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Book The Lost Pianos of Siberia

Download or read book The Lost Pianos of Siberia written by Sophy Roberts and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “melodious” mix of music, history, and travelogue “reveals a story inextricably linked to the drama of Russia itself . . . These pages sing like a symphony.” —The Wall Street Journal Siberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies, and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell. Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos—grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, as well as humble Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the westernizing influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood. How these pianos traveled into this snowbound wilderness in the first place is testament to noble acts of fortitude by governors, adventurers, and exiles. Siberian pianos have accomplished extraordinary feats, from the instrument that Maria Volkonsky, wife of an exiled Decembrist revolutionary, used to spread music east of the Urals, to those that brought reprieve to the Soviet Gulag. That these instruments might still exist in such a hostile landscape is remarkable. That they are still capable of making music in far-flung villages is nothing less than a miracle. The Lost Pianos of Siberia follows Roberts on a three-year adventure as she tracks a number of instruments to find one whose history is definitively Siberian. Her journey reveals a desolate land inhabited by wild tigers and deeply shaped by its dark history, yet one that is also profoundly beautiful—and peppered with pianos. “An elegant and nuanced journey through literature, through history, through music, murder and incarceration and revolution, through snow and ice and remoteness, to discover the human face of Siberia. I loved this book.” —Paul Theroux

Book Bad Tourist

Download or read book Bad Tourist written by Suzanne Roberts and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both a memoir in travel essays and an anti-guidebook, Bad Tourist takes us across four continents to fifteen countries, showing us what not to do when traveling. A woman learning to claim her own desires and adventures, Suzanne Roberts encounters lightning and landslides, sharks and piranha-infested waters, a nightclub drugging, burning bodies, and brief affairs as she searches for the love of her life and finally herself. Throughout her travels Roberts tries hard not to be a bad tourist, but owing to her cultural blind spots, things don’t always go as planned. Fearlessly confessional, shamelessly funny, and wholly unapologetic, Roberts offers a refreshingly honest account of the joys and absurdities of confronting new landscapes and cultures, as well as new versions of herself. Raw, bawdy, and self-effacing, Bad Tourist is a journey packed with delights and surprises—both of the greater world and of the mysterious workings of the heart.

Book Architecture  Travellers and Writers

Download or read book Architecture Travellers and Writers written by Anne Hultzsch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does the way in which buildings are looked at, and made sense of, change over the course of time? How can we find out about this? By looking at a selection of travel writings spanning four centuries, Anne Hultzsch suggests that it is language, the description of architecture, which offers answers to such questions. The words authors use to transcribe what they see for the reader to re-imagine offer glimpses at modes of perception specific to one moment, place and person. Hultzsch constructs an intriguing patchwork of local and often fragmentary narratives discussing texts as diverse as the 17th-century diary of John Evelyn, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and an 1855 art guide by Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt. Further authors considered include 17th-century collector John Bargrave, 18th-century novelist Tobias Smollett, poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, critic John Ruskin as well as the 20th-century architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. Anne Hultzsch teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

Book Monuments and Memory  Made and Unmade

Download or read book Monuments and Memory Made and Unmade written by Robert S. Nelson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining how monuments preserve memory, these essays demonstrate how phenomena as diverse as ancient drum towers in China and ritual whale killings in the Pacific Northwest serve to represent and negotiate time.

Book Thomas North s 1555 Travel Journal

Download or read book Thomas North s 1555 Travel Journal written by Dennis McCarthy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal: From Italy to Shakespeare makes available a little known early modern journal kept by a member of Queen Mary’s delegation to Rome, its purpose to win papal approval of England’s return to Roman Catholicism. The book provides details of the six-month journey, a discussion of the manuscript, and an identification of the twenty-year-old Thomas North as its author. It also points to numerous connections between the journal and the plays of Shakespeare, extending the playwright’s debt beyond North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives and revealing how the journal served as a template for The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII. Both, the authors argue, were written by North during the Marian years (1554-58) and later adapted by Shakespeare. Like the authors’ 2018 “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels” by George North,this book presents original work using digital research tools, including massive databases and plagiarism software. The earlier book garnered worldwide attention, with a front-page story in The New York Times.

Book A Traveller s Year

Download or read book A Traveller s Year written by and published by Quarto Publishing Group USA. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of anecdotes for each day of the year on the subject of travel and exploration from Charles Darwin, Michael Palin, Evelyn Waugh, and others. With an emphasis on the period 1750–1950—the classic era of both European exploration and diary-writing—this anthology features excerpts that convey men and women’s experiences of travel and discovery from the sixteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. The authors of the pieces range from famous explorers such as Captains Cook and Scott to modern travel writers journeying through the contemporary world, from people who pushed back the boundaries of geographical knowledge to people who wrote about what they did on their summer holidays. The book includes an introduction, explanatory notes and mini-biographies of all the contributors, including: Gertrude Bell (woman traveller in the Middle East) James Boswell (travels in Scotland and the Hebrides) William Cobbett (Rural Rides through England) Christopher Columbus (journals of his voyages to America) Charles Darwin (Voyage of the Beagle) Captain James Cook (voyages in the Pacific) Washington Irving (American writer travelled in Europe in first decades of nineteenth century) Edward Lear (landscape painter and nonsense writer produced journals of his travels in Greece, Corsica, Near East etc) Lewis & Clark (journals of famous journey of American exploration) William Morris (wrote a journal of a trip to Iceland in 1870s) Michael Palin (a Python abroad) Mungo Park (African explorer in early nineteenth century) Captain Robert Falcon Scott (doomed journey to South Pole) Evelyn Waugh (diaries of 1930s travels in Mediterranean and beyond) William John Wills (explorer of Australia)

Book The Study Abroad Journal

    Book Details:
  • Author : Brooke Roberts
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2016-09-15
  • ISBN : 9780998085500
  • Pages : pages

Download or read book The Study Abroad Journal written by Brooke Roberts and published by . This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Study Abroad Journal is a 16 week journal that helps you focus on what you really want in your experience abroad. It is the place for you to capture all your thoughts, goals, reflections, and experiences in one place. You'll walk away with a beautiful keepsake that you can return to again and again. The Journal guides you to zero in on your end goals, make a plan for how to reach them, and assess along the way. Your Journal will help you explain what you learned, how you grew, and what skills you will carry to your next adventure and your future career. All designed by you. It's hard to see how far you've come if you don't track as you go. The Study Abroad Journal will help you understand where you want to go, how to get there, and keep you on track.

Book A Russian Journal

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Steinbeck
  • Publisher : Penguin UK
  • Release : 2001-05-03
  • ISBN : 014118633X
  • Pages : 306 pages

Download or read book A Russian Journal written by John Steinbeck and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2001-05-03 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Steinbeck and Capa began a remarkable journey through the Soviet Union. Combining Steinbeck's compassion and humour with Capa's photographs, this text is a unique portrit of Russia and its people as they emerged from the ravages of war.

Book Seeing from Above

    Book Details:
  • Author : Mark Dorrian
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Release : 2013-10-03
  • ISBN : 0857722891
  • Pages : 336 pages

Download or read book Seeing from Above written by Mark Dorrian and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The view from above, or the 'bird's-eye' view, has become so ingrained in contemporary visual culture that it is now hard to imagine our world without it. It has risen to pre-eminence as a way of seeing, but important questions about its effects and meanings remain unexplored. More powerfully than any other visual modality, this image of 'everywhere' supports our idea of a world-view, yet it is one that continues to be transformed as technologies are invented and refined. This innovative volume, edited by Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin, offers an unprecedented range of discussions on the aerial view, covering topics from sixteenth-century Roman maps to the Luftwaffe's aerial survey of Warsaw to Google Earth. Underpinned by a cross-disciplinary approach that draws together diverse and previously isolated material, this volume examines the politics and poetics of the aerial view in relation to architecture, art, film, literature, photography and urbanism and explores its role in areas such as aesthetics and epistemology. Structured through a series of detailed case studies, this book builds into a cultural history of the aerial imagination.

Book Almost Somewhere

Download or read book Almost Somewhere written by Suzanne Roberts and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2023-10 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award in Outdoor Literature It was 1993, Suzanne Roberts had just finished college, and when her friend suggested they hike California’s John Muir Trail, the adventure sounded like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined that the twenty-eight-day hike would change her life. Part memoir, part nature writing, part travelogue, Almost Somewhere is Roberts’s account of that hike. John Muir wrote of the Sierra Nevada as a “vast range of light,” and that was exactly what Roberts was looking for. But traveling with two girlfriends, one experienced and unflappable and the other inexperienced and bulimic, she quickly discovered that she needed a new frame of reference. Her story of a month in the backcountry—confronting bears, snowy passes, broken equipment, injuries, and strange men—is as much about finding a woman’s way into outdoor experience as it is about the natural world Roberts so eloquently describes. Candid and funny, and finally, wise, Almost Somewhere not only tells the whimsical coming-of-age story of a young woman ill-prepared for a month in the mountains but also reflects a distinctly feminine view of nature. This new edition includes an afterword by the author looking back on the ways both she and the John Muir Trail have changed over the past thirty years, as well as book club and classroom discussion questions and photographs from the trip.

Book A Living Work of Art

    Book Details:
  • Author : A. J. Kox
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2021-02-12
  • ISBN : 0192643363
  • Pages : 352 pages

Download or read book A Living Work of Art written by A. J. Kox and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was one of the greatest physicists and mathematicians the Netherlands has ever known. Einstein called him "a living work of art, a perfect personality". During his funeral in 1928, the entire Dutch nation mourned. The national telegraph service was suspended for three minutes and his passing was national and international front-page news. The cream of international science, an impressive list of dignitaries, including the Prince Consort, and thousands of ordinary people turned out to see Lorentz being carried to his last resting place. This biography describes the life of Lorentz, from his early childhood, as the son of a market gardener in the provincial town of Arnhem, to his death, as a towering figure in physics and in international scientific cooperation and as a trailblazer for Einstein's relativity theory. A number of chapters shed light on his unique place in science, the importance of his ideas, his international conciliatory and scientific activities after World War One, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his important role as Einstein's teacher and intellectual critic. By making use of recently discovered family correspondence, the authors were able to show that there lies a true human being behind Lorentz's façade of perfection. One chapter is devoted to Lorentz's wife Aletta, a woman in her own right, whose progressive feminist ideas were of considerable influence on those of her husband. Two separate chapters focus on his most important scientific achievements, in terms accessible to a general audience.

Book Conjuring the Real

Download or read book Conjuring the Real written by Rumiko Handa and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of lectures by distinguished scholars about the uses of architecture in literature, film, and theater.

Book Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

Download or read book Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes written by Robert Louis Stevenson and published by Cosimo Classics. This book was released on 1879 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 23 September 1878 Stevenson set out from Le Monastier in the Haut Loire, to tramp through the wild region of the Cevennes. His only companion was a small donkey to carry basic necessities, and a commodious "sleeping sack". In the next 12 days, at a pace dictated by the donkey and carrying most of the supplies himself, he travelled 120 miles across rivers, mountains and forests. His stylish and witty account was published in 1879.

Book Ways Around Modernism

    Book Details:
  • Author : Stephen Bann
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2013-10-18
  • ISBN : 1135870616
  • Pages : 241 pages

Download or read book Ways Around Modernism written by Stephen Bann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Bann examines the arguments for the centrality of French modernist painting. He begins by focusing particularly on the notion of the modernist break, as it has been interpreted with regard to painters like Manet and Ingres. He argues that ‘curiosity’, with its origins in the seventeenth-century world-view can be a valid concept for understanding some aspects of contemporary art that contest the modern, suggesting ways of sidetracking the modern by adopting a lengthier historical view.

Book Troubling the Water

    Book Details:
  • Author : Abby Seiff
  • Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
  • Release : 2022-03
  • ISBN : 1640124764
  • Pages : 160 pages

Download or read book Troubling the Water written by Abby Seiff and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Troubling the Water uncovers the threats of the Tonle Sap and what its disappearance means for the survival of those that count on it. But it is much more than that; It is a story that taps into a universal fact we will all have to contend with soon: we are destroying our resources in a way that cannot be undone"--

Book Paper   Stone

    Book Details:
  • Author : Hélène Andorre Hinson Staley
  • Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
  • Release : 2011-04-04
  • ISBN : 1456887300
  • Pages : 543 pages

Download or read book Paper Stone written by Hélène Andorre Hinson Staley and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2011-04-04 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FOUR BRITISH FORGEMEN IMMIGRATED to United States in the midst of the Industrial Revolution leaving behind with their children and grandchildren trails of Paper & Stone, A Leighton History in England & the United States. THESE FOUR SONS OF Richard and Diana Maybury Leighton of Shropshire,England fashioned their lives around aspirations, which came under the direct study of two researchers Hélène Hinson Staley and Robert Allen DeVries. Isaac in 1851, John in 1856, William around 1858 and Thomas about 1865 traveled from the United Kingdom over the ocean to North America. Later their journeys took them to New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, Michigan and Ohio looking for the perfect place to work and raise families – to find their fortunes and adventures. Clues they left are like breadcrumbs in the grass. We are like birds flocking to preserve their experiences herein. THE EXISTENCE OF THE Leighton surname is additionally traced to the time of William the Conqueror after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Chapter III discusses those Leightons in England’s earliest records and sheds light on Beriah Botfield’s compilation Stemmata Botevilliana, which was published in 1858 and contains the earliest Leightons, recorded in The Domesday Book. Perhaps you carry the Leighton surname and wish to learn more of those you share this name with, or perhaps you are a Leighton descendant? Maybe you wish to learn more of how Staley and DeVries opened doors to their ancestors in order to gain further understanding of how we came to be.

Book The Inner Edge

    Book Details:
  • Author : Joelle K. Jay
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
  • Release : 2009-08-10
  • ISBN : 0313378061
  • Pages : 304 pages

Download or read book The Inner Edge written by Joelle K. Jay and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-08-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An esteemed executive coach shows managers and leaders how they can achieve personal and professional success—and leave a mark on the world. Dr. Joelle Jay's The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership draws on timeless principles and Jay's experiences with hundreds of leaders from America's most successful and admired companies, setting out ten essential components of leading well and living well. In The Inner Edge, Dr. Jay offers customized coaching to help leaders overcome challenges, leverage opportunities, and maximize their talents, teams, and time. Through vivid examples, conversations with accomplished leaders, insightful perspectives on leadership, and thought-provoking questions and exercises, Jay shows readers that leadership is not just a label, but a way of life. Finding your edge, gaining clarity, focusing and taking action, expanding your knowledge—under Jay's training these and other principles become concrete achievable assets for living and leading. The result is an essential resource for helping leaders get results for their organizations in a way that capitalizes on—and enriches—their own unique identity.