Search results for ""Voracious""
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC On Kubrick: Revised Edition
In a comprehensively revised and updated new edition, James Naremore provides an illuminating critical account of the films of Stanley Kubrick, from his earliest feature, Fear and Desire (1953), to the posthumously-produced A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001). Naremore offers provocative analyses of each of Kubrick's films, considering his emphasis on the absurdity of combat, as in Paths of Glory (1957) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), the failure of scientific reasoning, as in 2001 (1968), and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality, as in Dr Strangelove (1964) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). He argues that while Kubrick was a voracious intellectual and a life-long autodidact, the fascination of his work has less to do with the ideas it espouses than with the emotions it evokes. Combining close readings with new insights into the production histories and cultural contexts of key films, Naremore provides a concise yet thorough discussion that will be useful to students of Kubrick's filmmaking and cinephiles who seek a deeper insight into the work of this perfectionist genius. Revised throughout, this new edition also includes a fully updated bibliography of critical writings on Kubrick's cinema.
£26.99
Orion Publishing Co Seven Devils: From the Sunday Times bestselling authors Elizabeth May and L. R. Lam
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES TOP FIVE BESTSELLER'Moves at a cracking pace and, with neat plot twists and cliffhangers, is page-turning fun' GuardianSeven resistance fighters will free the galaxy from the ruthless Empire - or die trying.After Eris faked her death, she thought she had left her old life as Princess Discordia - heir to the galaxy's most ruthless empire - behind. But joining the Novantaen Resistance, an organisation opposed to the Empire's voracious expansion, throws her right back into the fray.Resistance fighter pilot Clo has been given a mission: infiltrate an Empire spaceship ferrying deadly cargo to gain vital intelligence. A task made all the more difficult when she's forced to partner with an old enemy - Princess Discordia herself, Eris.They discover more than they bargained for on the ship: fugitives with first-hand knowledge of the Empire's inner workings. With this information, these women might just bring the Empire to its knees. But the clock is ticking: Eris's brother Damocles, new heir to the throne, plans to disrupt a peace summit with the only remaining free alien people, ensuring the Empire's total domination. Unless this band of unlikely rebels stops him, millions will die . . .
£9.99
Ediciones Lea Las aventuras de Don Quijote de la Mancha para niños
Don Quijote is a voracious reader of chivalrous novels, those ones in which men travel on horseback across the countryside fighting giants and freeing princesses. Nothing in the stories is true, but Don Quijote doesn’t know that. He’s determined to become a knight-errant himself. Together with his faithful squire Sancho Panza, he’ll cross the Spanish kingdom in search of adventure! This greatest classic of Spanish literature has been adapted for readers ages 9-12.Don Quijote es un voraz lector de novelas de caballerÍa, esas donde los hombres van a caballo por los campos, combatiendo contra gigantes y liberando princesas que fueron secuestradas por hombres malvados. Nada de lo que cuentan esas historias es cierto, pero Don Quijote no lo sabe. ¡Él mismo quiere convertirse en un valiente caballero andante! Junto con su fiel escudero Sancho Panza, recorrerÁ los reinos de EspaÑa en busca de aventuras que lo hagan famoso, mientras suspira por el amor de su amada, la bella doncella Dulcinea del Toboso. Una adaptaciÓn para chicos de entre 9 y 12 aÑos del mayor clÁsico de la literatura en espaÑol. Una obra ilustrada a todo color para lectores curiosos y aventureros.
£9.42
Paizo Publishing, LLC Starfinder RPG Alien Archive 2 Pocket Edition
Outer space is full of alien species both benign and malevolent. Starfinder Alien Archive 2 presents a host of new creatures designed for use with the Starfinder Roleplaying Game! From the laser-breathing tashtaris and starship-eating stellar protozoans to dust mantas and undead bone troopers, the creatures in this codex will challenge adventurers no matter where in the galaxy they may travel. What's more, player rules for a variety of species let players not just fight aliens, but be them! Inside this book, you'll find the following: • Over 100 bizarre life-forms both classic and new, from the voracious akatas and silicon-based quorlus to radioactive pluprex demons and void-dwelling vermin. • More than a dozen races with full player rules, letting you play everything from an uplifted bear to a sentient slug. • New alien technology to help give your character an edge, including armor, weapons, magic items, and spells. • New rules for magical polymorphing, environmental template grafts to modify creatures to fit any world on the fly, and more! The pocket edition presents the same contents in a smaller sized softcover for a lower price and better portability.
£20.69
Pan Macmillan Gladstone
Winner of the Whitbread Biography of the Year.William Gladstone was, with Tennyson, Newman, Dickens, Carlyle, and Darwin, one of the stars of nineteenth-century British life. He spent sixty-three of his eighty-nine years in the House of Commons and was prime minister four times, a unique accomplishment. From his critical role in the formation of the Liberal Party to his preoccupation with the cause of Irish Home Rule, he was a commanding politician and statesman nonpareil. But Gladstone the man was much more: a classical scholar, a wide-ranging author, a vociferous participant in all the great theological debates of the day, a voracious reader, and an avid walker who chopped down trees for recreation. He was also a man obsessed with the idea of his own sinfulness, prone to self-flagellation and persistent in the practice of accosting prostitutes on the street and attempting to persuade them of the errors of their ways.Gladstone, by historian and eminent politician Roy Jenkins, is a full and deep portrait of a complicated man, offering a sweeping picture of a tumultuous century in British history, and is also a brilliant example of the biographer's art.
£15.29
Stanford University Press Writing Against Time
For centuries, a central goal of art has been to make us see the world with new eyes. Thinkers from Edmund Burke to Elaine Scarry have understood this effort as the attempt to create new forms. But as anyone who has ever worn out a song by repeated listening knows, artistic form is hardly immune to sensation-killing habit. Some of our most ambitious writers—Keats, Proust, Nabokov, Ashbery—have been obsessed by this problem. Attempting to create an image that never gets old, they experiment with virtual, ideal forms. Poems and novels become workshops, as fragments of the real world are scrutinized for insights and the shape of an ideal artwork is pieced together. These writers, voracious in their appetite for any knowledge that will further their goal, find help in unlikely places. The logic of totalitarian regimes, the phenomenology of music, the pathology of addiction, and global commodity exchange furnish them with tools and models for arresting neurobiological time. Reading central works of the past two centuries in light of their shared ambition, Clune produces a revisionary understanding of some of our most important literature.
£89.10
HarperCollins Publishers Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict
The wayward life (1898–1979) of the voracious art collector and great female patron of world-famous artists. ‘Mrs Guggenheim, how many husbands have you had?’ ‘Do you mean my own, or other people’s?’ Peggy Guggenheim was an American millionairess art collector and legendary lover, whose father died on the Titanic returning from installing the lift machinery in the Eiffel Tower. She lived in Paris in the 1930s and got to know all the major artists – especially the Surrealists. (Later she bullied Max Ernst into marrying her, but was snubbed by Picasso.) When the Second World War broke out, she bought great numbers of paintings from artists fleeing to America; as a Jew she escaped from Vichy France and set up in New York, where in the 1940s and 50s she befriended and encouraged the New York School (Jackson Pollock, Rothko, etc.) Her emotional life was in constant turmoil – a life of booze, bed and bohemia (mostly rich bohemia). Her favourite husband was a drunken English dilettante writer called Lawrence Vail, but she bedded many others, including Samuel Beckett. Later she moved to Venice, where her memory is enshrined in the world-famous palazzo that houses her Guggenheim Collection.
£17.09
Murdoch Books Hidden Kitchens of Sri Lanka
Take an evocative journey into the heart of the real Sri Lanka with intrepid photographer and writer, Bree Hutchins. With a voracious appetite for all things culinary and an undaunting spirit of adventure, Bree ventures into areas where most foreigners don't go, seeking out the hidden kitchens of Sri Lanka.On the reawakening Jaffna Peninsula, war widows cook crab curry and fry spicy snacks, while in a remote eastern village, Sumith stirs vats of smoky milk toffee over an open fire in a factory behind his home. Bamini cooks thosai for the Hindu temple feast, and old William boils up his Ceylon tea at Colombo's dawn wholesale market, just as he's done every day for sixty years. And at Monaragala Prison, in one of the poorest districts in Sri Lanka, the inmates prepare a fragrant fish curry with pol roti.Hidden Kitchens of Sri Lanka is far more than a collection of traditional recipes; stunningly vivid photographs, Bree interweaves recipes with heartfelt stories about the people who opened not only their kitchens but their homes and hearts to her, to create a moving yet hopeful picture of Sri Lanka today.
£20.00
Saraband Incandescent: We Need to Talk About Light
Light is changing, dramatically. Our world is getting brighter - you can see it from space. But is brighter always better? Artificial light is voracious and spreading. Vanquishing precious darkness across the planet, when we are supposed to be using less energy. The quality of light has altered as well. Technology and legislation have crushed warm incandescent lighting in favour of harsher, often glaring alternatives. Light is fundamental - it really matters. It interacts with life in profound yet subtle ways: it tells plants which way to grow, birds where to fly and coral when to spawn. It tells each and every one of us when to sleep, wake, eat. We mess with the eternal rhythm of dawn-day-dusk-night at our peril. But mess with it we have, and we still don't truly understand the consequences. In Incandescent, journalist Anna Levin reveals her own fraught relationship with changes in lighting, and she explores its real impact on nature, our built environment, health and psychological well-being. We need to talk about light, urgently. And ask the critical question: just how bright is our future?
£9.99
Faber & Faber Children of the Sun
I didn't read your books. I licked them, I rubbed them all over my naked body and licked them.Protasov, detached and idealistic, wants only to immerse himself in chemical experiments to perfect mankind. He's more or less oblivious to the voracious advances of the half-crazed widow Melaniya and his best friend's unrelenting pursuit of his wife, let alone the cholera epidemic and the starving mob at his gates. While Nanny fusses round, Protasov's admiring circle, variously skeptical, romantic and lovesick, spar over culture and the cosmos. Only Liza, neurotic and patronized, feels the suffering of the peasantry and senses that their own privileged world is in jeopardy.Gone? They're everywhere. Have you heard about the riots? The starvation and the flagrant disregard of authority. This disregard is building walls and barriers between us all. And they are massing. The crowds of angry people. And the hate... the hate between us all... kills everything.Written during the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905, Maxim Gorky's darkly comic Children of the Sun depicts the new middle-class, foolish perhaps but likeable, as they flounder around, philosophizing, yearning, or scuttling between test tubes, blind to their impending annihilation.This is Andrew Upton's fourth English version of a play for the National by one of the great Russian masters, including his acclaimed adaptation of Gorky's Philistines.
£9.99
The University of Chicago Press The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore
Skittering figures of urban legend - and a ubiquitous reality - cockroaches are nearly as abhorred as they are ancient. Even as our efforts to exterminate them have developed into ever more complex forms of chemical warfare, roaches basic design of six legs, two hypersensitive antennae, and one set of voracious mandibles has persisted unchanged for millions of years. But as Richard Schweid shows in The Cockroach Papers, while some species of these evolutionary superstars do indeed plague our kitchens and restaurants, exacerbate our asthma, and carry disease, our belief in their total villainy is ultimately misplaced. Traveling from New York City to Louisiana, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Morocco, Schweid blends stories of his own squirm - inducing roach encounters with meticulous research to spin a tale both humorous and harrowing. As he investigates roaches' more nefarious interactions with our species - particularly with those of us living at the margins of society - Schweid also explores their astonishing diversity, how they mate, what they'll eat, and what we've written about them (from Kafka and Nelson Algren to Archy and Mehitabel). Knowledge soon turns into respect, and Schweid looks beyond his own fears to arrive at an uncomfortable truth: We humans are no more peaceful, tidy, or responsible about taking care of the Earth or each other than these tiny creatures that swarm in the dark corners of our minds, homes, and cereal boxes.
£15.18
Thames & Hudson Ltd Cabinet of Wonders: The Gaston-Louis Vuitton Collection
Representing the third generation of Vuittons, Gaston-Louis’s wide interests and voracious curiosity were intimately bound with the future of the family business. A collector since his childhood, Gaston-Louis Vuitton (1883–1970) accumulated hundreds of objects over his lifetime. In addition to forming a collection of trunks – his first motivation and the one he announced publicly – his roving eye lit upon rare antique travel articles, locks and escutcheons, hand tools, perfume bottles, African masks, walking canes, vintage children’s toys, books, hotel labels (usually fixed on customers’ trunks), printed monograms and other typographical rarities. Together they form a rich personal evocation of curiosités industrielles, or quirks of the trade, as Gaston-Louis liked to call them. He described himself as an ‘unrepentant collector’, delighted by the ‘joy of the treasure hunter, the toil of the collector, […] an inexhaustible source of inspiration’. This is a collection that will capture the imagination of anyone inspired by bizarre and eclectic curiosities, or those with an interest in the cultural taste and interests of someone who lived through the height of the Art Deco period – indeed, someone whose life was defined by the rigours and the rewards of world travel. It exhibits the highest design and production values for discerning international voyagers in search of the sources of luxury creativity.
£67.50
Hodder & Stoughton When Women Lead: What We Achieve, Why We Succeed and What We Can Learn
In her groundbreaking, deeply reported work, Julia Boorstin reveals the odds-defying leadership approaches of women running the world's most innovative and successful companies - and what we can learn from them.Now, in When Women Lead, Boorstin brings together the stories of over sixty of those female CEOs and leaders, and dozens of new studies. Her combination of narrative and research reveals how once-underestimated characteristics, from vulnerability and gratitude to divergent thinking, can be vital superpowers - and that anyone can work these approaches to their advantage. Featuring new interviews with Gwyneth Paltrow, Jenn Hyman, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Lena Waithe, Shivani Siroya, and more, When Women Lead is a radical blueprint for the future of business, and our world at large.'Filled with top-notch research, practical insight and stories from the most inspiring women in business, Julia Boorstin lays out a new, inclusive vision for leadership and our world at large that we all will benefit from.' - Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive'When Women Lead is replete with concrete insights that have personally helped me navigate our unprecedented times of change. Weaving together perspectives from tech, business, politics, the cultural sphere and beyond, Boorstin's deep reporting and voracious inquiries serve not only as a tactical manual for individuals, but as a toolkit for building interdisciplinary connections.' - Bettina Korek, CEO of the Serpentine Galleries, London
£20.00
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc J Dilla's Donuts
From a Los Angeles hospital bed, equipped with little more than a laptop and a stack of records, James “J Dilla” Yancey crafted a set of tracks that would forever change the way beatmakers viewed their artform. The songs on Donuts are not hip hop music as “hip hop music” is typically defined; they careen and crash into each other, in one moment noisy and abrasive, gorgeous and heartbreaking the next. The samples and melodies tell the story of a man coming to terms with his declining health, a final love letter to the family and friends he was leaving behind. As a prolific producer with a voracious appetite for the history and mechanics of the music he loved, J Dilla knew the records that went into constructing Donuts inside and out. He could have taken them all and made a much different, more accessible album. If the widely accepted view is that his final work is a record about dying, the question becomes why did he make this record about dying? Drawing from philosophy, critical theory and musicology, as well as Dilla’s own musical catalogue, Jordan Ferguson shows that the contradictory, irascible and confrontational music found on Donuts is as much a result of an artist’s declining health as it is an example of what scholars call “late style,” placing the album in a musical tradition that stretches back centuries.
£9.99
Yale University Press Bouguereau and America
An in-depth exploration into the immense popularity of William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s work in America throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries Seeking to bring Gallic sophistication and worldly elegance into their galleries and drawing rooms, wealthy Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries collected the work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) in record numbers. This fascinating volume offers an in-depth exploration of Bouguereau’s overwhelming popularity in turn-of-the-century America and the ways that his work—widely known from reviews, exhibitions, and inexpensive reproductions—resonated with the American public. While also lauded by the French artistic establishment and a dominant presence at the Parisian Salons, Bouguereau achieved his greatest success selling his idealized and polished paintings to a voracious American market. In this book, the authors discuss how the artist’s sensual classical maidens, Raphaelesque Madonnas, and pristine peasant children embodied the tastes of American Gilded Age patrons, and how Bouguereau’s canvases persuasively functioned as freshly painted Old Masters for collectors flush with new money.Published in association with the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Memphis Brooks Museum of ArtExhibition Schedule:Milwaukee Art Museum (02/15/19–05/12/19)Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (06/22/19–09/22/19)San Diego Museum of Art (11/09/19–03/15/20)
£40.00
Abrams Music Is History
Questlove collects the 500 songs that have changed not just popular music, but also the world Questlove's Music Is History is an in-depth look into the 500 most influential songs in the history of music. Most famously known as a the drummer and joint frontman for the Grammy Award-winning band The Roots, Questlove is also an astute musicologist and voracious historian. In this book, Questlove dives into musical history from every decade of twentieth century, choosing one essential track from each year. The author thoughtfully and insightfully unpacks each song's cultural significance by placing it in its historical context, discussing real world events that shaped both the song's creation and its lasting impact. Analyses of iconic classics like "Sir Duke" by Stevie Wonder include tangents into the histories of science, politics, and pop culture. Questlove moves fluidly from the personal to the political, from Curtis Mayfield to the history of Black representation in cinema to musings on the Nixon presidency. Complete with comprehensive playlists organized around personal, playful themes like "Songs That Got Shafted" or "Songs With a Part I Really Like Even Though I Don't Like the Whole Song," this book is so full of Questlove's essential recommendations that it feels like a conversation with the industry's coolest music obsessive. Music Is History is a masterclass in music by a contemporary icon—a new American musical canon from one of music's most influential and unique voices.
£19.79
Yale University Press Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova
A fast-paced narrative about the world-famous libertine Giacomo Casanova, from celebrated biographer Leo Damrosch “Fully succeeds in communicating that ‘vivid presentness,’ that ‘joyful eagerness’ for life, which is what keeps us reading Casanova—and reading about him.”—Gregory Dowling, Wall Street Journal “A nuanced, deftly contextualized biography of an adventurer, an opportunist, and a man of voracious appetites. . . . Another top-notch work from Damrosch.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The life of the iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) has never been told in the depth it deserves. An alluring representative of the Enlightenment’s shadowy underside, Casanova was an aspiring priest, an army officer, a fortune teller, a con man, a magus, a violinist, a mathematician, a Masonic master, an entrepreneur, a diplomat, a gambler, a spy—and the first to tell his own story. In his vivid autobiography Histoire de Ma Vie, he recorded at least a hundred and twenty love affairs, as well as dramatic sagas of duels, swindles, arrests, and escapes. He knew kings and an empress, Catherine the Great, and most of the famous writers of the time, including Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. Drawing on seldom used materials, including the original French and Italian primary sources, and probing deeply into the psychology, self-conceptions, and self-deceptions of one of the world’s most famous con men and seducers, Leo Damrosch offers a gripping, mature, and devastating account of an Enlightenment man, freed from the bounds of moral convictions.
£25.00
Pegasus Books The Tsarina's Lost Treasure: Catherine the Great, a Golden Age Masterpiece, and a Legendary Shipwreck
A riveting history and maritime adventure about priceless masterpieces originally destined for Catherine the Great.On October 1771, a merchant ship out of Amsterdam, Vrouw Maria, crashed off the stormy Finnish coast, taking her historic cargo to the depths of the Baltic Sea. The vessel was delivering a dozen Dutch masterpiece paintings to Europe’s most voracious collector: Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. Among the lost treasures was The Nursery, an oak-paneled triptych by Leiden fine painter Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt’s most brilliant student and Holland’s first international superstar artist. Dou’s triptych was long the most beloved and most coveted painting of the Dutch Golden Age, and its loss in the shipwreck was mourned throughout the art world. Vrouw Maria, meanwhile, became a maritime legend, confounding would-be salvagers for more than two hundred years. In July 1999, a daring Finnish wreck hunter found Vrouw Maria, upright on the sea floor and perfectly preserved. The Tsarina’s Lost Treasure masterfully recounts the fascinating tale of Vrouw Maria—her loss and discovery—weaving together the rise and fall of the artist whose priceless masterpiece was the jewel of the wreckage. Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees bring to vivid life the personalities that drove (and are still driving) this compelling tale, evoking Robert Massie’s depiction of Russian high politics and culture, Simon Schama’s insights into Dutch Golden Age art and art history, Gary Kinder’s spirit of, danger and adventure on the beguiling Archipelago Sea.
£11.69
Princeton University Press What Bugged the Dinosaurs?: Insects, Disease, and Death in the Cretaceous
Millions of years ago in the Cretaceous period, the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex--with its dagger-like teeth for tearing its prey to ribbons--was undoubtedly the fiercest carnivore to roam the Earth. Yet as What Bugged the Dinosaurs? reveals, T. rex was not the only killer. George and Roberta Poinar show how insects--from biting sand flies to disease-causing parasites--dominated life on the planet and played a significant role in the life and death of the dinosaurs. The Poinars bring the age of the dinosaurs marvelously to life. Analyzing exotic insects fossilized in Cretaceous amber at three major deposits in Lebanon, Burma, and Canada, they reconstruct the complex ecology of a hostile prehistoric world inhabited by voracious swarms of insects. The Poinars draw upon tantalizing new evidence from their amazing discoveries of disease-producing vertebrate pathogens in Cretaceous blood-sucking flies, as well as intestinal worms and protozoa found in fossilized dinosaur excrement, to provide a unique view of how insects infected with malaria, leishmania, and other pathogens, together with intestinal parasites, could have devastated dinosaur populations. A scientific adventure story from the authors whose research inspired Jurassic Park, What Bugged the Dinosaurs?? offers compelling evidence of how insects directly and indirectly contributed to the dinosaurs' demise.
£22.50
University of California Press Selected Works of D.T. Suzuki, Volume III: Comparative Religion
Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki was a key figure in the introduction of Buddhism to the non-Asian world. Many outside Japan encountered Buddhism for the first time through his writings and teaching, and for nearly a century his work and legacy have contributed to the ongoing religious and cultural interchange between Japan and the rest of the world, particularly the United States and Europe. This third volume of Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki brings together a diverse collection of Suzuki's letters, essays, and lectures about non-Buddhist religions and his thoughts on their relation to Buddhism, as well as his reflections on the nature of religion itself. Some of these writings have been translated into English for the first time in this volume. As a long-term resident of the United States, a world traveller, and a voracious consumer of information about all forms of religion, Suzuki was one of the foremost Japanese mediators of Eastern and Western religious cultures for nearly seven decades. An introduction by Jeff Wilson and Tomoe Moriya analyzes Suzuki's frequent encounters with texts and practitioners of many religions, considers how events in Suzuki's lifetime affected his interpretations of Christianity, Shinto, and other traditions, and demonstrates that his legacy as a scholar extends well beyond Buddhism.
£37.80
Columbia University Press Éric Rohmer: A Biography
The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinema from 1957 to 1963, Eric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forward. Despite his privacy, he cared deeply about politics, religion, culture, and fostering a public appreciation of the medium he loved. This exhaustive biography uses personal archives and interviews to enrich our knowledge of Rohmer's public achievements and lesser known interests and relations. The filmmaker kept in close communication with his contemporaries and competitors: Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. He held a paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, the fate of the environment, Catholicism, classical music, and the French nightclub scene, and his films were regularly featured at New York and Los Angeles film festivals. Despite an austere approach to life, Rohmer had a voracious appetite for art, culture, and intellectual debate captured vividly in this definitive volume.
£22.00
Yale University Press Artists We've Known: Selected Works from the Walter Hopps and Caroline Huber Collection
An eclectic selection of twentieth-century artwork from the collection of legendary curator and museum director Walter Hopps, some with personal reminiscences by the artists themselves Over a fifty-year career that included stints at the famed Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and as director of the Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon Museum), the Corcoran Gallery, and as founding director of the Menil Collection, the legendary curator Walter Hopps (1932–2005) established himself as a voracious and eclectic collector of twentieth-century art. Hopps together with his wife Caroline Huber—also a curator, as well as an artist—assembled an adventurous and diverse collection of art, a large portion of which has been donated or promised to the Menil Collection. Featuring sculpture and photography as well as drawings and paintings, and including work by Christo, Linda Connor, Beauford Delaney, Anne Doran, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and Niki de Saint Phalle, to name a few, this book reveals the personal choices of two fine curatorial minds. Many of the more than fifty works illustrated have a story—often marvelous, sometimes humorous, and in several cases in the artist’s own words—of how they came to be in the collection. The publication also highlights artists not often featured in print, such as John Altoon, James Bettison, Mark Flood, and Sonia Gechtoff. Candid photos also highlight some of interactions between Hopps, Huber, and the artists from 1957 to 2001. Distributed for the Menil Collection
£35.00
University of Illinois Press Francois Ozon
In just over a decade, François Ozon has earned an international reputation as a successful and provocative filmmaker. A student of Eric Rohmer and Jean Douchet at the prestigious Fémis, Ozon made a number of critically acclaimed shorts in the 1990s and released his first feature film Sitcom in 1998. Two additional shorts and eleven feature films have followed, including international successes 8 femmes and Swimming Pool and more recent releases such as Angel, Ricky, and Le refuge. Ozon's originality lies in his filmmaking style, which draws on familiar cinematic traditions (the crime thriller, the musical, the psychological drama, the comedy, the period piece) but simultaneously mixes these recognizable genres and renders them unfamiliar. Despite tremendous diversity in cinematic choices, Ozon's oeuvre is surprisingly consistent in its desire to blur the traditional frontiers between the masculine and the feminine, gay and straight, reality and fantasy, auteur and commercial cinema. Thibaut Schilt provides an overview of François Ozon's career to date, highlighting the director's unrestrained, voracious cinephilia, his recurrent collaborations with women screenwriters and actresses, and the trademarks of his cinema including music, dance, and the clothes that accompany these now typically Ozonian episodes. Schilt contextualizes Ozon's filmmaking within the larger fields of French filmmaking and international queer cinema, and he discusses several major themes running through Ozon's work, including obsessions with inadequate fathers, various types of mourning, and a recurring taste for "the foreign." The volume also includes an insightful interview with the director.
£18.99
Harvard University Press The New Geopolitics of Natural Gas
We are in the midst of an energy revolution, led by the United States. As the world’s greatest producer of natural gas moves aggressively to expand its exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), America stands poised to become an energy superpower—an unanticipated development with far-reaching implications for the international order. Agnia Grigas drills deep into today’s gas markets to uncover the forces and trends transforming the geopolitics of gas.The boom in shale gas production in the United States, the growth of global LNG trade, and the buildup of gas transport infrastructure worldwide have so transformed the traditional markets that natural gas appears to be on the verge of becoming a true global commodity. Traditional suppliers like Russia, whose energy-poor neighbors were dependent upon its gas exports and pipelines, are feeling the foundations of the old order shifting beneath their feet. Grigas examines how this new reality is rewriting the conventional rules of intercontinental gas trade and realigning strategic relations among the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, and beyond.In the near term, Moscow’s political influence will erode as the Russian gas giant Gazprom loses share in its traditional markets while its efforts to pivot eastward to meet China’s voracious energy needs will largely depend on Beijing’s terms. In this new geopolitics of gas, the United States will enjoy opportunities but also face challenges in leveraging its newfound energy clout to reshape relations with both European states and rising Asian powers.
£30.56
Octopus Publishing Group Unexplained Deaths: How one woman changed homicide investigation forever
For most of human history, sudden and unexpected deaths of a suspicious nature, when they were investigated at all, were examined by lay persons without any formal training. People often got away with murder. That is, until Frances Glessner Lee.Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962), born a socialite to a wealthy and influential Chicago family, was never meant to have a career, let alone one steeped in death and depravity. Yet she became the mother of modern forensics and was instrumental in elevating homicide investigation to a scientific discipline. Frances Glessner Lee learned forensic science under the tutelage of pioneering medical examiner Magrath. A voracious reader too, Lee acquired and read books on criminology and forensic science - eventually establishing the largest library of legal medicine. Lee went on to create The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death - a series of dollhouse-sized crime scene dioramas depicting the facts of actual cases in exquisitely detailed miniature - and perhaps the thing she is most famous for. Celebrated by artists, miniaturists and scientists, they were first used as a teaching tool in homicide seminars at Harvard Medical School in the 1930s, subsequently becoming an integral part of the longest-running and still the highest-regarded training for police detectives of its kind in America. In Unexplained Deaths, Bruce Goldfarb weaves Lee's remarkable story with the advances in forensics made in her lifetime to tell the tale of the birth of modern forensics.
£9.04
John Blake Publishing Ltd Roger Federer: The Definitive Biography
Roger Federer is not only one of the greatest tennis players ever to pick up a racket - if not the greatest - but he is one of the global icons of our time. Characterised by a mixture of passion and calmness, a fierce competitor with a regal bearing, he is both an athlete and an ambassador, a street fighter and a statesman. But who is he really? And what are the experiences and influences that have shaped him into the world figure he is today?This acclaimed biography, first published in 2006 and now fully updated in its ninth edition, traces Federer's life and career, from his first tentative swings with a racket to legendary status. The vastly experienced writer, broadcaster and tennis historian Chris Bowers talked exclusively to many of the people who helped shape the young Roger Federer, and together with his own experiences following Federer's career from his junior title at Wimbledon at age sixteen to his twentieth major title nineteen years later, he presents an affectionate and analytical portrait of one of the great names of modern-day sport. His book has enough information to satisfy the most voracious Federer fan, and enough talking points to keep an argument going until the small hours.In its portrait of Roger Federer - the man, the player, the icon - this masterly biography brings the player's story up to date, while also examining his place in tennis and sporting history.
£9.99
University of Nebraska Press Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Hearing Voices takes a fresh look at sound in the poetry and prose of colonial Latin American poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51–95). A voracious autodidact, Sor Juana engaged with early modern music culture in a way that resonates deeply in her writing. Despite the privileging of harmony within Sor Juana’s work, however, links between the poet’s musical inheritance and subjects such as acoustics, cognition, writing, and visual art have remained unexplored. These lacunae have marginalized nonmusical aurality and contributed to the persistence of both ocularcentrism and a corresponding visual dominance in scholarship on Sor Juana—and indeed in early modern cultural production in general. As in many areas of her work, Sor Juana’s engagement with acoustical themes restructures gendered discourses and transposes them to a feminine key. Hearing Voices focuses on these aural conceits in highlighting the importance of sound and—in most cases—its relationship with gender in Sor Juana’s work and early modern culture. Sarah Finley explores attitudes toward women’s voices and music making; intersections of music, rhetoric, and painting; aurality in Baroque visual art; sound and ritual; and the connections between optics and acoustics. Finley demonstrates how Sor Juana’s striking aurality challenges ocularcentric interpretations and problematizes paradigms that pin vision to logos, writing, and other empirical models that traditionally favor men’s voices. Sound becomes a vehicle for women’s agency and responds to anxiety about the female voice, particularly in early modern convent culture.
£48.60
Headline Publishing Group Hard Rules: Dirty Money 1
Wall Street meets Sons of Anarchy in Hard Rules, the smouldering, scorching first novel in the explosively sexy Dirty Money series from New York Times bestseller Lisa Renee Jones, author of the Inside Out series, which Kirkus Reviews calls: 'Angst-y, sexy contemporary romance with big emotional and financial stakes set against the backdrop of two dynamic families. Sure to leave readers desperate for the next installment'.How bad do you want it? The only member of the Brandon empire with a moral compass, Shane Brandon is ready to make his family's business legitimate. His ruthless brother Derek wants to keep Brandon Enterprises cemented in lies, deceit and corruption. But the harder Shane fights to pull the company back into the light, the darker he has to become. Then he meets Emily Stevens, a woman who not only stirs a voracious sexual need in him, but becomes the only thing anchoring him between good and evil. Emily is consumed by an all-encompassing passion for Shane. She trusts him. He trusts her, but therein lies the danger. Because Emily has a secret - the very thing that brought her to him in the first place - and that secret could destroy them both.EXCLUSIVE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION - BONUS ALTERNATIVE POV SCENE!Are you ready to play by the hard rules of the Brandon family empire? Look for the next enthralling novel in the Dirty Money series, Damage Control.
£10.04
Yale University Press Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova
A fast-paced narrative about the world-famous libertine Giacomo Casanova, from celebrated biographer Leo Damrosch “Fully succeeds in communicating that ‘vivid presentness,’ that ‘joyful eagerness’ for life, which is what keeps us reading Casanova—and reading about him.”—Gregory Dowling, Wall Street Journal “A nuanced, deftly contextualized biography of an adventurer, an opportunist, and a man of voracious appetites. . . . Another top-notch work from Damrosch.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The life of the iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) has never been told in the depth it deserves. An alluring representative of the Enlightenment’s shadowy underside, Casanova was an aspiring priest, an army officer, a fortune teller, a con man, a magus, a violinist, a mathematician, a Masonic master, an entrepreneur, a diplomat, a gambler, a spy—and the first to tell his own story. In his vivid autobiography Histoire de Ma Vie, he recorded at least a hundred and twenty love affairs, as well as dramatic sagas of duels, swindles, arrests, and escapes. He knew kings and an empress, Catherine the Great, and most of the famous writers of the time, including Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. Drawing on seldom used materials, including the original French and Italian primary sources, and probing deeply into the psychology, self-conceptions, and self-deceptions of one of the world’s most famous con men and seducers, Leo Damrosch offers a gripping, mature, and devastating account of an Enlightenment man, freed from the bounds of moral convictions.
£16.99
Little, Brown Book Group A Different Kind Of Weather: A Memoir
'Why did you go into politics in the first place?'A question that former Cabinet minister has found himself asked, and indeed asking himself, over the years, Lord Waldegrave's is a life lived through politics.The youngest of seven children, and the son of an earl, Waldegrave's quintessentially English upbringing would go on to shape the course of his life, instilling in him a sense of independence and self-discipline needed to steel one for a successful career in government. Formative years spent at Eton, Oxford and Harvard fortified his resolve to enter the political establishment, and by the early seventies he finally achieved his greatest ambition.As an fearless young Conservative politician in the seventies and eighties, one who witnessed the fall of Heath and the triumph and eventual decline of Thatcher, Waldegrave was firmly at the heart of one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods of modern British history. However just as his star was in the ascent, Waldegrave became embroiled in a scandal which tarnished his reputation, but could not dampen his voracious enthusiasm for the political game. An unembroidered account of the narcotic effect of politics from one of the most fiercely intellectual governmental figures of the modern age, A Different Kind of Weather is a beautifully weighted memoir of political success and failure, and the passing of an era.A Spectator Book of the Year - 'refreshingly and engagingly candid' (Jane Ridley)
£9.89
Vintage Publishing Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels was one of Adolf Hitler’s most loyal acolytes. But how did this club-footed son of a factory worker rise from obscurity to become Hitler’s malevolent minister of propaganda, most trusted lieutenant and personally anointed successor? In this definitive one-volume biography, renowned German Holocaust historian Peter Longerich sifts through the historical record – and thirty thousand pages of Goebbels’s own diary entries – to answer that question. Longerich paints a chilling picture of a man driven by a narcissistic desire for recognition who found the personal affirmation he craved within the virulently racist National Socialist movement – and whose lifelong search for a charismatic father figure inexorably led him to Hitler. This comprehensive biography documents Goebbels’ ascent through the ranks of the Nazi Party, where he became a member of the Führer’s inner circle and launched a brutal campaign of anti-Semitic propaganda. Goebbels delivers fresh and important insight into how the Nazi message of hate was conceived, nurtured, and disseminated, and shreds the myth of Goebbels’ own genius for propaganda. It also reveals a man dogged by insecurities and – though endowed with near-dictatorial control of the media – beset by bureaucratic infighting. And, as never before, Longerich exposes Goebbels’s twisted personal life – his mawkish sentimentality, manipulative nature, and voracious sexual appetite. This complete portrait of the man behind Hitler’s message is sure to become a standard for historians and students of the Holocaust for decades to come.
£16.99
Amberley Publishing Scandalous Liaisons: Charles II and his Court
Scandalous Liaisons tells the story of the most hedonistic, loose-living court in English history, from Charles II’s youthful years and mistresses in France, to his tempestuous relationship with the hot-tempered, sexually and financially voracious Barbara Villiers. Of Charles’s mistresses, everybody’s favourite was the perky Cockney actress, Nell Gwyn. Nell and the French aristocrat (and not-so-very secret agent) Louise de Keroualle were the two women he would remember on his deathbed. The court, a world of extravagant displays of wealth, was also a sexual merry-go-round of flirtation, cuckoldry and betrayals, occasional unwanted pregnancies and fierce duels, as ordinary people looked on, fascinated and appalled. Filled with flamboyant men and women and astonishing incidents, this book draws on a wealth of writing by contemporary observers, such as diaries and memoirs (from Pepys and the French Comte de Gramont), letters, gossip, biting satires and bawdy lampoons directed at everyone from bishops to promiscuous court beauties and poxed swaggerers. All this is set in the context of Restoration libertinism and political events such as Charles’s secret deals with Louis XIV, the wars with the Dutch, court political intrigues and popular anti-Catholic feeling. Based on contemporary sources and modern historical studies, Scandalous Liaisons provides a richly varied and entertaining picture of a most extraordinary time.
£12.37
Profile Books Ltd The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria
From Dr Annie Gray, presenter of BBC2's Victorian Bakers What does it mean to eat like a queen? Elizabeth gorged on sugar, Mary on chocolate and Anne was known as 'Brandy Nan'. Victoria ate all of this and more. The Greedy Queen celebrates Victoria's appetite, both for food and, indeed, for life. Born in May 1819, Victoria came 'as plump as a partridge'. In her early years she lived on milk and bread under the Kensington system; in her old age she suffered constant indigestion yet continued to over-eat. From intimate breakfasts with the King of France, to romping at tea-parties with her children, and from state balls to her last sip of milk, her life is examined through what she ate, when and with whom. In the royal household, Victoria was surrounded by ladies-in-waiting, secretaries, dressers and coachmen, but below stairs there was another category of servant: her cooks. More fundamental and yet completely hidden, they are now uncovered in their working environment for the first time. Voracious and adventurous in her tastes, Queen Victoria was head of state during a revolution in how we ate - from the highest tables to the most humble. Bursting with original research, The Greedy Queen considers Britain's most iconic monarch from a new perspective, telling the story of British food along the way.
£11.09
Sonicbond Publishing The Human League and the Sheffield Electro Scene On Track: Every Album, Every Song
Sheffield in the late-1970s was isolated from what was happening in London in the same way that Liverpool had been in 1963. A unique generation of electro-experimental groupings evolved in the former Steel City around Cabaret Voltaire and The Future. The Future split into two factions, Clock DVA and The Human League. Then The Human League split into two further factions, Heaven 17, and The Human League as we now know them, fronted by Philip Oakey with Joanne Catherall and Susan Sulley. Dare became one of the most iconic albums of the eighties; the album by which Human League are most instantly recognised. It is a musically ambitious album, both driven and voracious album, with giddy grenades of shared inventiveness. A triumph of content over considerable style, at once phenomenally commercial and gleefully avant-garde. The American success of 'Don't You Want Me', accelerated by the high-gloss movie-quality video, exploiting the band's extreme visual appeal, heralded what was soon termed the Second British Invasion. It was the first of two Human League singles to top the American charts. This book tells the full story, from the band's origins in Sheffield, through the full arc of Human League and the very early Heaven 17 hits, and the albums - track-by-track, into the twenty-first century...
£15.99
Fordham University Press Caterpillage: Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting
Caterpillage is a study of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting. It develops an interpretive approach based on the author’s previous studies of portraiture, and its goal is to offer its readers a new way to think and talk about the genre of still life. The book begins with a critique of iconographic discourse and particularly of iconography’s treatment of vanitas symbolism. It goes on to argue that this treatment tends to divert attention from still life’s darker meanings and from the true character of its traffic with death. Interpretations of still life that focus on the vanity of human experience and the mutability of life minimize the impact made by the representation of such voracious pillagers of plant life as insects, snails, and caterpillars. The message sent by still life’s preoccupation with these small-scale predators is not merely vanitas. It is rapacitas. Caterpillage also explores the impact of this message on the meaning of the genre’s French name. We use the conventional term nature morte (“dead nature”) without giving any thought to how misleading it is. Because so many portrayals of still life involve cut flowers, which, although still in bloom, are dying, it would be more accurate to name the genre nature mourant. The subjects of still life are plants that are still living, plants that are dying but not yet dead.
£36.90
Prometheus Books Rocket Age: The Race to the Moon and What It Took to Get There
Rocket Age traces the history of spaceflight innovation from Robert Goddard’s early experiments with liquid fuel rockets, through World War II and the work of Wernher von Braun and his German engineers, on to the postwar improvements made by Sergei Korolev and his team in the Soviet Union, and culminating with the historic Moon walk made by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on July 20, 1969. From designers to engineers, and even communication specialists and the builders who assembled these towering rockets, hundreds of thousands of people worked on getting humans to the Moon, yet only a few have been recognized for their contributions. George D. Morgan sets the record straight by giving these forgotten figures of space travel their due. The son of rocket scientists who worked directly on NASA projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, Morgan gives behind-the-scenes details on the famous missions, including a rare interview with Dieter Huzel –Wernher von Braun’s right-hand man and a chief engineer on every major manned space program. Even the most voracious readers of US space flight history will discover things in this book that they have never read before. Rocket Age shines a light on those that have for too long been left out of the picture of the race to land on the Moon.
£17.09
Skyhorse Publishing ROAR: Roger Orr: American Master, The Oral Biography
A new novel by Hollywood’s "master of satire."The myth of an epic, public life—its triumphs and tragedies—is a particularly American obsession. ROAR is a metafictional exploration of such a life and attendant fame of an extraordinary, and completely made up, man. Born in Nashville in 1940 and adopted by a wealthy San Francisco couple, Roger Orr—“Roar”—became an underground stand-up comedian with a cult following while still in his teens, segueing to an acclaimed songwriter in the Sixties. In the decades that followed, his talent spanned the worlds of entertainment, from film directing and books to fine art (paintings, sculpture). His promethean energies expanded to the world of medicine; he became a dermatologist, the first to patent cadaver skin for burn victims. A spiritual seeker who returned to India throughout his life, Roar was also a voracious lover of both men and women. The journey of Roger Orr was a premonition of the cultural earthquakes to come. It wasn’t until his 40s that Roar learned his birth mother was black and it wasn't until his early 60s when he began the hormonal treatment and surgeries that chipped away at the armor covering what he always knew was his true identity: that of a woman. Roar’s saga is best told by a cacophony of voices—family members, critics, historians, and the famous (Meryl Streep, Amanda Gorman, Dave Chappelle, Andy Warhol)—including some heard from the grave. In ROAR, Wagner brilliantly paints a vivid picture of one man, our times, and our culture's enduring obsession with fame.
£22.45
Transworld Publishers Ltd Hereward: The Bloody Crown: (The Hereward Chronicles: book 6): The climactic final novel in the James Wilde’s bestselling historical series
Hereward's story concludes in this brutal, bloody and thrilling page-turner - perfect for fans of Bernard Cornwell and Conn Iggulden. "With great gusto...James Wilde has succeeded in giving new and convincing life to a half-forgotten English hero." -- BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE"Vividly describes those turbulent, dismal years...this is a masterful tale, graphic and gory, and loaded with medieval history." -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY"A truly spell-binding series...masterfully done." -- PARMENIAN BOOKS"Loved every minute." -- ***** Reader review"Wonderful storytelling" -- ***** Reader review"Full of twists and turns, aside factual events, recommended to all readers who enjoy battles and honour seeped in last events" -- ***** Reader review***************************************************************BLADES ARE SHARPENED, BATTLE LINES DRAWN. NOW IS THE TIME FOR HEROES...1081: The bloody battle for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire begins.Within the city of Constantinople itself, three mercenary factions will go to any lengths, including murder, to seize the throne.And outside the city's walls, twin powers threaten a siege that will crush the once-mighty empire forever: to the west, the voracious forces of the most feared Norman warlord are gathering, while in the east, the Turkish hordes are massing - theirs is a lust for slaughter.And in the midst of this maelstrom of brutality and betrayal, Hereward and his English spear-brothers prepare to make what could be their final stand . . .Hereward: The Bloody Crown is the final book in James Wilde's six book Hereward series. Have you read Hereward, Hereward: The Devil's Army, Hereward: End of Days, Hereward: Wolves of New Rome andHereward: The Immortals- the first five books in the series?
£9.99
OR Books Extinction: A Radical History
With a new introduction by the author Some thousands of years ago, the world was home to an immense variety of large mammals. From wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers to giant ground sloths and armadillos the size of automobiles, these spectacular creatures roamed freely. Then human beings arrived. Devouring their way down the food chain as they spread across the planet, they began a process of voracious extinction that has continued to the present. Headlines today are made by the existential threat confronting remaining large animals such as rhinos and pandas. But the devastation summoned by humans extends to humbler realms of creatures including beetles, bats and butterflies. Researchers generally agree that the current extinction rate is nothing short of catastrophic. Currently the earth is losing about a hundred species every day. This relentless extinction, Ashley Dawson contends in a primer that combines vast scope with elegant precision, is the product of a global attack on the commons, the great trove of air, water, plants and creatures, as well as collectively created cultural forms such as language, that have been regarded traditionally as the inheritance of humanity as a whole. This attack has its genesis in the need for capital to expand relentlessly into all spheres of life. Extinction, Dawson argues, cannot be understood in isolation from a critique of our economic system. To achieve this we need to transgress the boundaries between science, environmentalism and radical politics. Extinction: A Radical History performs this task with both brio and brilliance.
£12.99
Bedford Square Publishers Chance
From the LA Times Book Prize-winning author comes a suspenseful and mind-bending novel about Eldon Chance, a forensic neuropsychiatrist at the end of his rope - now a Hulu TV series starring Hugh Laurie and Gretchen Moi. Chance is a dark story about psychiatric mystery, sexual obsession, fractured identities, and terrifyingly realistic violence; a tale told amid the back streets of California's Bay Area, far from the cleansing breezes of the ocean. The antihero of this book, Dr. Eldon Chance, a neuropsychiatrist, is a man primed for spectacular ruin. Into Dr. Chance's blighted life walks Jaclyn Blackstone, the abused, attractive wife of an Oakland homicide detective, a violent and jealous man. Jaclyn appears to be suffering from a dissociative identity disorder. In time, Chance will fall into bed with her; or is it with her alter ego, the voracious and volatile Jackie Black? The not-so-good doctor, despite his professional training, isn't quite sure and soon finds himself up against her husband, Raymond, a formidable and dangerous adversary. Meanwhile, Chance also meets a young man named D, a self-styled, streetwise philosopher skilled in the art of the blade. It is around this trio of unique and dangerous individuals that long-guarded secrets begin to unravel, obsessions grow, and the doctor's carefully arranged life comes to the brink of implosion. Chance is a twisted, harrowing, and impossible-to-put-down head trip through the fun house of fate; it's not pretty, it's not sweet, but it is disturbing and unforgettable.
£8.99
Harvard University Press Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America
In the mid-eighteenth century, colonial Americans became enamored with the rich colors and silky surface of mahogany. This exotic wood, imported from the West Indies and Central America, quickly displaced local furniture woods as the height of fashion. Over the next century, consumer demand for mahogany set in motion elaborate schemes to secure the trees and transform their rough-hewn logs into exquisite objects. But beneath the polished gleam of this furniture lies a darker, hidden story of human and environmental exploitation.Mahogany traces the path of this wood through many hands, from source to sale: from the enslaved African woodcutters, including skilled “huntsmen” who located the elusive trees amidst dense rainforest, to the ship captains, merchants, and timber dealers who scrambled after the best logs, to the skilled cabinetmakers who crafted the wood, and with it the tastes and aspirations of their diverse clientele. As the trees became scarce, however, the search for new sources led to expanded slave labor, vicious competition, and intense international conflicts over this diminishing natural resource. When nineteenth-century American furniture makers turned to other materials, surviving mahogany objects were revalued as antiques evocative of the nation's past.Jennifer Anderson offers a dynamic portrait of the many players, locales, and motivations that drove the voracious quest for mahogany to adorn American parlors and dining rooms. This complex story reveals the cultural, economic, and environmental costs of America’s growing self-confidence and prosperity, and how desire shaped not just people’s lives but the natural world.
£20.95
Little, Brown Book Group The Merry Spinster: Tales of everyday horror
'Dark and dreadful and persistently clever. Ortberg bloodily turns familiar tales inside out.' Rainbow Rowell'A collection of stories delectable, formidable, and nimble. As a fantasist and short story writer, Ortberg is without peer.' Kelly Link'Ortberg has a voracious appetite for poison apples, and a genius for finding the places in fairyland where all the bodies are buried. The Merry Spinster will ruin your most-loved fables, in the best possible way.' Charlie Jane Anders'Ortberg has the sloe gin wit of Dorothy Parker and the soul of a Classics nerd. It's like both of them sat next to each other in The Merry Spinster and gossiped away. The result is an absolute delight.' John Scalzi'Ortberg has created a Frankenstein's monster of familiar narratives . . . [that swings] between Terry Pratchett's satirical jocularity and Angela Carter's sinister, shrewd storytelling, and the result is gorgeous, unsettling, splenic, cruel, and wickedly smart. I've never read anything quite like them, and I bet, Dear Reader, that you haven't either.' Carmen Maria MachadoA collection of darkly mischievous stories based on classic fairy tales. Sinister and inviting, familiar and alien all at the same time, The Merry Spinster updates traditional children's stories and fairy tales with elements of psychological horror, emotional clarity, and a keen sense of feminist mischief.Unfalteringly faithful to its beloved source material, The Merry Spinster also illuminates the unsuspected, and frequently alarming, emotional complexities at play in the stories we tell ourselves and each other as we tuck ourselves in for the night.Bed time will never be the same.
£14.99
Chicago Review Press Immunity: How Elie Metchnikoff Changed the Course of Modern Medicine
Around Christmas of 1882, while peering through a microscope at starfish larvae in which he had inserted tiny thorns, Russian zoologist Elie Metchnikoff had a brilliant insight: what if the mobile cells he saw gathering around the thorns were nothing but a healing force in action? Metchnikoff’s daring theory of immunity—that voracious cells he called phagocytes formed the first line of defense against invading bacteria—would eventually earn the scientist a Nobel Prize, shared with his archrival, as well as the unofficial moniker “Father of Natural Immunity.” But first he had to win over skeptics, especially those who called his theory “an oriental fairy tale.”Using previously inaccessible archival materials, author Luba Vikhanski chronicles Metchnikoff’s remarkable life and discoveries in the first moder n biography of this hero of medicine. Metchnikoff was a towering figure in the scientific community of the early twentieth century, a tireless humanitarian who, while working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, also strived to curb the spread of cholera, syphilis, and other deadly diseases. In his later years, he startled the world with controversial theories on longevity, launching a global craze for yogurt, and pioneered research into gut microbes and aging. Though Metchnikoff was largely forgotten for nearly a hundred years, Vikhanski documents a remarkable revival of interest in his ideas on immunity and on the gut flora in the science of the twenty-first century.
£23.95
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Bloodleaf
"Enchanting, visceral, and twisty." - New York Times bestselling author of Ash Princess, Laura Sebastian "Bloodleaffeels like a classic in the making." - Sara Holland, New York Times bestselling author of Everless A roar of a dark and luscious epic fantasy that's layered with heady romance, bloodthirsty magic, and ghostly intrigue - an absolutely wicked delight. AGES: 14 plus AUTHOR: Crystal Smith is a writer, photographer, and artist who developed an early love of storytelling in a family of voracious readers. She resides in Utah with her high school sweetheart husband and two lively sons. When she isn't writing or creating, she can be found re-watching Jane Eyre or reading ghost stories with all the lights on Princess Aurelia is a prisoner to her crown and the heir that nobody wants. Surrounded by spirits and banned from using her blood-magic, Aurelia flees her country after a devastating assassination attempt. To escape her fate, Aurelia disguises herself as a commoner in a new land and discovers a happiness her crown has never allowed. As she forges new bonds and perfects her magic, she begins to fall for a man who is forbidden to rule beside her. But the ghosts that haunt Aurelia refuse to abandon her, and she finds herself succumbing to their call as they expose a nefarious plot that only she can defeat. Will she be forced to choose between the weight of the crown and the freedom of her new life?
£17.14
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Greythorne
Brimming with deliciously mysterious magic, political intrigue, and a passionate heroine who will do anything to save the ones she loves - this highly anticipated sequel to Bloodleaf, praised as "enchanting, visceral, and twisty" by Laura Sebastian, won't disappoint. Princess Aurelia's life is turned upside down when the kingdom she thought she saved turns to ruin, a loved one is tragically killed in a shipwreck, and her home country refuses to respect her brother's legitimate claim to the throne. With no place left to call her own, Aurelia returns to Greythorne Manor - her best friend's family mansion - only to get swept up in a coup d'etat on the night of her brother's coronation. With everyone turned against her and enemies closing in on all sides, Aurelia has nothing left to lose in a mad fight to protect the only people she has left - her family. But in her darkest moments, when all seems grim, will Aurelia find a spark of hope from a love she thought long lost? A read bursting with romance, magic, and ghostly intrigue, Greythorne will not disappoint. AGES: 14 plus AUTHOR: Crystal Smith is a writer, photographer, and artist who developed an early love of storytelling in a family of voracious readers. She resides in Utah with her high school sweetheart husband and two lively sons. When she isn't writing or creating, she can be found re-watching Jane Eyre or reading ghost stories with all the lights on
£17.02
Tuttle Publishing Bruce Lee Artist of Life: Inspiration and Insights from the World's Greatest Martial Artist
Named one of TIME magazine's 100 Greatest Men of the Century, Bruce Lee's impact and influence has only grown since his untimely death in 1973. Part of the seven-volume Bruce Lee Library, this installment of the famed martial artistAes private notebooks allows his legions of fans to learn more about the man whose groundbreaking action films sparked a worldwide interest in the Asian martial arts. Bruce Lee Artist of Life explores the development of Lee's thoughts about Gung Fu (Kung Fu), philosophy, psychology, poetry, Jeet Kune Do, acting, and self-knowledge. Edited by John Little, a leading authority on Lee's life and work, the book includes a selection of letters that eloquently demonstrate how Lee incorporated his thought into actions and advice to others. Although Lee rose to stardom through his physical prowess and practice of jeet kune do;the system of fighting he founded;Lee was also a voracious and engaged reader who wrote extensively, synthesizing Eastern and Western thought into a unique personal philosophy of self-discovery. Martial arts practitioners and fans alike eagerly anticipate each new volume of the Library and its trove of rare letters, essays, and poems for the light it sheds on this legendary figure.Bruce Lee was known as an amazing martial artist, but he was also a profound thinker. He left behind seven volumes of writing on everything from quantum physics to philosophy. ; John Blake, CNN
£12.99
Little, Brown Book Group Playing Dirty
For fans of Bared to You, Say My Name and Beautiful Bastard comes the start of an irresistible new series in which competition is the ultimate seduction.Shaw Matthews plays to win, and he intends to snag a coveted partnership at San Diego's hottest sports agency by signing America's top athlete. Only one woman stands in his way: rival agent Cassidy Whalen. But eliminating the competition will be Shaw's pleasure when he concocts an ingenious plan to seduce Cassidy and show the beautiful ballbreaker who's the better man for the job. That is, until Cassidy turns the tables - and their steamy encounters start breaking all the rules . . . 'Sure to satisfy' - J Kenner'Fun, action-packed . . . Readers will be eager to read the sequel, hoping for more rough and dirty sexual acrobatics, friendship, backstabbing, and empathy.' - Publishers Weekly'This snappy, sexy novel moves at breakneck speed, with abundant snark and sports euphemisms. . . . [C. L.] Parker's penchant for dry humor and vivid, voracious sex scenes breathes life into a well-trodden premise.'-Library Journal'Parker writes intense storylines that anyone can relate to. Her characters are complex, with long and sometimes turbulent pasts that they have overcome, that still continues to affect their present. . . . I cannot wait to see where she takes this new series.' - Fresh Fiction'Playing Dirty is [a] top ten hottest book for this year.' - Under the Covers'Smokin' hot, toe-curling, yummilicious! Yup . . . just a few words to describe this hot, hot read.' - The Reading Cafe"A story and characters that are unforgettable and equally super hot, intense and emotional!"-Collector of Book Boyfriends
£10.04
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Pocket Book of Insect Anatomy
Insects live alongside us in great profusion – sometimes even in intimate proximity. Their importance to the ecosystems of our world, and to our own survival, cannot be overstated. But it can be challenging to relate to them as fellow living beings when their bodies’ structure and function are so dramatically different from our own. This excellent RSPB guide to insect anatomy aims to demystify the way that insects live, from the fine detail of their internal processes to the way they co-exist with all other forms of life. Insects exhibit dizzying diversity across their millions of species. Among them are mighty hunters, voracious plant defoliators, deep divers, high-fliers, master builders and devoted parents. Within the vast nests of honey-bees, ants and termites, we see them come together to form a huge, complex, multifaceted living machine. All this variation and potential has come about through evolved modification of a simple but perfectly elegant body plan. Each chapter of this book tackles a particular body system or aspect of insect biology, from respiration to digestion, movement to metamorphosis. Using a step-by-step approach, the book breaks down structures and processes and explores the myriad ways these are expressed in different insect groups. Separate pages delve into particular aspects of insect biology and ecology, such as how their colours are formed and the biology behind their remarkable migratory behaviour. Featuring numerous diagrams and more than 200 colour photos, this user-friendly guide is perfect for anyone interested in learning more about these extraordinary animals that – in terms of numbers, if not size – dominate our planet today.
£15.99