Book picks similar to
Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything by Timothy Clark
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Beth
M. Cowden - 2016
But when the rest of her family dies of the plague, Beth is married off to an older man who wants to join the settlers in Oregon. Having little choice, she agrees and reluctantly starts her new life. Her strength is quickly noticed by her new husband, as she insists on driving one of the wagons on their journey. While enjoying the view from atop a cliff during a rest stop, the ground collapses from beneath her. After searching for her for hours and finding no trace, the wagon train must go on without her. She awakens days later in a teepee surrounded by Indians. What dangers lie ahead for this young woman, and will she find the happiness that has eluded her until now?
Lady Mysterious
Wendy Soliman - 2018
Lord Nathan Stanford, the guest of honour, is easily able to resist Melanie Latimer’s charms but is intrigued by Kyra’s secretive activities. Why did she leave her family home and why, at such a young age, has she withdrawn from the marriage mart? Nate makes it his business to find out more about the mysterious lady who single-handedly holds her fragmented family together. Shocked to the core by what he discovers, Nate sets out to protect her from the gambling curse that has destroyed her family and the evil man who wants to possess her. But at what cost to himself? Will he be able to help her find out why her brother’s wife disappeared without trace? And will Nate find a way to convince Kyra that spinsterhood doesn’t suit her…
1000 Facts about Historic Figures Vol. 1
James Egan - 2018
Martin Luther King had a pillow fight on the day he died. Osama Bin Laden loved Mr. Bean and Super Mario Bros. Pope Francis used to be a bouncer. Muhammad Ali starred in a Broadway show. Saddam Hussein played Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You during his 2002 campaign. Julius Caesar was never the emperor of Rome. Nelson Mandela said meeting the Spice Girls was “one of the greatest moments of my life.” The last thing Walt Disney said was “Kurt Russell.” Sigmund Freud tried to cure his daughter of being a lesbian. John F. Kennedy went out with Hitler’s ex-girlfriend. Abraham Lincoln took part in 300 wrestling matches. He only lost once. Michael Jackson tried to buy Marvel so he could play Spider-Man. Isaac Newton invented calculus when he was 25. He didn’t tell anybody for four years. Donald Trump tried to make a cartoon about him saving the world from aliens. Charles Manson never killed anybody in his entire life. Genghis Khan’s army killed 11% of every human being on Earth. Charles Darwin though the world was constantly growing in size. Historians believe they figured out the identity of Jack the Ripper.
On the Warpath
James Willard Schultz - 2015
Schultz was a noted author, explorer, Glacier National Park guide, fur trader and historian of the Blackfoot Indians. While operating a fur trading post at Carroll, Montana and living amongst the Pikuni tribe during the period 1880-82, he was given the name "Apikuni" by the Pikuni chief, Running Crane. Schultz is most noted for his prolific stories about Blackfoot life and his contributions to the naming of prominent features in Glacier National Park. On the Warpath, by James Willard Schultz, is a unique and odd story of a white man's experiences while living among Indians as one of themselves. It has an extraordinarily intimate effect, as if it might be a translation from some tale written in an Indian dialect. As a story it contains many incidents that will thrill young readers. For older ones it will be valuable as a study of Indian mental and spiritual life. This book originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1914 has been reformatted for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the reformatting.
Dress Code: The Naked Truth About Fashion
Mari Grinde Arntzen - 2014
In this book, Mari Grinde Arntzen asks how and why this is—how can fashion simultaneously attract us to its glamour and repel us with its superficiality and how being called “fashionable” can be at once a compliment and an insult. Arntzen guides us through the major figures and brands of today’s fashion industry, showing how they shape us and in turn why we love to be shaped by them. She examines both everyday, affordable “fast fashion” brands, as well as the luxury market, to show how fashion commands a powerful influence on every socioeconomic level of our society. Stepping into our closets with us, she thinks about what happens when we get dressed: why fashion can make us feel powerful, beautiful, and original at the same time that it forces us into conformity. Stripping off the layers of the world’s fifth largest industry, garment by garment, she holds fashion up as a phenomenon, business, and art, exploring the questions it forces us to ask about the body, image, celebrity, and self-obsession. Ultimately, Arntzen asks the most direct question: what is fashion? How has it taken such a powerful hold on the world, forever propelling us toward its concepts of beauty?
The Making of Australia
David Hill - 2014
Told through the key figures who helped build it into the thriving nation it is today, David Hill once again offers up Australian history at its most entertaining and accessible. In his latest book, David Hill traces the story of our nation from its European beginnings to Federation. When James Cook landed on the east coast of Australia, the rest of the world had some idea of how empty, vast and wild this continent was, but so little was known of it that in 1788 most people thought it was two lands. In the subsequent years, its coastline was charted, its interior opened up, and its cities, laws and economy developed. In this riveting, wide-ranging history, David Hill traces how this happened through the key figures who built this country into the thriving nation it is today: from its prescient and fair-minded first governor, Arthur Phillip, to the unpopular William Bligh, the victim of the country's first and only military coup; from the visionary builder and law-maker Lachlan Macquarie to William Wentworth, the son of a convict who secured Australia's first elected parliament; from Henry Parkes, the grand old man of politics who started the fraught process of Federation, to the first prime minister, Edmund Barton. It was Barton who formed the first Australian government just in time for the inaugural celebrations on 1 January 1901, when the nation of Australia was born! David Hill is one of our most popular writers of Australian history. His previous books, The Forgotten Children, 1788, The Gold Rush and The Great Race have all been bestsellers.
Jazz In The Bittersweet Blues Of Life
Wynton Marsalis - 2001
Set in the studio, on the stage, and in great cities and small towns across the country, this book captures life on the road for Marsalis and his musicians, evoking its ritual and renewal, energy and spirituality. Describing the art of improvisation, the book's two voices mirror the interplay at the heart of jazz. "On the road and on the bandstand," Marsalis writes, "something great may happen at any moment, something that might even change your life." Alternately luminous and boisterous, often poignant, and always passionate, Marsalis and Vigeland's extraordinary dialogue is a must for fans, musicians, and anyone curious about America's only indigenous art form.
A Town of Lawlessness
Ethan Westfield - 2020
When he is finally ready to turn a new page in life, he shoots for the moon and moves to the town of Moville to work in mining. Feeling like he is one step closer to his dream, little did he know that the life of a miner is more fraught with peril and disappointment than he'd imagined. The moment he discovers that a vicious killer is out there, taking the lives of innocent miners for no apparent reason, he is willing to risk it all to track him down. Will Jack manage to find the answer behind the enigma of the horrible murders? Or will the truth behind them remain forever hidden, haunting the small town?While trying to connect all dots and solve the intriguing mystery, Jack meets Charlotte Campbell, the town's head schoolteacher. Although they get off to a rocky start, he will soon realize that he's not alone in the battle against the town's enemies. Together they will fight the forces that wreak havoc in Moville, a lifetime adventure that will bring them closer. Even though their attraction is impossible to deny, their affection cannot be expressed as long as a criminal is out there. Will they finally have a chance at love, or will their romance be doomed to be lost forever?As the days go by and the murderers continue to bring chaos to what was once a thriving town, Jack feels like his dream is being shattered into a million pieces. Will his valor and wit win out in the end, leading him to the life he has been eagerly waiting for? Or will the cruel felon stop him from riding down the trail to happiness?"A Town of Lawlessness" is a historical adventure novel of approximately 80,000 words. No cliffhangers, only pure unadulterated action.
A TASTE OF THE TRENCHES: The story of a soldier on the Western Front
D. Reitz - 2015
Deneys Reitz was an unusual soldier. Having fought against the British in the Boer War, in 1917 he decided to go to London, in order to join the British Army. Presenting himself at a recruiting office in Chelsea, he enlisted as a private soldier. Shortly afterwards he was commissioned, and was sent to the Western Front in September 1917. Whilst on the Western Front, he witnessed the German spring offensive in 1918, and the allied counter-attack which followed. He was wounded twice as well as being gassed. Reitz experienced more than his fair share of the difficulties of trench warfare, from finding himself living in a trench whose sides were built out of sandbag-covered corpses, to being stretchered into a Casualty Clearing Station with serious wounds.
American Legends: The Life of James Cagney
Charles River Editors - 2013
*Includes Cagney's own quotes about his life and career. *Includes a bibliography for further reading. *Includes a table of contents. "You don't psych yourself up for these things, you do them...I'm acting for the audience, not for myself, and I do it as directly as I can." – James Cagney A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history’s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors’ American Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of America’s most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known. When the American Film Institute assembled its top 100 actors of all time at the close of the 20th century, one of the Top 10 was James Cagney, an actor whose acting and dancing talents spawned a stage and film career that spanned over 5 decades and once compelled Orson Welles to call him "maybe the greatest actor to ever appear in front of a camera." Indeed, his portrayal of “The Man Who Owns Broadway”, George M. Cohan, earned him an Academy Award in the musical Yankee Doodle Dandy, and as famed director Milos Forman once put it, "I think he's some kind of genius. His instinct, it's just unbelievable. I could just stay at home. One of the qualities of a brilliant actor is that things look better on the screen than the set. Jimmy has that quality." Ultimately, it was portraying tough guys and gangsters in the 1930s that turned Cagney into a massive Hollywood star, and they were the kind of roles he was literally born to play after growing up rough in Manhattan at the turn of the 20th century. In movies like The Public Enemy (which included the infamous “grapefruit scene”) and White Heat, Cagney convincingly played criminals that brought Warner to the forefront of Hollywood and the gangster genre. Cagney also helped pave the way for younger actors in the genre, like Humphrey Bogart, and he was so good that he found himself in danger of being typecast. While Cagney is no longer remembered as fondly or as well as Bogart, he was also crucial in helping establish the system in which actors worked as independent workers free from the constraints of studios. Refusing to be pushed around, Cagney was constantly involved in contract squabbles with Warner, and he often came out on top, bucking the conventional system that saw studios treat their stars as indentured servants who had to make several films a year. American Legends: The Life of James Cagney examines the life and career of one of Hollywood’s most iconic actors. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Cagney like never before, in no time at all.
Where Eagles Dance: A Saga of Early California
Marian Sepulveda - 2015
The wagon trains, Indian attacks, a lone survivor, and her tale of life among the Kumeyaay. Parts of this story are factual: the trail blazing Butterfield Overland Mail, the unfolding conflicts in California over the issue of slavery, and the looming Civil War. Woven into this historical fabric are the stories of Abby, a young girl raised by Indians; John Jay Butterfield, scion of the founder of the Overland Mail; Waterman Ormsby, reporter for the New York Herald; and many other compelling personages drawn from fact and fiction. Join author Marian Sepulveda as she guides you through this unique chapter in early California lore.
Poet Be Like God
Lewis Ellingham - 1998
He died in 1965 virtually unrecognized, yet in the following years his work and thought have attracted and intrigued an international audience. Now this comprehensive biography gives a pivotal poet his due. Based on interviews with scores of Spicer's contemporaries, Poet Be Like God details the most intimate aspects of Spicer's life-his family, his friends, his lovers-illuminating not only the man but also many of his poems. Such illumination extends also to the works of others whom Spicer came to know, including the writers Frank O'Hara, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Helen Adam, Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, Philip K. Dick, Richard Brautigan, and Marianne Moore and the painters Jess, Fran Herndon, and Jay DeFeo. The resulting narrative, an engaging chronicle of the San Francisco Renaissance and the emergence of the North Beach gay scene during the 50s and 60s, will be indispensable reading for students of American literature and gay studies.
Tintin & Co.
Michael Farr - 2007
Farr presents his choice of the dozen most important and colorful characters from "The Adventures of Tintin." This handsome, lavishly-illustrated volume takes a closer look at the remarkable cast that enriches the adventures.