LOL I don’t have the patience for this!
Learn why Lara, not Zhivago, is the center of Pasternak’s masterpiece, Dr. Zhivago, and why Cyrano de Bergerac is the forerunner of modern-day science-fiction writers. Learn how many odysseys The Odyssey contains, and why Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories are a pinnacle of twentieth-century literature. From Ovid to Pavese, Xenophon to Dickens, Galileo to Gadda, Calvino covers the classics he has loved most with essays that are fresh, accessible, and wise. Why Read the Classics? firmly establishes Calvino among the rare likes of Nabokov, Borges, and Lawrence–writers whose criticism is as vibrant and unique as their groundbreaking fiction.
Opening: “In France they start to read Balzac at school, and judging by the number of editions in circulation people apparently continue to read him long after the end of their schooldays. But if there were an official survey on Balzac’s popularity in Italy, I am afraid he would figure very low down the list”
Calvino has some interesting points in each of the thirty-six essays, however this is really more for the serious lit-lovers. No doubt I shall reach for the relevent chapters when I get around to the books he discusses.So it’s a keeper for the reference library
Description: “Miss Manners with Fangs.” —LA Weekly We live in a world that’s very different from the one in which Emily Post came of age. Many of us who are nice (but who also sometimes say “f*ck”) are frequently at a loss for guidelines about how to be a good person who deals effectively with the increasing onslaught of rudeness we all encounter.
To lead us out of the miasma of modern mannerlessness, science-based and bitingly funny syndicated advice columnist Amy Alkon rips the doily off the manners genre and gives us a new set of rules for our twenty-first century lives.
With wit, style, and a dash of snark, Alkon explains that we now live in societies too big for our brains, lacking the constraints on bad behavior that we had in the small bands we evolved in. Alkon shows us how we can reimpose those constraints, how we can avoid being one of the rude, and how to stand up to those who are.
Foregoing prissy advice on which utensil to use, Alkon answers the twenty-first century’s most burning questions about manners, including: * Why do many people, especially those under forty, now find spontaneous phone calls rude? * What can you tape to your mailbox to stop dog walkers from letting their pooch violate your lawn? * How do you shut up the guy in the pharmacy line with his cellphone on speaker? * What small gift to your new neighbors might make them think twice about playing Metallica at 3 a.m.? Combining science with more than a touch of humor, Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck is destined to give good old Emily a shove off the etiquette shelf (if that’s not too rude to say).
Twenty odd minutes into this and I can tell this is not for me at this time.
bookshelves: fraudio, tbr-busting-2014, published-1997, young-adult, sci-fi, gorefest, dystopian, skim-through, summer-2014
narrated by Charles Carrol
Description: In a futuristic urban wasteland, evil Overlords have decreed that no child shall live a day past his fourteenth birthday. On that Sad Birthday, the child is the object of an obscene harvest resulting in the construction of a machinelike creature whose sole purpose is to kill.
The mysterious Shade — once a man, but now more like the machines he fights — recruits the few children fortunate enough to escape. With luck, cunning, and skill, four of Shade’s children come closer than any to discovering the source of the Overlords’ power — and the key to their downfall. But the closer the children get, the more ruthless Shade seems to become …
Expect you have noticed I’m trying to whittle some off the TBR pile. There really are some weird choices I’ve made over the years.
Anyone remember Logan’s Run? This is a bit like that only the cut off (literally) is fourteen instead of thirty years of age. A skim through worth just the two entrail eating aliens.
bookshelves: e-book, ipad, nonfiction, published-2014, net-galley, wwi, war, skim-through
Description: An unprecedented panorama of Europe on the brink
July 1914 is a definitive account of the crisis that led to the First World War. Offering a multi-national perspective on the events of that fateful summer, it focuses on the often haphazard and chaotic nature of decision-making in the capitals of Europe, showing how Europe descended into a largely inadvertent war. It is a riveting story of misperceptions and deliberate deceptions; of “doves” and “hawks” who struggled to comprehend a complex international situation; and of the collective failure of Europe’s ruling elites.
Going behind the scenes—from Berlin to London to St. Petersburg and beyond—July 1914 offers a powerful antidote to assumptions of the war’s inevitability.
P47: The assination of Franz Ferdinand had also removed the one man who on previous occasions had restrained the ‘war party’.
One hundred years ago the war that was to end all wars was brewing up. Otte has put together an erudite brick of a book chocablock with footnotes, references and sources. This is everything one would expect from university press however I was more beguiled by Tuchman’s approach: ‘I never did understand how France, on the defensive, managed to capture Alsace’ which sent her off to research and won the Pulitzer with her book The Guns of August.
Another easier read that had everything nailed wasGeorge, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I
Wiki bare facts:
On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead in Sarajevo, by Gavrilo Princip, one of a group of six assassins (five Serbs and one Bosnian Muslim), coordinated by Danilo Ilić. The political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary’s south-Slav provinces so they could be combined into a Greater Serbia or a Yugoslavia. The assassins’ motives were consistent with the movement that later became known as Young Bosnia. Serbian military officers stood behind the attack. The assassination led directly to the First World War when Austria-Hungary subsequently issued an ultimatum against Serbia, which was partially rejected. Austria-Hungary then declared war, marking the outbreak of the war.
The Latin Bridge in Sarajevo, close to the site of the assassination.
T. G. Otte is a professor of history at the University of East Anglia.
Commemorating the First World War: Titles from Cambridge
The Centennial of the First World War
bookshelves: architecture, how-to, published-27bc, skim-through, skoolzy-stuff, nonfiction, e-book, roman-civilisation
Okay, because I can be very silly, this second group of books will start off with Vitruvian Penguin:
The proper opening to Book Six is thus: It is related of the Socratic philosopher Aristippus*, that being shipwrecked and cast ashore on the coast of the Rhodians, he observed geometrical figures drawn thereon and cried out to his companions: ‘Let us be of good cheer because I see the traces of man.’
Corinthian atrium from #Pompeii at the House of M. Epidius Rufus …
The reason for visiting Vitruvius is the question of concrete, and did the Romans use it. The answer lies in the first chapter of Book VII:
First I shall begin with the concrete flooring, which is the most important of the polished finishings, observing that great pains and the utmost precaution must be taken to ensure its durability.
HUZZAH! Job done.
*Aristippus glorified bodily pleasure and Epicurus glorified intellectual pleasures – Aristippus may have been the forefather of the sexual revolution. Both believed there was no afterlife for the Gods to exact revenge in.
Aristippus had a nose to the carnal.
Aristippus, Rome Palazzo Spada
bookshelves: dip-in-now-and-again, skim-through, ancient-history, architecture, e-book, how-to, nonfiction, history, published-27bc, roman-civilisation, rome, skoolzy-stuff
After a rather understandably brown-tongued humble preface we are then advised that architects should know their history, music, art, philosophy, astronomy and medicine.
The Temples of Minerva, Mars and Hercules will be Doric, since the virile strengths of these Gods make daintiness entirely inappropriate to their Houses.
Book Two opens with Dinocratus who had quite the idea – make Mount Athos into a statue of a God. Looksee here:
Timotheus: a sculpture of Leda and the Swan in which the queen Leda of Sparta protected a swan from an eagle, on the basis of which a Roman marble copy in the Capitoline Museums is said to be “after Timotheus”.
The basis of a Björk dress:
The Mausoleum at the ancient city of Halicarnassus was the tomb of the king, Mausolus.
As for “wattle and daub”, I could wish that it had never been invented.
Basilica, Pompeii
Vitruvian Etruscan temple model. – Archaic Etruscan – In his book, On Architecture, Vitruvius set out the rules for designing Tuscan temples.
Vitruvian Harmonics
Aspendos
Tepidarium at Pompeii
bookshelves: published-1976, skim-through, spring-2014, art-forms, history, ipad, nonfiction, e-book
The Toledo (Ohio US, not Spain) Museum of Art was founded April 18, 1901 by a small group of citizens under the leadership of Edward Drummond Libbey, Toledo industrialist, whose successful glass company and its successor companies have formed the economic cornerstone of this city for many years.
Jean-Honore Fragonard, Blind-Man’s Buff
It would be very tempting to fill up this here thought box with images from the catalogue, however there is a distict possibility that someone here on gramazon is planning a visit to The Toledo and who wants to spoil another’s enjoyment. not I
This guidebook has a paragraph short history of the artists and would be a treasured memoir for gallery visitors
Bettie's Books 