EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Glass

    Book Details:
  • Author : Alan Macfarlane
  • Publisher : University of Chicago Press
  • Release : 2002-10
  • ISBN : 9780226500287
  • Pages : 284 pages

Download or read book Glass written by Alan Macfarlane and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-10 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picture, if you can, a world without glass. There would be no microscopes or telescopes, no sciences of microbiology or astronomy. People with poor vision would grope in the shadows, and planes, cars, and even electricity probably wouldn't exist. Artists would draw without the benefit of three-dimensional perspective, and ships would still be steered by what stars navigators could see through the naked eye. In Glass: A World History, Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin tell the fascinating story of how glass has revolutionized the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Starting ten thousand years ago with its invention in the Near East, Macfarlane and Martin trace the history of glass and its uses from the ancient civilizations of India, China, and Rome through western Europe during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution, and finally up to the present day. The authors argue that glass played a key role not just in transforming humanity's relationship with the natural world, but also in the divergent courses of Eastern and Western civilizations. While all the societies that used glass first focused on its beauty in jewelry and other ornaments, and some later made it into bottles and other containers, only western Europeans further developed the use of glass for precise optics, mirrors, and windows. These technological innovations in glass, in turn, provided the foundations for European domination of the world in the several centuries following the Scientific Revolution. Clear, compelling, and quite provocative, Glass is an amazing biography of an equally amazing subject, a subject that has been central to every aspect of human history, from art and science to technology and medicine.

Book World of Glass

Download or read book World of Glass written by Jan Greenberg and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first children's book about Dale Chihuly, the world-renowned glass sculptor His crew calls him Maestro. Thousands of fans call him a magician. Over the past five decades, Dale Chihuly (b. 1941) has created some of the most innovative and popular works of art in museums and gardens around the world. Authors Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan met with Chihuly in his studio for exclusive interviews discussing his early life, his passion for glassblowing, and his dazzling works. Lavishly illustrated with Chihuly's art and family photographs, this book discusses Chihuly's workshop and his glassblowing technique. The book includes a step-by-step look at how blown glass is created, a list of places to see Chihuly's artwork, endnotes, a bibliography, and an index.

Book How Glass Changed the World

Download or read book How Glass Changed the World written by Seth C. Rasmussen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Glass production is thought to date to ~2500 BC and had found numerous uses by the height of the Roman Empire. Yet the modern view of glass-based chemical apparatus (beakers, flasks, stills, etc.) was quite limited due to a lack of glass durability under rapid temperature changes and chemical attack. This “brief” gives an overview of the history and chemistry of glass technology from its origins in antiquity to its dramatic expansion in the 13th century, concluding with its impact on society in general, particularly its effect on chemical practices.

Book The Whole World Over

    Book Details:
  • Author : Julia Glass
  • Publisher : Anchor
  • Release : 2006-05-23
  • ISBN : 0375424385
  • Pages : 530 pages

Download or read book The Whole World Over written by Julia Glass and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2006-05-23 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Three Junes comes the story of Greenie Duquette, who lavishes most of her passionate energy on her Greenwich Village bakery and her young son—until she makes an impulsive decision that will change the course of several lives around her. Greenie's husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart. At Walter’s restaurant, the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie’s coconut cake and decides to woo her away to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts—heading west without her husband.

Book Glitterworlds

    Book Details:
  • Author : Rebecca Coleman
  • Publisher : MIT Press
  • Release : 2020-04-28
  • ISBN : 1912685388
  • Pages : 194 pages

Download or read book Glitterworlds written by Rebecca Coleman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original examination of the ubiquity of glitter—from bodily adornment to activist glitter bombing—and its vibrant and transformational properties. Glitter is everywhere, from crafting to makeup, from vagazelling to glitter-bombing, from fashion to fish. Glitter also gets everywhere. It sticks to what it is and isn't supposed to, and travels beyond its original uses, eliciting reactions ranging from delight to irritation. In Glitterworlds, Rebecca Coleman examines this ubiquity of glitter, following it as it moves across different popular cultural worlds and exploring its effect on understandings and experiences of gender, sexuality, class and race. Coleman investigates how girls engage with glitter in collaging workshops to imagine their futures; how glitter can adorn the outside and the inside of the body; how glitter features in the films Glitter and Precious; and how LGBTQ* activists glitter bomb homophobic and transphobic people. Throughout, Coleman attends to the plurality of politics that glitter generates, approaching this through the concepts of hope, wonder, fabulation, and prefigurative politics—all of which indicate the making of different, better worlds, although often not in ways that are straightforward or conventional. She develops an original account of future politics, where time is nonlinear and sometimes non-progressive. Coleman's argument brings together feminist cultural theory, feminist new materialisms, and theories on futures and temporality, in order to propose that we should understand glitter as a thing—vibrant, processual, transformational, and traversing boundaries between media and material, culture and nature, bodies and environments.

Book Glass Town

Download or read book Glass Town written by Isabel Greenberg and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A graphic novel about the Brontë siblings and their inventive childhood from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Encyclopedia of Early Earth. NPR Best Book of 2020 Glass Town is an original graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg that encompasses the eccentric childhoods of the four Brontë children—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne. The story begins in 1825, with the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth, the eldest siblings. It is in response to this loss that the four remaining Brontë children set pen to paper and created the fictional world that became known as Glass Town. This world and its cast of characters would come to be the Brontës’ escape from the realities of their lives. Within Glass Town the siblings experienced love, friendship, war, triumph, and heartbreak. Through a combination of quotes from the stories originally penned by the Brontës, biographical information about them, and Greenberg’s vivid comic book illustrations, readers will find themselves enraptured by this fascinating imaginary world. “This lyrical, endlessly inventive book will appeal equally to lovers of history, literature, and metatextual fantasy.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Drawn with a cheery and expansive sweep that belies its sometimes somber subject, Glass Town is a testament to the (usually) redemptive powers of imagination.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune “Greenberg pulls Glass Town and its characters directly from the Brontës’ juvenilia, giving readers a look into the early creativity of an iconic literary family with a playful visual style that captures the Brontës’ enthusiasm as they discover what fiction can do.” —AV Club

Book The Art of Glass

Download or read book The Art of Glass written by Antonio Neri and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THIS is the first of a series of volumes edited by Professor M. Cable illustrating progress in understanding glass making from the 17th century to the early part of the 19th. Known as THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS BOOK ON GLASSMAKING, it was first published, in Italian, in 1612, as L'Arte Vetraria by Antonio Neri who claimed to have experience of glassmaking in several countries and described the best practice of that time, particularly in making coloured glasses. A second edition printed in 1661 made the work more widely known. An English translation by Christopher Merrett MD, one of the early Fellows of the Royal Society, was published in 1662. Merrett added very extensive notes of his own which almost doubled the length of the book. That text became the master for subsequent editions. It was eventually translated into Latin, French, German, and Spanish, and reprinted at least twenty times over the course of almost two centuries. This edition reproduces Merrett's original layout, including the printers ornaments, but is set more legibly and corrects some errors. It is introduced by an essay written in 1962 by Professor W. E. S. Turner FRS which explains the background and importance of this work.

Book The World s Work

Download or read book The World s Work written by and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 888 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Glass Making in the Greco Roman World

Download or read book Glass Making in the Greco Roman World written by Patrick Degryse and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-21 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New insights into the trade and processing of mineral raw materials for glass making - Free ebook at OAPEN Library (www.oapen.org) This book presents a reconstruction of the Hellenistic-Roman glass industry from the point of view of raw material procurement. Within the ERC funded ARCHGLASS project, the authors of this work developed new geochemical techniques to provenance primary glass making. They investigated both production and consumer sites of glass, and identified suitable mineral resources for glass making through geological prospecting. Because the source of the raw materials used in the manufacturing of natron glass can be determined, new insights in the trade of this material are revealed. While eastern Mediterranean glass factories were active throughout the Hellenistic to early Islamic period, western Mediterranean and possibly Italian and North African sources also supplied the Mediterranean world with raw glass in early Roman times. By combining archaeological and scientific data, the authors develop new interdisciplinary techniques for an innovative archaeological interpretation of glass trade in the Hellenistic-Roman world, highlighting the development of glass as an economic material. Contributors Annelore Blomme (KU Leuven), Sara Boyen (KU Leuven), Dieter Brems (KU Leuven), Florence Cattin (Université de Bourgogne), Mike Carremans (KU Leuven), Veerle Devulder (KU Leuven, UGent), Thomas Fenn (Yale University), Monica Ganio (Northwestern University), Johan Honings (KU Leuven), Rebecca Scott (KU Leuven)

Book Victorian Glassworlds

Download or read book Victorian Glassworlds written by Isobel Armstrong and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-04-24 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period. The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto inconceivable. Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens. The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace, and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions. First, to look through glass was to look through the residues of the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second, literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened between seer and seen, incorporating a modern philosophical problem into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings. Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts. Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the individual manufacturers and artisans who founded glass culture, the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment, including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments as the telescope and microscope were known. A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity.

Book Amazed

    Book Details:
  • Author : Mark Roland Langdale
  • Publisher : Troubador Publishing Ltd
  • Release : 2021-10-08
  • ISBN : 1800467044
  • Pages : 302 pages

Download or read book Amazed written by Mark Roland Langdale and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2021-10-08 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a very usual day, on a very usual school trip to Hampton Court Maze, there is a very unusually named girl called Victoriana Elizabeth Alice Royal. At least she can concentrate on history today and learn new facts as she wanders the maze. But little does Victoriana know that history will come alive for her in a way it never has before...

Book The World s Best Music

Download or read book The World s Best Music written by and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Designing Worlds

    Book Details:
  • Author : Kjetil Fallan
  • Publisher : Berghahn Books
  • Release : 2016-06
  • ISBN : 1785331558
  • Pages : 296 pages

Download or read book Designing Worlds written by Kjetil Fallan and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-06 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From consumer products to architecture to advertising to digital technology, design is an undeniably global phenomenon. Yet despite their professed transnational perspective, historical studies of design have all too often succumbed to a bias toward Western, industrialized nations. This diverse but rigorously curated collection recalibrates our understanding of design history, reassessing regional and national cultures while situating them within an international context. Here, contributors from five continents offer nuanced studies that range from South Africa to the Czech Republic, all the while sensitive to the complexities of local variation and the role of nation-states in identity construction.

Book Terraria Gigantica

    Book Details:
  • Author : Dana Fritz
  • Publisher : University of New Mexico Press
  • Release : 2017-10-01
  • ISBN : 0826358748
  • Pages : 89 pages

Download or read book Terraria Gigantica written by Dana Fritz and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a new approach to environmental photography, Dana Fritz explores the world’s largest enclosed landscapes: Arizona’s Biosphere 2, Cornwall’s Eden Project, and Nebraska’s Lied Jungle and Desert Dome at the Henry Doorly Zoo. In these vivaria, plants are grown amid carefully constructed representations of the natural world to entertain and educate tourists while also supporting scientific research. Together, these architectural and engineering marvels stand as working symbols of our complex relationship with the environment. Giant terraria require human control of temperature, humidity, irrigation, insects, weeds, and other conditions to create otherwise impossible ecosystems. While technical demands inform the design of these spaces, the juxtapositions of natural and artificial elements generate striking visual paradoxes that can go unnoticed. Here Fritz turns away from visitors’ prepared sight lines, revealing alternate views that dispel the illusion of natural conditions. Inviting questions about what it means to create and contain landscapes, Terraria Gigantica inspires contemplation of our ecological future.

Book The World Is Made of Glass

Download or read book The World Is Made of Glass written by Morris West and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2017-08-23 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magda von Gamsfeld is beautiful, rich and intelligent, and on the verge of suicide. She has a consultation with the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung at a time when his personal life is in turmoil. Their confrontation is an extraordinary voyage through the mind that leads to a terrible admission of guilt. A cryptic and mysterious case history appears in the autobiography of pioneering Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung: 'A lady came to my office. She refused to give her name . . . What she had to communicate to me was a confession. Some twenty years ago, she had committed a murder . . .' Jung's encounter with the woman had an explosive effect on him, and brought him very close to total breakdown. Morris West recreates this episode in a gripping blend of truth and dramatic speculation. Set in pre-World War I Europe, The World is Made of Glass is a powerful novel of love, sexual obsession, murder and guilt. It has been called Morris West's finest creation of the imagination. 'An audacious and wonderful novel.' The Mail on Sunday 'An enthralling story.' The Spectator

Book The Age of Glass

    Book Details:
  • Author : Stephen Eskilson
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Release : 2018-02-08
  • ISBN : 1474278388
  • Pages : 249 pages

Download or read book The Age of Glass written by Stephen Eskilson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Glass has long transformed the architectural landscape. From the Crystal Palace through to the towering glass spires of today's cities, few architectural materials have held such immense symbolic resonance in the modern era. The Age of Glass explores the cultural and technological ascension of glass in modern and contemporary architecture. Showing how the use of glass is driven as much by changing cultural concerns as it is by developments in technology and style, it traces the richly interwoven material, symbolic, and ideological histories of glass to show how it has produced and dispersed meaning in architecture over the past two centuries. The book's chapters focus on key moments within the modern history of architecture, moments when glass came to the forefront of architectural thought, and which illustrate how glass has been used at different times to project different cultural ideas. A wide range of topics are explored – from the tension between expressionism and functionalism, to the persistent theme of glass and social class, to how glass has reflected political ideas from Nazism through to today's global consumer capitalism. The book also grapples with current arguments about sustainability, while, taking into account the advent of digital LED screens and 'smart glass', offering new cultural perspectives on the future and asking what glass architecture will signify in the digital age. Combining close readings of buildings with insights drawn from research, plus good storytelling and strong contemporary relevance, The Age of Glass offers a fascinating new perspective on modern architecture and culture.

Book Into the Looking Glass

Download or read book Into the Looking Glass written by Sarah Clarke Stuart and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Into the Looking Glass, an analytical guide for Fringe viewers and science fiction fans in general, explores the influence of these traditions on Fringe. It also reveals how the show reflects - and sometimes critiques - the society from which it emerges. Along with many other post-9/11 television shows, Fringe has demonstrated the West's collective paranoia about foreign invaders and domestic corruption. It also lays bare the spread of radical advances in technology and urges its viewers to ponder the ethical limitations of science.