Download or read book The Hottentot Venus written by Rachel Holmes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed biography of Sarah Baartman, once a slave and later a showgirl 'A significant and timely book ... Holmes has produced a laceratingly powerful story' Frances Wilson, Literary Review 'Impeccable ... In telling her extraordinary story, Holmes's fascinating book illuminates the forces which dominated her age, and resound in our own' Sunday Telegraph In 1810 the slave turned showgirl Sarah Baartman, London's most famous curiosity, became its legal cause célèbre. Famed for her exquisite physique – in particular her shapely bottom – she was stared at, stripped, pinched, painted, worshipped and ridiculed. This talented, tragic young South African woman became a symbol of exploitation, colonialism – and defiance. In this scintillating and vividly written book Rachel Holmes traces the full arc of Baartman's extraordinary life for the first time.
Download or read book The Anatomical Venus written by Morbid Anatomy Museum and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath the original Venetian glass and rosewood case at La Specola in Florence lies Clemente Susini's Anatomical Venus (c. 1790), a perfect object whose luxuriously bizarre existence challenges belief. It - or, better, she - was conceived of as a means to teach human anatomy without need for constant dissection, which was messy, ethically fraught and subject to quick decay. This life-sized wax woman is adorned with glass eyes and human hair and can be dismembered into dozens of parts revealing, at the final remove, a beatific foetus curled in her womb. Sister models soon appeared throughout Europe, where they not only instructed the specialist students, but also delighted the general public. Deftly crafted dissectable female wax models and slashed beauties of the world's anatomy museums and fairgrounds of the 18th and 19th centuries take centre stage in this disquieting volume. Since their creation in late 18th-century Florence, these wax women have seduced, intrigued and amazed. Today, they also confound, troubling the edges of our neat categorical divides: life and death, science and art, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, spectacle and education, kitsch and art. Incisive commentary and captivating imagery reveal the evolution of these enigmatic sculptures from wax effigy to fetish figure and the embodiment of the uncanny.
Download or read book Venus Don t Go There written by Michael T. Santini and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where do the unrighteous go after death? What is the plight of the guilty after the Day of Judgment? Are places like heaven, hell, and the lake of fire physical locations in the universe? Biblically based and scientifically reasoned answers to these questions, and more, lead to locating the planet Venus as one possible place for perdition. The book Venus: Don't Go There-What Science and Religion Reveal about Life after Death reviews past and present discoveries and provides future evidence for alliance between the physical sciences and the Bible. God ordained the sciences and religion to work together for the common good and to lead toward a comprehensive understanding of the future. Correlation between the Holy Scriptures and the sciences can work together to provide reasonable and meaningful truths. Through interdisciplinary study, the author deduces the ultimate destiny for unsaved humanity could be within the solar system, while providing a unique perspective to life after death.
Download or read book The Birth of Venus written by Sarah Dunant and published by Random House. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.
Download or read book African Queen written by Rachel Holmes and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-03-25 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saartjie Baartman was twenty-one years old when she was taken from her native South Africa and shipped to London. Within weeks, the striking African beauty was the talk of the social season of 1810–hailed as “the Hottentot Venus” for her exquisite physique and suggestive semi-nude dance. As her fame spread to Paris, Saartjie became a lightning rod for late Georgian and Napoleonic attitudes toward sex and race, exploitation and colonialism, prurience and science. In African Queen, Rachel Holmes recounts the luminous, heartbreaking story of one woman’s journey from slavery to stardom. Born into a herding tribe known as the Eastern Cape Khoisan, Saartjie was barely out of her teens when she was orphaned and widowed by colonial war and forced aboard a ship bound for England. A pair of clever, unscrupulous showmen dressed her up in a body stocking with a suggestive fringe and put her on the London stage as a “specimen” of African beauty and sexuality. The Hottentot Venus was an overnight sensation. But celebrity brought unexpected consequences. Abolitionists initiated a lawsuit to win Saartjie’s freedom, a case that electrified the English public. In Paris, a team of scientists subjected her to a humiliating public inspection as they probed the mystery of her sexual allure. Stared at, stripped, pinched, painted, worshipped, and ridiculed, Saartjie came to symbolize the erotic obsession at the heart of colonialism. But beneath the costumes and the glare of publicity, this young Khoisan woman was a person who had been torn from her own culture and sacrificed to the whims of fashionable Europe. Nearly two centuries after her death, Saartjie made headlines once again when Nelson Mandela launched a campaign to have her remains returned to the land of her birth. In this brilliant, vividly written book, Rachel Holmes traces the full arc of Saartjie’s extraordinary story–a story of race, eros, oppression, and fame that resonates powerfully today.
Download or read book Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus written by Clifton Crais and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Displayed on European stages from 1810 to 1815 as the Hottentot Venus, Sara Baartman was one of the most famous women of her day, and also one of the least known. As the Hottentot Venus, she was seen by Westerners as alluring and primitive, a reflection of their fears and suppressed desires. But who was Sara Baartman? Who was the woman who became the Hottentot Venus? Based on research and interviews that span three continents, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus tells the entwined histories of an elusive life and a famous icon. In doing so, the book raises questions about the possibilities and limits of biography for understanding those who live between and among different cultures. In reconstructing Baartman's life, the book traverses the South African frontier and its genocidal violence, cosmopolitan Cape Town, the ending of the slave trade, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, London and Parisian high society, and the rise of racial science. The authors discuss the ramifications of discovering that when Baartman went to London, she was older than originally assumed, and they explore the enduring impact of the Hottentot Venus on ideas about women, race, and sexuality. The book concludes with the politics involved in returning Baartman's remains to her home country, and connects Baartman's story to her descendants in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus offers the authoritative account of one woman's life and reinstates her to the full complexity of her history.
Download or read book The Anatomical Venus written by Joanna Ebenstein and published by Distributed Art Publishers (DAP). This book was released on 2016 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At head of title: Morbid Anatomy Museum.
Download or read book Venus and Adonis written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1870 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Transit of Venus written by Shirley Hazzard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves A Penguin Classic Considered "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" (The Paris Review), The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal. With exquisite, breathtaking prose, Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story.
Download or read book Venus as a Boy written by Luke Sutherland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-18 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel of extraordinary power from a writer to watch. In a small flat in London, a young man is turning to gold. But before he dies, before his skin and eyes and tongue harden into a golden death mask, he wants to share the amazing story of his life. Born and raised on the barren Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland, his childhood is a brutal one, devoid of tenderness. It is a miracle when he meets Tracy, falls in love, and discovers his true gift: the merest touch of him is enough to induce visions of angels and orchids. The physical heights he is able to reach-and to which he can bring others-go far beyond any normal sensual pleasure. Armed with this inexplicable talent, he makes his way to London, where he falls in with a group of teens forced to make a living on the street. Luke Sutherland's modern-day myth about the power of love veers from stratosphere to gutter, from visions of heaven to the all-too-mortal yearning for even one glimpse of it. With Venus as a Boy Sutherland has written a moving, poetic novel that manages to imbue the harsh realities of life on the street with a mesmerizing and ethereal beauty.
Download or read book Venus Don t Go There written by Michael T. Santini and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If heaven will be coming to the third planet from the sun, then where will hell or the lake of fire be? This question will be increasingly asked as the final judgment of humankind approaches. Places of loss and banishment will be away from paradisical Earth. Dr. Santini, a minister and retired aerospace engineer who has worked on top secret space projects, argues that just as heaven will be on a renewed Earth, hell will also be a physically real place—and it could be on Venus or a distant exoplanet. In this book, he investigates the interactive nature of the eternal spiritual realm with the domain of our planetary existence. He provides evidence for the fusing of the seen and unseen worlds by exploring the fundamental properties of the universe, which include space, time, matter, and energy. By revealing correlations between the Bible and science, the author deduces the ultimate destiny for saved and unsaved humanity could be within the universe, providing a new perspective on life after death.
Download or read book The Life and Death of Planet Earth written by Peter D. Ward and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Planet Earth is middle-aged. Science has worked hard to piece together the story of the evolution of our world up to this point, but only recently have we developed the understanding and the tools to describe the entire life cycle of a planet. Ward and Brownlee, a geologist and an astronomer respectively, combine their knowledge of how the critical sustaining systems of our planet evolve through time with their understanding of the life cycles of stars and solar systems, to tell the story of the second half of Earth's life. The process of evolution will essentially reverse itself: life as we know it will subside until only the simplest forms remain. Eventually, they too will disappear. The oceans will evaporate, the atmosphere will degrade, and, as the sun slowly expands, Earth itself will eventually meet a fiery end. --From publisher description.
Download or read book Venus on Wheels written by Gelya Frank and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-05-30 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1976 Gelya Frank began writing about the life of Diane DeVries, a woman born with all the physical and mental equipment she would need to live in our society--except arms and legs. Frank was 28 years old, DeVries 26. This remarkable book--by turns moving, funny, and revelatory--records the relationship that developed between the women over the next twenty years. An empathic listener and participant in DeVries's life, and a scholar of the feminist and disability rights movements, Frank argues that Diane DeVries is a perfect example of an American woman coming of age in the second half of the twentieth century. By addressing the dynamics of power in ethnographic representation, Frank--anthropology's leading expert on life history and life story methods--lays the critical groundwork for a new genre, "cultural biography." Challenged to examine the cultural sources of her initial image of DeVries as limited and flawed, Frank discovers that DeVries is gutsy, buoyant, sexy--and definitely not a victim. While she analyzes the portrayal of women with disabilities in popular culture--from limbless circus performers to suicidal heroines on the TV news--Frank's encounters with DeVries lead her to come to terms with her own "invisible disabilities" motivating the study. Drawing on anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, law, and the history of medicine, Venus on Wheels is an intellectual tour de force.
Download or read book Life and Death written by William Walker and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-01-07 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room-unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world. For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?
Download or read book I Am Venus written by Bárbara Mujica and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2013-06-13 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fictional account of the seventeenth-century Spanish painter’s life is “a very enjoyable read . . . A portrait of Velázquez and a meditation on love” (Washington Independent Review of Books). Narrated by the mysterious model who posed for Rokeby Venus, Diego Velázquez’s only surviving female nude, I Am Venus is the riveting account of a great artist’s rise to prominence, set against the backdrop of political turmoil and romantic scandal. A sweeping story of scandal and passion, and a vivid recreation of a corrupt kingdom on the brink of collapse, I Am Venus is a thrilling novel that brings to life the public and private worlds of Spain’s greatest painter. “A well-plotted read with engaging characters and rich detail. Fans of Tracy Chevalier and Elizabeth Kostova as well as art history buffs will enjoy Mujica’s interpretation.” —Library Journal “A worthwhile read . . . Mujica continues her realistic representation by loading the text with rich historical detail [that] instantly creates a sensory world for her readers to inhabit.” —Booklist “Mujica’s prose is vigorous and intense, and the story is paradoxically both dark and illuminating.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Master of Life and Death written by Robert Silverberg and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room--unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world. For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies and become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?
Download or read book Venus Envy written by Shannon McKelden and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-01-02 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Venus: “After a few centuries of turning pumpkins into coaches and frogs into princes, I thought I was getting the hang of being a fairy godmother. Maybe soon Zeus would let me back onto Mount Olympus . . . then I met Rachel Greer. A goody-two-shoes do-gooder who ignored my advice—terrific advice, if I do say so myself—about men. And kept nagging me for spending too much time in the bathroom when everyone knows a goddess always needs to look her best. Rachel: “I had a decent job, friends, a loving family. My volunteer work, as a mentor for young women and a dog-walker at the local shelter, kept me hopping. Then this amazingly beautiful woman, who literally turns heads—men walk into walls when she passes by—announces she’s my fairy godmother, here to help me fall in love! Next thing I know, she’s moved into my apartment and kicked me out of my own bedroom. Of course I thought she was nuts . . . until the magic started to happen.”
