Red Brick Black Mountain White Clay

Author : Christopher Benfey
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143122851
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay written by Christopher Benfey and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Beautiful, haunted, evocative and so open to where memory takes you. I kept thinking that this is the book that I have waited for: where objects, and poetry intertwine. Just wonderful and completely sui generis." (Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes) An unforgettable voyage across the reaches of America and the depths of memory, this generational memoir of one incredible family reveals America’s unique craft tradition. In Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, renowned critic Christopher Benfey shares stories—of his mother’s upbringing in rural North Carolina among centuries-old folk potteries; of his father’s escape from Nazi Europe; of his great-aunt and -uncle Josef and Anni Albers, famed Bauhaus artists exiled at Black Mountain College—unearthing an ancestry, and an aesthetic, that is quintessentially American. With the grace of a novelist and the eye of a historian, Benfey threads these stories together into a radiant and mesmerizing harmony.

Author : Christopher Benfey
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1440629536
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Summer of Hummingbirds written by Christopher Benfey and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-04-17 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The country's most noted writers, poets, and artists converge at a singular moment in American life, a great companion to fans of the film A Quiet Passion, starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson. At the close of the Civil War, the lives of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade intersected in an intricate map of friendship, family, and romance that marked a milestone in the development of American art and literature. Using the image of a flitting hummingbird as a metaphor for the gossamer strands that connect these larger-than-life personalities, Christopher Benfey re-creates the summer of 1882, the summer when Mabel Louise Todd-the protégé to the painter Heade-confesses her love for Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, and the players suddenly find themselves caught in the crossfire between the Calvinist world of decorum, restraint, and judgment and a new, unconventional world in which nature prevails and freedom is all.

Author : Christopher Benfey
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0307432270
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Wave written by Christopher Benfey and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an international power. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific. In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit group of nineteenth-century travelers—connoisseurs, collectors, and scientists—who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving Old Japan. As Benfey writes, “A sense of urgency impelled them, for they were convinced—Darwinians that they were—that their quarry was on the verge of extinction.” These travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is “shadowed by hostile and mysterious Japan”; the historian Henry Adams and the artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an art-collecting trip and find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who marries a samurai’s daughter and becomes Japan’s preeminent spokesman in the West; Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb Mt. Fuji; Edward Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world’s leading expert on both Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the astronomer Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and writes seminal works on Japanese culture before turning his restless attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo enthusiast) Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous Easterners come West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of Tea became a cult favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher of his time, who studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre. Finally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity “seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril.”

Author : Diane Johnson
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0698137485
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Flyover Lives written by Diane Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] vivid . . . quest for roots. . . . Splendid.” —The New York Times Book Review Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of venturing off to see the world—and did. Now having traveled widely and lived part-time in Paris for many years, she is stung when a French friend teases her about Americans’ indifference to history. Could it be true? The j’accuse haunts Diane and inspires her to dig into her family’s past, working back from the Friday night football of her youth to the adventures illuminated in the letters and memoirs of her stalwart pioneer ancestors—beginning with a lonely young soldier who came to America from France in 1711. As enchanting as her bestselling novels, Flyover Lives is a moving examination of identity and the “wispy but material” family ghosts who shape us. As Johnson pays tribute to her deep Midwestern roots, she captures the perpetual tug-of-war between the magnetic pull of home and our lust for escape and self-invention.

Author : Cathleen Schine
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 1250050057
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fin & Lady written by Cathleen Schine and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Greenwich Village of 1964, eleven-year-old Fin moves in with his glamorous, careless older sister, and it's hard to tell who's raising whom.

Author : David Lodge
Publisher : Penguin Group
ISBN 13 : 0143122096
Total Pages : 449 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Man of Parts written by David Lodge and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting novel about the remarkable life—and many loves—of author H. G. Wells H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, was one of the twentieth century's most prophetic and creative writers, a man who immersed himself in socialist politics and free love, whose meteoric rise to fame brought him into contact with the most important literary, intellectual, and political figures of his time, but who in later years felt increasingly ignored and disillusioned in his own utopian visions. Novelist and critic David Lodge has taken the compelling true story of Wells's life and transformed it into a witty and deeply moving narrative about a fascinating yet flawed man. Wells had sexual relations with innumerable women in his lifetime, but in 1944, as he finds himself dying, he returns to the memories of a select group of wives and mistresses, including the brilliant young student Amber Reeves and the gifted writer Rebecca West. As he reviews his professional, political, and romantic successes and failures, it is through his memories of these women that he comes to understand himself. Eloquent, sexy, and tender, the novel is an artfully composed portrait of Wells's astonishing life, with vivid glimpses of its turbulent historical background, by one of England's most respected and popular writers.

Author : Edward Chiera
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107486653
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book They Wrote on Clay written by Edward Chiera and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-12 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1939, this book contains an assessment of the historical evidence provided by ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets. The text is accompanied by a number of photographs of the tablets, as well as of important archaeological sites and Babylonian artefacts. Chiera's enthusiasm for his subject is clear, as the text is accessibly written and contains many Babylonian legends and assesses their relationship to biblical texts. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Assyriology and the ancient Middle East.

Author : Lee Clay Johnson
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1101912448
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nitro Mountain written by Lee Clay Johnson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mine-riddled town of Bordon, Virginia, a group of lost souls are bound together by alcohol, small-time crime, and music. Leon is a lovesick bass player with a broken hand and a belief that next time—next time—he’ll definitely get it right; Jennifer is the bright-but-battered waitress who can’t quite escape the orbit of Arnett, the local drug dealer. When Jennifer convinces Leon to murder Arnett so she can finally be free, a dark chain of events is set in motion, its violence echoing the pain and misery that shape their fractured lives.

Author : Beth Macy
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 0316231568
Total Pages : 513 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Factory Man written by Beth Macy and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller about one man's battle to save hundreds of jobs by demonstrating the greatness of American business. The Bassett Furniture Company was once the world's biggest wood furniture manufacturer. Run by the same powerful Virginia family for generations, it was also the center of life in Bassett, Virginia. But beginning in the 1980s, the first waves of Asian competition hit, and ultimately Bassett was forced to send its production overseas. One man fought back: John Bassett III, a shrewd and determined third-generation factory man, now chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co, which employs more than 700 Virginians and has sales of more than $90 million. In Factory Man, Beth Macy brings to life Bassett's deeply personal furniture and family story, along with a host of characters from an industry that was as cutthroat as it was colorful. As she shows how he uses legal maneuvers, factory efficiencies, and sheer grit and cunning to save hundreds of jobs, she also reveals the truth about modern industry in America.

Author : Heinrich Ries
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book High-grade Clays of the Eastern United States written by Heinrich Ries and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: