Bastard Countryside

Author : Robin Friend
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781912719044
Total Pages : 104 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bastard Countryside written by Robin Friend and published by . This book was released on 2018-12-10 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bastard Countryside collects together 15 years worth of exploration within the British landscape, dwelling on what Victor Hugo called the ‘bastard countryside’: “somewhat ugly but bizarre, made up of two different natures”. Friend’s large-format colour images scrutinise these inbetween, unkempt, and often surreal marginal areas of the country, highlighting frictions between the pastoral sublime and the discarded, often polluted reality of the present.Starting from a classical landscape tradition, Friend’s meticulous 5x4 photographs are given heightened effect through exaggerations of colour and composition, embodying a friction between British pastoral ideals and present reality. In particular, Friend follows moments in which the expected narrative of the landscape is rudely interrupted: often through leakage, pollution, or the wreckage and containment of nature.In his accompanying essay, writer Robert Macfarlane describes Bastard Countryside as “a vision par excellence of our synthetic ‘modern nature’– produced by assemblage and entanglement rather than purity and distinction”. Contained within Friend’s photographs are “hard questions [...] about what kinds of landscape one might wish either to pass through or to live in; about what versions of ‘modern nature’ might be worth fighting for, and why.” -- Publisher's website.

Author : Sam Kean
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 0316381667
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Bastard Brigade written by Sam Kean and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes the gripping, untold story of a renegade group of scientists and spies determined to keep Adolf Hitler from obtaining the ultimate prize: a nuclear bomb. Scientists have always kept secrets. But rarely have the secrets been as vital as they were during World War II. In the middle of building an atomic bomb, the leaders of the Manhattan Project were alarmed to learn that Nazi Germany was far outpacing the Allies in nuclear weapons research. Hitler, with just a few pounds of uranium, would have the capability to reverse the entire D-Day operation and conquer Europe. So they assembled a rough and motley crew of geniuses -- dubbed the Alsos Mission -- and sent them careening into Axis territory to spy on, sabotage, and even assassinate members of Nazi Germany's feared Uranium Club. The details of the mission rival the finest spy thriller, but what makes this story sing is the incredible cast of characters -- both heroes and rogues alike -- including: Moe Bergm, the major league catcher who abandoned the game for a career as a multilingual international spy; the strangest fellow to ever play professional baseball. Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist credited as the discoverer of quantum mechanics; a key contributor to the Nazi's atomic bomb project and the primary target of the Alsos mission. Colonel Boris Pash, a high school science teacher and veteran of the Russian Revolution who fled the Soviet Union with a deep disdain for Communists and who later led the Alsos mission. Joe Kennedy Jr., the charismatic, thrill-seeking older brother of JFK whose need for adventure led him to volunteer for the most dangerous missions the Navy had to offer. Samuel Goudsmit, a washed-up physics prodigy who spent his life hunting Nazi scientists -- and his parents, who had been swept into a concentration camp -- across the globe. Irène and Frederic Joliot-Curie, a physics Nobel-Prize winning power couple who used their unassuming status as scientists to become active members of the resistance. Thrust into the dark world of international espionage, these scientists and soldiers played a vital and largely untold role in turning back one of the darkest tides in human history.

Author : Daniel Wilkinson
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822333685
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Silence on the Mountain written by Daniel Wilkinson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a young human rights worker, "Silence on the Mountain" is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's 36-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people.

Author : T.J. Clark
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0525520511
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Painting of Modern Life written by T.J. Clark and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2017-06-28 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From T.J. Clark comes this provocative study of the origins of modern art in the painting of Parisian life by Edouard Manet and his followers. The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was a brand-new city, recently adorned with boulevards, cafés, parks, Great Exhibitions, and suburban pleasure grounds—the birthplace of the habits of commerce and leisure that we ourselves know as "modern life." A new kind of culture quickly developed in this remade metropolis, sights and spectacles avidly appropriated by a new kind of "consumer": clerks and shopgirls, neither working class nor bourgeois, inventing their own social position in a system profoundly altered by their very existence. Emancipated and rootless, these men and women flocked to the bars and nightclubs of Paris, went boating on the Seine at Argenteuil, strolled the island of La Grande-Jatte—enacting a charade of community that was to be captured and scrutinized by Manet, Degas, and Seurat. It is Clark's cogently argued (and profusely illustrated) thesis that modern art emerged from these painters' attempts to represent this new city and its inhabitants. Concentrating on three of Manet's greatest works and Seurat's masterpiece, Clark traces the appearance and development of the artists' favorite themes and subjects, and the technical innovations that they employed to depict a way of life which, under its liberated, pleasure-seeking surface, was often awkward and anxious. Through their paintings, Manet and the Impressionists ask us, and force us to ask ourselves: Is the freedom offered by modernity a myth? Is modern life heroic or monotonous, glittering or tawdry, spectacular or dull? The Painting of Modern Life illuminates for us the ways, both forceful and subtle, in which Manet and his followers raised these questions and doubts, which are as valid for our time as for the age they portrayed.

Author : Martin Walker
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 038534953X
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Devil's Cave written by Martin Walker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Another delightful installment in the internationally acclaimed series: It's spring in St. Denis. The village choir is preparing for its Easter concert, the wildflowers are blooming, and among the lazy whorls of the river a dead woman is found floating in a boat. This means another case for Bruno, the town’s cherished chief of police. With the discovery of sinister markings and black candles near the body, it seems to Bruno that the occult might be involved. And as questions mount—most notably about a troubling real estate proposal in the region and the sudden reappearance of an elderly countess—Bruno and his colleagues are drawn ever closer to a climactic showdown in the Gouffre de Colombac: the place locals call the Devil’s Cave.

Author : Martin Walker
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 1443409448
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Crowded Grave written by Martin Walker and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruno’s day has not started well: an international summit to be held in a local chateau is being threatened by Basque separatists, and animal-rights campaigners have declared a war on the beloved local delicacy, foie gras, in the form of an attack on a local duck farm. Horst Vogelstern, a famed researcher working in the archaeological treasure house that is the Vézère Valley, has made a find that promises to change our understanding of humankind’s evolution, but complications ensue when another body is unearthed at the site—one that sports a gunshot wound to the head and is definitely not ancient. Bruno senses a link between the activist groups and the unidentified body, but his investigation is hindered by further attacks on local farms and the interference of local bureaucrats. When Horst disappears under mysterious circumstances, the scope of the case widens, and tension in the town of St-Denis reaches an all-time high. The Crowded Grave is a sense-stirring portrait of the culture, camaraderie and culinary customs of French country life, accompanied by a satisfying and intoxicating mystery.

Author : Gregory Rodriguez
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307472736
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds written by Gregory Rodriguez and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-10-14 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented account of the long-term cultural and political influences that Mexican-Americans will have on the collective character of our nation.In considering the largest immigrant group in American history, Gregory Rodriguez examines the complexities of its heritage and of the racial and cultural synthesis--mestizaje--that has defined the Mexican people since the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. He persuasively argues that the rapidly expanding Mexican American integration into the mainstream is changing not only how Americans think about race but also how we envision our nation. Brilliantly reasoned, highly thought provoking, and as historically sound as it is anecdotally rich, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds is a major contribution to the discussion of the cultural and political future of the United States.

Author : Liang Hong
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1839761776
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China in One Village written by Liang Hong and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A global future in the history of a single village After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Henan Province. What she found was an extended family riven by the seismic changes in Chinese society and a village turned inside out by emigration, neglect, and environmental despoliation. Combining family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, Liang’s by turns lyrically poetic and movingly raw investigation into the fate of her village became a bestselling book in China and brought her fame. For many months, Liang walked the roads and fields of her village, recording the stories of her relatives—especially her irascible, unforgettable father—and talking to everyone from high government officials to the lowest of village outcasts. Across China, many saw in Liang’s riveting interviews with family members and childhood acquaintances a mirror of their own lives, and her observations about the way the greatest rural-to-urban migration of modern times has twisted the country resonated deeply. China in One Village tells the story of contemporary China through one clear-eyed, literary observer, one family, and one village.

Author : Arturo Warman
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807854372
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Corn & Capitalism written by Arturo Warman and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the history and importance of corn worldwide, Arturo Warman traces its development from a New World food of poor and despised peoples into a commodity that plays a major role in the modern global economy. The book, first published in Mexico i

Author : Eric Idle
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780753820858
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Greedy Bastard Diary written by Eric Idle and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'I still feel somewhat nervous encroaching on the Palin territory of writing a travel diary based on a journey... thought it is true, I reason, that all the Pythons have been involved in documentaries. So this must be a Python thing. What is this urge to probe and examine by ex-comedians? Are they tired of dressing up as women? Surely not.' - Eric Idle The man who brought you the anthems 'Always look on the bright side of life' and 'Sit on my Face and Tell me That You Love Me' shows his naughty bits - and much more! As he crossed the US on The Greedy Bastard Tour, Eric Idle kept a diary on the Monty Python website updating fans with his experiences, insights and observations. Inspired by those blogs, THE GREEDY BASTARD DIARY is an honest, hysterical and moving book - part travelogue, part memoir - that chronicles those 80 days on the road, offering Idle's thoughts on his career, personal life and the country he now calls his home. Reflective, ironic, and stamped with his renowned wit, this illuminating work takes readers on a personal tour with the legendary star and offers an intimate, close-up look inside the man as never before.