The Beauty and the Terror

Author: Catherine Fletcher
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190908505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
A new account of the birth of the West through its birthplace--Renaissance Italy The period between 1492--resonant for a number of reasons--and 1571, when the Ottoman navy was defeated in the Battle of Lepanto, embraces what we know as the Renaissance, one of the most dynamic and creatively explosive epochs in world history. Here is the period that gave rise to so many great artists and figures, and which by its connection to its classical heritage enabled a redefinition, even reinvention, of human potential. It was a moment both of violent struggle and great achievement, of Michelangelo and da Vinci as well as the Borgias and Machiavelli. At the hub of this cultural and intellectual ferment was Italy. The Beauty and the Terror offers a vibrant history of Renaissance Italy and its crucial role in the emergence of the Western world. Drawing on a rich range of sources--letters, interrogation records, maps, artworks, and inventories--Catherine Fletcher explores both the explosion of artistic expression and years of bloody conflict between Spain and France, between Catholic and Protestant, between Christian and Muslim; in doing so, she presents a new way of witnessing the birth of the West.

The Next Great Migration

Author: Sonia Shah
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526629216
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
'A dazzlingly original picture of our relentlessly mobile species' NAOMI KLEIN 'Fascinating . . . Likely to prove prophetic in the coming months and years' OBSERVER 'A dazzling tour through 300 years of scientific history' PROSPECT 'A hugely entertaining, life-affirming and hopeful hymn to the glorious adaptability of life on earth' SCOTSMAN __________________ We are surrounded by stories of people on the move. Wild species, too, are escaping warming seas and desiccated lands in a mass exodus. Politicians and the media present this upheaval of migration patterns as unprecedented, blaming it for the spread of disease and conflict, and spreading anxiety across the world as a result. But the science and history of migration in animals, plants, and humans tell a different story. Far from being a disruptive behaviour, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing. Climate changes triggered the first human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea levels allowed our passage across the Bering Sea. Unhampered by borders, migration allowed our ancestors to people the planet, into the highest reaches of the Himalayan Mountains and the most remote islands of the Pacific, disseminating the biological, cultural and social diversity that ecosystems and societies depend upon. In other words, migration is not the crisis – it is the solution. __________________ Tracking the history of misinformation from the 18th century through to today's anti-immigration policies, The Next Great Migration makes the case for a future in which migration is not a source of fear, but of hope.

Bodies

Author: Susie Orbach
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1429918942
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Esteemed Psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach diagnoses the crisis in our relationship to our bodies and points the way toward a process of healing. Throughout the Western world, people have come to believe that general dissatisfaction can be relieved by some change in their bodies. Here Susie Orbach explains the origins of this condition, and examines its implications for all of us. Challenging the Freudian view that bodily disorders originate and progress in the mind, Orbach argues that we should look at self-mutilation, obesity, anorexia, and plastic surgery on their own terms, through a reading of the body itself. Incorporating the latest research from neuropsychology, as well as case studies from her own practice, she traces many of these fixations back to the relationship between mothers and babies, to anxieties that are transferred unconsciously, at a very deep level, between the two. Orbach reveals how vulnerable our bodies are, how susceptible to every kind of negative stimulus--from a nursing infant sensing a mother's discomfort to a grown man or woman feeling inadequate because of a model on a billboard. That vulnerability makes the stakes right now tremendously high. In the past several decades, a globalized media has overwhelmed us with images of an idealized, westernized body, and conditioned us to see any exception to that ideal as a problem. The body has become an object, a site of production and commerce in and of itself. Instead of our bodies making things, we now make our bodies. Susie Orbach reveals the true dimensions of the crisis, and points the way toward healing and acceptance.

The Beginning of Terror

Author: David Kleinbard
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814748538
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
The insights here are of such depth, and contain such beauty in them, that time and again the reader must pause for breath. At last Rilke has met a critic whose insight, courage, and humanity are worthy of his life and work." —Leslie Epstein Director, Graduate Creative Writing Program, Boston University "[A] well-reasoned, fairly fascinating, and illuminating study which soundly and convincingly applies Freudian and particularly post-Freudian insights into the self, to Rilke's life and work, in a way which enlightens us considerably as to the relationship between life and work in original ways. Kleinbard takes off where Hugo Simenauer's monumental psycho- biography of Rilke (1953) left off. . . . He succeeds in giving us a psychic portrait of the poet which is more illuminating and which . . . does greater justice to its subject than any of his predecessors.. . . . Any reader with strong interest in Rilke would certainly welcome the availability of this study." —Walter H. Sokel,Commonwealth Professor of German and English Literatures,University of Virginia. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to bear, and we wonder at it so because it calmly disdainsto destroy us." —Rilke Beginning with Rilke's 1910 novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The Beginning of Terror examines the ways in which the poet mastered the illness that is so frightening and crippling in Malte and made the illness a resource for his art. Kleinbard goes on to explore Rilke's poetry, letters, and non-fiction prose, his childhood and marriage, and the relationship between illness and genius in the poet and his work, a subject to which Rilke returned time and again. This psychoanalytic study also defines the complex connections between Malte's and Rilke's fantasies of mental and physical fragmentation, and the poet's response to Rodin's disintegrative and re-integrative sculpture during the writing of The Notebooks and New Poems. One point of departure is the poet's sense of the origins of his illness in his childhood and, particularly, in his mother's blind, narcissistic self- absorption and his father's emotional constriction and mental limitations. Kleinbard examines the poet's struggle to purge himself of his deeply felt identification with his mother, even as he fulfilled her hopes that he become a major poet. The book also contains chapters on Rilke's relationships with Lou Andreas Salom and Aguste Rodin, who served as parental surrogates for Rilke. A psychological portrait of the early twentieth-century German poet, The Beginning of Terror explores Rilke's poetry, letters, non-fiction prose, his childhood and marriage. David Kleinbard focuses on the relationship between illness and genius in the poet and his work, a subject to which Rilke returned time and again.

The Terror

Author: Dan Simmons
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316003883
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 798

Book Description
The "masterfully chilling" novel that inspired the hit AMC series (Entertainment Weekly). The men on board the HMS Terror — part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage — are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in. “The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years.” —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe

The Terror of Constantinople (Death of Rome Saga Book Two)

Author: Richard Blake
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 184894828X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 542

Book Description
If you loved Gladiator and Spartacus, you'll love the second book in the DEATH OF ROME SAGA. 610 AD. Invaded by Persians and barbarians, the Byzantine Empire is tearing itself apart in civil war. Phocas, the maniacally bloodthirsty Emperor, holds Constantinople by a reign of terror. The uninvaded provinces are turning one at a time to the usurper, Heraclius. Just as the battle for the Empire approaches its climax, Aelric of England turns up in Constantinople. Blackmailed by the Papacy to leave off his career of lechery and market-rigging in Rome, he thinks his job is to gather texts for a semi-comprehensible dispute over the Nature of Christ. Only gradually does he realise he is a pawn in a much larger game.

The Terror of History

Author: Teofilo F. Ruiz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400839424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Book Description
A reflection on the diverse ways Western humanity has attempted to escape its frightening history This book reflects on Western humanity's efforts to escape from history and its terrors—from the existential condition and natural disasters to the endless succession of wars and other man-made catastrophes. Drawing on historical episodes ranging from antiquity to the recent past, and combining them with literary examples and personal reflections, Teofilo Ruiz explores the embrace of religious experiences, the pursuit of worldly success and pleasures, and the quest for beauty and knowledge as three primary responses to the individual and collective nightmares of history. The result is a profound meditation on how men and women in Western society sought (and still seek) to make meaning of the world and its disturbing history. In chapters that range widely across Western history and culture, The Terror of History takes up religion, the material world, and the world of art and knowledge. "Religion and the World to Come" examines orthodox and heterodox forms of spirituality, apocalyptic movements, mysticism, supernatural beliefs, and many forms of esotericism, including magic, alchemy, astrology, and witchcraft. "The World of Matter and the Senses" considers material riches, festivals and carnivals, sports, sex, and utopian communities. Finally, "The Lure of Beauty and Knowledge" looks at cultural productions of all sorts, from art to scholarship. Combining astonishing historical breadth with a personal and accessible narrative style, The Terror of History is a moving testimony to the incredibly diverse ways humans have sought to cope with their frightening history.

Beauty's Nothing

Author: Nadav Kander
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Nadav Kander creates unfailingly beautiful photographs with the formal precision of a master photographer. But beauty is the beguiling lure for Kander's disconcerting explorations into representation through genre as diverse as portraiture, landscape, and still life. He employs the seductive charm of aestheticism to expose our inconsistent response to the female nude, to probe questions of morality and desire in a series on Cuban prostitutes, and to manifest the fragile imbalances of the American landscape with its endlessly repeating artifice at the edge of vast emptiness. The book is composed of chapters of images, interleaved with short stories, poems, and essays, each responding to a particular image or section. Each sequence elaborates a narrative, at times driven by the commissioned texts and often arising from the friction between two dissociated images. Nadav Kander was born in Israel in 1961 and was raised in South Africa. In 1982 he moved to London, where in 1986 he set up his first studio. Kander has received international critical acclaim for his photography and is one of the most sought-after photographers working today. In the preceding few years, Kander has shot for numerous magazines and commercial accounts, including Nova, Visionaire, Dazed & Confused, Raygun, Rolling Stone, Zoom, the London Sunday Times, Sports Illustrated, Graphis, and others. He has exhibited in museums and galleries such as the Saatchi Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Photographic Society, and the Tate Museum. This book, his first, is accompanied by an international touring exhibition.

To Quell the Terror: The Mystery of the Vocation of the Sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne Guillotined July 17, 1794

Author: William Bush
Publisher: ICS Publications
ISBN: 1939272165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
This book recounts the dramatic true story of the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, martyred during the French Revolution's "Great Terror," and known to the world through their fictional representation in Gertrud von Le Fort's Song at the Scaffold and Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites. At the height of the French Revolution's "Great Terror," a community of sixteen Carmelite nuns from Compiègne offered their lives to restore peace to the church and to France. Ten days after their deaths by the guillotine, Robespierre fell, and with his execution on the same scaffold the Reign of Terror effectively ended. Had God thus accepted and used the Carmelites' generous self-gift? Through Gertrud von Le Fort's modern novella, Song at the Scaffold, and Francis Poulenc's famed opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites, (with its libretto by Georges Bernanos), modern audiences around the world have become captivated by the mysterious destiny of these Compiègne martyrs, Blessed Teresa of St. Augustine and her companions. Now, for the first time in English, William Bush explores at length the facts behind the fictional representations, and reflects on their spiritual significance. Based on years of research, this book recounts in lively detail virtually all that is known of the life and background of each of the martyrs, as well as the troubled times in which they lived. The Compiègne Carmelites, sustained by their remarkable prioress, emerge as distinct individuals, struggling as Christians to understand and respond to an awesome calling, relying not on their own strength but on the mercy of God and the guiding hand of Providence. The book includes an index and 15 photos.

Texts of Terror

Author: Phyllis Trible
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780334029007
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
In this book, Phyllis Trible examines four Old Testament narratives of suffering in ancient Israel: Hagar, Tamar, an unnamed concubine and the daughter of Jephthah. These stories are for Trible the "substance of life", which may imspire new beginnings and by interpreting these stories of outrage and suffering on behalf of their female victims, the author recalls a past that is all to embodied in the present, and prays that these terrors shall not come to pass again. "Texts of Terror" is perhaps Trible's most readable book, that brings biblical scholarship within the grasp of the non-specialist. These "sad stories" about women in the Old Testament prompt much refelction on contemporary misuse of the Bible, and therefore have considerable relevance today.