Download or read book Thieves of Baghdad written by Matthew Bogdanos and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-09 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thieves of Baghdad is a riveting account of Colonel Matthew Bogdanos and his team's extraordinary efforts to recover over 5,000 priceless antiquities stolen from the Iraqi National Museum after the fall of Baghdad. A mixture of police procedural, treasure hunt, war-time thriller, and cold-eyed assessment of the international black market in stolen art, Thieves of Baghdad also explores the soul of a truly remarkable man: a soldier, a father, and a passionate, dedicated scholar.
Download or read book The Thief of Bagdad written by Achmed Abdullah and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection was published in the 1920s and serves as a classic Muslim fantasy tales in the English language. This book was an evocative piece of work, which has a rich imagination of the Muslim environment and is an important source of inspiration for other Muslim fantasy novels.
Download or read book Chasing Aphrodite written by Jason Felch and published by HMH. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “thrilling, well-researched” account of years of scandal at the prestigious Getty Museum (Ulrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist). In recent years, several of America’s leading art museums have voluntarily given up their finest pieces of classical art to the governments of Italy and Greece. Why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity? The answer lies at the Getty, one of the world’s richest and most troubled museums, and scandalous revelations that it had been buying looted antiquities for decades. Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and candid interviews, these two journalists give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the inner workings of a world-class museum, and tell a story of outlandish characters and bad behavior that could come straight from the pages of a thriller. “In an authoritative account, two reporters who led a Los Angeles Times investigation reveal the details of the Getty Museum’s illicit purchases, from smugglers and fences, of looted Greek and Roman antiquities. . . . The authors offer an excellent recap of the museum’s misdeeds, brimming with tasty details of the scandal that motivated several of America’s leading art museums to voluntarily return to Italy and Greece some 100 classical antiquities worth more than half a billion dollars.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “An astonishing and penetrating look into a veiled world where beauty and art are in constant competition with greed and hypocrisy. This engaging book will cast a fresh light on many of those gleaming objects you see in art museums.” —Jonathan Harr, author of The Lost Painting
Download or read book William Cameron Menzies written by James Curtis and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He was the consummate designer of film architecture on a grand scale, influenced by German expressionism and the work of the great European directors. He was known for his visual flair and timeless innovation, a man who meticulously preplanned the color and design of each film through a series of continuity sketches that made clear camera angles, lighting, and the actors’ positions for each scene, translating dramatic conventions of the stage to the new capabilities of film. Here is the long-awaited book on William Cameron Menzies, Hollywood’s first and greatest production designer, a job title David O. Selznick invented for Menzies’ extraordinary, all-encompassing, Academy Award–winning work on Gone With the Wind (which he effectively co-directed). It was Menzies—winner of the first-ever Academy Award for Art Direction, jointly for The Dove (1927) and Tempest (1928), and who was as well a director (fourteen pictures) and a producer (twelve pictures)—who changed the way movies were (and still are) made, in a career that spanned four decades, from the 1920s through the 1950s. His more than 120 films include Rosita (1923), Things to Come (1936), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Kings Row (1942), Mr. Lucky (1943), The Pride of the Yankees (1943), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Address Unknown (1944), It’s a Wonderful Life (1947), Invaders from Mars (1953), and Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Now, James Curtis, acclaimed film historian and biographer, writes of Menzies’ life and work as the most influential designer in the history of film. His artistry encompassed the large, scenic drawings of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad (1924), which created a new standard for beauty on the screen and whose exotic fairy-tale sets are still regarded as pure genius. (“I saw The Thief of Bagdad when it first came out,” said Orson Welles—he was, at the time, a nine-year-old boy. “I’ll never forget it.”) Curtis writes of Menzies’ design and supervision of John Barrymore’s Beloved Rogue (1927), a film that remains a masterpiece of craft and synthesis, one of the most distinctive pictures to emerge from Hollywood’s waning days of silent films, and of his extraordinary, opulent appointments for Gone With the Wind (1939). It was Menzies who defined and solidified the role of art director as having overall control of the look of the motion picture, collaborating with producers like David O. Selznick and Samuel Goldwyn; with directors such as D. W. Griffith, Raoul Walsh, Alfred Hitchcock, Lewis Milestone, and Frank Capra. And with actors as varied as Ingrid Bergman, W. C. Fields, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, John Barrymore, Barbara Stanwyck, Ronald Reagan, Gary Cooper, Vivien Leigh, Carole Lombard, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, and David Niven. Interviewing colleagues, actors, directors, friends, and family, and with full access to the William Cameron Menzies family collection of original artwork, correspondence, scrapbooks, and unpublished writing, Curtis brilliantly gives us the path-finding work of the movies’ most daring and dynamic production designer: his evolution as artist, art director, production designer, and director. Here is a portrait of a man in his time that makes clear how the movies were forever transformed by his startling, visionary work. (With 16 pages of color illustrations, and black-and-white photographs throughout.)
Download or read book Korda written by Charles Drazin and published by Sidgwick & Jackson Limited. This book was released on 2002 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander Kordas own story is as extraordinary as any film hes ever made, taking him from revolutionary Hungary to Hollywood during the advent of sound, and London in the 30s where he set up a film empire. A friend of Churchill, he worked for British Intelligence and was knighted for his war effort. In his new book, Charles Drazin paints a vivid picture of this remarkable man.
Download or read book IraqiGirl Diary of a Teenage Girl in Iraq written by IraqiGirl and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I feel that I have been sleeping all my life and I have woken up and opened my eyes to the world. A beautiful world! But impossible to live in. These are the words of fifteen-year-old Hadiya, blogging from the city of Mosul, Iraq, to let the world know what life is really like as the military occupation of her country unfolds. In many ways, her life is familiar. She worries about exams and enjoys watching Friends during the rare hours that the electricity in her neighborhood is running. But the horrors of war surround her everywhere—weeklong curfews, relatives killed, and friends whose families are forced to flee their homes. With black humor and unflinching honesty, Hadiya shares the painful stories of lives changed forever. “Let’s go back,” she writes, “to my un-normal life.” With her intimate reflections on family, friendship, and community, IraqiGirl also allows us to witness the determination of one girl not only to survive, but to create, amidst the devastation of war, a future worth living for. "Hadiya's authentically teenage voice, emotional struggles and concerns make her story all the more resonant." —Publishers Weekly “Despite all the news coverage about the war in Iraq, very little is reported about how it affects the daily lives of ordinary citizens. A highschooler in the city of Mosul fills in the gap with this compilation of her blog posts about living under U.S. occupation. She writes in English because she wants to reach Americans, and in stark specifics, she records the terrifying dangers of car bombs on her street and American warplanes overhead, as well as her everyday struggles to concentrate on homework when there is no water and electricity at home. Her tone is balanced: she does not hate Americans, and although she never supported Saddam Hussein, she wonders why he was executed... Readers will appreciate the details about family, friends, school, and reading Harry Potter, as well as the ever-present big issues for which there are no simple answers." —Hazel Rochman, Booklist “IraqiGirl has poured reflections of her daily life into her blog, reaching all over the cyber-world from her home in northern Iraq. She writes about the universals of teen life—school, family, TV, food, Harry Potter—but always against the background of sudden explosions, outbursts of gunfire, carbombs, death.… [A]n important addition to multicultural literature.” —Elsa Marston, author of Santa Claus in Baghdad and Other Stories About Teens in the Arab World “A book as relevant to adults as teenagers and children. Hadiya’s clear, simple language conveys the feelings of a teenager, offering a glimpse into the daily life of a professional middle-class Iraqi family in an ancient-modern city subjected to a brutal occupation.” —Haifa Zangana, author of City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance
Download or read book The Bohemians written by Jasmin Darznik and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling novel of one of America’s most celebrated photographers, Dorothea Lange, exploring the wild years in San Francisco that awakened her career-defining grit, compassion, and daring. “Jasmin Darznik expertly delivers an intriguing glimpse into the woman behind those unforgettable photographs of the Great Depression, and their impact on humanity.”—Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things In this novel of the glittering and gritty Jazz Age, a young aspiring photographer named Dorothea Lange arrives in San Francisco in 1918. As a newcomer—and naïve one at that—Dorothea is grateful for the fast friendship of Caroline Lee, a vivacious, straight-talking Chinese American with a complicated past, who introduces Dorothea to Monkey Block, an artists’ colony and the bohemian heart of the city. Dazzled by Caroline and her friends, Dorothea is catapulted into a heady new world of freedom, art, and politics. She also finds herself falling in love with the brilliant but troubled painter Maynard Dixon. As Dorothea sheds her innocence, her purpose is awakened and she grows into the artist whose iconic Depression-era “Migrant Mother” photograph broke the hearts and opened the eyes of a nation. A vivid and absorbing portrait of the past, The Bohemians captures a cast of unforgettable characters, including Frida Kahlo, Ansel Adams, and D. H. Lawrence. But moreover, it shows how the gift of friendship and the possibility of self-invention persist against the ferocious pull of history.
Download or read book The Arabian Nights Reader written by Ulrich Marzolph and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Arabian Nights commands a place in world literature unrivaled by any other fictional work of "Oriental" provenance. Bringing together Indian, Iranian, and Arabic tradition, this collection of tales became popular in the Western world during the eighteenth century and has since exerted a profound influence on theater, opera, music, painting, architecture, and literature. The Arabian Nights Reader offers an authoritative guide to the research inspired by this rich and intricate work. Through a selection of sixteen influential and currently relevant essays, culled from decades of scholarship, this volume encompasses the most salient research topics to date, from the Nights' early history to interpretations of such famous characters as Sheherazade. While serious research on the Nights began early in the nineteenth century, some of the most puzzling aspects of the collection's complex history and character were solved only quite recently. This volume's topics reflect the makings of a transnational narrative: evidence of a ninth-century version of the Nights, the work's circulation among booksellers in twelfth-century Cairo, the establishment of a "canonical" text, the sources used by the French translator who introduced the Nights to the West and the dating of this French translation, the influence of Greek literature on the Nights, the genre of romance, the relationship between narration and survival within the plots, reception of the Nights from the nineteenth century onward, interpretations of single stories from the collection, the universal nature of the sexual politics surrounding Sheherazade, and the repercussion of the Nights in modern Arabic literature. As this collection demonstrates, the Arabian Nights helped shape Western perceptions of the "Orient" as the quintessential "Other" while serving to inspire Western creativity. The research presented here not only deepens our insight into this great work but also heightens our awareness of the powerful communal forces of transnational narrative.
Download or read book Moonshadow written by Jasmine Sabu and published by UBASFILM, Limited. This book was released on 1996-12-12 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book War Porn written by Roy Scranton and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the best and most disturbing war novels in years." —The Wall Street Journal “War porn,” n. Videos, images, and narratives featuring graphic violence, often brought back from combat zones, viewed voyeuristically or for emotional gratification. Such media are often presented and circulated without context, though they may be used as evidence of war crimes. War porn is also, in Roy Scranton’s searing debut novel, a metaphor for the experience of war in the age of the War on Terror, the fracturing and fragmentation of perspective, time, and self that afflicts soldiers and civilians alike, the global networks and face-to-face moments that suture our fragmented lives together. In War Porn three lives fit inside one another like nesting dolls: a restless young woman at an end-of-summer barbecue in Utah; an American soldier in occupied Baghdad; and Qasim al-Zabadi, an Iraqi math professor, who faces the US invasion of his country with fear, denial, and perseverance. As War Porn cuts from America to Iraq and back again, as home and hell merge, we come to see America through the eyes of the occupied, even as we see Qasim become a prisoner of the occupation. Through the looking glass of War Porn, Scranton reveals the fragile humanity that connects Americans and Iraqis, torturers and the tortured, victors and their victims.
Download or read book The First King of Hollywood written by Tracey Goessel and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first truly definitive biography of Douglas Fairbanks, the greatest leading man of the silent film era"--
Download or read book Special Effects written by Richard Rickitt and published by Watson-Guptill Publications. This book was released on 2000 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history and evolution of motion picture special effects from silent films' smoke and mirrors to computer-assisted effects, and dissects such components as optical illusions, models, animation, and makeup and sound effects.
Download or read book A Life in Movies written by Michael Powell and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2000 with total page 723 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Much, much more than the reminiscences of a film director. It's a rich, beautifully detailed history of a time, a place, and a world gone by--the British film industry from the 1920s through the late 1940s, in which every remembrance . . . is filtered through [Powell's] poetic genius . . . as absorbing as any novel".--Martin Scorsese. 30 photos.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film written by R. G. Young and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2000 with total page 1028 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty-five years in the making, and destined to be the last word in fanta-film references! This incredible 1,017-page resource provides vital credits on over 9,000 films (1896-1999) of horror, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, heavy melodrama, and film noir. Comprehensive cast lists include: directors, writers, cinematographers, and composers. Also includes plot synopses, critiques, re-title/translation information, running times, photographs, and several cross-referenced indexes (by artist, year, song, etc.). Paperback.
Download or read book Pilgrimage from Darkness Nuremburg to Jerusalem written by and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: !-- Oskar Eder was born near Nuremberg in 1925. His youth was influenced by Germany's xenophobic patriotism and Nazi politics. Suffering teenage angst and falling under the sway of the Jungvolk, the younger branch of the Hitler Youth, he was suspicious of his socialist parents' loyalties. He admired older, tougher boys and went on to become a member of the Luftwaffe. During pilot training he discovered that his sheltered small-town life and Nazi propaganda had hidden the fact that something was fundamentally wrong with Germany. After the war he acquired a law degree and began practicing law but was spiritually destitute. Inspired by the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and by Indian spiritualism, he began a search for his own spirit. He delved into the philosophies of the Middle East and Asia, first as a Sufi student and then among yogic Hindus, Sikhs, and Ahmadiyyan Muslims. In his quest he found his way to the gates of Jerusalem and joined a circle that included Jerusalem's foremost thinkers and philosophers. In Israel he worked the land on a kibbutz, studied Hebrew, read the Bible, and came face to face both with his own guilt and with German Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. This haunting biography recounts how he found a personal spirituality that eased the pain of his past. After the struggle to assimilate himself with Jewish people and adapt to their culture, he converted to Judaism and took a new name, Asher. Today, welcomed into a society that had many reasons to reject him, he is married to an Israeli Holocaust survivor whom he met at an international peace conference. They live as observant Jews in Jerusalem. David E. Feldman lives in Long Beach, New York.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Fantasy written by John Clute and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1999-03-15 with total page 1110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like its companion volume, "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction", this massive reference of 4,000 entries covers all aspects of fantasy, from literature to art.
Download or read book The Enchanted Screen written by Jack Zipes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-01-27 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films offers readers a long overdue, comprehensive look at the rich history of fairy tales and their influence on film, complete with the inclusion of an extensive filmography compiled by the author. With this book, Jack Zipes not only looks at the extensive, illustrious life of fairy tales and cinema, but he also reminds us that, decades before Walt Disney made his mark on the genre, fairy tales were central to the birth of cinema as a medium, as they offered cheap, copyright-free material that could easily engage audiences not only though their familiarity but also through their dazzling special effects. Since the story of fairy tales on film stretches far beyond Disney, this book, therefore, discusses a broad range of films silent, English and non-English, animation, live-action, puppetry, woodcut, montage (Jim Henson), cartoon, and digital. Zipes, thus, gives his readers an in depth look into the special relationship between fairy tales and cinema, and guides us through this vast array of films by tracing the adaptations of major fairy tales like "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," "Snow White," "Peter Pan," and many more, from their earliest cinematic appearances to today. Full of insight into some of our most beloved films and stories, and boldly illustrated with numerous film stills, The Enchanted Screen, is essential reading for film buffs and fans of the fairy tale alike.
