Category: Humor & Entertainment

Book Summary :

“This remarkable exposition of Leonardo’s work” illuminates how he was centuries ahead of his time—and the lessons we can learn from his style of thought (Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University). Leonardo da Vinci was a brilliant artist, scientist, engineer, mathematician, architect, and inventor. But he was also, Fritjof Capra argues, a profoundly modern man. Capra’s decade-long study of Leonardo’s fabled notebooks reveal him as a “systems thinker” centuries before the term was coined. Leonardo believed the key to understanding the world was in perceiving the connections between phenomena and the larger patterns formed by those relationships. Seeing the world as a dynamic, integrated whole, Leonardo often used concepts from one area to illuminate problems in another. For example, his studies of the movement of water informed his ideas about how landscapes are shaped, how sap rises in plants, how air moves over a bird’s wing, and how blood flows in the human body. His observations of nature enhanced his art, his drawings were integral to his scientific studies and architectural designs. Capra describes seven defining characteristics of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius and includes a list of over forty discoveries Leonardo made that weren’t rediscovered until centuries later. His overview of Leonardo’s thought follows the organizational scheme Leonardo himself intended to use if he ever published his notebooks. So in a sense, this is Leonardo’s science as he himself would have presented it.

Book Summary :

This volume of original essays fills a significant research gap in Chinese film studies by offering an interdisciplinary, comparative examination of ethnic Chinese film stars from the silent period to the era of globalization. Whereas studies of stars and stardom have developed considerably in the West over the past two decades, there is no single book in English that critically addresses issues related to stars and stardom in Chinese culture. Chinese Film Stars offers exemplary readings of historically, geographically and aesthetically multifaceted star phenomena. An international line up of contributors test a variety of approaches in making sense of discourses of stars and stardom in China and the US, explore historical contexts in which Chinese film stars are constructed and transformed in relation to changing sociopolitical conditions, and consider issues of performance and identity specific to individual stars through chapter-by-chapter case studies. The essays explore a wide range of topics such as star performance, character type, media construction, political propaganda, online discourses, autobiographic narration, as well as issues of gender, genre, memory and identity. Including fifteen case studies of individual Chinese stars and illustrated with film stills throughout, this book is an essential read for students of Chinese film, media and cultural studies.

Book Summary :

What happens when an individual becomes the subject of many and divergent portraits? “Biography,” says Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, “is a deceptive genre. Positioned between fact and fiction and elusive in its purposes, biography displays an individual life, an existence patterned by conventions that have also shaped the reader’s experience.” In This Woman in Particular, Walker explores versions of Emily Carr’s life that have appeared over the last half-century. Walker contends that the biographical image of Emily Carr that emerges from an accumulation of biographies, films, plays and poetry as well as her own autobiographical writing establishes an elaborated cultural artefact — an “image” that is bound by its very nature to remain forever incomplete and always elusive. She demonstrates how changes in Carr’s biographical image parallel the maturing of Canadian biographical writing, reflecting attitudes toward women artists and the shifting balance between religion, secular attitudes and contemporary spirituality. And she concludes that biography plays a crucial role in all our lives in initiating and sustaining debate on vital personal and collective concerns.

Book Summary :

Armchair travelers beware! Japanese Things will lure you out of your cozy, comfy home and chair to an unusual country with bewitching manners and customs—and once you have succumbed to its spell you will never be the same. Here in one neat package you will meet the flavor, charm, and piquancy of old Japan—a revised reprint of one of the indispensable books on Japan, by the late Prof. Basil Hall Chamberlain, eminent British scholar who in the latter part of the 19th century "taught Japanese and Japan to the Japanese." Many books in one, this monumental compilation contains such diversified subjects as Art and Abacus; Botany and Buddhism; Charms and Cherry Blossoms; Daimyos and Divination; Fairy Tales and Flowers; Gardens and Government; History and Hara-kiri; Law and Language; Marriage and Music; Poetry and Pottery; Shinto and Singing Girls (Geisha); Tea and Theater, and Writing and Wood Engraving. In this long-awaited reprint, in which the title has been changed from Things Japanese, the reader will encounter exquisite objects of daily Japanese life, the gardens and cultures of the fields, the harmony and balance in the fundamentals of day-by-day existence.

Book Summary :

He claimed to be “the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced,” said Grant Wood, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.” Wood was one of America’s most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself. In his time, he was an “almost mythical figure,” recognized most supremely for his hard-boiled farm scene, American Gothic, a painting that has come to reflect the essence of America’s traditional values—a simple, decent, homespun tribute to our lost agrarian age. In this major new biography of America’s most acclaimed, and misunderstood, regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed to have been anything but plain, or simple . . . R. Tripp Evans reveals the true complexity of the man and the image Wood so carefully constructed of himself. Grant Wood called himself a farmer-painter but farming held little interest for him. He appeared to be a self-taught painter with his scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore but he was classically trained, a sophisticated artist who had studied the Old Masters and Flemish art as well as impressionism. He lived a bohemian life and painted in Paris and Munich in the 1920s, fleeing what H. L. Mencken referred to as “the booboisie” of small-town America. We see Wood as an artist haunted and inspired by the images of childhood; by the complex relationship with his father (stern, pious, the “manliest of men”); with his sister and his beloved mother (Wood shared his studio and sleeping quarters with his mother until her death at seventy-seven; he was forty-four). We see Wood’s homosexuality and how his studied masculinity was a ruse that shaped his work. Here is Wood’s life and work explored more deeply and insightfully than ever before. Drawing on letters, the artist’s unfinished autobiography, his sister’s writings, and many never-before-seen documents, Evans’s book is a dimensional portrait of a deeply complicated artist who became a “National Symbol.” It is as well a portrait of the American art scene at a time when America’s Calvinistic spirit and provincialism saw Europe as decadent and artists were divided between red-blooded patriotic men and “hothouse aesthetes.” Thomas Hart Benton said of Grant Wood: “When this new America looks back for landmarks to help gauge its forward footsteps, it will find a monument standing up in the midst of the wreckage . . . This monument will be made out of Grant Wood’s works.”

Book Summary :

Expo 67, the world's fair held in Montreal during the summer of 1967, brought architecture, art, design, and technology together into a glittering modern package. Heralding the ideal city of the future to its visitors, the Expo site was perceived by critics as a laboratory for urban and architectural design as well as for cultural exchange, intended to enhance global understanding and international cooperation. This collection of essays brings new critical perspectives to Expo 67, an event that left behind a significant material and imaginative legacy. The contributors to this volume reflect a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and address Expo 67 across a broad spectrum ranging from architecture and film to more ephemeral markers such as postcards, menus, pavilion displays, or the uniforms of the hostesses employed on the site. Collectively, the essays explore issues of nationalism, the interplay of tradition and modernity, twentieth-century discourse about urban experience, and the enduring impact of Expo 67's technological experimentation. Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir is a compelling examination of a world's fair that had a profound impact locally, nationally, and internationally.

Book Summary :

2016 has been a very intense, full year of events and Politics Design. Very different from any previous one’s. With regard to politics, seems like they were all over the media and for the first time, Fake News were an essential topic of any social-political debate. Being accustomed to posters, signs, stickers, etc., exclusively based on typography and layout. This time it was somehow different and social networks exclusively Twitter and Facebook have assumed an extremely fundamental role in elections both in Europe – UK ‘Brexit‘ and in the United States the emergence of a new character named Donald Trump. From here we can see that information and manipulation of information was the key to these choices and the results of them. So everything happens so fast like a huge snowball that exists but no many of us understand in a war of constant bombardment of information. The book is a compilation of the result of intensive research in contemporary politics. With the use of text and visual language, the author portrays the most iconic political moments not only from Brexit, Europe, United States (Donald Trump) but also from the world in general. Politics Design emphasises the importance of the political stamps in human history and identity.

Book Summary :

Comedy is crucial to how the English see themselves. This book considers that proposition through a series of case studies of popular English comedies and comedians in the twentieth century, ranging from the Carry On films to the work of Mike Leigh and contemporary sitcoms such as The Royle Family, and from George Formby to Alan Bennett and Roy 'Chubby' Brown. Relating comic traditions to questions of class, gender, sexuality and geography, A National Joke looks at how comedy is a cultural thermometer, taking the temperature of its times. It asks why vulgarity has always delighted English audiences, why camp is such a strong thread in English humour, why class influences what we laugh at and why comedy has been so neglected in most theoretical writing about cultural identity. Part history and part polemic, it argues that the English urgently need to reflect on who they are, who they have been and who they might become, and insists that comedy offers a particularly illuminating location for undertaking those reflections.

Book Summary :

Any teacher of the Civil War would do well to consult this volume and incorporate some of the captivating tales into lectures and readings."—Journal of Military History

Book Summary :

Patterns are everywhere in nature - in the ranks of clouds in the sky, the stripes of an angelfish, the arrangement of petals in flowers. Where does this order and regularity come from? It creates itself. The patterns we see come from self-organization. Whether living or non-living, scientists have found that there is a pattern-forming tendency inherent in the basic structure and processes of nature, so that from a few simple themes, and the repetition of simple rules, endless beautiful variations can arise. Part of a trilogy of books exploring the science of patterns in nature, acclaimed science writer Philip Ball here looks at how shapes form. From soap bubbles to honeycombs, delicate shell patterns, and even the developing body parts of a complex animal like ourselves, he uncovers patterns in growth and form in all corners of the natural world, explains how these patterns are self-made, and why similar shapes and structures may be found in very different settings, orchestrated by nothing more than simple physical forces. This book will make you look at the world with fresh eyes, seeing order and form even in the places you'd least expect.

Book Summary :

This searing critique of participatory art—from its development to its political ambitions—is “an essential title for contemporary art history scholars and students as well as anyone who has . . . thought, ‘Now that’s art!’ or ‘That’s art?’” (Library Journal) Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawel Althamer and Paul Chan. Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling, and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.

Book Summary :

An examination of how screen texts embrace, refute, and reinvent the cultural heritage of antiquity, this volume looks at specific story-patterns and archetypes from Greco-Roman culture. The contributors offer a variety of perspectives, highlighting key cultural relay points at which a myth is received and reformulated for a particular audience.