T. J. Klune

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

Under the Whispering Door is a contemporary fantasy with TJ Klune's signature “quirk and charm” (Publishers Weekly) about a ghost who refuses to cross over and the ferryman he falls in love with When a reaper comes to collect Wallace Price from his own funeral, Wallace suspects he really might be dead. Instead of leading him directly to the afterlife, the reaper takes him to a small village. On the outskirts, off the path through the woods, tucked between mountains, is a particular tea shop, run by a man named Hugo. Hugo is the tea shop's owner to locals and the ferryman to souls who need to cross over. But Wallace isn’t ready to abandon the life he barely lived. With Hugo’s help he finally starts to learn about all the things he missed in life. When the Manager, a curious and powerful being, arrives at the tea shop and gives Wallace one week to cross over, Wallace sets about living a lifetime in seven days. By turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, this absorbing tale of grief and hope is told with TJ Klune's signature warmth, humor, and extraordinary empathy.

Under the Whispering Door

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Philip Ball

A Biography of Chartres Cathedral

Chartres Cathedral, south of Paris, is revered as one of the most beautiful and profound works of art in the Western canon. But what did it mean to those who constructed it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? And why, during this time, did Europeans begin to build churches in a new style, at such immense height and with such glorious play of light, in the soaring manner we now call Gothic? Universe of Stone shows that the Gothic cathedrals encode a far-reaching shift in the way medieval thinkers perceived their relationship with their world. For the first time, they began to believe in an orderly, rational world that could be investigated and understood. This change marked the beginning of Western science and also the start of a long and, indeed, unfinished struggle to reconcile faith and reason. By embedding the cathedral in the culture of the twelfth century—its schools of philosophy and science, its trades and technologies, its politics and religious debates—Philip Ball makes sense of the visual and emotional power of Chartres. Beautifully illustrated and written, filled with astonishing insight, Universe of Stone argues that Chartres is a sublime expression of the originality and vitality of a true "first renaissance," one that occurred long before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, or Francis Bacon.

Universe of Stone

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George W. Boudreau

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Culture, Society, and the Life of Things in Early Anglo-America

A collection of essays that examine early American cultural, political, and social history through a material lens, exploring the meanings of objects ranging from artworks and domestic furnishings to Penn's Treaty Tree.

A Material World

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Joanna Richardson

Art, Music, Drama/Theater

These courtesans were the queens of the profession. Presented are twelve of the most distinguished courtesans in Paris during their golden age.

The Courtesans

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Frits Scholten

This volume catalogs the more than two hundred remarkable and varied pieces of European sculpture and metalwork--dating from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century--amassed by Robert Lehman, one of the foremost art collectors of his generation. Highlights of the collection's exemplary aquamanilia, bronze sculptures, medals, and plaquettes include a medieval aquamanile, the finest of its type, depicting the theme of foolish love in the fable of Phyllis and Aristotle, as well as a commanding figure of Mars in the guise of a musketeer loading his weapon, dating to the seventeenth century. Each work in this catalog is illustrated, in many cases with new color photography, and elucidated by in-depth scholarly discussion.

European Sculpture and Metalwork

The Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume XII

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Richard E. Spear

Philip Sohm

Christopher R. Marshall

Raffaella. Morselli

Elena Fumagalli

Renata Ago

In this highly original book five leading art historians team up with two distinguished economic and social historians to investigate the financial worlds of painters in Baroque Italy. Exploring the many variables that determined the prices asked or received by painters—including the status of their patrons, the size of works and time spent making them, their subject matter, and their number of figures—the authors offer major insights into the social lives, psychological disposition, and economic circumstances of a wide range of major and minor artists.

Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters

Rome: setting the stage / Richard E. Spear -- Naples / Christopher R. Marshall -- Bologna / Raffaella Morselli -- Florence / Elena Fumagalli -- Venice / Philip Sohm -- Five industrious cities / Renata Ago -- The painting industry in early modern Italy / Richard A. Goldthwaite.

Painting for Profit

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Christopher Dell

Encounters with Great Works of Art

The stories behind the paintings and sculptures that form our common artistic heritage, illustrated with superb reproductions of the works, as well as dozens of details and comparative works.

What Makes a Masterpiece?

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Anthea Callen

Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body

Beginning in 1800, Looking at Men explores how the modern male body was forged through the intimately linked professions of art and medicine, which deployed muscular models and martial arts to renew the beau idéal. This ideal of the virile body derived from the athletic perfection found in the classical male nude. The study of human anatomy and dissection in both art and medicine underpinned a modern gladiatorial ideal, its representations setting the parameters not just of 'normal' virile masculinity but also its abject 'other'. Through the shared violence of human dissection and martial arts, male artists and medics secured their professional privilege and authority on the bodies of 'roughs'. First and foremost visual, this process has literary parallels in Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde. While embodying signs of dominant power and signalling differences of race, class, gender and sexuality, the virile masculine ideal contained its shadow, the threat of loss, of a Darwinian 'degeneration' that required vigilant intervention to ensure the health of nations. Anthea Callen's lively and intelligent study casts a new eye on contributions by many lesser-known artists, as well as more familiar works by Géricault, Courbet, Dalou and Bazille through to Eakins, Thornycroft, Leighton and Tonks, and includes images that draw on photography and the popular visual cultures of boxing, wrestling and bodybuilding. Callen reassesses ideas of the modern male body and virile manhood in this exploration of the heteronormative, the homosocial and the homoerotic in art, anatomy and nascent anthropology.

Looking at Men

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Barbara Walters

A Memoir

Audition

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Geert Mak

Philipp Blom

In this gracefully written examination of Amsterdam's soul--part history, part travel guide--the Dutch writer Geert Mak imaginatively depicts the lives of early Amsterdam residents and traces the city's progress from a small town of merchants, sailors, farmers, and fishermen to a thriving metropolis. 64 halftones.

Amsterdam

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Kevin Starr

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge

A passionate chronicle of the Golden Gate Bridge's construction by a National Humanities Medal-winning historian reveals influences from culture and nature that shaped its development while offering insight into its role as a national symbol of American engineering and innovation.

Golden Gate

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Giovanni Dupre

E. M. Peruzzi

William Wetmore Story

Thoughts on Art and Autobiographical Memoirs of Giovanni Dupre

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Dava Sobel

How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos

Traces the story of the reclusive sixteenth-century cleric who introduced the revolutionary idea that the Earth orbits the sun, describing the dangerous forces and complicated personalities that marked the publication of Copernicus's findings.

A More Perfect Heaven

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David Esterly

A Journey to the Heart of Making

The Lost Carving

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Albert Leong

The Life and Art of Ernst Neizvestny

Centaur

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Calvin Tomkins

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A Biography

This biography of the influential artist Marcel Duchamp by New Yorker writer and art critic Calvin Tomkins has been out of print for many years. Featuring full-colour illustrations, this new edition commemorates the 100th anniversary of Duchamp's first Readymade, 'Bicycle Wheel', a version of which is in MoMA's collection.

Duchamp

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Jonathan Clements

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

'From the Fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.' Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, the Vikings surged from their Scandinavian homeland to trade, raid and invade along the coasts of Europe. Their influence and expeditions extended from Newfoundland to Baghdad, their battles were as far-flung as Africa and the Arctic. But were they great seafarers or desperate outcasts, noble heathens or oafish pirates, the last pagans or the first of the modern Europeans? This concise study puts medieval chronicles, Norse sagas and Muslim accounts alongside more recent research into ritual magic, genetic profiling and climatology. It includes biographical sketches of some of the most famous Vikings, from Erik Bloodaxe to Saint Olaf, and King Canute to Leif the Lucky. It explains why the Danish king Harald Bluetooth lent his name to a twenty-first century wireless technology; which future saint laughed as she buried foreign ambassadors alive; why so many Icelandic settlers had Irish names; and how the last Viking colony was destroyed by English raiders. Extending beyond the traditional 'Viking age' of most books, A Brief History of the Vikings places sudden Scandinavian population movement in a wider historical context. It presents a balanced appraisal of these infamous sea kings, explaining both their swift expansion and its supposed halt. Supposed because, ultimately, the Vikings didn't disappear: they turned into us.

The Vikings

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David Leeming

Sex in the World of Myth

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Laura J. Snyder

Johannes Vermeer Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek and the Reinvention of S

The remarkable story of how an artist and a scientist in seventeenth-century Holland transformed the way we see the world. On a summer day in 1674, in the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek—a cloth salesman, local bureaucrat, and self-taught natural philosopher—gazed through a tiny lens set into a brass holder and discovered a never-before imagined world of microscopic life. At the same time, in a nearby attic, the painter Johannes Vermeer was using another optical device, a camera obscura, to experiment with light and create the most luminous pictures ever beheld. “See for yourself!” was the clarion call of the 1600s. Scientists peered at nature through microscopes and telescopes, making the discoveries in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and anatomy that ignited the Scientific Revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses, mirrors, and camera obscuras, creating extraordinarily detailed paintings of flowers and insects, and scenes filled with realistic effects of light, shadow, and color. By extending the reach of sight the new optical instruments prompted the realization that there is more than meets the eye. But they also raised questions about how we see and what it means to see. In answering these questions, scientists and artists in Delft changed how we perceive the world. In Eye of the Beholder, Laura J. Snyder transports us to the streets, inns, and guildhalls of seventeenth-century Holland, where artists and scientists gathered, and to their studios and laboratories, where they mixed paints and prepared canvases, ground and polished lenses, examined and dissected insects and other animals, and invented the modern notion of seeing. With charm and narrative flair Snyder brings Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek—and the men and women around them—vividly to life. The story of these two geniuses and the transformation they engendered shows us why we see the world—and our place within it—as we do today.

Eye of the Beholder

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Amos Oz

Lovingly, he evokes his departed parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, along with their household employees, to create a vital gallery of dramatic, lyrical, epic, and sometimes absurd heroes. With gentle humor, the child prodigy of the faraway past and the accomplished artist of today engage in a spirited dialogue from which emerges a self-portrait of the "Artist as a Young - and middle-aged and aging - Survivor.""--BOOK JACKET.

Painted in Words

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Anna Tummers

Authenticating Paintings by Rembrandt and His Contemporaries

Attributing old master paintings is one of the most difficult tasks of the art historian. While authorship has important implications for the field of art history and for valuation, little has been written on the theory and techniques of the connoisseur's work. This volume analyzes the role of the expert's intuition along with efforts to develop scientific techniques. The author focuses on the challenges of attributing seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, then turns to investigating connoisseurship, arguing that to evaluate authenticity, it is necessary to understand what it meant when the paintings were created. Further discussions probe the understanding of an “original” versus a “copy” at a time when painters routinely produced multiple versions of a work; the meaning of “by the master's hand” when paintings were often produced with the help of assistants; and the significance of style when artists intentionally varied theirs depending on the subject matter or the audience.

The Eye of the Connoisseur

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John Julius Norwich

Chronicles the history of France, from Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul in the mid-first century BC to the end of World War II.

A History of France

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A. Wiel

A History of Venice: From Its Founding to the Unification of Italy This description may be from another edition of this product.

From Its Founding to the Unification of Italy

History of Venice

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Marc Kaufman

Marc Kaufman's riveting, game-changing book tells the incredible true story of science's search for the beginnings of life on Earth--and the likelihood of it existing elsewhere in our universe. For decades, researchers assumed that the genesis of life was too delicate a process, and the conditions needed to support it too fragile, for it to exist anywhere other than Earth. But recent discoveries--from microbes and creatures living in unimaginably inhospitable environments to newly discovered extra-solar planets--point towards a day when the existence of extraterrestrial life will be irrefutably confirmed. Science reporter Marc Kaufman takes readers around the globe, into space, and miles below Earth's surface to show how the search for life on other planets is changing the way humans think about their own history, about what it means to be human, and about what, exactly, life is. First Contact is the first book to bring together recent developments across many competing branches of science, from microbiology to geochemistry, physics, and astronomy, all racing to verify what was once deemed impossible. Kaufman demystifies the key points behind the rigorous science and advanced technology that is edging ever closer to the most important discovery of modern times.m

Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth

Are we alone in the universe? Almost certainly not. In First Contact, Marc Kaufman provides a gripping tour of the magnificent new science of astrobiology that is closing in on the discovery of extraterrestrial life. In recent decades, scientists generally held that the genesis of life was unique to Earth: It was too delicate a process, and the conditions needed to support it too fragile, for it to exist anywhere else. But we are now on the verge of the biggest discovery since Copernicus and Galileo told us that Earth is not at the center of the universe. New scientific breakthroughs have revolutionized our assumptions about the building blocks of life and where it may be found. Scientists have hunted down and identified exoplanets, those mysterious balls in the universe that orbit distant suns not too different from our own. They have discovered extremophiles, the extraordinary microbes that thrive in environments of intense heat or cold that may mimic the inhospitable conditions of other planets. They have landed rovers on Mars and detected its methane, a possible signature of past life. And they have created sophisticated equipment to sweep the sky for distant radio signals and to explore the deep icebound lakes of Antarctica. Each of these developments has brought forth a new generation of out-of-the-box researchers, adventurers, and thinkers who are each part Carl Sagan, part Indiana Jones, part Watson and Crick—and part forensic specialists on CSI: Mars. In this masterful book, Kaufman takes us to the frontiers of astrobiology’s quest for extraterrestrial life and shows how this quest is inextricably linked with the quest to understand life on Earth. He takes us deep under the glaciers of Antarctica, into the mouth of an Alaskan volcano, and beneath the Earth into the unbearable heat of a South African mine, and leads us to the world’s driest desert. For thousands of years, humans have wondered about who and what might be living beyond the confines of our planet. First Contact transports us into the cosmos to bring those musings back to Earth and recast our humanity.

First Contact

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Anna cilento

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