Search results for ""Author Adam Van Doren""

Filled with wit and insight, this is a fascinating tour of Venice from an artist's perspective. The city of Venice has always provided an almost irresistible lure for both writers and artists. Henry James loved it, as did Ruskin, Browning, Pound, and Brodsky. For artists, it has been a compulsory magnet since the time of Bellini and Canaletto. By the 19th century there was hardly an artist of note - Whistler and Turner, Sargent and Prendergas - who was not seduced by the city's charms, history, and aesthetic heritage. For the depiction of Venice by artists, it's a high bar that's been set, but Adam Van Doren, grandson of the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren, convincingly confronts the competition in this charming memoir, a verbal and visual account of his love affair with the city. His story is personal; like all other artists, he sees the city through his own eyes, but he is also well-informed historically, lacing his tour with information, opinion, and wit.

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“Beautifully alive.”—Wall Street JournalWinner of the 2022 Distinguished Book Award from The Society of Colonial WarsA tour through the original thirteen colonies in search of historical sites and their stories in America’s founding. Obscure, well-known, off-the-beaten path, and on busy city streets, here are taverns, meeting houses, battlefields, forts, monuments, homes which all combine to define our country—the places where daring people forged a revolution. There is always something new to be found in America’s past that also brings greater clarity to our present and the future we choose to make as a nation. Author-artist Adam Van Doren traveled from Maine to Georgia in that spirit. There are thirty-seven landmarks included, with fifteen additional locations noted in brief. From the Bunker Hill monument in Massachusetts to the Camden Battlefield Site in South Carolina, this is a tour of an American cultural landscape with a curious, perceptive, and insightful guide. The reader steps inside cabins at Valley Forge where nearly two thousand soldiers perished during a cruel winter, meets the chef at Philadelphia’s City Tavern where the menu is based on 18th century fare, seeks out the Swamp Fox in Georgia, visits the homes of Alexander Hamilton, John and Abigail Adams, the Joseph Webb House on the Connecticut River where French general Rochambeau made plans with Washington, and much more. An unvarnished view, we also see Philipsburg Manor, in Sleepy Hollow, New York, where Blacks were once held as slaves to work in the Hudson River Valley. For armchair travelers and anyone fascinated by Americana, Van Doren (The House Tells the Story: Homes of the American Presidents) has created an unforgettable journey through history. We see the Founders—both their stunning achievements and chilling moral failures—where they lived, fought, and agreed on a common purpose, to create a nation whose future—and legacy—is continually evolving.

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A personal look at the buildings that define Yale University through the eyes of alumni. “The Stones of Yale is a delight—fresh and highly observant. I will be turning to its pages again and again, I have no doubt.”—David McCullough Artist Adam Van Doren wanted to know how Yale University’s buildings made people feel to live and to study in them. He spoke to alumni as diverse as actor Sam Waterston, the writer Christopher Buckley, Yale librarian Judith Schiff, former NFL great Calvin Hill, architect Cesar Pelli, among others, about their experiences and illustrates this book in gorgeous watercolor paintings of the buildings of Yale that interest him most. Rather than an architectural analysis of buildings, Van Doren explores the visceral experience of seeing them and being inside them. This is one-of-a-kind approach that will interest anyone who’s felt the intangible power of a building and a place.

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