![]() ![]() More than 300 illustrations trace the history of Western art as it relates, in the broadest sense, to the topic of beauty. Along the way, the text examines the intersection of standards of beauty with Christian belief, notions of the Sublime, the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, and bourgeois culture. ![]() ![]() This survey ranges over such themes as the mathematics of ideal proportions, the problem of representing ugliness, the fascination of the exotic and art for art's sake. ![]() History of Beauty is really about the history of philosophical and perceptual notions of perfection and how they have been applied to ideas and objects, as well as to the human body. In History of Beauty, renowned author Umberto Eco sets out to demonstrate how every historical era has had its own ideas about eye-appeal. Storia della bellezza = History of Beauty = On Beauty, 2nd ed, 2005, Umberto Ecoīeauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it also has a lot to do with the beholder's cultural standards. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Later essays recount Sedaris’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, walking New York’s empty streets and wondering if his livelihood-reading works-in-progress to audiences all over the country-is gone for good. The collection progresses somewhat chronologically, beginning with essays that look back to Sedaris’ childhood and to his young adult years when he was writing plays with his sister Amy in New York City. One of the collection’s delights is a commencement address delivered at Oberlin College that skates along on the surface with funny throwaway lines and ridiculousness while offering slyly sensible life advice underneath. This essay, like several others here, also offers deft, sharp commentary on masculinity. It’s a perfect David Sedaris essay: one that lures you in with funny family anecdotes and self-deprecation, gives a sideways look at some aspect of society, then ends with an unexpected emotional punch. In the book’s opening essay, “Active Shooter,” Sedaris and his sister Lisa visit a firing range in North Carolina, which offers him a chance to plunge into the oddities of gun culture as they learn to shoot pistols. David Sedaris’ latest essay collection, Happy-Go-Lucky, finds the author in late midlife, mining his life, the lives of his family-including his longtime boyfriend, Hugh, his siblings and his 98-year-old dad-and their surroundings for comedic stories. ![]() ![]() He had never seen anything like the weapons room at the Los Angeles Institute before. Kit had only recently found out what a flail was, and now there was a rack of them hanging over his head, shiny and sharp and deadly. But success may come with a price he and Emma cannot even imagine, one that will have repercussions for everyone and everything they hold dear. Spurred on by a dark bargain with the Seelie Queen, Emma her best friend, Cristina and Mark and Julian Blackthorn embark on a journey into the Courts of Faerie, where glittering revels hide bloody danger and no promise can be trusted.Īs dangers close in, Julian devises a risky new scheme that depends on the cooperation of an unpredictable enemy. ![]() Their only hope is the Black Volume of the Dead, a spell book of terrible power. But how can she when the Blackthorn family is threatened by enemies on all sides? ![]() ![]() Lord of Shadows is a Shadowhunters novel.Įmma Carstairs has just learned that the love she shares with her warrior partner and parabatai, Julian Blackthorn, isn’t just forbidden-it could destroy them both. ![]() Sunny Los Angeles can be a dark place indeed in Cassandra Clare’s Lord of Shadows, the bestselling sequel to Lady Midnight. A #1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller ![]() ![]() ![]() The deeper we move in our own being, the closer we come to Christ. Christ’s soul and our soul are like an everlasting knot. to portray the strands of time and eternity intertwined, of the human and the creaturely inseparably interrelated, of the one and the many forever married. And any true well-being in our lives will be found not in isolation but in relation. What Julian hears is that “we are all one.” We have come from God as one, and to God we shall return as one. ![]() Grace is given, she says, “to bring nature back to that blessed point from which it came, namely God.” It is given that we may hear again the deepest sounds within us. It is given to free us from the unnaturalness of what we have become and done to one another and to the earth. Grace is given to save our nature, not to save us from our nature. So she speaks of “smelling” God, of “swallowing” God in the waters and juices of the earth, of “feeling” God in the human body and the body of creation. God is “nature’s substance,” the very essence of life. So it is to the very essence of our being that we look for God. And we will know the One from whom we have come only to the extent that we know ourselves. We are not simply made by God we are made “of God.” So we encounter the energy of God in our true depths. “God is our mother as truly as God is our father,” she says. She says that Christ is the one who connects us to the “great root” of our being. John Philip Newell’s beautiful summary of Julian’s visions: ![]() ![]() ![]() I “happened” to meet Mike at the New Word Alive conference in Wales in 2011. As you could guess from this post’s title, that book was Delighting in the Trinity by my friend, Mike Reeves. But recently I was surprised at the effect a very short book (135 pages!) could have on me. There have been many other books that have helped shape and inform my relationship with God. It was only as I read Desiring God through a second time that I began to understand Christ died on the cross not only to endure God’s wrath in my place but to give me endless joy in him. ![]() I couldn’t believe that what satisfied me best and glorified God most could be the same thing. I thought that my actions only pleased God as they were displeasing to me. In fact, as a recovering legalist, the book didn’t make sense to me. In the mid-90s I read Desiring God by John Piper for the first time. As I read through it, my eyes were opened to the necessity of humility in the Christian life and the profound effect of expository preaching. In the late 70s my wife, Julie, gave me Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Studies in the Sermon on the Mount for my birthday. ![]() Through the years I’ve been grateful for the many books God has used outside of Scripture to expand and deepen my relationship with him. By Bob Kauflin on Apin -Books, -Worship and God, -Worship and the Trinity, -WorshipGod Conferences ![]() ![]() ![]() And that the maddest edges are increasingly defining relatively ordinary people. Ronson not only uncovers the mystery of the hoax, but also realizes, to his dismay, that the individuals at the helm of the lunacy industry are sometimes just as insane as those they study, with their own drives and obsessions. He spends time with a death-squad leader incarcerated in Coxsackie, New York, for mortgage fraud a legendary CEO whose psychopathy has been talked about in the news and a patient in a criminally insane asylum who insists he's sane and surely not a psychopath. There are currently 374 known mental disorders. Books Read and Share (3600 BC 500 AD) Ancient History & Civilisation (500 1500). As a result, Ronson approaches the corridors of power, armed with his new psychopath-spotting powers. THE MAN WHO FAKED MADNESS - The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry - by Jon Ronson. Ronson is taught how to recognize high-flying persons by looking for little telltale verbal and nonverbal cues by an influential psychologist who believes many successful CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths. Jon Ronson's investigation into a possible hoax perpetrated on the world's finest neurologists leads him unintentionally into the lunacy industry. The Psychopath Test is an enthralling voyage inside the minds of psychopaths. A bestselling journalist investigates psychopaths and the business of doctors, scientists, and everyone else who studies them in this wild adventure. ![]() ![]() ![]() As an aspiring artist, I can appreciate the distinctive motif and line characteristics that was Mr. ![]() Hatched and cross-hatched in such a way as to seem like a simple sketch, until you take a closer look and realise that each and every little line was deliberately placed.It's intricate, to say the least. The art was instantly recognizable: dark, moody, and drawn with a line quality that cannot be ignored. Gorey until I was a bit older, when i saw a copy of "the Ghastlycrumb Tinies" at a local bookstore. However, it didn't actually occur to me to seek out the work of Mr. ![]() Gorey when i was 7 years old he illustrated the covers and frontispieces of a seires of books by John Bellairs (an author who i enjoyed reading at the time). Work sought after by fans of his uniquely macabri illustrative style. Gorey had had time to leave behind an impressive body of work. Gorey's demise was unexpected and disenheartening when I finally learned of it on Tuesday, April 18. My three favorites are: The Doubtful Guest, The Beastly Baby and The Willowdale Handcar. I've been collecting reprints of his books ever since. Upon opening a newly arrived box of books, I found a copy of Edward Gorey's Amphigorey. Image by Michael Romanos [ I first discovered Gorey's works fifteen years ago while working in a bookshop in Washington, DC. Edward Gorey (1925-2000) Memorial Page at ![]() ![]() Abstract concepts are introduced without warning and rarely defined to any satisfactory degree, while fascinating objects receive only the briefest descriptions, if any at all. Okorafor draws from her rich knowledge of cultural warfare to craft nuanced commentary on how we mock "alien" peoples at our own peril however, the plotting and characterization suffer from lack of authorial attention. Midway through the voyage to the university, her ship is attacked without warning by Meduse warriors, and Binti must draw upon her unique strengths to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Binti is a teenage girl from Earth, a member of the marginalized and disrespected Himba culture, and the first of her people to attend the prestigious Oomza University, located on a distant planet and home to the galaxy's finest academic minds. ![]() ![]() ![]() Okorafor's sci-fi novella tackles sprawling ideas with little satisfactory resolution. ![]() ![]() I may have other interests: I am “interested”, for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. ![]() I can bring you no reports from any other front. Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. ![]() I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions – with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating – but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space. In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. ![]() Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() More surprises and delights, gods and demons, and laughs and tears await in this immensely satisfying conclusion to the wild ride that began with the lighting of a lamp. The most unexpected answer will come from a most unexpected place. Their quest to get in will have them calling on old friends, meeting new allies, and facing fearsome trials, like.performing in a rock concert? When the moment of confrontation finally arrives, it's up to Aru to decide who deserves immortality, the devas or the asuras. ![]() ![]() But how can Aru, Mini, and Brynne hope to defeat him without their celestial weapons? The Sleeper and his army are already plundering the labyrinth, and the sisters can't even enter. *Chokshi spins a fantastical narrative that seamlessly intertwines Hindu cosmology and folklore, feminism, and witty dialogue for an uproarious novel.-Kirkus Reviews (starred review of Aru Shah and the End of Time) The Pandavas only have until the next full moon to stop the Sleeper from gaining access to the nectar of immortality, which will grant him infinite power. Will the Sleeper gain immortality or be stopped once and for all? Best-selling author Rick Riordan presents the breathtaking conclusion to Roshani Chokshi's New York Times best-selling Pandava quintet. ![]() |