Kingdom Under Glass PDF Download

Author: Jane Desmarais
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780239750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Monsters under Glass explores our enduring fascination with hothouses and exotic blooms, from their rise in ancient times, through the Victorian vogue for plant collecting, to the vegetable monsters of twentieth-century science fiction and the movies, comics, and video games of the present day. Our interest in hothouses can be traced back to the Roman emperor Tiberius, but it was only in the early nineteenth century that a boom in exotic plant collecting and new glasshouse technologies stimulated the imagination of novelists, poets, and artists, and the hothouse entered the creative language in a highly charged way. Decadent writers in England and Europe—including Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde—transformed the hothouse from a functional object to a powerful metaphor of metropolitan life, sexuality, and being replete with a dark underside of decay and death; and of consciousness itself, nurtured and dissected under glass. In a study as wide-ranging, vivid, and beautiful as our beloved exotic blooms themselves, Jane Desmarais charts the history and influence of these humid, tropical worlds and their creations, providing a steamy window onto our recent past.

Author: Jay Kirk
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429989165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
A sweeping historical narrative of the life of Carl Akeley, the famed explorer and taxidermist who changed the way Americans viewed the conservation of the natural world During the golden age of safaris in the early twentieth century, one man set out to preserve Africa's great beasts. In this epic account of an extraordinary life lived during remarkable times, Jay Kirk follows the adventures of the brooding genius who revolutionized taxidermy and created the famed African Hall we visit today at New York's Museum of Natural History. The Gilded Age was drawing to a close, and with it came the realization that men may have hunted certain species into oblivion. Renowned taxidermist Carl Akeley joined the hunters rushing to Africa, where he risked death time and again as he stalked animals for his dioramas and hobnobbed with outsized personalities of the era such as Theodore Roosevelt and P. T. Barnum. In a tale of art, science, courage, and romance, Jay Kirk resurrects a legend and illuminates a fateful turning point when Americans had to decide whether to save nature, to destroy it, or to just stare at it under glass.

Author: David Koenig
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780964060517
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This volume presents an evaluation of the quality and financial successes of the Disney Company's ventures. It also provides an overview of and behind-the-scenes information about 30 Disney animated films from "Snow White" through "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". The author relates each film to its original tale, gives the Disney version, and tells what and why cuts were made. The exposed secrets consist of such things as "Plot Holes," "Bloopers," "Hidden Images," and "Strange Reactions." Anecdotes about the growth of the Disney industry and the development of the theme-park rides are included. One of the most enticing sidebars offers over 50 names that were originally considered for the seven dwarfs.

Author: Thomas Leslie
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252094794
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
A detailed tour, inside and out, of Chicago's distinctive towers from an earlier age For more than a century, Chicago's skyline has included some of the world's most distinctive and inspiring buildings. This history of the Windy City's skyscrapers begins in the key period of reconstruction after the Great Fire of 1871 and concludes in 1934 with the onset of the Great Depression, which brought architectural progress to a standstill. During this time, such iconic landmarks as the Chicago Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, the Marshall Field and Company Building, the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Palmolive Building, the Masonic Temple, the City Opera, Merchandise Mart, and many others rose to impressive new heights, thanks to innovations in building methods and materials. Solid, earthbound edifices of iron, brick, and stone made way for towers of steel and plate glass, imparting a striking new look to Chicago's growing urban landscape. Thomas Leslie reveals the daily struggles, technical breakthroughs, and negotiations that produced these magnificent buildings. He also considers how the city's infamous political climate contributed to its architecture, as building and zoning codes were often disputed by shifting networks of rivals, labor unions, professional organizations, and municipal bodies. Featuring more than a hundred photographs and illustrations of the city's physically impressive and beautifully diverse architecture, Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871–1934 highlights an exceptionally dynamic, energetic period of architectural progress in Chicago.

Author: Stuart Dybek
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466806370
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
The stolid landscape of Chicago suddenly turns dreamlike and otherworldly in Stuart Dybek's classic story collection. A child's collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. A lowly rightfielder's inexplicable death turns him into a martyr to baseball. Strains of Chopin floating down the tenement airshaft are transformed into a mysterious anthem of loss. Combining homely detail and heartbreakingly familiar voices with grand leaps of imagination, The Coast of Chicago is a masterpiece from one of America's most highly regarded writers.

Author: Joel Greenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226306496
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
"In A Natural History of the Chicago Region, Greenberg takes you on a journey that begins with European explorers and settlers and hasn't ended yet. Along the way he introduces you to the physical forces that have shaped the area from southeastern Wisconsin to northern Indiana and Berrien County in Michigan; the various habitat types present in the region and how European settlement has affected them; and the insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish, and mammals found in presettlement times, then amid the settlers and now amid the skyscrappers. In all, Greenberg chronicles the development of nineteen counties in Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin across centuries of ecological, technological, and social transformations."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Judy Chicago
Publisher: Viking
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
"Forty pages of full-color artwork, black-and-white photographs, and four gatefold spreads mark an account of the creation of Judy Chicago's powerful evocation of the horror of the Holocaust in a work of art called Holocaust Project." -- Amazon.com viewed August 7, 2020.

Author: Jay Kirk
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9780312610739
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this epic account of an extraordinary life lived during remarkable times, Jay Kirk follows the adventures of legendary explorer and taxidermist Carl Akeley, who revolutionized taxidermy and environmental conservation and created the famed African Hall at New York's Museum of Natural History. Akeley risked death time and again in the jungles of Africa as he stalked animals for his dioramas and hobnobbed with outsized personalities of the era, such as Theodore Roosevelt and P. T. Barnum. Kingdom Under Glass is "a rollicking biography...an epic adventure...[and] a beguiling novelistic portrait of a man and an era straining to hear the call of the wild" (Publishers Weekly).

Author: Feroz Rather
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9352641620
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Over the last three decades, Kashmir has been ravaged by insurgency. While reams have been written on it - in human rights documents, academic theses, non-fiction accounts of the turmoil, and government and military reports - the effects of the violence on its inhabitants have rarely been rendered in fiction. Feroz Rather's The Night of Broken Glass corrects that anomaly. Through a series of interconnected stories, within which the same characters move in and out, the author weaves a tapestry of the horror Kashmir has come to represent. His visceral imagery explores the psychological impact of the turmoil on its natives - Showkat, who is made to wipe off graffiti on the wall of his shop with his tongue; Rosy, a progressive, jeans-wearing 'upper-caste' girl who is in love with 'lower-caste' Jamshid; Jamshid's father Gulam, a cobbler by profession who never finds his son's bullet-riddled body; the ineffectual Nadim 'Pasture', who proclaims himself a full-fledged rebel; even the barbaric and tyrannical Major S, who has to contend with his own nightmares. Grappling with a society brutalized by the oppression of the state, and fissured by the tensions of caste and gender, Feroz Rather's remarkable debut is as much a paean to the beauty of Kashmir and the courage of its people as it is a dirge to a paradise lost.

Author: Alex Poppe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780996490559
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Girl, World is a collection of stories about survival: women discovering their untapped strengths and their metamorphoses into becoming whole. Mixing lyricism, stark realism, emotional depth, and vivacious language, Alex Poppe has crafted unforgettable female characters who navigate through places where the big political picture is captured in their personal stories.