Download or read book The Surface of Things written by Prita Meier and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major history of photography from coastal East Africa The ports of the Swahili coast—Zanzibar and Mombasa among them—have long been dynamic centers of trade where diverse peoples, ideas, and materials converge. With the arrival of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, these predominantly Muslim coastal communities cultivated and transformed the medium. The Surface of Things examines the complex maritime dynamics that shaped the photography of coastal Africa, exploring the pleasure and power of beautiful things and the ways people and their pictures transcended the boundaries of the colonial world. Immersing readers in the globally interconnected networks of eastern Africa’s port cities, Prita Meier demonstrates how photographs are not static images but mobile objects with remarkable shape-shifting qualities. Beginning with the earliest photographs introduced through seaborne commerce, the medium’s integration into the cultural landscape was swift. Photographs functioned as objects of decoration, good taste, and cosmopolitanism, but were also used by local elites and foreigners to coerce and objectify enslaved people. Meier uncovers the oppressive agenda behind postcards and other popular images while describing African strategies of subversion and rebellion, revealing the performative authority that individuals exerted over their photographic likenesses. Featuring more than two hundred images published here for the first time, The Surface of Things repositions the continent’s islands and archipelagos at the center of global photographic histories and shows how the people of the African Indian Ocean world experienced photography as a force of both oppression and freedom.
Download or read book The Pale Surface of Things written by Janey Bennett and published by Janey Bennett. This book was released on 2007 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fast moving novel in a Cretan village - kidnappings and killings, prayers and healing, ethics and ritual...and a darn good tale.
Download or read book On the Surface of Things written by Felice Frankel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using innovative photographic technology, Felice Frankel finds startling abstract beauty on the surfaces of objects all around us. Chemist George M. Whitesides explains each photograph, describing why and how each of these phenomena occur.
Download or read book The Surface Breaks a reimagining of The Little Mermaid written by Louise O'Neill and published by Scholastic UK. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep beneath the sea off the cold Irish coast, Gaia is a young mermaid who dreams of being human... but at what terrible price? Hans Christian Andersen's dark original fairy tale is reimagined through a searing feminist lens, with the stunning, scalpel-sharp writing and world building that has won Louise her legions of devoted fans.
Download or read book Beneath the Surface written by Barbara Garay and published by . This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath the surface is a collection of poetry about overcoming trauma, navigating love, enduring heartbreak, dealing with depression and anxiety, and coping through it by becoming emotionally resilient. The book is split into five chapters: Roots. Love. Hear break. Internal Struggle. Resilience.
Download or read book Fewer Better Things written by Glenn Adamson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, a timely and passionate case for the role of the well-designed object in the digital age. Curator and scholar Glenn Adamson opens Fewer, Better Things by contrasting his beloved childhood teddy bear to the smartphones and digital tablets children have today. He laments that many children and adults are losing touch with the material objects that have nurtured human development for thousands of years. The objects are still here, but we seem to care less and know less about them. In his presentations to groups, he often asks an audience member what he or she knows about the chair the person is sitting in. Few people know much more than whether it's made of wood, plastic, or metal. If we know little about how things are made, it's hard to remain connected to the world around us. Fewer, Better Things explores the history of craft in its many forms, explaining how raw materials, tools, design, and technique come together to produce beauty and utility in handmade or manufactured items. Whether describing the implements used in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the use of woodworking tools, or the use of new fabrication technologies, Adamson writes expertly and lovingly about the aesthetics of objects, and the care and attention that goes into producing them. Reading this wise and elegant book is a truly transformative experience.
Download or read book Antonioni or The Surface of the World written by Seymour Chatman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michelangelo Antonioni is one of the great visual artists of the cinema. The central and distinguishing strength of Antonioni's mature films, Seymour Chatman argues, is narration by a kind of visual minimalism, by an intense concentration on the sheer appearance of things and a rejection of explanatory dialogue. Though traditional audiences have balked at the "opacity" of Antonioni's films, it is precisely their rendered surface that is so eloquent once one learns to read it. Not despite, but through, their silences the films show a deep concern with the motives, perceptions and vicissitudes of the emotional life. This study covers films not dealt with in any other book on the great director, including Il mistero di Obertwald (1980) and Identificazione di una donna (1982), which have not yet been seen in the U.S. Its coverage of the early documentaries and features, when Antonioni was forging his new and original stylistic "language," is especially full. In a free-ranging analysis of the evolution of Antonioni's style that quotes liberally from Antonioni's own highly articulate writings and interviews, Chatman shows how difficult it was for the filmmaker to liberate his art from the conventional means of rendering narrative, especially dialogue, conventional sound effects, and commentative music. From his first efforts to his triumphant achievements in the tetralogy of L'avventura, L'eclisse, and Il deserto rosso, Antonioni's acute sensibility struggled to achieve the mastery that has won him a secure place in film history. Chatman's study is the only complete account of Antonioni's work available in English. Its novel visual approach to the films while attract not only film scholars but also readers interested in painting and architecture—both important elements of Antonioni's work.
Download or read book The Oldest Living Things in the World written by Rachel Sussman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before, insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way. Her work is both timeless and timely, and spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. It is underscored by an innate environmentalism and driven by Sussman’s relentless curiosity. She begins at “year zero,” and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present. These ancient individuals live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter a century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, to an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. Sussman journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, primeval organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and to Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that’s the last individual of its kind. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planet—and what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world’s most extreme environments, yet climate change and human encroachment have put many of them in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with untimely deaths by human hands. Alongside the photographs, Sussman relays fascinating – and sometimes harrowing – tales of her global adventures tracking down her subjects and shares insights from the scientists who research them. The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of our future.
Download or read book Wallace Stevens written by Wallace Stevens and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. Wallace Stevens was born in Pennsylvania in 1879. Harmonium, published in 1923, became a landmark in modern American poetry with its startling imagery and meditations on art, reality and imagination. It was followed by Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer and The Necessary Angel. Stevens died in 1955.
Download or read book Surface Encounters written by Ron Broglio and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developing a phenomenology of the animal other through contemporary art
Download or read book Factfulness written by Hans Rosling and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates “Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” —Melinda Gates "Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. --- “This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance...Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” Hans Rosling, February 2017.
Download or read book Terrible Things written by David Surface and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen stories in which people reach the limits of their known worlds. Stories where ghosts take many forms, where the monsters are sometimes human, sometimes not. Stories where desperate people find out what they're capable of, and husbands and wives traveling on dark roads discover how lost they truly are. Stories where the discoveries people make come at a cost, and crossing over into the unknown can be both liberating and terrifying.
Download or read book Project Hail Mary written by Andy Weir and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of The Martian, a lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this “propulsive” (Entertainment Weekly), cinematic thriller full of suspense, humor, and fascinating science—in development as a major motion picture starring Ryan Gosling. HUGO AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST BOOKS: Bill Gates, GatesNotes, New York Public Library, Parade, Newsweek, Polygon, Shelf Awareness, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal • “An epic story of redemption, discovery and cool speculative sci-fi.”—USA Today “If you loved The Martian, you’ll go crazy for Weir’s latest.”—The Washington Post Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he? An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could deliver, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian—while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.
Download or read book Touching the Surface written by Kimberly Sabatini and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experience the afterlife in this lyrical, paranormal debut novel that will send your heart soaring. When Elliot finds herself dead for the third time, she knows she must have messed up, big-time. She doesn’t remember how she landed in the afterlife again, but she knows this is her last chance to get things right. Elliot just wants to move on, but first she will be forced to face her past and delve into the painful memories she’d rather keep buried. Memories of people she’s hurt, people she’s betrayed…and people she’s killed. As she pieces together the secrets and mistakes of her past, Elliot must find a way to earn the forgiveness of the person she’s hurt most and reveal the truth about herself to the two boys she loves…even if it means losing them both forever.
Download or read book Wallace Stevens written by Milton J. Bates and published by Berkeley : University of California Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of the life and works of Wallace Stevens, Bates sets out to show how one poet transcended biography by transforming it into fables of identity. He presents a fascinating and persuasive account of Stevens's inner life -- the life he lived through his poetry. He examines the significant biographical influences on the poet's work: his relationship with his parents and wife, the ambience of Harvard College at the turn of the century, the New York avant-garde that flourished during World War I, political pressure from the Left during the '30s, his reading of Nietzsche and genealogical research in the '40s, and his late accommodation with traditional religious belief. Bates makes the poet seem not an isolated figure but part of a rich environment that includes politics, business and aesthetic speculation. ISBN 0-520-04909-8 : $26.95.
Download or read book Surface Detail written by Iain M. Banks and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2010-10-28 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surface Detail is among Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, a breathtaking achievement from a writer whose body of work is without parallel in the modern history of science fiction. It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters. It begins with a murder. And it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself. Lededje Y'breq is one of the Intagliated, her marked body bearing witness to a family shame, her life belonging to a man whose lust for power is without limit. Prepared to risk everything for her freedom, her release, when it comes, is at a price, and to put things right she will need the help of the Culture. Benevolent, enlightened and almost infinitely resourceful though it may be, the Culture can only do so much for any individual. With the assistance of one of its most powerful -- and arguably deranged -- warships, Lededje finds herself heading into a combat zone not even sure which side the Culture is really on. A war -- brutal, far-reaching -- is already raging within the digital realms that store the souls of the dead, and it's about to erupt into reality. It started in the realm of the Real and that is where it will end. It will touch countless lives and affect entire civilizations, but at the center of it all is a young woman whose need for revenge masks another motive altogether. The Culture Series Consider Phlebas The Player of Games Use of Weapons The State of the Art Excession Inversions Look to Windward Matter Surface Detail The Hydrogen Sonata
Download or read book The Classical Weekly written by and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
