"For the teachers and students of Seattle's Garfield High School, the trip was just a public-relations lark, for helping a wealthy Pacific island open a science museum, they were to get a free trip around the world. It all seemed too esay. It was. As their chartered 747 crossed the Pacific, a huge spacecraft swooped down, cut off its wings, swallowed it up, and headed deep into outer space. Next stop: Charon, the moon of Pluto. Suddenly the flight crew, the students, and their teacher found themselves the unwilling guests of unseen and unreliable hosts whose life-support systems were breaking down. Even worse, the humans were caught in a deadly cross-fire between the rapidly failing aliens and a mad computer program that considered only itself indispensable, and whose intentions clearly were to destroy Earth ..."--Page 4 of cover
The author of The Mona Lisa Sacrifice and The Dead Hamlets delivers “a vastly entertaining, fantastical, breakneck hodgepodge quest novel” (Publishers Weekly). In the third Cross book, the immortal angel killer Cross faces his most dangerous enemy yet: Noah. For ages Noah has sailed the seas, seeking out all of God’s mistakes and imprisoning them on his ark. Noah is not humanity’s savior but is instead God’s jailer. But he has grown increasingly mad over the centuries, and now he is determined to end the world by raising the mysterious Sunken City. Only one person can stop him: Cross. As Cross races to stop Noah from finding the Sunken City, he’s joined by a few old friends, such as Alice from the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland tales, and several new characters make memorable appearances as well: Captain Nemo and his crew of Atlanteans aboard the submarine the Nautilus; the sorcerous pirate Blackbeard, who has sworn revenge upon Cross; the devilish angel Sariel, whose sacred duty is to protect God’s Bible; and the eerie and mysterious Ishmael, who may be the key to the world’s salvation—or its damnation. Cross must find a way to bring them all together to stop Noah or the world will drown in madness. “Despite their crazed, iconoclastic appearance, Roman’s novels are skillfully wrought, thematically deep, with a philosophical depth and a keen sense for both story and its implications . . . once you spend a bit of time in Cross’s head, you won’t be able to get him out of yours.” —Vancouver Sun
Michelangelo, like Leonardo, was a man of many talents; sculptor, architect, painter and poet, he made the apotheosis of muscular movement, which to him was the physical manifestation of passion. He moulded his draughtsmanship, bent it, twisted it, and stretched it to the extreme limits of possibility. There are not any landscapes in Michelangelo's painting. All the emotions, all the passions, all the thoughts of humanity were personified in his eyes in the naked bodies of men and women. He rarely conceived his human forms in attitudes of immobility or repose. Michelangelo became a painter so that he could express in a more malleable material what his titanesque soul felt, what his sculptor's imagination saw, but what sculpture refused him. Thus this admirable sculptor became the creator, at the Vatican, of the most lyrical and epic decoration ever seen: the Sistine Chapel. The profusion of his invention is spread over this vast area of over 900 square metres. There are 343 principal figures of prodigious variety of expression, many of colossal size, and in addition a great number of subsidiary ones introduced for decorative effect. The creator of this vast scheme was only thirty-four when he began his work. Michelangelo compels us to enlarge our conception of what is beautiful. To the Greeks it was physical perfection; but Michelangelo cared little for physical beauty, except in a few instances, such as his painting of Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and his sculptures of the Pietà. Though a master of anatomy and of the laws of composition, he dared to disregard both if it were necessary to express his concept: to exaggerate the muscles of his figures, and even put them in positions the human body could not naturally assume. In his later painting, The Last Judgment on the end wall of the Sistine, he poured out his soul like a torrent. Michelangelo was the first to make the human form express a variety of emotions. In his hands emotion became an instrument upon which he played, extracting themes and harmonies of infinite variety. His figures carry our imagination far beyond the personal meaning of the names attached to them.
Tenaciously pursued by NAZI hunters, Adolf Hitler Jr enlists in the U.S. Marines seeking anonymity. His enemies locate him and influence U.S Government agencies to assign him to Iraq where they believe he can be more easily killed... Suspense, fear and murders occur... Some other mentioned events and influences on the novel are: Adolf Hitler´s private journal; Holocaust propaganda; The ark of the Covenant; Sexuality; Secret laboratories at Dimona, Israel and at Peenemunde, Germany; The Swastika symbol; UFOs; Aliens, Angels and Gods; Neo-NAZI atomic research; WW II: The Christian vs. Jew vs. Communist war; The Iraq religious war.
From the early Renaissance through Baroque and Romanticism to Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop, these canonical works of Western Art span eight centuries and a vast range of subjects. Here are the sacred and the scandalous, the minimalist and the opulent, the groundbreaking and the conventional. There are paintings that captured the feeling of an era and those that signaled the beginning of a new one. Works of art that were immediately recognised for their genius, and others that were at first met with resistance. All have stood the test of time and in their own ways contribute to the dialectic on what makes a painting great, how notions of art have changed, to what degree art reflects reality, and to what degree it alters it. Brought together, these great works illuminate the changing preoccupations and insights of our ancestors, and give us pause to consider which paintings from our own era will ultimately join the canon.
In this third installment of the New York Times–bestselling Neverwinter Saga, Drizzt draws his sword once more for the sake of his friends Drizzt and Dahlia Sin’felle have defeated the sorceress Sylora Salm, but Dahlia’s thirst for revenge is far from slaked. Now, she speaks of nothing but the moment she will face the evil Netherese lord Herzgo Alegni—a moment she has been waiting for since she was just a child. Though Drizzt and Dahlia’s bond is no longer just one of friendship, there is much he does not know about his new lover. What is the driving force behind the darkness he’s seen within her? Can he justify another battle to settle a grudge he does not understand? But Dahlia isn’t the only one seeking vengeance against Alegni. Artemis Entreri, Drizzt’s former enemy, offers to aid Dahlia in her mission, hoping it will win him his freedom. But partnering with Entreri poses new challenges: Charon’s Claw, Algeni’s sentient sword, dominates Entreri’s movements—if not his mind. And then there’s the way Entreri looks at Dahlia, causing Drizzt to wonder if the cunning assassin is still more foe than friend. Charon's Claw is the third book in the Neverwinter Saga and the twenty-fifth installment in the Legend of Drizzt series.
Steven de Selby has a hangover. Bright lights, loud noise, and lots of exercise are the last thing he wants. But that's exactly what he gets when someone starts shooting at him. Steven is no stranger to death -- Mr. D's his boss after all -- but when a dead girl saves him from sharing her fate, he finds himself on the wrong end of the barrel. His job is to guide the restless dead to the underworld but now his clients are his own colleagues, friends, and family. Mr. D's gone missing and with no one in charge, the dead start to rise, the living are hunted, and the whole city teeters on the brink of a regional apocalypse -- unless Steven can shake his hangover, not fall for the dead girl, and find out what happened to his boss -- that is, Death himself. The Business of Death includes the first two volumes of the Death Works trilogy, Death Most Definite and Managing Death, as well as the third volume.
The name Michelangelo instantly conjures up the Sistine Chapel, the David, the Pieta and countless other great works. In his History of Italian Painting, the French writer Stendhal remarked that, “between Greek antiquity and Michelangelo nothing exists, except more or less skilled forgeries”. In Promenade in Rome, Chateaubriant expresses his admiration for the refined lines of the Pieta. A number of great writers such as Manzoni view Michelangelo as one of the indisputable Masters of the western revival in art. The work of Michelangelo has, indisputably, stood the test of time. How was he able, in so few years, to develop the methods behind a body of work worthy of his Greek predecessors? Often referred to as a superhuman and a creative genius, Michelangelo was an incomparable artist of the Italian Renaissance and is often ranked alongside Leonardo da Vinci in terms of influence and achievement. In this work, Jean-Matthieu Gosselin explores Michelangelo’s many identities: sculptor, architect, painter and draughtsman.
