Illustrated throughout with detailed photographs and illustrations, and using clear, easy-to-follow text, The Practical Astronomer takes you on a step-by-step journey from the basics of what can be seen with the naked eye, to how you can view more distant objects such as the planets of the solar system, and even galaxies far, far away-all in your own backyard.

    Despite the protests of both families, they found a crumbling villa on a windy Tuscan hilltop, called San Martino, and they poured themselves into the house and the land–and what they built together bound them together. They had a son. They finished the house. They were happy.But away from her family and the ease of life to which she was accustomed, Alice begins to slip into a vast and encompassing loneliness. She stumbles into an ill-advised affair with a childhood sweetheart that increasingly takes her away from San Martino and into the social swirl of wartime Rome. She is with her lover when her young son dies from meningitis…and her unbearable sorrow is compounded by terrible guilt. Her indiscretion is noticed by a careful pair of eyes–those of Robert Marshall, the master restorer and dealer of renaissance art. In exchange for his silence, he demands Alice hide a priceless Caravaggio at San Martino, a national treasure that he has sold to the Germans. Neither knows, however, that the Caravaggio is, in fact, a fake, painted by Marshall’s assistant as revenge for Marshall’s scorning her as a lover and returning to his pregnant wife. Kristin had merely hoped to privately humiliate Marshall. But his sale of the forgery has placed him in far great danger than she anticipated. Compelled to make things right, she travels to San Martino in an attempt to destroy the painting. Meanwhile, inconsolable at the death of his son and at his wife’s betrayal, Claudio retreats first into silence, and then into an actual absence. He has left, without saying good-bye, without offering the grieving Alice a chance to redeem herself for her ghastly sin. As WWII moves towards its inexorable conclusion, as the front lines sweeps closer and closer to San Martino, Alice and Kristin not only have to confront the onslaught of soldiers and the destruction of everything they hold dear, but also the consequences of their past mistakes.

    In The King's Two Bodies, Kantorowicz traces the historical problem posed by the King's two bodies--the body politic and the body natural--back to the Middle Ages and demonstrates, by placing the concept in its proper setting of medieval thought and political theory, how the early-modern Western monarchies gradually began to develop a political theology.?The king's natural body has physical attributes, suffers, and dies, naturally, as do all humans; but the king's other body, the spiritual body, transcends the earthly and serves as a symbol of his office as majesty with the divine right to rule. The notion of the two bodies allowed for the continuity of monarchy even when the monarch died, as summed up in the formulation The king is dead. Long live the king.Bringing together liturgical works, images, and polemical material, The King's Two Bodies explores the long Christian past behind this political theology. It provides a subtle history of how commonwealths developed symbolic means for establishing their sovereignty and, with such means, began to establish early forms of the nation-state.Kantorowicz fled Nazi Germany in 1938, after refusing to sign a Nazi loyalty oath, and settled in the United States. While teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he once again refused to sign an oath of allegiance, this one designed to identify Communist Party sympathizers. He was dismissed as a result of the controversy and moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he remained for the rest of his life, and where he wrote The King's Two Bodies.

    Unlike the friends she makes at school, Paula strives to understand the specifics of what she's painting--replicating a wood's essence or a marble's wear requires method, technique, and talent, she finds, but also something else: craftsmanship. She resolutely chooses the painstaking demands of craft over the abstraction of high art.With the attention of a documentary filmmaker, de Kerangal follows Paula's apprenticeship, punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles, and long, festive evenings. After completing her studies at the Institute, Paula continues to practice her art in Paris, in Moscow, then in Italy on the sets of great films, all as if rehearsing for a grand finale: at a job working on Lascaux IV, a facsimile reproduction of the world's most famous paleolithic cave art and the apotheosis of human cultural expression.An enchanted, atmospheric, and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel, Painting Time is an intimate and unsparing exploration of craft, inspiration, and the contours of the contemporary art world. As she did in her acclaimed novels The Heart and The Cook, Maylis de Kerangal unravels a tightly wound professional world to reveal the beauty within.

    For those who want the best, Flemish lace is the only choice, an exquisite perfection of thread and air. For those who want something they don’t have, Flemish lace can buy almost anything–or anyone.For Lisette, lace begins her downfall, and the only way to atone for her sins is to outwit the noble who now demands the impossible. To fail means certain destruction. But for Katharina, lace is her salvation. It is who she is; it is what she does. If she cannot make this stunning tempest of threads, a dreaded fate awaits.The most lucrative contraband in Europe, with its intricate patterns and ephemeral hope, threatens to cost them everything. Lace may be the deliverance for which they all pray... or it may bring the ruin and imprisonment they all fear.

    It asks what would have happened if Damien Hirst had never arrived? If someone else had become the most notorious and influential young British artist? And what if that someone had been more talented, more provocative, more outrageous? And far, far funnier?Early on in this bravura debut we are informed that Hirst was hit and killed by a train in 1989 (“apparently when drunk”) – and the focus of everyone’s attention falls instead on Randall. Randall – a big, lumbering ape of a man – is a genius of language as much as art, supremely able to baffle, bemuse and amuse the press, public and all around him. He makes a fortune, causes chaos, changes the art world – the whole world – and provides brilliant quips every step of the way: “There’s only two things you can do with art: make it, and buy it. Everything else – talking about it, thinking about it, selling it, looking at it – either comes under one of those two, or doesn’t count.”

     Even more so when your mother’s mantra, "Never More," keeps running through your head. Beverly is starting over and taking charge of her life. She’s moved, has her own business, two puppies, friends, and most surprising to her, a new relationship! But can she trust her heart to him? It’s hard to let go of old hurts. If you’re over fifty and have ever been betrayed by someone, you need to read this book and know that miracles can happen and dreams can come true. A two-time USA Today Bestselling Author brings you the second book in the Midlife Journey Series. Scroll up and click Buy Now.

    

    As her full-time carer, Tottie listened to daily recitations of her favourite saying: 'Mother, mother, it's a bugger, sell the pig and buy me out.” Catch up now with Tottie in the AM years – After Mother – as she starts her new life in the rural Livradois-Forez region of the Auvergne, living in Tottie's Grottage. Meet the local inhabitants, from exotic birds to colourful characters like the Bin Pickers, Library Lady and the Bowing Farmer. All are described with Tottie's familiar gently ironic humour. Discover the procedure behind the Frogification of Tottie, and if her bid for French nationality is successful. 'Mother Was It Worth It?' is the concluding part of the Sell the Pig series, which began with 'Sell the Pig' and 'Is That Billinge Lump?'

    Fearing the taint of her mother’s scandalous past, she strives to live a life of virtue and integrity, yet is pulled toward a love that can never be hers. From a girl too desperate to be wise she becomes, through pain and heartbreak, a woman who at last finds her honor and her dreams.Once again, Gretchen Craig presents a page-turning historical novel of insight and compassion. Theena and her sisters are flawed, engrossing, and totally believable.

    After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, and... at the wax museum, heads are what they do.In the tradition of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, Edward Carey's Little is a darkly endearing cavalcade of a novel—a story of art, class, determination, and how we hold on to what we love.

     A young prostitute seeking temporary refuge from the brothel, Rachel awakens in a beautiful garden in Arles to discover she is being sketched by a red-haired man in a yellow straw hat. This is no ordinary artist but the eccentric painter Vincent van Gogh—and their meeting marks the beginning of a remarkable relationship. He arrives at their first assignation at No. 1, Rue du Bout d'Arles, with a bouquet of wildflowers and a request to paint her—and before long, a deep, intense attachment grows between Rachel and the gifted, tormented soul. But the sanctuary Rachel seeks from her own troubled past cannot be found here, for demons war within Vincent's heart and mind. And one shocking act will expose the harsh, inescapable truth about the artist she has grown to love more than life.

    Fiero manages to integrate the political, cultural, and social history of the world into one coherent and fascinating whole. It is a masterpiece of scholarship . . . balanced, interesting, easy to read, and consummately beautiful. Our professors praise its accuracy and scope and our students unanimously say it is their favorite textbook. -- Sonia Sorrell, Pepperdine University The Humanistic Tradition features a flexible, topical approach that helps students understand humankind's creative legacy as a continuum rather than as a series of isolated events. This widely acclaimed interdisciplinary survey offers a global perspective, countless illustrations, and more than 150 literary sources. Available in multiple formats, The Humanistic Tradition explores the political, economic, and social contexts of human culture, providing a global and multicultural perspective which helps students better understand the relationship between the West and other world cultures.

     Liliane Bettencourt is the world s richest woman and the eleventh wealthiest person on the planet, as of 2016. But at ninety-four, she s embroiled in an incredible controversy that has dominated the headlines and ensnared a former president of France in the controversy. Why? Thanks to an artist and photographer named Francois-Marie Banier, who was given hundreds of millions of dollars by Liliane. Liliane s daughter, Francoise, considers Banier a con man and filed a lawsuit against him, but Banier has a far different story to tell. It s all become Europe s biggest scandal in years, uncovering a shadowy corporate history, buried World War II secrets, illicit political payoffs, and much more. Written by Tom Sancton, aVanity Faircontributor and formerTimecorrespondent currently living in France, The Bettencourt Affairis part courtroom drama; part upstairs-downstairs tale; part business narrative of a glamorous global company with past Nazi connections; and part character-driven story of a complex, fascinating family and the intruder who nearly tore it apart."

    The two sisters were abandoned as babies on the steps of the Ospedale della Pietà, Venice's world-famous foundling hospital and musical academy. High-spirited and rebellious, Chiaretta marries into a great aristocratic Venetian family and eventually becomes one of the most powerful women in Venice. Maddalena becomes a violin virtuoso and Antonio Vivaldi's muse. The Four Seasons is a rich, literary imagination of the world of 18th-century Venice and the lives and loves of two extraordinary women.