Download or read book Severed written by Frances Larson and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and cryonicists promise that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever. From shrunken heads to trophies of war; from memento mori to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.
Download or read book Severed A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found written by Frances Larson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-11-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “wide-ranging and thoughtful” (Wall Street Journal) exploration of the varied obsessions that the “civilized West” has had with decapitated heads and skulls. The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses, encases the brain, and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body. It is our most distinctive attribute and connects our inner selves to the outer world. Yet there is a dark side to the head’s preeminence, one that has, in the course of human history, manifested itself in everything from decapitation to headhunting. So explains anthropologist Frances Larson in this fascinating history of decapitated human heads. From the Western collectors whose demand for shrunken heads spurred massacres to Second World War soldiers who sent the remains of the Japanese home to their girlfriends, from Madame Tussaud modeling the guillotined head of Robespierre to Damien Hirst photographing decapitated heads in city morgues, from grave-robbing phrenologists to skull-obsessed scientists, Larson explores our macabre fixation with severed heads.
Download or read book The Severed Head written by Julia Kristeva and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) offers an extended consideration of artistic figurations of the severed head, the organizing theme to an exhibition she coordinated at the Louvre in 1998. Though she follows a single historical trajectory, moving from Paleolithic skull cults to antique Greek sculpture to the Surrealist drawings, Kristeva eschews the disciplinary constraints of art history, instead employing psychoanalysis to explore the intertwined problems of representation and mortality posed by the severed head. For Kristeva, the capacity to figure the life of the mind first requires a confrontation with this horrific object that stands at the boundary between life and death, registering not only the loss of corporeal form but also subjective interiority. Though this book does not engage with recent images of decapitation, it is not without contemporary political-cultural import; for Kristeva, these cruel artistic figurations offer us the capacity to contemplate the sacred within a technology-driven contemporary visual culture. Verdict While a challenging text, this beautifully written and richly layered meditation on mortality and representation will undoubtedly appeal to those readers interested in semiotic and psychoanalytically informed readings of art.-Jonathan Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr.(c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Download or read book A Severed Head written by Iris Murdoch and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1976-11-18 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel about the frightfulness and ruthlessness of being in love, from the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, “this is nothing to do with happiness.” A Severed Head was adapted for a successful stage production in 1963 and was later made into a film starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, and Ian Holm.
Download or read book The Beginning of Everything written by Robyn Schneider and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robyn Schneider's The Beginning of Everything is a witty and heart-wrenching teen novel that will appeal to fans of books by John Green and Ned Vizzini, novels such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and classics like The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye. Varsity tennis captain Ezra Faulkner was supposed to be homecoming king, but that was before—before his girlfriend cheated on him, before a car accident shattered his leg, and before he fell in love with unpredictable new girl Cassidy Thorpe. As Kirkus said in a starred review, "Schneider takes familiar stereotypes and infuses them with plenty of depth. Here are teens who could easily trade barbs and double entendres with the characters that fill John Green's novels." Funny, smart, and including everything from flash mobs to blanket forts to a poodle who just might be the reincarnation of Jay Gatsby, The Beginning of Everything is a refreshing contemporary twist on the classic coming-of-age novel—a heart-wrenching story about how difficult it is to play the part that people expect, and how new beginnings can stem from abrupt and tragic endings.
Download or read book The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue written by Patricia Palmer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores actual and literary depictions of beheadings in sixteenth-century Ireland and addresses how violence is transcribed into art.
Download or read book Undreamed Shores written by Frances Larson and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first decades of the 20th century, five women - Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood and Barbara Freire-Marreco - arrived at Oxford to take the newly created Masters in Anthropology. Though their circumstances differed radically, all were intent on visiting and studying remote communities a world away from their own. Through their work, they resisted the prejudices of the male establishment, proving that women could be explorers and scientists, too. In the wastes of Siberia; in the villages and pueblos of the Nile and New Mexico; on Easter Island; and in the uncharted interior of New Guinea, they found new freedoms - yet when they returned to England, loss, madness and self-doubt awaited them. Frances Larson's masterful group biography is a revelatory portrait of five hidden heroines of British scholarship.
Download or read book Heads Will Roll written by Larissa Tracy and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-01-20 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capitalizing upon the enduring fascination with decapitation in European culture, this collection examines--through a variety of critical lenses--the recurring "roles/rolls" of severed human heads in the medieval and early modern imagination.
Download or read book Severance written by Robert Olen Butler and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2006-08-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer-winning Butler presents 62 stories, each exactly 240 words long, capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person's mind after their head has been severed. The characters are both real and imagined, including Medusa and Anne Boleyn.
Download or read book Losing Our Heads written by Regina Janes and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2005-08-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the fascination that decollation holds for us, as individuals and as a culture? Why does the idea make us laugh and the act make us close our eyes? Losing Our Heads explores in both artistic and cultural contexts the role of the chopped-off head. It asks why the practice of decapitation was once so widespread, why it has diminished—but not, as scenes from contemporary Iraq show, completely disappeared—and why we find it so peculiarly repulsive that we use it as a principal marker to separate ourselves from a more “barbaric”or “primitive” past? Although the topic is grim, Regina Janes’s treatment and conclusions are neither grisly nor gruesome, but continuously instructive about the ironies of humanity’s cultural nature. Bringing to bear an array of evidence, the book argues that the human ability to create meaning from the body motivates the practice of decapitation, its diminution, the impossibility of its extirpation, and its continuing fascination. Ranging from antiquity to the late nineteenth-century passion for Salomé and John the Baptist, and from the enlightenment to postcolonial Africa’s challenge to the severed head as sign of barbarism, Losing Our Heads opens new areas of investigation, enabling readers to understand the shock of decapitation and to see the value in moving past shock to analysis. Written with penetrating wit and featuring striking illustrations, it is sure to captivate anyone interested in his or her head.
Download or read book Basketful of Heads written by Joe Hill and published by DC Comics. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joe Hill, the horror mastermind behind NOS4A2 and Locke & Key, arrives at DC with the twisted tale of June Branch-trapped with four cunning criminals who have snatched her boyfriend for deranged reasons of their own. Now she must fight for her life with the help of an impossible 8th-century Viking axe that can pass through a man’s neck in a single swipe-and leave the severed head still conscious and capable of supernatural speech. Each disembodied head has a malevolent story of its own to tell, and it isn’t long before June finds herself in a desperate struggle to hack through their lies and manipulations...racing to save the man she loves before time runs out. But is June Branch a woman fighting for her life-or a deranged axe murderer with a basketful of paranoid fantasies? The truth is even more horrifying than a basketful of heads. Collects Basketful of Heads #1-7.
Download or read book When They Severed Earth from Sky written by Elizabeth Wayland Barber and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-02 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to rocks? What was the Golden Calf? Why are mirrors believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think that mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George actually fought dragons, since dragons don't exist? Strange though they sound, however, these "myths" did not begin as fiction. This absorbing book shows that myths originally transmitted real information about real events and observations, preserving the information sometimes for millennia within nonliterate societies. Geologists' interpretations of how a volcanic cataclysm long ago created Oregon's Crater Lake, for example, is echoed point for point in the local myth of its origin. The Klamath tribe saw it happen and passed down the story--for nearly 8,000 years. We, however, have been literate so long that we've forgotten how myths encode reality. Recent studies of how our brains work, applied to a wide range of data from the Pacific Northwest to ancient Egypt to modern stories reported in newspapers, have helped the Barbers deduce the characteristic principles by which such tales both develop and degrade through time. Myth is in fact a quite reasonable way to convey important messages orally over many generations--although reasoning back to the original events is possible only under rather specific conditions. Our oldest written records date to 5,200 years ago, but we have been speaking and mythmaking for perhaps 100,000. This groundbreaking book points the way to restoring some of that lost history and teaching us about human storytelling.
Download or read book Stiff The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers written by Mary Roach and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-04-27 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look inside the world of forensics examines the use of human cadavers in a wide range of endeavors, including research into new surgical procedures, space exploration, and a Tennessee human decay research facility.
Download or read book Headhunting and the Body in Iron Age Europe written by Ian Armit and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the widespread evidence for the removal, curation and display of the human head in Iron Age Europe.
Download or read book Rest in Pieces written by Bess Lovejoy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated, and even filed away in a lawyer's office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, legs, skulls, hearts, lungs, and nether regions have embarked on voyages that crisscross the globe and stretch the imagination.
Download or read book Poisoner in Chief written by Stephen Kinzer and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of All the Shah’s Men and The Brothers tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the CIA’s secret drug and mind-control experiments of the 1950s and ’60s. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s master magician and gentlehearted torturer—the agency’s “poisoner in chief.” As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace—including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. He paid prostitutes to lure clients to CIA-run bordellos, where they were secretly dosed with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture. For years he was the chief supplier of spy tools used by CIA officers around the world. Stephen Kinzer, author of groundbreaking books about U.S. clandestine operations, draws on new documentary research and original interviews to bring to life one of the most powerful unknown Americans of the twentieth century. Gottlieb’s reckless experiments on “expendable” human subjects destroyed many lives, yet he considered himself deeply spiritual. He lived in a remote cabin without running water, meditated, and rose before dawn to milk his goats. During his twenty-two years at the CIA, Gottlieb worked in the deepest secrecy. Only since his death has it become possible to piece together his astonishing career at the intersection of extreme science and covert action. Poisoner in Chief reveals him as a clandestine conjurer on an epic scale.
Download or read book Napoleon the Great written by Andrew Roberts and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-05-27 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Andrew Roberts, author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Storm of War, this is the definitive modern biography of Napoleon It has become all too common for Napoleon Bonaparte's biographers to approach him as a figure to be reviled, bent on world domination, practically a proto-Hitler. Here, after years of study extending even to visits paid to St Helena and 53 of Napoleon's 56 battlefields, Andrew Roberts has created a true portrait of the mind, the life, and the military and above all political genius of a fundamentally constructive ruler. This is the Napoleon, Roberts reminds us, whose peacetime activity produced countless indispensable civic innovations - and whose Napoleonic Code provided the blueprint for civil law systems still in use around the world today. It is one of the greatest lives in world history, which here has found its ideal biographer. The sheer enjoyment which this book will give anyone who loves history is enormous.
