugoslavia, this book presents a new examination of the end of the Cold War in Europe. Incorporating declassified documents from the CIA, the administration of George H.W. Bush, and the British Foreign Office; evidence generated by The Hague Tribunal; and more than forty personal interviews with former diplomats and policy makers, Glaurdić exposes how the realist policies of the Western powers failed to prop up Yugoslavia's continuing existence as intended, and instead encouraged the Yugoslav Army and the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević to pursue violent means. The book also sheds light on the dramatic clash of opinions within the Western alliance regarding how to respond to the crisis. Glaurdić traces the origins of this clash in the Western powers’ different preferences regarding the roles of Germany, Eastern Europe, and foreign and security policy in the future of European integration. With subtlety and acute insight, The Hour of Europe provides a fresh understanding of events that continue to influence the shape of the post–Cold War Balkans and the whole of Europe.

Read more less

A compelling, expansive history of the relationship between China and Russia, from the seventeenth century to the present Russia and China, the largest and most populous countries in the world, respectively, have maintained a delicate relationship for four centuries. In addition to a four-thousand-kilometer border, they have periodically shared a common outlook on political and economic affairs. But they are, in essence, profoundly different polities and cultures, and their intermittent alliances have proven difficult and at times even volatile. Philip Snow provides a full account of the relationship between these two global giants. Looking at politics, religion, economics, and culture, Snow uncovers the deep roots of the two nations’ alignment. We see the shifts in the balance of power, from the wealth and strength of early Qing China to the Tsarist and Soviet ascendancies, and episodes of intense conflict followed by harmony. He looks too at the experiences and opinions of ordinary people, which often vastly differed from those of their governments, and considers how long the countries’ current amicable relationship might endure.

Read more less

A compelling argument for a new set of attitudes toward human capital to sharpen our competitive edge and to fuel the creative sparks in any environment “[A book that] remains both highly readable and relevant.”—Michael B. Arthur, Forbes.com (2023) This timely book challenges conventional business wisdom about competition, secrecy, motivation, and creativity. Orly Lobel, an internationally acclaimed expert in the law and economics of human capital, warns that a set of counterproductive mentalities are stifling innovation in many regions and companies. Lobel asks how innovators, entrepreneurs, research teams, and every one of us who experiences the occasional spark of creativity can triumph in today’s innovation ecosystems. In every industry and every market, battles to recruit, retain, train, energize, and motivate the best people are fierce. From Facebook to Google, Coca-Cola to Intel, JetBlue to Mattel, Lobel uncovers specific factors that produce winners or losers in the talent wars. Combining original behavioral experiments with sharp observations of contemporary battles over ideas, secrets, and skill, Lobel identifies motivation, relationships, and mobility as the most important ingredients for successful innovation. Yet many companies embrace a control mentality—relying more on patents, copyright, branding, espionage, and aggressive restrictions of their own talent and secrets than on creative energies that are waiting to be unleashed. Lobel presents a set of positive changes in corporate strategies, industry norms, regional policies, and national laws that will incentivize talent flow, creativity, and growth. This vital and exciting reading reveals why everyone wins when talent is set free.

Read more less

Donna and Howard Stone, two of Chicago’s premier art patrons, have collected works of art in all media for more than 30 years, building one of the most distinguished private collections of contemporary art in the country. Much of what they have acquired relates to advanced Minimalism and Conceptualism in the art of the 1960s and 1970s, and the various kinds of artistic practices that these movements inspired in contemporary art. Contemporary Collecting is a compelling and detailed look at the entire collection and highlights pieces included in the exhibit, which features works by artists Dan Flavin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, and Franz West. Included in the catalogue are an introduction to the impressive collection by James Rondeau, an essay by Judith Russi Kirshner on notable works in the collection, and an in-depth interview with Donna and Howard Stone about their history as collectors.Distributed for the Art Institute of ChicagoExhibition Schedule:The Art Institute of Chicago(06/25/10-09/19/10)

Read more less

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a fresh look at Lillian Hellman’s restless life, her extraordinary plays, and her autobiographical myths“A fast-flowing, deeply provocative portrait of a seductive, truculent, and audacious literary powerhouse.”—Booklist Glamorous, talented, audacious—Lillian Hellman knew everyone, did everything, had been everywhere. By the age of twenty-nine she had written The Children’s Hour, the first of four hit Broadway plays, and soon she was considered a member of America’s first rank of dramatists, a position she maintained for more than twenty-five years. Apart from her literary accomplishments—eight original plays and three volumes of memoirs—Hellman lived a rich life filled with notable friendships, controversial political activity, travel, and love affairs, most importantly with Dashiell Hammett. But by the time she died, the truth about her life and works had been called into question. Scandals attached to her name, having to do with sex, with money, and with her own veracity. Dorothy Gallagher confronts the conundrum that was Lillian Hellman—a woman with a capacity to inspire outrage as often as admiration. Exploring Hellman’s leftist politics, her Jewish and Southern background, and her famous testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Gallagher also undertakes a new reading of Hellman’s carefully crafted memoirs and plays, in which she is both revealed and hidden. Gallagher sorts through the facts and the myths, arriving at a sharply drawn portrait of a woman who lived large to the end of her remarkable life and never backed down from a fight.About Jewish Lives: Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present. In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award.More praise for Jewish Lives: "Excellent" –New York Times "Exemplary" –Wall Street Journal "Distinguished" –New Yorker "Superb" –The Guardian

Read more less

This book presents an entirely fresh view of the upbringing of English children in upper and professional class families over three centuries. Drawing on direct testimony from contemporary diaries and letters, the book revises previous understandings of parenting and what it was like to grow up in the period between 1600 and 1914. Using advice literature which set out developing ideologies of childhood, gender and parenting, the book explores the separate but complementary roles of mothers and fathers in raising their children. Male upbringing is discussed in terms of schooling, female through the moral and social context of a domestic schoolroom dominated by a governess. Boys were trained for the world, girls for society and marriage. Rare teenage diaries surviving from the Georgian and Victorian periods show teenagers speaking for themselves about education; relationships with parents, siblings and friends; and their social, class and gender identity.

Read more less

Universally recognized as a brilliant and gifted 18th-century artist, Johan Zoffany (1733-1810) was regarded by Horace Walpole as one of the three greatest painters in England, along with his friends Reynolds and Gainsborough. Yet he has remained without a detailed study of his life and works, owing to the fascinating and complex vicissitudes of his career, now established from widely scattered sources. From being a late-baroque painter at a German princely court to working under the royal patronage of George III and Queen Charlotte, from his serious interest in Indian life and landscape, developed while living near Calcutta, to his attacks on the bloody progress of the French Revolution, Zoffany created pictures that document with incomparable liveliness the worlds and people among whom he moved.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Welcome to Encounters, a groundbreaking Chinese language program that features a dramatic series filmed entirely in China. The program’s highly communicative approach immerses learners in the Chinese language and culture through video episodes that directly correspond to units in the combination textbook-workbook. By combining a compelling story line with a wealth of educational materials, Encounters weaves a tapestry of Chinese language and culture rich in teaching and learning opportunities.Encounters follows a carefully structured and cumulative approach. Students progress from listening and speaking to the more difficult skills of reading and writing Chinese characters, building grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation skills along the way.The Encounters program includes:• Two Full-color Student Books for introductory Chinese study • Annotated Instructor’s Editions with answer keys and suggested class activities • Two Character Writing Workbooks linked directly to the Student Book • Ten hours of video materials, comprising dramatic episodes, cultural segments, and animations, all integrated with the Student Books • A total of 200 minutes of audio material, linked to the Student Books, for listening and speaking practice • A website, www.encounterschinese.com, providing access to all audiovisual material of the program upon adoptionEach new, print copy of a Student Book comes with a 10-digit access code which provides one year of complimentary access to the website and its media. Students who purchase an eBook, or who are looking to extend their access to the website material, must buy a new access code. These codes are available at http://yalebooks.com/yupbooks/encounters.asp.

Read more less

The first comprehensive biography of Mary Granville Delany—the artist and court insider whose flower collages, in particular, continue to inspire widespread admiration “Biographer Clarissa Campbell Orr immerses you in the minutiae of Mary’s life.”—Constance Craig-Smith, Daily Mail Mary Granville Delany (1700–1788), perhaps best known simply as Mrs Delany, is best remembered for her captivating paper collages of flowers, but her artistic flourishing came late in life. This nuanced, deeply researched biography pulls back the lens to place Delany’s art in the broader context of her family life, relationships with royalty, and her endeavor to live as an independent woman. Clarissa Campbell Orr, a noted authority on the eighteenth century court, charts Mary Delany’s development from a young woman at the heart of elite circles to beloved godmother and celebrated collagist. Orr traces the varied connections Mary Delany fostered throughout her life and which influenced her intellectual and artistic development: she was friends with prominent figures such as Methodist leader, John Wesley, composer G. F. Handel, the writer Jonathan Swift, and England’s leading patron of science, Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. Mrs Delany reveals its subject to be far more than a widow befriended by George III and Queen Charlotte; she is, instead, restored to her proper place in the era’s aristocratic society –and as a ground-breaking artist.

Read more less

The importance of martyrdom for the spread of Christianity in the first centuries of the Common Era is a question of enduring interest. In this innovative new study, Candida Moss offers a radically new history of martyrdom in the first and second centuries that challenges traditional understandings of the spread of Christianity and rethinks the nature of Christian martyrdom itself. Martyrdom, Moss shows, was not a single idea, theology, or practice: there were diverse perspectives and understandings of what it meant to die for Christ.Beginning with an overview of ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish ideas about death, Moss demonstrates that there were many cultural contexts within which early Christian views of martyrdom were very much at home. She then shows how distinctive and diverging theologies of martyrdom emerged in different ancient congregations. In the process she reexamines the authenticity of early Christian stories about martyrs and calls into question the dominant scholarly narrative about the spread of martyrdom in the ancient world.

Read more less

“The ubiquity of the digital lifestyle has forced us to write and think about technology in a different way.”—Steven Johnson In his Introduction to this beautifully curated collection of essays, Steven Johnson heralds the arrival of a new generation of technology writing. Whether it is Nicholas Carr worrying that Google is making us stupid, Dana Goodyear chronicling the rise of the cellphone novel, Andrew Sullivan explaining the rewards of blogging, Dalton Conley lamenting the sprawling nature of work in the information age, or Clay Shirky marveling at the “cognitive surplus” unleashed by the decline of the TV sitcom, this new generation does not waste time speculating about the future. Its attitude seems to be: Who needs the future? The present is plenty interesting on its own. Packed with sparkling essays culled from print and online publications, The Best Technology Writing 2009 announces a fresh brand of technology journalism, deeply immersed in the fascinating complexity of digital life.The Best Technology Writing 2009 includes essays written by:Julian DibbellDana GoodyearFarhad ManjooDavid TalbotAndrew SullivanRobin McKieDalton ConleyNicholas CarrThe Oniondanah boydJoshua DavisClive ThompsonElizabeth KolbertDan HillSharon WeinbergerKevin KellyLuke O'BrienAdam Stermberghand Clay Shirky

Read more less

Over the course of five decades, the seventeenth-century naturalist Georgius Everhardus Rumphius assiduously gathered information on the native plants of Ambon Island and its archipelago. By presenting descriptions of the plants and their multiple uses, he succeeded in creating a cultural and scientific treasury of incomparable value for today’s botanists, anthropologists, ethnobotanists, science historians, medicinal chemists, and other scholars. This comprehensive reference, complete with over 800 original illustrations, describes in remarkable detail more than 2,000 plants, their habitats, and their economic and medicinal uses. Also recorded are native plant names in Malay, Latin, Dutch, and Ambonese—and often in Macassarese and Chinese as well. E. M. Beekman's introduction discusses the Herbal’s significance for tropical botanical literature and surveys the Indonesian economic and medicinal uses of the plants Rumphius described. Beekman also provides invaluable annotations throughout the Herbal.Copublished with the National Tropical Botanical Garden

Read more less

This book celebrates the achievements of Alice Guy Blaché (1873–1968), the first woman motion picture director and producer. From 1896 to 1907, she created films for Gaumont in Paris. In 1907, she moved to the United States and established her own film company, Solax. From 1914 to 1920, Guy Blaché was an independent director for a number of film companies. Despite her immensely productive and creative career, Guy Blaché’s indispensable contribution to film history has been overlooked. She entered the world of filmmaking at its nascent stage, when films were seen primarily as a medium in the service of science or as an adjunct to selling cameras. Working with Gaumont cameramen and cameras and the new technical advances for the projection of film, she became one of the film pioneers ushering in the new era of motion pictures as a narrative form. Written by cinema history experts and curators, this handsome volume brings to light a critical new mass of Guy Blaché’s film oeuvre in an effort to restore her to her rightful place in film history.Published in association with the Whitney Museum of American ArtExhibition Schedule:Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (11/6/09 - 1/24/10)

Read more less

Meet the imperious aristocrat, the wily confidence man, the Napoleonic hero, and the soulless sinner—iconic figures on the Street since the days of the Revolution Wall Street: no other place on earth is so singularly identified with money and the power of money. And no other American institution has inspired such deep moral, cultural, and political ambivalence. Is the Street an unbreachable bulwark defending commercial order? Or is it a center of mad ambition?This book recounts the colorful history of America’s love-hate relationship with Wall Street. Steve Fraser frames his fascinating analysis around the roles of four iconic Wall Street types—the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist—all recurring figures who yield surprising insights about how the nation has wrestled, and still wrestles, with fundamental questions of wealth and work, democracy and elitism, greed and salvation. Spanning the years from the first Wall Street panic of 1792 to the dot.com bubble-and-bust and Enron scandals of our own time, the book is full of stories and portraits of such larger-than-life figures as J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Michael Milken. Fraser considers the conflicting attitudes of ordinary Americans toward the Street and concludes with a brief rumination on the recent notion of Wall Street as a haven for Everyman.

Read more less

Was Franco sympathetic to Nazi Germany? Why didn't Spain enter World War II? In what ways did Spain collaborate with the Third Reich? How much did Spain assist Jewish refugees?This is the first book in any language to answer these intriguing questions. Stanley Payne, a leading historian of modern Spain, explores the full range of Franco’s relationship with Hitler, from 1936 to the fall of the Reich in 1945. But as Payne brilliantly shows, relations between these two dictators were not only a matter of realpolitik. These two titanic egos engaged in an extraordinary tragicomic drama often verging on the dark absurdity of a Beckett or Ionesco play.Whereas Payne investigates the evolving relationship of the two regimes up to the conclusion of World War II, his principal concern is the enigma of Spain’s unique position during the war, as a semi-fascist country struggling to maintain a tortured neutrality. Why Spain did not enter the war as a German ally, joining with Hitler to seize Gibraltar and close the Mediterranean to the British navy, is at the center of Payne’s narrative. Franco’s only personal meeting with Hitler, in 1940 to discuss precisely this, is recounted here in groundbreaking detail that also sheds significant new light on the Spanish government’s vacillating policy toward Jewish refugees, on the Holocaust, and on Spain’s German connection throughout the duration of the war.

Read more less

A masterful collection by a literary giant of the past century, rendered by one of our most esteemed Italian translators"A fine sampling of Pirandello’s world, convincingly translated by Jewiss, who negotiates the problems of bringing his vivid, colloquial prose and effortless storytelling into English with great skill.”—Tim Parks, New York Review of Books Regarded as one of Europe’s great modernists, Pirandello was also a master storyteller, a fine observer of the drama of daily life with a remarkable ear for dialogue and a keen sense of the crushing burdens of class, gender, and social conventions. Set in the author’s birthplace of Sicily, where the arid terrain and isolated villages map the fragile interior world of his characters, and in Rome, where modern life threatens centuries-old traditions, these original stories are sun baked with the deep lore of Italian folktales. In “The Jar,” a broken earthenware pot pits its owner, a quarrelsome landholder, against a clever inventor of a mysterious glue. “The Dearly Departed” tells the story of a young widow and her new husband on their honeymoon, haunted at every turn by the sly visage of the deceased. The scorned lover, the intransigent bureaucrat, the lonely mother, the wretched peasant—Pirandello’s characters expose the human condition in all its fatalism, injustice, and raw beauty. For lovers of Calvino and Pasolini, these picturesque stories preserve a memory of an Italy long gone, but one whose recurring concerns still speak to us today.

Read more less

The essays in More than One examine sequentiality and serialism in the practice of photography from the medium’s earliest years to the present. Contributors explore nuances of syntax and sense raised by works like photographic albums, books, thematic portfolios, journalistic photo features, and documentations of performance art. Fully illustrated essays discuss, among other topics, the little-known volume Beyond This Point (1929), a collaborative experiment by American photographer Francis Bruguiere and London radio producer Lance Sieveking; the evolving relationship between public space and sexual self-definition in the early work of Minor White; and an important performance work by artist Ana Mendieta. The title essay surveys the social conditions and expressive motives that have given rise to serial and sequential forms throughout the history of photography.Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum

Read more less

This generously illustrated volume surveys a new chapter in the history of environmental art, one in which space, geopolitics, human relations, urbanism, and utopian dreamwork play as important a role as, if not more than, raw earth. Discussed are case studies by seven artists and two artist teams—Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Emre Hüner, Andrea Geyer, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucy Raven, and Santiago Sierra. While some of these artists explore historical and symbolic configurations of space, others parse the social, legal, and economic conditions of specific land-sites, including the Navajo Nation, the island of Vieques, the border town of Juarez, and the cities of Tongling, Jerusalem, and Beirut. Not confined to the displacement of matter, these artists employ a wide range of media, such as performance, animation, assemblage, and photography.Distributed for the Princeton University Art MuseumExhibition Schedule:Princeton University Art Museum 10/23/10 – 02/20/11

Read more less

The Lone Star State is home to a dazzling array of world-class artworks, many in private collections and rarely exhibited. Reflecting the Kimbell Art Museum’s own collecting strengths, this book focuses on the art of Europe and the ancient Mediterranean from about 700 B.C. to around 1950. Over 40 prominent collections are featured along with works that have been given to museums in Texas or have left the state through gift or sale. Among the artists included are Thomas Gainsborough, Paul Gauguin, Guercino, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vincent van Gogh. The distinguished scholar Richard R. Brettell contributes a comprehensive essay on the importance of private collecting in Texas.Distributed for the Kimbell Art MuseumExhibition Schedule:Kimbell Art Museum (11/22/09 – 3/21/10)

Read more less

Hull is one of the great historic trading centers of northeast England. Severely hit by industrial decline, it has recently begun to see substantial regeneration. Exciting new architectural projects reflect the fierce pride of the community and relate closely to the city’s magnificent maritime history. Filled with numerous maps, plans, and superb, specially taken color photographs, this new Pevsner guide is an indispensable visitor’s companion to Hull.

Read more less

No area of Wales is more rewarding to the architectural traveler than Gwynedd—the historic counties of Anglesey, Caernarfon and Merioneth, which are the setting for many of Wales’s greatest buildings. This book examines the buildings of the region, from Beaumaris, Caernafon, Conwy, and Harlech castles and atmospheric medieval churches to Nonconformist chapels and houses in distinctive vernacular traditions.

Read more less

This is the first publication to explore the role of mirrors, spinning, and “neurotic” architecture––a feeling of psychological breakdown––in the work of one of America’s most important contemporary artists, Paul McCarthy (b. 1945). The book is published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Whitney, for which McCarthy is creating two new installations to appear alongside his Bang Bang Room (1992) and two recently rediscovered film loops (1966, 1971). Each work involves a room structure that the viewer can step into and experience—often becoming disoriented as either the floor or entire structure spins, or as walls fold inward and outward. By comparing McCarthy’s use of rotational movement and visual effects to that of other artists of the 1960s and 1970s, the author seeks a new understanding of this bold innovator. An interview with McCarthy himself offers an unprecedented discussion of the influences on his art—including experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, and Bruce Conner. The book not only raises new points but also recovers information and images from films once lost.Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American ArtExhibition Schedule:Whitney Museum of American Art (June 26 – October 12, 2008)

Read more less