Download or read book Thom Gunn written by Michael Nott and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could “give the dead a voice, make them sing” (Hilton Als, The New Yorker). Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death. Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city’s queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was “an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity.” Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn’s poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself. Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn’s life: his traditional childhood in England; his mother’s suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America’s most innovative poets.

Download or read book Thrive written by Arianna Huffington and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Thrive, Arianna Huffington makes an impassioned and compelling case for the need to redefine what it means to be successful in today's world. Arianna Huffington's personal wake-up call came in the form of a broken cheekbone and a nasty gash over her eye--the result of a fall brought on by exhaustion and lack of sleep. As the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group--one of the fastest growing media companies in the world--celebrated as one of the world's most influential women, and gracing the covers of magazines, she was, by any traditional measure, extraordinarily successful. Yet as she found herself going from brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion, she wondered is this really what success feels like? As more and more people are coming to realize, there is far more to living a truly successful life than just earning a bigger salary and capturing a corner office. Our relentless pursuit of the two traditional metrics of success--money and power--has led to an epidemic of burnout and stress-related illnesses, and an erosion in the quality of our relationships, family life, and, ironically, our careers. In being connected to the world 24/7, we're losing our connection to what truly matters. Our current definition of success is, as Thrive shows, literally killing us. We need a new way forward. In a commencement address Arianna gave at Smith College in the spring of 2013, she likened our drive for money and power to two legs of a three-legged stool. They may hold us up temporarily, but sooner or later we're going to topple over. We need a third leg--a third metric for defining success--to truly thrive. That third metric, she writes in Thrive, includes our well-being, our ability to draw on our intuition and inner wisdom, our sense of wonder, and our capacity for compassion and giving. As Arianna points out, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success. They don't commemorate our long hours in the office, our promotions, or our sterling PowerPoint presentations as we relentlessly raced to climb up the career ladder. They are not about our resumes--they are about cherished memories, shared adventures, small kindnesses and acts of generosity, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh. In this deeply personal book, Arianna talks candidly about her own challenges with managing time and prioritizing the demands of a career and raising two daughters--of juggling business deadlines and family crises, a harried dance that led to her collapse and to her "aha moment." Drawing on the latest groundbreaking research and scientific findings in the fields of psychology, sports, sleep, and physiology that show the profound and transformative effects of meditation, mindfulness, unplugging, and giving, Arianna shows us the way to a revolution in our culture, our thinking, our workplace, and our lives.

Download or read book Facts and Fears written by James R. Clapper and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The former Director of National Intelligence speaks out in this New York Times bestseller When he stepped down in January 2017 as the fourth United States Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper had been President Obama's senior intelligence advisor for six and a half years, longer than his three predecessors combined. He led the US Intelligence Community through a period that included the raid on Osama bin Laden, the Benghazi attack, the leaks of Edward Snowden, and Russia's influence operation on the 2016 U.S election. In Facts and Fears, Clapper traces his career through the growing threat of cyberattacks, his relationships with Presidents and Congress, and the truth about Russia's role in the presidential election. He describes, in the wake of Snowden and WikiLeaks, his efforts to make intelligence more transparent and to push back against the suspicion that Americans' private lives are subject to surveillance. Finally, it was living through Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and seeing how the foundations of American democracy were--and continue to be--undermined by a foreign power that led him to break with his instincts grown through more than five decades in the intelligence profession, to share his inside experience. Clapper considers such controversial questions as, is intelligence ethical? Is it moral to intercept communications or to photograph closed societies from orbit? What are the limits of what we should be allowed to do? What protections should we give to the private citizens of the world, not to mention our fellow Americans? Is there a time that intelligence officers can lose credibility as unbiased reporters of hard truths by asserting themselves into policy decisions? Facts and Fears offers a privileged look inside the United States intelligence community and addresses with the frankness and professionalism for which James Clapper is known some of the most difficult challenges in our nation's history.

Download or read book Born On A Blue Day written by Daniel Tammet and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-01-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journey into one of the most fascinating minds alive today—guided by the owner himself. Bestselling author Daniel Tammet (Thinking in Numbers) is virtually unique among people who have severe autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life and able to explain what is happening inside his head. He sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures, and he can perform extraordinary calculations in his head. He can learn to speak new languages fluently, from scratch, in a week. In 2004, he memorized and recited more than 22,000 digits of pi, setting a record. He has savant syndrome, an extremely rare condition that gives him the most unimaginable mental powers, much like those portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man. Fascinating and inspiring, Born on a Blue Day explores what it’s like to be special and gives us an insight into what makes us all human—our minds.

Download or read book A Century of Innovation written by 3M Company and published by 3m Company. This book was released on 2002 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compilation of 3M voices, memories, facts and experiences from the company's first 100 years.

Download or read book The Last Utopia written by Samuel Moyn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Download or read book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks written by Rebecca Skloot and published by Crown. This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The story of modern medicine and bioethics—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”—Entertainment Weekly NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE • ONE OF THE “MOST INFLUENTIAL” (CNN), “DEFINING” (LITHUB), AND “BEST” (THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS • WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Entertainment Weekly • O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • Financial Times • New York • Independent (U.K.) • Times (U.K.) • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews • Booklist • Globe and Mail Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

Download or read book Designing History written by Michael S. Smith and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited insider's look at one of the design milestones of the twenty-first century: Michael S Smith's celebrated decoration of the Obama White House, featuring a foreword by Michelle Obama. 2020 HONORABLE MENTION FOR THE FOREWORD INDIES AWARD IN HOBBIES/HOME Created for design enthusiasts, political aficionados, and students of Americana, Designing History documents Michael Smith's extraordinary collaboration with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. Not since Jacqueline Kennedy's iconic work on the White House has a designer of Michael Smith's stature been commissioned to bring a new design spirit to the mansion. Through extensive photography, behind-the-scenes stories, and rich archival material, the book places the Obama White House within the context of the building's storied past and its evolution over the past two centuries. The book beautifully documents the process of updating the country's most symbolic residence, revealing how Smith's collaboration on the decoration, showcasing of artworks, and style of entertaining reflected the youthful spirit of the First Family and their vision of a more progressive, inclusive American society. Ultimately, this book will serve as both a historical document and a voyeur's delight, capturing a specific moment in time for the White House, the Obamas, and the American experience.

Download or read book Installations by Architects written by Sarah Bonnemaison and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2009-08-12 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives. The first survey of its kind, Installations by Architects features fifty of the most significant projects from the last twenty-five years by today's most exciting architects, including Anderson Anderson, Philip Beesley, Diller + Scofidio, John Hejduk, Dan Hoffman, and Kuth/Ranieri Architects. Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context. There is no doubt that installations will continue to play a critical role in the practice of architecture. Installations by Architects aims to contribute to the role of installations in sharpening our understanding of the built environment.

Download or read book Historical Painting Techniques Materials and Studio Practice written by Arie Wallert and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1995-08-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bridging the fields of conservation, art history, and museum curating, this volume contains the principal papers from an international symposium titled "Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice" at the University of Leiden in Amsterdam, Netherlands, from June 26 to 29, 1995. The symposium—designed for art historians, conservators, conservation scientists, and museum curators worldwide—was organized by the Department of Art History at the University of Leiden and the Art History Department of the Central Research Laboratory for Objects of Art and Science in Amsterdam. Twenty-five contributors representing museums and conservation institutions throughout the world provide recent research on historical painting techniques, including wall painting and polychrome sculpture. Topics cover the latest art historical research and scientific analyses of original techniques and materials, as well as historical sources, such as medieval treatises and descriptions of painting techniques in historical literature. Chapters include the painting methods of Rembrandt and Vermeer, Dutch 17th-century landscape painting, wall paintings in English churches, Chinese paintings on paper and canvas, and Tibetan thangkas. Color plates and black-and-white photographs illustrate works from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.

Download or read book Psychosocial Aspects of Disability written by Irmo Marini, PhD, DSc, CRC, CLCP and published by Springer Publishing Company. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What a marvelous and amazing textbook. Drs. Marini, Glover-Graf and Millington have done a remarkable job in the design of this highly unique book, that comprehensively and very thoughtfully addresses the psychosocial aspects of the disability experience. These highly respected scholars have produced a major work that will be a central text in rehabilitation education for years to come." From the Foreword by Michael J. Leahy, Ph.D., LPC, CRC Office of Rehabilitation and Disability Studies Michigan State University "This is an excellent book, but the best parts are the stories of the disabled, which give readers insights into their struggles and triumphs." Score: 94, 4 Stars--Doody's Medical Reviews What are the differences between individuals with disabilities who flourish as opposed to those who never really adjust after a trauma? How are those born with a disability different from individuals who acquire one later in life? This is the first textbook about the psychosocial aspects of disability to provide students and practitioners of rehabilitation counseling with vivid insight into the experience of living with a disability. It features the first-person narratives of 16 people living with a variety of disabling conditions, which are integrated with sociological and societal perspectives toward disability, and strategies for counseling persons with disabilities. Using a minority model perspective to address disability, the book focuses on historical perspectives, cultural variants regarding disability, myths and misconceptions, the attitudes of special interest and occupational groups, the psychology of disability with a focus on positive psychology, and adjustments to disability by the individual and family. A wealth of counseling guidelines and useful strategies are geared specifically to individual disabilities. Key Features: Contains narratives of people living with blindness, hearing impairments, spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, polio, mental illness, and other disabilities Provides counseling guidelines and strategies specifically geared toward specific disabilities, including "dos and don'ts" Includes psychological and sociological research relating to individual disabilities Discusses ongoing treatment issues and ethical dilemmas for rehabilitation counselors Presents thought-provoking discussion questions in each chapter Authored by prominent professor and researcher who became disabled as a young adult

Download or read book LSD My Problem Child written by Albert Hofmann and published by Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. This book was released on 2017-09-27 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of LSD told by a concerned yet hopeful father, organic chemist Albert Hofmann, Ph.D. He traces LSD's path from a promising psychiatric research medicine to a recreational drug sparking hysteria and prohibition. In LSD: My Problem Child, we follow Dr. Hofmann's trek across Mexico to discover sacred plants related to LSD, and listen in as he corresponds with other notable figures about his remarkable discovery. Underlying it all is Dr. Hofmann's powerful conclusion that mystical experiences may be our planet's best hope for survival. Whether induced by LSD, meditation, or arising spontaneously, such experiences help us to comprehend "the wonder, the mystery of the divine, in the microcosm of the atom, in the macrocosm of the spiral nebula, in the seeds of plants, in the body and soul of people." More than sixty years after the birth of Albert Hofmann's problem child, his vision of its true potential is more relevant, and more needed, than ever.

Download or read book Idea Makers written by Stephen Wolfram and published by Wolfram Media. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book of thoroughly engaging essays from one of today's most prodigious innovators provides a uniquely personal perspective on the lives and achievements of a selection of intriguing figures from the history of science and technology. Weaving together his immersive interest in people and history with insights gathered from his own experiences, Stephen Wolfram gives an ennobling look at some of the individuals whose ideas and creations have helped shape our world today. Contents includes biographical sketches of: Richard Feynman Kurt Godel Alan Turing John von Neumann George Boole Ada Lovelace Gottfried Leibniz Benoit Mandelbrot Steve Jobs Marvin Minsky Russell Towle Bertrand Russell Alfred Whitehead Richard Crandall Srinivasa Ramanujan Solomon Golomb

Download or read book Recovering Untold Stories written by University of Kansas Libraries and published by . This book was released on 2019-02-13 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A project of the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research

Download or read book Jackson Pollock written by Pepe Karmel and published by The Museum of Modern Art. This book was released on 1999 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published to accompany the exhibition Jackson Pollock held the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1 November 1998 to 2 February 1999.

Download or read book Alan M Turing written by Sara Turing and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing never-before-published material, this fascinating account sheds new light on one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Unbroken written by Laura Hillenbrand and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. In boyhood, Louis Zamperini was an incorrigible delinquent. As a teenager, he channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics. But when World War II began, the athlete became an airman, embarking on a journey that led to a doomed flight on a May afternoon in 1943. When his Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean, against all odds, Zamperini survived, adrift on a foundering life raft. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will. Appearing in paperback for the first time—with twenty arresting new photos and an extensive Q&A with the author—Unbroken is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit, brought vividly to life by Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand. Hailed as the top nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and the Indies Choice Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year award “Extraordinarily moving . . . a powerfully drawn survival epic.”—The Wall Street Journal “[A] one-in-a-billion story . . . designed to wrench from self-respecting critics all the blurby adjectives we normally try to avoid: It is amazing, unforgettable, gripping, harrowing, chilling, and inspiring.”—New York “Staggering . . . mesmerizing . . . Hillenbrand’s writing is so ferociously cinematic, the events she describes so incredible, you don’t dare take your eyes off the page.”—People “A meticulous, soaring and beautifully written account of an extraordinary life.”—The Washington Post “Ambitious and powerful . . . a startling narrative and an inspirational book.”—The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent . . . incredible . . . [Hillenbrand] has crafted another masterful blend of sports, history and overcoming terrific odds; this is biography taken to the nth degree, a chronicle of a remarkable life lived through extraordinary times.”—The Dallas Morning News “An astonishing testament to the superhuman power of tenacity.”—Entertainment Weekly “A tale of triumph and redemption . . . astonishingly detailed.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “[A] masterfully told true story . . . nothing less than a marvel.”—Washingtonian “[Hillenbrand tells this] story with cool elegance but at a thrilling sprinter’s pace.”—Time “Hillenbrand [is] one of our best writers of narrative history. You don’t have to be a sports fan or a war-history buff to devour this book—you just have to love great storytelling.”—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks