Cloud Atlas (20th Anniversary Edition)

Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307373576
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 541

Book Description
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction Featuring a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

Impermanent Ways

Author: Jeffery Grayer
Publisher: Noodle Books
ISBN: 9781906419318
Category : Railroads
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
As with many other counties, the railway network of Hampshire has diminished to a shadow of its former size over the last two generations. It was not simply the effects of the famous Beeching report that rendered the various routes extinct, but also the actions of the operators themselves. They had already begun to take measures to reduce the number of lines operating, with closures taking place in almost every decade from the 1910s through to the 1970s. As a result of these changes, Hampshire now boasts an impressive network of closed lines, most of which are covered within this book, with stunning vistas capturing their final days as moribund railways. This new album takes readers on a lovely journey back to a time within living memory when the last vestiges of a larger network were still in existence. Compiled by well-known railway historian Jeffery Grayer, this book will be essential reading for all enthusiasts.

Artbibliographies Modern

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 784

Book Description

The Long Goodbye

Author: Meghan O'Rourke
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101486554
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
"Anguished, beautifully written... The Long Goodbye is an elegiac depiction of drama as old as life." -- The New York Times Book Review From one of America's foremost young literary voices, a transcendent portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love. What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O'Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief-its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies-an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond. O'Rourke's story is one of a life gone off the rails, of how watching her mother's illness-and separating from her husband-left her fundamentally altered. But it is also one of resilience, as she observes her family persevere even in the face of immeasurable loss. With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye conveys the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life, and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Effortlessly blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, it is not only an exceptional memoir, but a necessary one.

Slave Wales

Author: Chris Evans
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1783161205
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Book Description
Atlantic slavery does not loom large in the traditional telling of Welsh history. Yet Wales, like many regions of Europe, was deeply affected by the forced migration of captive Africans. Welsh commodities, like copper and brass made in Swansea, were used to purchase slaves on the African coast and some Welsh products, such as woollens from Montgomeryshire, were an important feature of plantation life in the West Indies. In turn, the profits of plantation agriculture flowed back into Wales, to be invested in new industries or to be lavished on country mansions. This book looks at Slave Wales between 1650 and 1850, bringing the most up-to-date scholarship on Atlantic slavery to bear on the Welsh experience. New research by Chris Evans casts light on previously unknown episodes, such as Welsh involvement with slave-based copper mining in nineteenth-century Cuba, and illuminates in new and disturbing ways familiar features of Welsh history - like the woollen industry - that have previously unsuspected 'slave dimensions'. Many Welsh people turned against slavery in the late eighteenth century, but Welsh abolitionism was never a particularly powerful force. Indeed, Chris Evans demonstrates that Welsh participation the slave Atlantic lasted well beyond the abolition of Britain's slave trade in 1807 and the ending of slavery in Britain's Caribbean empire in 1834.

Sixpence House

Author: Paul Collins
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
ISBN: 9781582344041
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside-to move, in fact, to the village of Hay-on-Wye, the "Town of Books" that boasts fifteen hundred inhabitants-and forty bookstores. Taking readers into a secluded sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding us through the creation of the author's own first book, Sixpence House becomes a heartfelt and often hilarious meditation on what books mean to us.

The Mind-body Problem

Author: Katha Pollitt
Publisher: Random House Incorporated
ISBN: 1400063337
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 82

Book Description
The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Antarctic Traveller presents a new volume of poetic works that include pieces inspired by the Bible and evoke such subjects as the joys and pain of parenthood, the private side of a literary life, and the complexities of love and marriage.

Blitzed!

Author: Steve Strange
Publisher: Orion Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780752847207
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
Steve Strange was head boy of the New Romantic movement. He ran the best clubs in London: Billy's, Blitz and Camden Palace, which defined the glitzy banality of the era; places where Spandau Ballet and Boy George came to life. He was the glamourpuss of glamourpusses, the campest boy in town. He formed, with Midge Ure, Visage, which became one of the biggest bands of the time, selling millions of records and gaining tabloid notoriety. This work recounts the rise and fall of the Blitz Kid himself and recounts from the epicentre the excess of the early eighties: the clubs, the people, the music, the money, his time spent recovering in Ibiza and India, the subsequent steady decline into cocaine and heroin abuse and his rise back to sanity. Steve recounts how he lost all his possessions in a house fire and days later learned of the death of his close friend Michael Hutchence. Within a couple of years Paula Yates had also committed suicide and Strange had ended up back in South Wales, homeless, mentally unstable and facing a court order for shoplifting. Somehow he managed to pull himself back from the brink.

A Century of Innovation

Author: 3M Company
Publisher: 3m Company
ISBN:
Category : 3M Company
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
A compilation of 3M voices, memories, facts and experiences from the company's first 100 years.

Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work

Author: Jonathan James Graham Alexander
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300060737
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
Who were the medieval illuminators? How were their hand-produced books illustrated and decorated? In this beautiful book Jonathan Alexander presents a survey of manuscript illumination throughout Europe from the fourth to the sixteenth century. He discusses the social and historical context of the illuminators' lives, considers their methods of work, and presents a series of case studies to show the range and nature of the visual sources and the ways in which they were adapted, copied, or created anew. Alexander explains that in the early period, Christian monasteries and churches were the main centers for the copying of manuscripts, and so the majority of illuminators were monks working in and for their own monasteries. From the eleventh century, lay scribes and illuminators became increasingly numerous, and by the thirteenth century, professional illuminators dominated the field. During this later period, illuminators were able to travel in search of work and to acquire new ideas, they joined guilds with scribes or with artists in the cities, and their ranks included nuns and secular women. Work was regularly collaborative, and the craft was learned through an apprenticeship system. Alexander carefully analyzes surviving manuscripts and medieval treatises in order to explain the complex and time-consuming technical processes of illumination - its materials, methods, tools, choice of illustration, and execution. From rare surviving contracts, he deduces the preoccupation of patrons with materials and schedules. Illustrating his discussion with examples chosen from religious and secular manuscripts made all over Europe, Alexander recreates the astonishing variety and creativity ofmedieval illumination. His book will be a standard reference for years to come.