Days With My Father
Phillip Toledano - 2010
Following the death of his mother, photographer Phillip Toledano was shocked to learn of the extent of his father's severe memory loss. He started a blog on which he posted photographs and accompanying reflections on his father's changing state. Through sometimes sad, often funny, and always loving observations, we follow Toledano as he learns to reconcile the elderly man living in a twilight of half memories with the ambitious and handsome young man he occasionally still glimpses. Days With My Father is an honest and moving reflection about coming to terms with an aging parent.
Durruti in the Spanish Revolution
Abel Paz - 1976
Abel Paz's magnificent biography resurrects the very soul of Spanish anarchism.”—Mike Davis, author of Planet of SlumsAK Press has commissioned an elegant, new and unabridged translation of the definitive biography of Spanish revolutionary and military strategist, Buenaventura Durruti. But Abel Paz, who fought alongside Durruti in the Spanish Civil War, has given us much more than an account of a single man’s life. Durruti in the Spanish Revolution is as much a biography of a nation and of a tumultuous historical era. Paz seamlessly weaves intimate biographical details of Durruti’s life—his progression from factory worker and father to bank robber, political exile and, eventually, revolutionary leader—with extensive historical background, behind-the-scenes governmental intrigue, and blow-by-blow accounts of major battles and urban guerrilla warfare. An amazing and exhaustive study of an incredible man and his life-long fight against fascism in both its capitalist and Stalinist forms.Includes Jose Luis Gutierres Molina’s introduction about Abel Paz’s life and the historiography of the Spanish Civil War.Abel Paz was born in 1921. At 15, he joined the Durruti Column and fought in the Spanish Revolution. After the revolution's defeat, he was active as a guerilla fighter against the Franco regime and spent eleven years in prison. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.Chuck Morse founded the Institute for Anarchist Studies, co-edited Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, and founded and edited The New Formulation: An Anti-Authoritarian Review of Books. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made
Richard Rhodes - 2015
The Spanish Civil War inspired and haunted an extraordinary number of exceptional artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and John Dos Passos. The idealism of the cause—defending democracy from fascism at a time when Europe was darkening toward another world war—and the brutality of the conflict drew from them some of their best work: Guernica, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia, The Spanish Earth.The war spurred breakthroughs in military and medical technology as well. New aircraft, new weapons, new tactics and strategy all emerged in the intense Spanish conflict. Indiscriminate destruction raining from the sky became a dreaded reality for the first time. Progress also arose from the horror: the doctors and nurses who volunteered to serve with the Spanish defenders devised major advances in battlefield surgery and front-line blood transfusion. In those ways, and in many others, the Spanish Civil War served as a test bed for World War II, and for the entire twentieth century. From the life of John James Audubon to the invention of the atomic bomb, readers have long relied on Richard Rhodes to explain, distill, and dramatize crucial moments in history. Now, he takes us into battlefields and bomb shelters, into the studios of artists, into the crowded wards of war hospitals, and into the hearts and minds of a rich cast of characters to show how the ideological, aesthetic, and technological developments that emerged in Spain changed the world forever.
All Played Out
Pete Davies - 1995
Once you could ignore football, avoid the back pages, turn the telly over, leave the pub. Now that's not possible because on 4 July 1990 in Turin's Stadium of the Alps gazza cried, England lost and football changed forever. Pete Davies witnessed all of this first hand. The players, the hooligans, the agents, the journalists, the fans - the full cast of football's rowdy circus. For nine month he had access to the England squad and their manager, Bobby Robson, talking to them freely about their hopes, their fears, their methods and their lives. So this is the real story, the unedited verdion. All Played Out - the first and last book to give the inside story of the greatest show on Earth. 'Pete Davies is incapable of writing a dull sentence. . . one of the most outrageously entertaining books of the year' Daily Post.
Wilfred Owen: A New Biography
Dominic Hibberd - 1975
Hibberd's new biography of the Great War's greatest poet, based on more than thirty years of wide-ranging research, brings new information and reinterpretation to virtually every phase of Owen's life--carefully guarded by family and friends after his death. Although Dominic Hibberd modestly says that his book 'is not, of course, definitive, ' it is hard to see how it could be improved upon. --Times Literary Supplement
Germany: A History
Francis Russell - 2015
Here, from New York Times bestselling historian Richard Russell, is the dramatic story of Germany - from the rise of Charlemagne to the age of Martin Luther, from the Thirty Years' War to the iron rule of Otto von Bismarck, and from the formation of the Weimar Republic to the fighting of two world wars.
The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss - 1995
Dr. Seuss) in a whole new light. Depicting outlandish creatures in otherworldly settings, the paintings use a dazzling rainbow of hues not seen in the primary-color palette of his books for children, and exhibit a sophisticated and often quite unrestrained side of the artist. 65 color illustrations.
The Queen's Pirate: Sir Francis Drake
Kevin Jackson - 2016
But Drake’s exploits in his earlier years, though less well known, are even more remarkable. Born into a poor, obscure family, he worked his way rapidly up in the maritime world to his first captaincy. Before long, he was the most successful of all English pirates, admired by his countrymen, hated and feared by the Spanish. Queen Elizabeth and her ministers saw the potential in this rough-mannered but enterprising young man, and gave him their blessing for the first British venture into the Pacific Ocean. This success of this voyage, which lasted for three years, exceeded their wildest hopes. Not only did Drake come home with a vast treasure of captured gold, silver and jewels; he became the first man ever to circumnavigate the globe in a single mission, and bring most of his crew home alive and well. Soon after his triumphant return, Elizabeth knighted this newly rich adventurer, and gave her blessing to his acts of pillage. It was a gesture that made war with Spain inevitable. And Drake’s part in the coming war changed the course of world history. SIR FRANCIS DRAKE: THE QUEEN’S PIRATE tells the extraordinary story of Drake’s early years and his journey around the world on his famous ship, the Golden Hind.
Biltmore Estate
Ellen Erwin Rickman - 2005
Created in the 1890s by George Washington Vanderbilt, a member of one of America's wealthiest families, the estate combined a 250-room French Renaissance-style chateau with 125,000 acres of gardens, forests, and working farms. Biltmore House served as Vanderbilt's primary residence for almost 20 years. After Mr. Vanderbilt's death in 1914, life at Biltmore continued for his wife Edith and daughter Cornelia. In 1930, Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil and her husband, Hon. John Francis Amherst Cecil, opened Biltmore House--the largest private home in the United States--to the public, firmly establishing the Asheville area as a major tourist destination.
The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits
Mihaela Noroc - 2017
The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs that celebrates women from fifty countries across the globe and shows that beauty is everywhere, regardless of money, race or social status, and comes in many different sizes and colours. Mihaela's portraits feature women in their native environments, from the Amazon rain forest to markets in India, London city streets and parks in Harlem, creating a mirror of our varied cultures and proving that beauty has no rules.'Stunning . . . aims to challenge the ideals of beauty dictated by the women's fashion magazine industry' Independent'A startling and revealing project' Daily Mail'Scrolling through "The Atlas of Beauty", beauty becomes not a universal standard, but a complicated tapestry' Huffington Post
Cindy Sherman: Retrospective
Cindy Sherman - 1997
Her art embodies two developments in the art world: the impact of postmodern theory on art practice; and the rise of photography and mass-media techniques as modes of artistic expression.
Shrapnel in the Heart: Letters and Remembrances from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Laura Palmer - 1987
For the first time, one book gives voice to the haunting, painful, tender, and healing tales of those who lost so much in America's least popular war.
Lee Miller: A Life
Carolyn Burke - 2005
Carolyn Burke, a biographer and art critic, here reveals how the muse who inspired Man Ray, Cocteau, and Picasso could be the same person who unflinchingly photographed the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau. Burke captures all the verve and energy of Miller’s life: from her early childhood trauma to her stint as a Vogue model and art-world ingénue, from her harrowing years as a war correspondent to her unconventional marriages and passion for gourmet cooking. A lavishly illustrated story of art and beauty, sex and power, Modernism and Surrealism, Lee Miller illuminates an astonishing woman’s journey from art object to artist.
Tim Hetherington: Infidel
Tim Hetherington - 2010
platoon, assigned to an outpost in the Korengal Valley--an area considered one of the most dangerous Afghan postings in the war against the Taliban--but it is as much about love and male vulnerability as it is about bravery and war. Embedded with writer Sebastian Junger, and shooting over the course of one year, photographer Tim Hetherington made a series of images that prove surprisingly tender in their depiction of camaraderie and vulnerability (among the most moving is a series of the platoon sleeping). Alongside revealing interviews with Hetherington's subjects and an introduction by Junger (with whom Hetherington co-directed the award-winning film Restrepo, about the work of the battalion), the book is also illustrated with graphics of the tattoos the soldiers gave each other in the camp. The title Infidel is taken from the tattoo the men adopted as a badge of their comradeship. Warm, moving and full of humor, this book is a tribute to the "rough men ready to do violence on our behalf" and a provocative contribution to the documentation of war in our time.Tim Hetherington was born in Liverpool, U.K., and took up photojournalism after studying literature at Oxford University. Five years spent living in Liberia resulted in the book Long Story Bit By Bit: Liberia Retold (2009), and awards for his photojournalism include World Press Photo of the Year 2007 (for his dramatic war photography from Afghanistan), the Rory Peck Award for Features (2008) and an Alfred I duPont Award for excellence in broadcast journalism while on assignment with Sebastian Junger for ABC News (2009). As a filmmaker, he has worked as both a cameraman and director/producer. Restrepo won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. He is based in New York and is a contributing photographer for Vanity Fair magazine.
The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944
Michael S. Neiberg - 2012
Other jewels of Europe -- sites like Warsaw, Antwerp, and Monte Cassino -- were, or would soon be, reduced to rubble during attempts to liberate them. But Paris endured, thanks to a fractious cast of characters, from Resistance cells to Free French operatives to an unlikely assortment of diplomats, Allied generals, and governmental officials. Their efforts, and those of the German forces fighting to maintain control of the city, would shape the course of the battle for Europe and color popular memory of the conflict for generations to come. In The Blood of Free Men, celebrated historian Michael Neiberg deftly tracks the forces vying for Paris, providing a revealing new look at the city's dramatic and triumphant resistance against the Nazis. The salvation of Paris was not a foregone conclusion, Neiberg shows, and the liberation was a chaotic operation that could have easily ended in the city's ruin. The Allies were intent on bypassing Paris so as to strike the heart of the Third Reich in Germany, and the French themselves were deeply divided; feuding political cells fought for control of the Resistance within Paris, as did Charles de Gaulle and his Free French Forces outside the city. Although many of Paris's citizens initially chose a tenuous stability over outright resistance to the German occupation, they were forced to act when the approaching fighting pushed the city to the brink of starvation. In a desperate bid to save their city, ordinary Parisians took to the streets, and through a combination of valiant fighting, shrewd diplomacy, and last-minute aid from the Allies, managed to save the City of Lights. A groundbreaking, arresting narrative of the liberation, The Blood of Free Men tells the full story of one of the war's defining moments, when a tortured city and its inhabitants narrowly survived the deadliest conflict in human history.