Strange Beauty PDF Download

Author: George Johnson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307765458
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
With a New Afterword "Our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann."--Richard Feynman Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way. Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-Mann's prodigious talent was evident from an early age--he entered Yale at 15, completed his Ph.D. at 21, and was soon identifying the structures of the world's smallest components and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe. Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour-de-force of both science writing and biography.

Author: Cynthia Jean Hahn
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271050780
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
"A study of reliquaries as a form of representation in medieval art. Explores how reliquaries stage the importance and meaning of relics using a wide range of artistic means from material and ornament to metaphor and symbolism"--Provided by publisher.

Author: A. Siewers
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023010052X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Strange Beauty provides a new perspective on early Celtic stories of the Otherworld and their relevance to today's ecological concerns, arguing for a contemporary re-reading of the Otherworld trope in relation to physical experience.

Author: Anja Huber
Publisher: Hatje Cantz
ISBN: 9783775749213
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
For his photographs and films, the Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf creates a world that has been staged down to its smallest detail. It seems very similar to ours, but its artificiality give it an enigmatic sense. Still, with their visuals borrowed from the film and advertising industries, the works are only flawlessly striking on the surface; in fact, they deal with questions of democracy, equality, or self-determination. Marking Olaf's first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany, the companion publication deals with essential aspects of Olaf's art and offers an attractive survey of his multifaceted oeuvre from the past forty years. Olaf's most recent works, some of which were created especially for the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Munich, will also be shown.

Author: Herbert Grabes
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 904202433X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This compact, indispensable overview answers a vexed question: Why do so many works of modern and postmodern literature and art seem designed to appear 'strange', and how can they still cause pleasure in the beholder? To help overcome the initial barrier caused by this 'strangeness', the general reader is given an initial, non-technical description of the 'aesthetic of the strange' as it is experienced in the reading or viewing process. There follows a broad survey of modern and postmodern trends, illustrating their staggering variety and making plain the manifold methods and strategies adopted by writers and artists to 'make it strange'. The book closes with a systematic summary of the theoretical underpinnings of the 'aesthetic of the strange', focussing on the ways in which it differs from both the earlier 'aesthetic of the beautiful' and the 'aesthetic of the sublime'. It is made amply clear that the strangeness characteristic of modern and postmodern art has ushered in an entirely new, 'third' kind of aesthetic – one that has undergone further transformation over the past two decades. Beyond its usefulness as a practical introduction to the 'aesthetic of the strange', the present study also takes up the most recent, cutting-edge aspects of scholarly debate, while initiates are offered an original approach to the theoretical implications of this seminal phenomenon.

Author: Susan Orlean
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307795292
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion. In this new edition, coming fifteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after she first met the “orchid thief,” Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay. Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. Praise for The Orchid Thief “Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”—The New York Times Book Review “Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times “Orlean’s snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.”—The Washington Post Book World “Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.”—Boston Sunday Globe “A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.”—The Wall Street Journal

Author: Charles Jencks
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
In an age dominated by nationalism and ethnic conflict, Charles Jencks argues that these reactionary tendencies can be countered by an equally powerful drive - heterophilia: the love of difference, the desire to seek out new experience and curiosity. All of these are essential to the creation of a new form of city, the heteropolis, epitomized by Los Angeles. With over one hundred ethnic groups, forty different lifestyle clusters, eighty languages spoken in the schools, and extraordinarily different flora and fauna, Los Angeles' diversity has now become one of its main drawing points, and problems. Precariously balanced between civil unrest and the creative enjoyment of difference, it is something towards which other world cities, with their mass-migration and global trade are heading. The hetero-architecture of Los Angeles suggests a way beyond the present impasse between the fundamentalists and the multiculturalists, a third position which diffuses confrontation with creative displacement and inclusive eclecticism. The strange beauty of hetero-architecture embraces variety, its informality allows marginalized groups to feel at home and its unusual metaphors suggest our connection to the natural world. Frank Gehry, Eric Owen Moss, Morphosis, Frank Israel and Charles Moore are its visible leaders, but there is also a vernacular and funk version of the genre as well as the populist versions of Jon Jerde and Disneyland. The philosophy of hetero-architecture accepts difference as a necessity and turns it into a virtue with an informal aesthetic at once polyglot, abstract and representational - that is radically eclectic and inclusive in an understated way. The 'L.A. Style', as it is known, bears affinities with other aesthetics such as the Wabi and Sabi style of the Japanese. With many world cities now facing increasing pluralization, the heteropolis is bound to become a major urban form of the future.

Author: Aliya Whiteley
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1837862060
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Nominated for the Shirley Jackson and Saboteur awards. The tenth anniversary edition of the critically acclaimed short novel, with an introduction by M. R. Carey. Somewhere away from the cities and towns, in the Valley of the Rocks, a society of men and boys gather around the fire each night to listen to their history recounted by Nate, the storyteller. Requested most often by the group is the tale of the death of all women. They are the last generation. One evening, Nate brings back new secrets from the woods; peculiar mushrooms are growing from the ground where the women’s bodies lie buried. These are the first signs of a strange and insidious presence unlike anything ever known before… Discover the Beauty. Also includes the novella The Arrival of Missives.

Author: Alva Noë
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429945257
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

Author: Libba Bray
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0731814908
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
It's 1895, and after the death of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she's being followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence's most powerful girls - and their foray into the spiritual world - lead to?