The Chinese imperial system combined a highly centralized administration with a Confucian philosophy of moral-political beliefs. The emperor was the Son of Heaven and enjoyed semi-divine powers, but he was not infallible: should he fail his subjects, rebellion was justified. The emperors therefore weathered centuries of violent change and, despite brutal revolts and civil wars, remained at the center of the largest political unit in the world, the Middle Kingdom. The emperors were an extraordinary group of men--and one woman, Wu Zetian--whose virtues and faults were magnified by their exalted position. Many were literary scholars and painters (the Song emperor, Huizong, founded an imperial academy of painting). Some were mentally retarded; and some left the control of the empire to their eunuchs, concubines, or dowager empresses. Under able rulers, China's frontiers expanded, dominating Central and Southeast Asia; under weak rulers the frontiers shrank, and for centuries the country was occupied by alien Mongols. It took the arrival of a civilization from the West with superior firepower finally to shake the Middle Kingdom's foundations. The detailed coverage includes: data files for every emperor, listing important information such as name at birth and details of wives and concubines; special features ranging from the Great Wall of China to the Ming Tombs; portraits of the major emperors and maps detailing, for example, the arrival of Buddhism and the Silk Road routes; time lines with at-a-glance visual guides to the length and key events of each emperor's reign.

    This is apparent in the many attempts to purge colour from art, literature and architecture, either by making it the property of some "foreign" body - the oriental, the feminine, the infantile the vulgar or the pathological - or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the inessential or the cosmetic, which in many cases amounts to the same thing. In Chromophobia, David Batchelor analyzes the history of, and motivations behind, chromophobia, from its beginnings through examples of nineteenth-century literature, twentieth-century architecture and film, to Pop art, minimalism and the art and architecture of the present day. Batchelor suggests how colour fits, or fails to fit, into the cultural imagination of the West, exploring such diverse themes as Melville's "great white whale," Le Corbusier's "journey to the East," Huxley's experiments with mescaline. Dorothy's travels in the Land of Oz and the implication of modern artists' experiments with industrial paints and materials.

    Your colorful pictures of flowers will produce a stunning flower art book that you can be proud of.In recent years coloring for grown-ups has become a widespread and growing hobby. There are of course many reasons for this, but here are just some... Coloring Lowers Stress And Anxiety Psychiatrists have long known that coloring relaxes the fear center of the brain and allows your mind to get some rest. In fact the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, is known to have given his patients mandalas to color more than one hundred years ago. In today's hectic world the stress reducing properties of coloring are possibly more valuable than ever. Coloring Trains Your Brain To Focus Remaining inside the lines as you color needs focus and, while you are concentrating on this stress-free and relaxing activity, you can forget about your worries. Coloring is a mind exercise which allows you to put aside everything else for the time you spend coloring, and this is very important in our increasingly demanding world. Coloring Helps In The Development Of Fine Motor Skills And Vision Coloring forces the two hemispheres of the brain to work together and involves both the use of logic (necessary for coloring forms) and creativity (as we mix and match colors). In turn, this brings those areas of the brain responsible for fine motor skills and vision into play, and helps in keeping these active and in developing them further. It is this aspect of coloring which is being seen more and more as especially valuable for older individuals, as many in the medical profession believe that it can delay, or even prevent, the onset of dementia. Coloring Provides The Chance To Be Social Although you might feel that coloring should be a solo occupation, its rising popularity is quickly turning it into a social one. Friends, families, work colleagues and others are getting together to eat, drink and enjoy the chance to socialize, through their shared interest in coloring books. Without doubt, this is a perfect excuse for getting together, as coloring needs only a minimum of concentration and can easily be done in a group setting. Coloring Lets You Be Yourself There are no rules when it comes to coloring and your coloring book is your coloring book. If you mistakenly make the cat's back leg green because you mistook it for part of the grass, who cares? If you feel like making the sky yellow, what does it matter? You can be as creative as you wish because this is your coloring book, and yours alone."You may already be a convert to adult coloring, in which case you will already know and appreciate its value. This may however be a new project for you and one which you are considering for any one of several different reasons. If this is something new for you then I urge you to give it a try. There is a reason why so many people are fired up about the world of adult coloring, so join in and start enjoying the benefits for yourself today. IMPORTANT Please note that the illustrations in this Kindle book are deliberately of a relatively low quality in order to keep the download size of the book small.

    J. Clark rewrites the history of modern art. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, he explains, the project called socialism may have come to an end at roughly the same moment as modernism. Did modernism and socialism depend on each other for their vitality—for their sense of the future and their wish to live in a fully material world? Have they died? Aware of modernism’s foibles and blind spots, but passionately attached to the movement’s wildness, Clark poses these fundamental questions in Farewell to an Idea. Modernism, Clark argues, was an extreme answer to an extreme condition—the one Max Weber summed up as “the disenchantment of the world.” Clark focuses on instances of maximum stress, when the movement revealed its true nature. The book begins with Jacques-Louis David, painting at the height of the Terror in 1793, then leaps forward to Pissarro a hundred years later, struggling to picture Two Young Peasant Women ina way that agreed with his anarchist politics. Next the author turns in succession to Cézanne’s paintings of the Grandes Baigneuses and their coincidence in time (and maybe intention) with Freud’s launching of psychoanalysis; to Picasso’s Cubism; and to avant-garde art after the Russian Revolution. Clark concludes with a reading of Jackson Pollock’s tragic version of abstraction and suggests a new set of terms to describe avant-garde art—perhaps in its final flowering—in America after 1945. Shifting between broad, speculative history and intense analysis of specific works, Clark not only transfigures our usual understanding of modern art, he also launches a new set of proposals about modernity itself.

     The hunt for a kidnapper reveals a conspiracy unlike anything seen in the small town of Odessa, Texas. Notes left for investigators claim to be from the kidnapper, taunting them along the way and mentioning one former-detective by name, Miriam Sandoval. Miriam is then enlisted to help crack the case, but what she finds results in more troubling questions, including dead suspects who aren’t working alone. Leaks soon compromise the case, and Miriam is left with the difficult decision of holding back or doing things her way. The clock is ticking, and the deadly game of a demented predator has just begun. Can Miriam solve the mystery in time, or will the missing girls’ suffer a tragic fate into the unknown?

     In the following pages of this true crime anthology, you will be introduced to some of the most tragic crime cases in modern history. The twelve crimes profiled in this volume will keep your eyes glued to the pages, although sometimes due to the shocking nature you will undoubtedly want to turn away. The primary theme of this volume is youth violence and some of the factors that have driven kids to kill. Some of the reasons were as shocking as the crimes themselves, such as the case of the two thirteen-year-old boys who killed one of the boy’s grandmother so they could buy some marijuana and have a pizza party. You will also read about teens who killed just for fun, such as Don Collins, while the motives for other teen murderers remain a mystery. The tragic case of the murder of the Doss family highlights that sometimes people, even teenagers, don’t need a reason to kill. Along with the profiles of teen killers are other chapters that examine cold case murder mysteries and other cases that can only be described as strange or bizarre. No matter the content, each of the twelve chapters are riveting and will keep you wanting to read more. So come along for a journey into the depraved criminal mind. The world you are about to enter may frighten and shock you, but you will also be intrigued as you learn what makes some of the worst killers tick…

    This book explores his work.

    Comics insider Peter Sanderson recounts Marvel's main story lines and delves into the lives of major characters, showing how different writers shaped their fates. The illustrations include scenes from ground-breaking stories, showcasing the best work of important Marvel artists.

    So grab your beading thread and needle, and get ready to stitch up a storm with some stellar seed bead jewelry patterns!Whether you use soft lace or super chunky yarn, you can’t go wrong with these super cool scarf patterns. Try a new stitch or take a chance on a new shape – you’ll love the results and will want to show off your piece to all of your friends. Have fun and get knitting!

    Art Psalms combines poems, artwork, and "mystic rants" that fuse imagination, creativity, and spirituality. Grey’s oracular poetry declares that art, both its creation and its observation, can be a spiritual practice. Many of these writings have been shared at gatherings worldwide, especially at New York City’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM), a contemporary sacred space co-founded by Alex and Allyson Grey. Selections include "Soul Marriage," which invites the reader to commit to personal and global transformation; "Guidance for Servants of God," precepts for life as a sacred path; and "The Plan," which aligns universal and individual creativity. The entire text of Grey’s spoken word performance, "WorldSpirit," is included here. Three annotated portfolios, "Meditations on the Divine Feminine," "Meditations on the Masters," and "Meditations on Mortality," explore the connection between drawing and meditation as ways of seeing. Equally meaningful for art lovers, the health and spiritual communities, and anyone seeking to develop their creativity, Art Psalms features over 150 new reproductions of drawings, paintings, and sacred geometry to enrich and awaken the inner artist in each of us.

    These monuments, built between the ninth and 15th centuries, the classic period of Khmer art, are unrivaled in architect

    Lebrecht compellingly demonstrates that classical recording has reached its end point, but this is not simply an expos? of decline and fall. It is, for the first time, the full story of a minor art form, analyzing the cultural revolution wrought by Schnabel, Toscanini, Callas, Rattle, the Three Tenors, and Charlotte Church. It is the story of how stars were made and broken by the record business; how a war criminal conspired with a concentration-camp victim to create a record empire; and how advancing technology, boardroom wars, public credulity and unscrupulous exploitation shaped the musical backdrop to our modern lives. The book ends with a suitable shrine to classical recording: the author's critical selection of the 100 most important recordings, and the 20 most appalling.Filled with memorable incidents and unforgettable personalities, from Goddard Lieberson, legendary head of CBS Masterworks who signed his letters as God; to Georg Solti, who turned the Chicago Symphony into the loudest symphony on earth - this is at once the captivating story of the life and death of classical recording and an opinionated, insider's guide to appreciating the genre, now and for years to come.

    Encourage restoration of Joy in the kitchen with these easy recipes.

    

    But what were once biblical or classical commonplaces are not so readily recognizable today. This book relates in a succinct and readable way the themes, sacred and secular, on which the repertoire of Western art is based. Combined here in a single volume are religious, classical, and historical themes, figures of moral allegory, and characters from romantic poetry that appeared throughout paintings and sculpture in Western art before and after the Renaissance. More than just a dictionary, this text places these subjects in their narrative, historical, or mythological context and uses extensive cross-referencing to enhance and clarify the meanings of these themes for the reader.The definitive work by which others are compared, this volume has become an indispensable handbook for students and general appreciators alike. This wholly redesigned second edition includes a new insert of images chosen by the author, as well as a new preface and index to highlight the ideas, beliefs, and social and religious customs that form the background of much of this subject matter.