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Paintings in Proust
by Eric Karpeles
A captivating, colorful examination of the ways in which Proust incorporated artists and the visual arts in his work. À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust is one of the most profoundly visual works in Western literature. Not only are there frequent references to specific works of art, notably during the narrator's visits to Venice and in his evaluations of the style of the imaginary painter Elstir, but certain characters are also evoked by comparison to particular paintings. Bloch's appearance as a boy is likened to the portrait of Mohammed II by Gentile Bellini; Odette de Crécy strikes Swann by her resemblance to a figure in a Botticelli fresco. Even the lesser figure of a certain Mme. Blattin becomes the subject of Proustian mischief by being described as "exactly the portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo." Eric Karpeles has identified and located the many paintings to which Proust makes reference; in other cases, where only a painter's name is mentioned to indicate a certain style or appearance, Karpeles has chosen a representative work to illustrate the impression that Proust sought to evoke. With some 200 paintings beautifully reproduced in full color and texts drawn from the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation, as well as concise commentaries on the novel's evolving story, this book is an essential addition to the libraries of Proustians everywhere. |
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A Platter of Figs
by David Tanis
Forget about getting back to the land, David Tanis just wants you to get back to the kitchen. For six months a year, David Tanis is the head chef at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, California, restaurant where he has worked alongside Alice Waters since the 1980s in creating a revolution in sustainable American cuisine. The other six months, Tanis lives in Paris in a seventeenth-century apartment, where he hosts intimate dinners for friends and paying guests, and prepares the food in a small kitchen equipped with nothing more than an old stove, a little counter space, and a handful of well used pots and pans. This is the book for anyone who wants to gather and feed friends around a table and nurture their conversation. It's not about showing off with complicated techniques and obscure ingredients. Worlds away from the showy Food Network personalities, Tanis believes that the most satisfying meals—for both the cook and the guest—are invariably the simplest. Home cooks can easily re-create any of his 24 seasonal, market-driven menus, from spring's Supper of the Lamb (Warm Asparagus Vinaigrette; Shoulder of Spring Lamb with Flageolet Beans and Olive Relish; Rum Baba with Cardamom) to winter's North African Comfort Food (Carrot and Coriander Salad; Chicken Tagine with Pumpkin and Chickpeas). Best of all, Tanis is an engaging guide with a genuine gift for words, whose soulful approach to food will make any kitchen, big or small, a warm and compelling place to spend time. |
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Words in Air
The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. The substantial, revealing—and often very funny—interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets. |
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The Conscience of a Liberal
by Paul Krugman
In this "clear, provocative" (Boston Globe) New York Times bestseller, Paul Krugman, today's most widely read economist, examines the past eighty years of American history, from the reforms that tamed the harsh inequality of the Gilded Age and the 1920s to the unraveling of that achievement and the reemergence of immense economic and political inequality since the 1970s. Seeking to understand both what happened to middle-class America and what it will take to achieve a "new New Deal," Krugman has created his finest book to date, a "stimulating manifesto" offering "a compelling historical defense of liberalism and a clarion call for Americans to retake control of their economic destiny" (Publishers Weekly). "As Democrats seek a rationale not merely for returning to power, but for fundamentally changing—or changing back—the relationship between America's government and its citizens, Mr. Krugman's arguments will prove vital in the months and years ahead."—Peter Beinart, New York Times |
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Schott's Almanac 2009
by Ben Schott
Schott's Almanac redefines the traditional almanac to present a record of the year just past and a guide to the year come. It is designed to be a practical and entertaining annual volume that tells the real stories of the year, from economic meltdown and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto to the England-less Euro 2008 and the Beijing Olympics, and from the American presidential elections and the Hollywood writers' strike to Bond 22, Quantum of Solace and the creation of artificial life. The section headings include: Chronicle; World; Society and Health; Sci, Tech, Net; Celebrity and Media; Music and Cinema; Books and Arts; Travel and Leisure; Money; Parliament and Politics; The Establishment; Sport; and, Ephemerides. In an age when information is plentiful but selection is rare, Schott's Almanac offers both the essential facts and the lucid analysis, combining the authority and accuracy of the "Economist" with the wit and vitality of "Have I Got News for You". |
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American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
by Bill McKibben (foreward by Al Gore)
As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, writer and activist Bill McKibben offers this unprecedented, provocative, and timely anthology, gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries. Classics of the environmental imagination—the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring—are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America's greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of "nature" join ecologists' memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations. |
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Our Lincoln
Edited by Eric Foner
In 1876 the abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed, "No man can say anything that is new of Abraham Lincoln." Undeterred, the contributors to Our Lincoln believe it is possible even now, especially if the starting point is the interaction between the life and the times. Several of these original essays focus on Lincoln's leadership as president and commander in chief. James M. McPherson examines Lincoln's deft navigation of the crosscurrents of politics and wartime strategy. Sean Wilentz assesses Lincoln's evolving position in the context of party politics. On slavery and race, Eric Foner writes of Lincoln and the movement to colonize emancipated slaves outside the United States. James Oakes considers Lincoln's views on race and citizenship. There are also brilliant essays on Lincoln's literary style, religious beliefs, and family life. The Lincoln who emerges is a man of his time, yet able to transcend and transform it—a reasonable measure of greatness. |
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The Hemingses of Monticello
by Annette Gordon-Reed
This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha. The Hemingses of Monticello sets the family's compelling saga against the backdrop of Revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790s Philadelphia, and plantation life at Monticello. Much anticipated, this book promises to be the most important history of an American slave family ever written. |
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In a Shade of Blue
by Eddie Glaude
In this provocative book, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., one of our nation's rising young African American intellectuals, makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Central to Glaude's mission is a rehabilitation of philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas, he argues, can be fruitfully applied to a renewal of African American politics. According to Glaude, Dewey's pragmatism, when attentive to the darker dimensions of life—or what we often speak of as the blues—can address many of the conceptual problems that plague contemporary African American discourse. How blacks think about themselves, how they imagine their own history, and how they conceive of their own actions can be rendered in ways that escape bad ways of thinking that assume a tendentious political unity among African Americans simply because they are black. Drawing deeply on black religious thought and literature, In a Shade of Blue seeks to dislodge such crude and simplistic thinking and replace it with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for black life in all its variety and intricacy. Glaude argues that only when black political leaders acknowledge such complexity can the real-life sufferings of many African Americans be remedied, an argument echoed in the recent rhetoric and optimism of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. |
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Correspondence: Pablo Picasso & Getrude Stein
Carefully edited and presented by period, this extraordinary exchange between two 20th century artistic giants stretches from 1906 to 1944. These newly translated letters, cards and scribbled notes illustrate their intimate correspondence and touch on both the weighty and the everyday—holidays, money, dinner invitations, art, family, lovers, travel arrangements, how work goes—or the war. Fast friends and revolutionary artists, they wrote to each other in French, a language neither ever entirely mastered. Despite this, the letters transcend the language barrier to illustrate a unique and enduring friendship. |
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