Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Artists, Architects & Photographers

A fascinating look at the real Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, the designer who forever revolutionized the way women look. She was a free spirit, brilliant business woman, and beauty who never found reciprocated love. Madsen, with authority, delves into this fashion doyenne's business and private lives to reveal one woman's extraordinary progress: from orphan to millinery shopkeeper, from lodestar of feminine style to a very rich woman with a closet full of dark secrets.

Andy Warhol claimed that he loved being outside a party—so that he could get in. But more often than not, the party was at his own studio, The Factory, where celebrities—from Edie Sedgwick and Allen Ginsberg to the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground—gathered in an ongoing bash.

One of the nation’s top art critics shows how six great artists made old age a time of triumph by producing some of the greatest work of their long careers—and, in some cases, changing the course of art history. Though these six artists differed in many respects, they shared one thing: a determination to go on creating, driven not by the bounding energies of youth but by the ticking clock that would inspire them to produce some of their greatest masterpieces.

Antony Armstrong-Jones, photographer, designer and film-maker, gained worldwide attention when he married Queen Elizabeth II's younger sister, Princess Margaret in 1960—the first non-aristocrat to marry into the Royal Family for 400 years. How did a "commoner" come to marry a princess, a woman whom he had long admired from afar? In fact, "Tony" descended from Welsh gentry, the son of a barrister and a society hostess. His family shared a long-established link with the Mountbatten arm of the Royal Family.

This is the previously untold backstory of Ong's Hat, the Infinite Game, and proto-ARG. It weaves together early rudimentary Artificial Intelligence (AI), encounters with disembodied intelligence, emergence, and the budding Internet culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Elements of psychedelic culture, Avant Garde art, punk rock, industrial music, experimental theater, improv, method acting, hermetic magick, beat literature, Esalen, the works of Philip K. Dick, and more converge to create this modern tale of a spiritual quest.

Jean Strouse's Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career—and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.

As America was stepping into the modern era, one great beauty became the artist's model of choice. Her perfect form became the emblem of the Gilded Age and appears on the greatest monuments of New York and the nation. Supermodel, actress, icon - her beauty paved the way for a life of glamour, passion, and ultimately tragedy. Her name is Audrey Munson.

P. T. Barnum's career of showmanship and charlatanry was marked by a surprising undercurrent of honesty and forthrightness. His exuberant autobiography forms a happy combination of all those traits, revealing the whole story of his world-famous hoaxes and publicity stunts. Here is a pageant of 19th-century America's gullibility and thirst for marvels, as told by the master of revels himself.

In 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began what would become one of history’s most influential works of art—The Last Supper. After a decade at the court of Lodovico Sforza, the duke of Milan, Leonardo was at a low point: at forty-three, he had failed, despite a number of prestigious commissions, to complete anything that truly fulfilled his astonishing promise. His latest failure was a giant bronze horse to honor Sforza’s father, made with material expropriated by the military.

Basándose en las miles de páginas de los cuadernos manuscritos de Leonardo y nuevos descubrimientos sobre su vida y su obra, Walter Isaacson teje una narración que conecta el arte de Da Vinci con sus investigaciones científicas, y nos muestra cómo el genio del hombre más visionario de la historia nació de habilidades que todos poseemos y podemos estimular, tales como la curiosidad incansable, la observación cuidadosa y la imaginación juguetona. Su creatividad, como la de todo gran innovador, resultó de la intersección entre la tecnología y las humanidades.

He died broke, bleeding, and unknown. Now he’s priceless. Van Gogh: A Life in Color, Pain, and Immortality isn’t your typical artist biography. It’s a raw, unfiltered journey into the soul of a man we turned into a myth — and what we lost when we did. This book peels away the poster boy tragedy, the swirling clichés, and the pop-culture memes to reveal the real Vincent: a failed preacher, a frantic letter-writer, a man who lived on bread crusts and absinthe — and painted like the stars were screaming.

George W. Bush arrived in the White House an untested governor with an unfortunate habit of tripping over his own tongue, presiding over an economy slipping into recession, and a nation more obsessed with reality television than with the reality of international terrorism. He was considered by many opinion-leaders a dupe, an illiterate, a cowboy, a preppie, a child of privilege. Now, it is clear to John Podhoretz that Bush has become, and will be remembered, as one of this nation's strongest leaders.

War photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir It’s What I Do is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life. What she does, with clarity, beauty, and candor, is to document, often in their most extreme moments, the complex lives of others. It’s her work, but it’s much more than that: it’s her singular calling.

Raging ambition. Towering egos. Competition under a veneer of courtesy. Heroic effort combined with plagiarism, theft, exaggeration, and fraud. This was the state of bird study in eastern North America during the early 1800s, as a handful of intrepid men raced to find the last few birds that were still unknown to science. The most famous name in the bird world was John James Audubon, who painted spectacular portraits of birds. But although his images were beautiful, creating art was not his main goal. Instead, he aimed to illustrate (and write about) as many different species as possible.

Eye Contact is the story of a photographer's decade-long journey in search of meaning and manhood. An experienced freelancer with the New York Times, author Luke Sharrett treats listeners to a behind-the-scenes look at covering the White House and flying aboard Air Force One. Despite achieving professional success at a young age, he is haunted by a feeling that he simply doesn't belong. He can't seem to outrun a nagging fear that he doesn't have what it takes to succeed in life. As he navigates his career, he begins searching for answers. Who am I? Where do I belong?

Anya Liftig grew up with a foot in two very different worlds: While her mother's upbringing was so rural that the other kids called her "holler rat," her father came from a comfortable, upper-middle-class Jewish family. Anya spent school years in affluent Connecticut and summers in the holler. Shaped by the experience, she would go on to win a scholarship to Yale and become an acclaimed artist, using provocative performances to explore the contradictions and unanswered questions of her life.

Das abenteuerliche Leben der Sehnsuchtsbilder von Caspar David Friedrich – mitreißend erzählt von Florian Illies. Kein deutscher Maler löst solche Emotionen aus wie Caspar David Friedrich: Seine abendlichen Himmel sind bis heute Ikonen der Sehnsucht, er inspirierte Samuel Beckett zu "Warten auf Godot" und Walt Disney zu "Bambi" – Goethe jedoch machte die rätselhafte Melancholie seiner Bilder so wütend, dass er sie auf der Tischkante zerschlagen wollte.

The Professor and the Parson traces the strange career of one of Britain's most eccentric criminals. Motivated not by money but by a desire for prestige, Peters lied, stole and cheated his way to academic positions and religious posts from Cambridge to New York, Singapore and South Africa. Frequently deported, and even more frequently discovered, his trail of destruction included seven marriages (three of which were bigamous), an investigation by the FBI and a disastrous appearance on Mastermind.

Dustin Kiskaddon draws on his own apprenticeship with Matt, the owner of Oakland's Premium Tattoo, and takes us behind the scenes into the complex world of professional tattooers. We join people who must routinely manage a messy and carnal type of work. Blood and Lightning brings us through the tattoo shop, where the smell of sterilizing agents, the hum of machines, and the sound of music spill out onto the back patio.

Following Once Were Warriors, Alan Duff wrote Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge. His controversial comments shook the country. A quarter of a century later, New Zealand and Maoridom are in a very different place. And so is Alan - he has published many more books, had two films made of his works, founded the Duffy Books in Homes literacy programme and endured 'some less inspiring moments, including bankruptcy'.