Search results for ""author robert sullivan""

Singular . . . Virtuosic . . . Double Exposure is the best book I've read about America [. . .] in many, many years. Corey Seymour, VogueExtraordinary . . . A transformative experience for the reader. Lucy SanteA large-hearted, wide-angled book . . . I couldn''t put it down. Ian FrazierA personal exploration of the American West and the work of one of America's greatest photographers.Timothy O'Sullivan is America's most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don't know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work surrealist

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Captain Cook in the Underworld is a book-length poem by a gifted Maori poet, an archetypal exploration of Western mythology and legend as it 'discovers' itself in the South Pacific. The poem was commissioned as the libretto for a new work with composer John Psathas for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Wellington's Orpheus Choir. Captain Cook in the Underworld offers fresh perspectives on the familiar story of Cook's Pacific explorations; it has a broad bi-cultural (European/Polynesian) frame of references; and Sullivan employs a bold risk-taking approach. The book is a highly stylised, 'operatic' account of the voyages, with similarities to the musical structure of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner', and opera. As the poem unfolds, European myth (Orpheus, Venus, etc) has to make space for Polynesian myth (Maui, Reinga, etc). In the final pages, Cook is required after his death to face up to the damage his expeditions have inflicted on the indigenous peoples of the Pacific. This theme of European guilt and recognition will have a strong and shocking impact.

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In A Child's Christmas in New England, Robert Sullivan and Glenn Wolff return together to their favorite subject. This is a memoir about a time when, and place where, (in the New England of the '50s and '60s), the snow was always deep and a light was always on in the window.

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Did you know that Santa Claus returns to the North Pole 1,756 times during Christmas Eve? Or that he averages about 75 million miles over the course of 31 hours? Back in 1000 AD his sleigh was originally made of bone and ivory, but now it's entirely constructed of graphite and stainless steel, even providing a durable swivel seat!Indeed, there has never been anything quite like Flight of the Reindeer. Most, if not all writers, have approached the adored Santa Claus tale in a variety of ways, but none have tried to explore the reasons behind it. Robert Sullivan provides documentation from Santalogists, historians, zoologists, and Arctic explorers to confirm that flying reindeer are anything but a myth, and that Santa Claus does, in fact, make his trek around the globe each Christmas Eve. Glenn Wolff's insightful and profoundly detailed illustrations impeccably coincide with Sullivan's comprehensive research to provide a classic for children and their parents. A must-have for the holiday season!

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The photographs in Nicholas Pollack’s new book Meadow were made between 2015-2020 in and around Secaucus, New Jersey, U.S. Inspired by the landscape of the New Jersey Meadowlands, Meadow is a body of work about a small plot of land and the friendships and interactions between a group of truck drivers who forge a transcendent relationship with the place. Nicholas Pollack’s Meadow is tied to place – specifically, a place that is neglected by society. Meadow tells the story of a group of truck drivers who made a piece of overlooked salt marsh their own. Operating in the tradition of documentary style photography, Pollack shows both the social and the physical landscapes of America in Meadow. This book is Nicholas Pollack’s ode to a small portion of the sprawling New Jersey Meadowlands, to its people and its landscape, and to the humanity enveloped in a post-industrial landscape.

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Few people today have ever heard of North Brother Island, though a hundred years ago it was place known to—and often feared by—nearly everyone in New York City. The island, a small dot in the East River, twenty acres slotted between today’s gritty industrial shores of the Bronx and Queens, was a minor piece of the New York archipelago until the late 19th century, when calls for social and sanitary reform—and the massive expansion of the city’s population—combined to remake NBI as a hospital island, a place to contain infectious disease and, later, other societal ills. Abandoned since 1963, North Brother Island is a ruin and a wildlife sanctuary (it is the protected nesting ground of the Black-crowned Night Heron), closed to the public and virtually invisible to it. But one cannot mistake its abandoned state as a sign of its irrelevance to the city’s history and culture. Traces of the extensive hospital campus remain, as do sites linked to notorious people (it was the final home of “Typhoid Mary”) and events (the steamship General Slocum sank by its shores). It has stories to tell. Photographer Christopher Payne (Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals) was granted permission by New York City’s Parks & Recreation Department to photograph the island over a period of years. The results are both beautiful and startling. On North Brother Island, devoid of human habitation for fifty years, buildings great and small are being consumed by the unchecked growth of vegetation. In just a few decades, a forest has sprung up where once there were the streets and manicured lawns of a hospital campus. North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City includes a history by University of Pennsylvania preservationist Randall Mason, who has studied the island extensively, and an essay by the writer Robert Sullivan (Rats, The Meadowlands), who came along on one of the rare expeditions.

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Originally written in 1921 for the author’s grandchildren, Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind has charmed generations with its warmth, simplicity, and wisdom. Rather than the dry recitation of events so common in school textbooks, van Loon’s witty, amiable tone animates the story of human history as a grand and perpetually unfolding adventure. Beginning with the origins of human life and sweeping forward to illuminate all of history, van Loon’s incomparable prose and original illustrations present a lively rendering of the people and events that have shaped the world we live in today. This new version has been brought up to date by best-selling historian Robert Sullivan, who continues van Loon’s personable style, incorporating the most important developments of the early twenty-first century, including the war on terrorism, global warming, and the election of Barack Obama. Engagingly written, delightfully informative, and always entertaining, this is the necessary classic of all ages, for all ages.

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