Download or read book Paradise Transformed written by Arthur C Verge and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Paradise Transformed written by Guy Cooper and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last two decades have seen a great explosion in the diversity, functionality, and beauty of modern garden design. The first major survey of contemporary private gardens, this book explores the imaginative ideas behind landscape design today. Lush color photographs, supported by plans, drawings, and lively commentary, thoroughly document gardens by twenty-eight leading landscape architects, featuring work in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. An international roster of designers is represented here, illustrating acknowledged masters, such as Dan Kiley and Ian Hamilton Finlay, in addition to vital young talents, including Kathryn Gustafson and Susan Child. In each of the categories in Paradise Transformed -- tradition, abstraction, innovation, and exploration -- a distinct approach to the private landscape is revealed, achieved in original ways by each designer. The modernist aesthetic, translated from architecture, painting, and sculpture, gives form to these marvelous private spaces. Architectural and artistic influences displayed in these gardens include Art Deco, Cubism, Surrealism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Minimalism, and the Earthworks of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the main tenets of the contemporary garden are: greater emphasis on gardens for personal use, not just plant display; the rejection of historical styles as total models and the incorporation of new concepts involving technology, architecture, and site; a variety of design themes, including symmetrical, asymmetrical, and curvilinear modes and their interplay; and a breakthrough to an ecological and regional awareness of the landscape.
Download or read book Paradise Beneath Her Feet written by Isobel Coleman and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now with a new Preface and Afterword by the author “Outstanding . . . [Isobel Coleman] takes us into remote villages and urban bureaucracies to find the brave men and women working to create change in the Middle East.”—Los Angeles Times In this timely and important book, Isobel Coleman shows how Muslim women and men across the Middle East are working within Islam to fight for women’s rights in a growing movement of Islamic feminism. Journeying through Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Coleman introduces the reader to influential Islamic feminist thinkers and successful grassroots activists working to create economic, political, and educational opportunities for women. Their advocacy for women’s rights based on more progressive interpretations of Islam are critical to bridging the conflict between those championing reform and those seeking to oppress women in the name of religious tradition. Socially, culturally, economically, and politically, the future of the region depends on finding ways to accommodate human rights, and in particular women’s rights, with Islamic law. These reformers—and thousands of others—are the people leading the way forward. Featuring new material that addresses how the Arab uprisings and other recent events have affected the social and political landscape of the region, Paradise Beneath Her Feet offers a message of hope: Change is coming to the Middle East—and more often than not, it is being led by women. Praise for Paradise Beneath Her Feet “Clearly written, deeply moving, and wonderfully enlightening.”—Reza Aslan, author of No god but God “[An] engrossing portrait of real Muslim women that reveals how Islamic feminists . . . are working with and within the culture, rather than against it . . . to forge ‘a legitimate Islamic alternative to the current repressive system.’ Coleman doesn’t diminish the enormity of the struggle, but she argues convincingly that it might yet rewrite Islam’s future.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A nuanced view of Islam’s role in public life that is cautiously hopeful.”—The Economist “Eye-opening . . . Deeply religious, profoundly determined and modern in every way, these are twenty-first-century women bent on change. Hear them roar and see a future being born before our eyes.”—Booklist
Download or read book Paradise Past written by Robert W. Kirk and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 400 years from Magellan's entrance into Pacific waters to 1920, the lives of the people of the South Pacific were utterly transformed. Exotic diseases from Europe and America, particularly the worldwide influenza pandemic, were deadly for islanders. Ardent missionaries changed the belief systems and lives of nearly all Polynesians, Aborigines, and those Papuans and Melanesians living in areas accessible to westerners. By 1920 every island and atoll in the South Seas had been claimed as a colony or protectorate of a power such as Britain, France or the United States. Factors aiding this imperial sweep included European outposts such as Sydney, advances in maritime technology, the work of missionaries, a desire to profit from the area's relatively sparse resources, and international rivalry that led to the scramble for colonies. The coming of westerners, as this book points out, was not entirely negative, as head-hunting, cannibalism, chronic warfare, human sacrifice, and other practices were diminished--but whole cultures were irreversibly changed or even eradicated.
Download or read book The Earth Transformed written by Peter Frankopan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2023-04-18 with total page 961 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A revolutionary new history that reveals how climate change has dramatically shaped the development—and demise—of civilizations across time *The ebook edition now includes endnotes. Anyone who purchased the book previously can re-download this updated edition and access the notes.* Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of the Moche civilization in South America that came about because of the cyclical pressures of El Niño to volcanic eruptions in Iceland that affected Egypt and helped bring the Ottoman empire to its knees, climate change and its influences have always been with us. Frankopan explains how the Vikings emerged thanks to catastrophic crop failure, why the roots of regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad lay in the collapse of cotton prices resulting from unusual climate patterns, and why the western expansion of the frontiers in North America was directly affected by solar flare activity in the eighteenth century. Again and again, Frankopan shows that when past empires have failed to act sustainably, they have been met with catastrophe. Blending brilliant historical writing and cutting-edge scientific research, The Earth Transformed will radically reframe the way we look at the world and our future.
Download or read book Bohemian Los Angeles written by Daniel Hurewitz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-04-30 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian Hurewitz brings to life a vibrant and all-but-forgotten milieu of artists, leftists, and gay men and women whose story played out over the first half of the twentieth century and continues to shape the entire American landscape. In a hidden corner of Los Angeles, the personal first became the political, the nation's first enduring gay rights movement emerged, and the broad spectrum of what we now think of as identity politics was born. Portraying life over more than forty years in the hilly enclave of Edendale (now part of Silver Lake), Hurewitz considers the work of painters and printmakers, looks inside the Communist Party's intimate cultural scene, and examines the social world of gay men. He discovers why and how these communities, inspiring both one another and the city as a whole, transformed American notions of political identity with their ideas about self-expression, political engagement, and race relations.--From publisher description.
Download or read book L A Noir written by John Buntin and published by Crown. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Other cities have histories. Los Angeles has legends. Midcentury Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America," a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world’s most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men–one L.A.’s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief–each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city. Former street thug turned featherweight boxer Mickey Cohen left the ring for the rackets, first as mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel’s enforcer, then as his protégé. A fastidious dresser and unrepentant killer, the diminutive Cohen was Hollywood’s favorite gangster–and L.A.’s preeminent underworld boss. Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Sammy Davis Jr. palled around with him; TV journalist Mike Wallace wanted his stories; evangelist Billy Graham sought his soul. William H. Parker was the proud son of a pioneering law-enforcement family from the fabled frontier town of Deadwood. As a rookie patrolman in the Roaring Twenties, he discovered that L.A. was ruled by a shadowy "Combination"–a triumvirate of tycoons, politicians, and underworld figures where alliances were shifting, loyalties uncertain, and politics were practiced with shotguns and dynamite. Parker’s life mission became to topple it–and to create a police force that would never answer to elected officials again. These two men, one morally unflinching, the other unflinchingly immoral, would soon come head-to-head in a struggle to control the city–a struggle that echoes unforgettably through the fiction of Raymond Chandler and movies such as The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential. For more than three decades, from Prohibition through the Watts Riots, the battle between the underworld and the police played out amid the nightclubs of the Sunset Strip and the mansions of Beverly Hills, from the gritty streets of Boyle Heights to the manicured lawns of Brentwood, intersecting in the process with the agendas and ambitions of J. Edgar Hoover, Robert F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X. The outcome of this decades-long entanglement shaped modern American policing–for better and for worse–and helped create the Los Angeles we know today. A fascinating examination of Los Angeles’s underbelly, the Mob, and America’s most admired–and reviled–police department, L.A. Noir is an enlightening, entertaining, and richly detailed narrative about the city originally known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Se–ora la Reina de los Angeles, "The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels."
Download or read book The Other Side of Paradise written by Julia Cooke and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché, 90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a dynamic scene: baby-faced anarchists with Mohawks gelled with laundry soap, whiskey-drinking children of the elite, Santería trainees, pregnant prostitutes, university graduates planning to leave for the first country that will give them a visa. This last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro animate life in a waning era of political stagnation as the rest of the world beckons: waiting out storms at rummy hurricane parties and attending raucous drag cabarets, planning ascendant music careers and black-market business ventures, trying to reconcile the undefined future with the urgent today. Eye-opening and politically prescient, The Other Side of Paradise offers a deep new understanding of a place that has so confounded and intrigued us.
Download or read book The Way We Really Were written by Roger W. Lotchin and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The customary picture of the World War II era in California has been dominated by accounts of the Japanese American concentration camps, African Americans, and women on the home front. The Way We Really Were substantially enlivens this view, addressing topics that have been neglected or incompletely treated in the past to create a more rounded picture of the wartime situation at home. Exploring the developments brought to fruition by the war and linking them to their roots in earlier decades, contributors address the diversity of the musical scene, which arose from a cross-pollination of styles brought by Okies, blacks, and Mexican migrants. They examine increased political involvement by women, Hollywood's response to the war, and the merging of business and labor interests in the Bay Area Council. They also reveal how wartime dynamics led to substantial environmental damage and lasting economic gains by industry. The Way We Really Were examines significant wartime changes in the circumstances of immigrant groups that have been largely overlooked by historians. Among these are Italian Americans, heavily insular and pro-Fascist before the war and very pro-American and assimilationist after, and Chinese American men, who achieved new legitimacy and entitlement through military service. Also included is a look at cultural negotiation among multiple ethnic groups in the Golden State. A valuable addition to the literature on California history, The War We Really Were provides an entree into new areas of scholarship and a fresh look at familiar ones.
Download or read book Boyle Heights written by George J. Sánchez and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The radical history of a dynamic, multiracial American neighborhood. “When I think of the future of the United States, and the history that matters in this country, I often think of Boyle Heights.”—George J. Sánchez The vision for America’s cross-cultural future lies beyond the multicultural myth of the "great melting pot." That idea of diversity often imagined ethnically distinct urban districts—the Little Italys, Koreatowns, and Jewish quarters of American cities—built up over generations and occupying spaces that excluded one another. But the neighborhood of Boyle Heights shows us something altogether different: a dynamic, multiracial community that has forged solidarity through a history of social and political upheaval. Boyle Heights is an in-depth history of the Los Angeles neighborhood, showcasing the potent experiences of its residents, from early contact between Spanish colonizers and native Californians to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the hunt for hidden Communists among the Jewish population, negotiating citizenship and belonging among Latino migrants and Mexican American residents, and beyond. Through each period and every struggle, the residents of Boyle Heights have maintained remarkable solidarity across racial and ethnic lines, acting as a unified polyglot community even as their tribulations have become more explicitly racial in nature. Boyle Heights is immigrant America embodied, and it can serve as the true beacon on a hill toward which the country can strive in a time when racial solidarity and civic resistance have never been in greater need.
Download or read book My Blue Heaven written by Becky M. Nicolaides and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-05 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: List of IllustrationsList of TablesAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. The Quest for Independence, 1920-19401. Building Independence in Suburbia2. Peopling the Subur 3. The Texture of Everyday Life4. The Politics of IndependencePart II. Closing Ranks, 1940-19655. "A Beautiful Place"6. The Suburban Good Life Arrives7. The Racializing of Local PoliticsEpilogueAcronyms for Collections and ArchivesNotes Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature written by Gregory Claeys and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of Thomas More's genre-defining work Utopia in 1516, the field of utopian literature has evolved into an ever-expanding domain. This Companion presents an extensive historical survey of the development of utopianism, from the publication of Utopia to today's dark and despairing tendency towards dystopian pessimism, epitomised by works such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Chapters address the difficult definition of the concept of utopia, and consider its relation to science fiction and other literary genres. The volume takes an innovative approach to the major themes predominating within the utopian and dystopian literary tradition, including feminism, romance and ecology, and explores in detail the vexed question of the purportedly 'western' nature of the concept of utopia. The reader is provided with a balanced overview of the evolution and current state of a long-standing, rich tradition of historical, political and literary scholarship.
Download or read book Revelation Teach the Text Commentary Series written by J. Scott Duvall and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Teach the Text Commentary Series utilizes the best of biblical scholarship to provide the information a pastor needs to communicate the text effectively. The carefully selected preaching units and focused commentary allow pastors to quickly grasp the big idea and key themes of each passage of Scripture. Each unit of the commentary includes the big idea and key themes of the passage and sections dedicated to understanding, teaching, and illustrating the text.
Download or read book The Apocalepticon written by Greg Castle and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Apocalepticon, a modern neo-classical epic poem, covering an encyclopedic range of subject matter, historical themes, philosophical schools and theological traditions - A work conceived over three decades, in a culmination of poetical language, that gives a new and original voice to the Western Epic Tradition.
Download or read book Future of Hope and Present Reality written by Andrew Chester and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2012 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first of a two-volume work with the overall title "Future Hope and Present Reality . These volumes had their origin in the Speaker s Lectures that Andrew Chester gave in Oxford; their main focus is central themes in biblical eschatology, and especially the apparent contradictions between what is hoped for in the future and what is experienced in the present: the stark discrepancy, that is, between the world as it is and the world as it should be. In this first volume, as the subtitle "Eschatology and Transformation in the Hebrew Bible indicates, the author is concerned with the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament; the second will be on the New Testament). He deals, successively, with central eschatological themes and the deep tensions they involve: divine threats of an absolute end (to human life and to the world itself), and divine promises of blessing and transformation, along with the theological questions inevitably raised by these - both in themselves and in relation to each other; the whole phenomenon of prophecy, and the problems it involves - not least, whether it can be taken seriously, in face of the contradictions and failures it manifests. He discusses the sheer discrepancy between ideal and reality in traditions relating to kingship, along with the tensions inherent in the emergence of messianic hope; death, as representing the end of any relationship with God, along with hope that goes beyond death - in relation both to the individual and also the nation; and, finally, visions of a transformed and paradisal world, and whether these can bear any relation to reality. It is argued that the Hebrew Bible can be seen to offer genuine grounds for hope, but that these can have any cogency only if the problems involved are really engaged with."
Download or read book Demanding Child Care written by Natalie M. Fousekis and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During World War II, as women stepped in to fill jobs vacated by men in the armed services, the federal government established public child care centers in local communities for the first time. When the government announced plans to withdraw funding and terminate its child care services at the end of the war, women in California protested and lobbied to keep their centers open, even as these services rapidly vanished in other states. Analyzing the informal networks of cross-class and cross-race reformers, policymakers, and educators, Demanding Child Care: Women's Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940–1971 traces the rapidly changing alliances among these groups. During the early stages of the childcare movement, feminists, Communists, and labor activists banded together, only to have these alliances dissolve by the 1950s as the movement welcomed new leadership composed of working-class mothers and early childhood educators. In the 1960s, when federal policymakers earmarked child care funds for children of women on welfare and children described as culturally deprived, it expanded child care services available to these groups but eventually eliminated public child care for the working poor. Deftly exploring the possibilities for partnership as well as the limitations among these key parties, Fousekis helps to explain the barriers to a publically funded comprehensive child care program in the United States.
Download or read book Seeking El Dorado written by Lawrence B. de Graaf and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 18th century, African Americans, like many others, have migrated to California to seek fortunes or, often, the more modest goals of being able to find work, own a home, and raise a family relatively free of discrimination. Not only their search but also its outcome is covered in Seeking El Dorado. Whether they settled in major cities or smaller towns, African Americans created institutions and organizations—churches, social clubs, literary societies, fraternal orders, civil rights organizations—that embodied the legacy of their past and the values they shared. Blacks came in search of the same jobs as other Americans, but the search often proved frustrating. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, African American leadership in the state consistently focused on achieving racial justice. The essays in this book speak of triumph and hardship, success, discrimination, and disappointment. Seeking El Dorado is a major contribution to black history and the history of the American West and will be of interest to both scholars and general readers.
