Search results for ""author richard francis""

Absorbing new telling of one of America's founding stories.The great success last year of Stacy Schiff's The Witches proves, once again, that abiding interest in the Salem Witch Trials remains high. Richard Francis's stunning novel Crane Pond is the story of Samuel Sewall, loving father and husband, anti-slavery advocate, defender of Native American rights, and presiding judge at the Salem Witchcraft Trials in 1692, where he sentenced twenty innocent women to death. He was the only judge to later admit his terrible mistake, and ask for forgiveness. At once a searing view of the Trials from the inside out, an empathetic portrait of one of the period's most tragic and redemptive figures, and an indictment of the malevolent power of religious and political idealism, Crane Pond explores the inner life of a well-meaning man who did evil. It humanizes an unflinching portrait of political hysteria that is as relevant today as it was in the seve

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“[Francis] is just so good at the transcription and transformation of everyday ordinary life, all seen from sideways on, so that everything becomes so strange and so funny.”–Tessa Hadley An elderly academic is accosted by a homeless woman on his way home from the cinema. She tells him her name is Laura. So begins a nightmarish journey for Gerald, who is forced to confront the mystery of his own past and to ask himself if he has lived a good life – or even a decent one. In the course of this very funny, sometimes disturbing and often moving novel, suppressed memories return to haunt him, including the question of the role he played in a family tragedy. Above all he has to assess the harm he may have done in a long-forgotten love affair. Those close to him suddenly appear unfathomable as he begins to question if he truly knows those closest to him and even himself. The problem with exploring the past, Gerald begins to see, is that there are an infinite number of ways to travel through it.

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The Arabian Nights is your magic carpet ride to exotic lands full of wonders and marvels. First collected nearly a thousand years ago, these folktales are presented as stories that crafty Scheherazade tells her husband, King Shahryar, over a thousand-and-one consecutive nights, to pique his interest for the next evening's entertainment and thereby save her life. Among them are some of the best-known legends of eastern storytelling, including the "Sinbad the Sailor," "Aladdin and His Magic Lamp," and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." This collection features more than twenty stories, in the classic translation of Sir Richard Burton, published between 1884 and 1886, and full-colour illustrations by Renata Fucikova and Jindra Capek. The Arabian Nights is one of Barnes & Noble's Leatherbound classics. Each volume features authoritative texts by the world's greatest authors in an exquisitely designed bonded-leather binding, with distinctive gilt edging and a silk-ribbon bookmark. Decorative, durable, and collectible, these books offer hours of pleasure to readers young and old and are an indispensable cornerstone for every home library.

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New England Transcendentalism was a vibrant and many-sided movement whose members are probably best remembered for their utopian experiments, their attempts to reconcile the contingent world of history with what they perceived as the stable and patterned world of nature. Richard Francis has written the first book to explore in detail the ideological basis of the three famous experiments during the 1840s: Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Henry David Thoreau's "community of one" on the shores of Walden Pond. Francis suggests that at the heart of Transcendentalism was a belief that all phenomena are connected in a repetitive sequence. The task was to explain how human society could be reordered to benefit from this seriality. Some members of the movement believed in evolutionary progress, whereas others hoped to be the agents of a sudden millennial transformation. They differed, as well, in their views as to whether the fundamental social unit was the individual, the family, the phalanstery, or the community. The story of the three communities was, inevitably, also the story of particular individuals, and Francis highlights the lives and ideas of such leaders as George Ripley, W. H. Channing, Bronson Alcott, Charles Lane, and Theodore Parker. The consistent underlying beliefs of the New England Transcendentalists have exerted a powerful influence on American intellectual and cultural history ever since.

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“[Francis] is just so good at the transcription and transformation of everyday ordinary life, all seen from sideways on, so that everything becomes so strange and so funny.”–Tessa Hadley An elderly academic is accosted by a homeless woman on his way home from the cinema. She tells him her name is Laura. So begins a nightmarish journey for Gerald, who is forced to confront the mystery of his own past and to ask himself if he has lived a good life – or even a decent one. In the course of this very funny, sometimes disturbing and often moving novel, suppressed memories return to haunt him, including the question of the role he played in a family tragedy. Above all he has to assess the harm he may have done in a long-forgotten love affair. Those close to him suddenly appear unfathomable as he begins to question if he truly knows those closest to him and even himself. The problem with exploring the past, Gerald begins to see, is that there are an infinite number of ways to travel through it.

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"‘Truth and Lies in Architecture’ delves deep into the soul of architects and their work." — Naser Nader Ibrahim, Amazing Architecture This is a collection of provocative essays that journey into the vexed circumstance of contemporary architectural practice. The nature of the great cultural, social, political, environmental, and consumerist challenges facing the contemporary architect are explored, interpreted, and questioned, while drawing connections from architecture theory, philosophy, science, literature, and film sources in an attempt to negotiate the territory between the truth and lies in architecture. These essays written by a leading Australian architect represent a level of comprehensive critical awareness rarely found within the architectural profession and one would be hard pressed to find another comparable figure in contemporary architectural practice. The entire argumentation is impressive, challenging, intellectually at the highest level and beautifully written.

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Australian architecture practice Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp's work varies in scale, yet it's all unified by an intuitive sense of place and an elaboration of the tectonic. This book presents FJMT's work in detail and places it within the emerging culture of Australian architecture. It documents FJMT's contribution to the wider culture of place and of architecture. A place acquires meaning through human intervention and transformation. Raised to the level of architecture these transformations interpret and represent society's values and aspirations. FJMT has a reputation as an ideas-driven practice with an agenda for strong public engagement and resolution of tectonics. Architecture as Material Culture documents this ability to uncover the real and often contradictory issues and potentials of a project through a very careful analysis of purpose and place.

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