Zelda, an Illustrated Life: The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald


Zelda Fitzgerald - 1996
    Scott Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda (1900-1948), was the model for his heroines and a celebrity in her own right, but little is known about her creative accomplishments. This autobiography aims to reveal her true nature and many talents. It traces the ups and downs of her life, from her Alabama childhood to the glamorous years with Scott, whom she married when she was only 19, and to her death in a fire at a mental hospital.

The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums... and why we need to talk about it


Alice Procter - 2020
    People are waking up to the seedy history of the world's art collections, and are starting to ask difficult questions about what the future of museums should look like. In The Whole Picture, art historian and Uncomfortable Art Tour guide Alice Procter provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art, and fills in the blanks with the stories that have been left out of the art history canon for centuries. The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space:The Palace The Classroom The Memorial The Playground Each section tackles the fascinating and often shocking stories of five different art pieces, including the propaganda painting that the East India Company used to justify its control in India; the Maori mokomokai skulls that were traded and collected by Europeans as 'art objects'; and Kara Walker's controversial contemporary sculpture A Subtlety, which raised questions about 'appropriate' interactions with art. Through these stories, Alice brings out the underlying colonial narrative lurking beneath the art industry today, and suggests different ways of seeing and thinking about art in the modern world.The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences


Sarah E. Hill - 2019
    By allowing women to control their fertility, the birth control pill has revolutionized women's lives. Women are going to college, graduating, and entering the workforce in greater numbers than ever before, and there's good reason to believe that the birth control pill has a lot to do with this. But there's a lot more to the pill than meets the eye.Although women go on the pill for a small handful of targeted effects (pregnancy prevention and clearer skin, yay!), sex hormones can't work that way. Sex hormones impact the activities of billions of cells in the body at once, many of which are in the brain. There, they play a role in influencing attraction, sexual motivation, stress, hunger, eating patterns, emotion regulation, friendships, aggression, mood, learning, and more. This means that being on the birth control pill makes women a different version of themselves than when they are off of it. And this is a big deal. For instance, women on the pill have a dampened cortisol spike in response to stress. While this might sound great (no stress!), it can have negative implications for learning, memory, and mood. Additionally, because the pill influences who women are attracted to, being on the pill may inadvertently influence who women choose as partners, which can have important implications for their relationships once they go off it. Sometimes these changes are for the better . . . but other times, they're for the worse. By changing what women's brains do, the pill also has the ability to have cascading effects on everything and everyone that a woman encounters. This means that the reach of the pill extends far beyond women's own bodies, having a major impact on society and the world.This paradigm-shattering book provides an even-handed, science-based understanding of who women are, both on and off the pill. It will change the way that women think about their hormones and how they view themselves. It also serves as a rallying cry for women to demand more information from science about how their bodies and brains work and to advocate for better research. This book will help women make more informed decisions about their health, whether they're on the pill or off of it.

Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths


Natalie Haynes - 2020
    And still, today, a wealth of novels, plays and films draw their inspiration from stories first told almost three thousand years ago. But modern tellers of Greek myth have usually been men, and have routinely shown little interest in telling women’s stories.Now, in Pandora’s Jar, Natalie Haynes – broadcaster, writer and passionate classicist – redresses this imbalance. Taking Greek creation myths as her starting point and then retelling the four great mythic sagas: the Trojan War, the Royal House of Thebes, Jason and the Argonauts, Heracles, she puts the female characters on equal footing with their menfolk. The result is a vivid and powerful account of the deeds – and misdeeds - of Hera, Aphrodite, Athene and Circe. And away from the goddesses of Mount Olympus it is Helen, Clytemnestra, Jocasta, Antigone and Medea who sing from these pages, not Paris, Agamemnon, Orestes or Jason.

Gothic Lolita


Masayuki Yoshinaga - 2007
    Influenced by Western fashion trends from the mid 1980s, young teenagers, predominately adolescent girls, congregate in the urban centres of Harajuku, Akihabara and a number of underground clubs in and around Tokyo, dressed head-to-toe in gothic costumes and late-Victorian dress. The psychological characteristics of the average Japanese Goth is one of introversion and exclusivity. The majority of girls in the scene are teenagers and most usually stop dressing and behaving this way by the age of eighteen. The origin of the movement was in Osaka in the mid 1990s when young teenagers adopted Gothic fashion in response to the clothes worn and promoted by Japanese Gothic rock bands. In the ten years since the trend began it has expanded to a number of cities including Tokyo and now boasts many thousands of devotees who dedicate their lives to creating ever more flamboyant and bizarre variations on the Gothic theme.

Dior (Universe of Fashion)


Marie-France Pochna - 1994
    This beautifully compact and illustrated book brings alive a great adventure, a period of dazzling rebirth led by Christian Dior, the modest, unassuming genius who made the phoenix fly again.

Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953


Elizabeth Winder - 2013
    She lived at the Barbizon Hotel, attended the ballet, went to a Yankee game, and danced at the West Side Tennis Club. She was supposed to be having the time of her life. But what would follow was, in Plath’s words, twenty-six days of pain, parties, and work, that ultimately changed the course of her life.Thoughtful and illuminating, featuring line drawings and black-and-white photographs, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 offers well-researched insights as it introduces us to Sylvia Plath—before she became one of the greatest and most influential poets of the twentieth century.

The Power of Art


Simon Schama - 2006
    "The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things; visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality. . . ."With the same disarming force, The Power of Art propels us on an eye-opening, breathtaking odyssey, zooming in on eight extraordinary masterpieces, from Caravaggio's David and Goliath to Picasso's Guernica. Jolting us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art forever.The embattled heroes—Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko—each in his own resolute way, faced crisis with steadfast defiance, pitting passion and conviction against scorn and short-sightedness. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the world.With vivid storytelling and powerfully evocative descriptive passages, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of Civil War Spain.Most compelling of all, The Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution of eight "eye-popping" world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works "tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. And when they do that, they answer, irrefutably and majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant art-conscript . . . 'OK, OK, but what's art really for?'"

Seeing Ourselves


Frances Borzello - 1998
    Beginning with the self-portraits of nuns in medieval illuminated manuscripts, Borzello reconstructs an overlooked genre and provides essential contextual information. She moves on to sixteenth-century Italy, where Sofonisba Anguissola painted one of the longest known series of self-portraits, recording her features from adolescence to old age. In 1630, Artemisia Gentileschi depicted herself as the personification of painting, and at the same time in the Netherlands Judith Leyster portrayed herself at her easel, as a relaxed, self-assured professional. In the 1700s, women from Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun to Angelica Kauffman conveyed, each in her own way, ideas of femininity and the artist's passion for her chosen field. And in the nineteenth century, as the doors to art schools began to open to women, self-portraits by the likes of Berthe Morisot, Marie Bashkirtseff, and photographers such as Alice Austen resonated with a newfound self-confidence. Seeing Ourselves concludes with the breaking of taboos in the twentieth century. Paula Modersohn-Becker imagines herself pregnant in her fantasy nude of 1906; Alice Neel paints herself naked at the age of eighty; and Frida Kahlo explicitly renders her own physical pain in a self-portrait complete with nails piercing her skin. And in recent decades, Cindy Sherman explores identity by transforming herself over and over into a cast of different characters, posing the questions that all the women in this enthralling book have faced when "seeing" themselves.

Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism


Seyward Darby - 2020
    Trump, journalist Seyward Darby went looking for the women of the so-called alt-right--really just white nationalism with a new label. The mainstream media depicted the alt-right as a bastion of angry white men, but was it? As women headlined resistance to the Trump administration's bigotry and sexism, most notably at the women's marches, Darby wanted to know why others were joining a movement espousing racism and anti-feminism. Who were these women, and what did their activism reveal about America's past, present, and future? Darby researched dozens of women across the country before settling on three: Corinna Olsen, Ayla Stewart, and Lana Lokteff. Each was born in 1979 and became a white nationalist in the post-9/11 era. Their respective stories of radicalization upend much of what we assume about women, politics, and political extremism.

Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists


Robert Hughes - 1990
    From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.   As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art.  In this book:  nearly a hundred of his finest essays on the subject.   For the realism of Thomas Eakins to the Soviet satirists Komar and Melamid, from Watteau to Willem de Kooning to Susan Rothenberg, here is Hughes—astute, vivid and uninhibited—on dozens of famous and not-so-famous artists.  He observes that Caravaggio was “one of the hinges of art history; there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same”; he remarks that Julian Schnabel’s “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting”; he calls John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park “almost the last word on Eden-as-Property”; he notes how “distorted traces of [Jackson] Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers that, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his.”  He knows how Norman Rockwell made a chicken stand still long enough to be painted, and what Degas said about success (some kinds are indistinguishable from panic).   Phrasemaker par excellence, Hughes is at the same time an incisive and profound critic, not only of particular artists, but also of the social context in which art exists and is traded.  His fresh perceptions of such figures as Andy Warhol and the French writer Jean Baudrillard are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions of the art market—its inflated prices and reputations, its damage to the public domain of culture.  There is a superb essay on Bernard Berenson, and another on the strange, tangled case of the Mark Rothko estate.  And as a finale, Hughes gives us “The SoHoiad,” the mock-epic satire that so amused and annoyed the art world in the mid-1980s.   A meteor of a book that enlightens, startles, stimulates and entertains.

Kawaii!: Japan's Culture of Cute


Manami Okazaki - 2013
    From cute handwriting came manga, Hello Kitty, and Harajuku, and the kawaii aesthetic now affects every aspect of Japanese life. As colorful as its subject matter, this book contains numerous interviews with illustrators, artists, fashion designers, and scholars. It traces the roots of the movement from sociological and anthropological perspectives and looks at kawaii's darker side as it morphs into gothic and gloomy iterations. Best of all, it includes hundreds of colorful photographs that capture kawaii's ubiquity: on the streets and inside homes, on lunchboxes and airplanes, in haute couture and street fashion, in cafes, museums, and hotels.

Luella’s Guide to English Style


Luella Bartley - 2010
    Then there are the icons – the English girl knows that Kate Moss and The Duchess of Devonshire both have a place in the style pantheon.Luella explains the style tribes vying for the English girl's allegiance, the social rituals she undergoes – from surfing in Cornwall to clubbing in Berlin – and the status symbols she marks herself out with. All this requires a lot of photographs, drawings, and, occasionally, diagrams.But Luella's Guide to English Style isn't simply a book about fashion and style, it's a work of social anthropology – delivered with a wink and a kiss on the cheek. Luella describes the English girl's approach to love and shows how the English girl gets better with age.With her background as London’s hippest designer and as an editor on Vogue and the London Evening Standard, Luella Bartley is brilliantly placed to map out English style and what it means for girls.

Notan: The Dark-Light Principle of Design


Dorr Bothwell - 1977
    In composition, it recognizes the separate but equally important identity of both a shape and its background.Since their introduction in the West, the intriguing exercises associated with Notan have produced striking results in every branch of Western art and design. This book, by two American artists and teachers who made an intensive study of Notan, was the first basic book on the subject in the West, and it remains one of the definitive texts. Through a series of simple exercises, it places the extraordinary creative resources of Notan easily within the grasp of Western artists and designers.Clearly and concisely, the authors demonstrate Notan's practical applications in six problems of progressive difficulty — creative exercises that will fascinate artists and designers of every calling and level of expertise. Along with these exercises, the book includes many illustrations of the principle of Notan, among them images as diverse as a sculpture by David Smith, a Samoan tapa cloth, a Museum of Modern Art shopping bag, New England gravestone rubbings, Japanese wrapping paper, a painting by Robert Motherwell, a psychedelic poster, and a carved and dyed Nigerian calabash. Painters, sculptors, potters, jewelry, and textile designers, architects, and interior designers all will discover — or rediscover — in these pages an ancient principle of composition that can help them meet creative challenges with fresh new perspective.

The Sartorialist


Scott Schuman - 2009
    His now-famous and much-loved blog, thesartorialist.com, is his showcase for the wonderful and varied sartorial tastes of real people across the globe. This book is a beautiful anthology of Scott?s favorite images, accompanied by his insightful commentary. It includes photographs of well-known fashion figures alongside people encountered on the street whose personal style and taste demand a closer look. From the streets of New York to the parks of Florence, from Stockholm to Paris, from London to Moscow and Milan, these are the men and women who have inspired Scott and the many diverse and fashionable readers of his blog. After fifteen years in the fashion business, Scott Schuman felt a growing disconnect between what he saw on the runways and in magazines, and what real people were wearing. The Sartorialist was his attempt to redress the balance. Since its beginning, the blog has become hugely admired and influential in the fashion industry and beyond. Thesartorialist.com is consistently named one of the top blogs in the world. A self-taught photographer, Schuman shoots for publications including French Vogue, American GQ, Fantastic Man and Elle, and a growing list of advertising clients. Scott has also shown his work at the New York photo gallery The Danziger Projects and appeared in the GAP Style Icon campaign in the fall of 2008. He has been named the number one fashion photography trend by American Photo magazine, as well as one of Time magazine?s top 100 design influencers.