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Author: National Portrait Gallery (Great Britain)
Publisher:
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781855144552
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Eight internationally acclaimed authors have invented imaginary biographies and character sketches based on fourteen unidentified portraits... in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery."--Back cover.
Author: James Trefil
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
Published: 2019-09-17
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 1588346730
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe captivating possibilities of extraterrestrial life on exoplanets, based on current scientific knowledge of existing worlds and forms of life It is now known that we live in a galaxy with more planets than stars. The Milky Way alone encompasses 30 trillion potential home planets. Scientists Trefil and Summers bring readers on a marvelous experimental voyage through the possibilities of life--unlike anything we have experienced so far--that could exist on planets outside our own solar system. Life could be out there in many forms: on frozen worlds, living in liquid oceans beneath ice and communicating (and even battling) with bubbles; on super-dense planets, where they would have evolved body types capable of dealing with extreme gravity; on tidally locked planets with one side turned eternally toward a star; and even on "rogue worlds," which have no star at all. Yet this is no fictional flight of fancy: the authors take what we know about exoplanets and life on our own world and use that data to hypothesize about how, where, and which sorts of life might develop. Imagined Life is a must-have for anyone wanting to learn how the realities of our universe may turn out to be far stranger than fiction.
Author: William H. Epstein
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-06-06
Total Pages: 354
ISBN-13: 1438460813
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBiopics—films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious figures from our national history—have long been one of Hollywood's most popular and important genres, offering viewers various understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives, Imagined Communities provides the first full-length examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases in American cinema while treating recent developments in three fields: cinema studies, particularly the history of Hollywood; national identity studies dealing with the American experience; and scholarship devoted to modernity and postmodernity. Films discussed include Houdini, Patton, The Great White Hope, Bound for Glory, Ed Wood, Basquiat, Pollock, Sylvia, Kinsey, Fur, Milk, J. Edgar, and Lincoln, and the book pays special attention to the crucial generic plot along which biopics traverse and showcase American lives, even as they modify the various notions of the national character.
Author: Sabrina Reed
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Published: 2022-11-04
Total Pages: 197
ISBN-13: 1772840122
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPerceptive, controversial, topical, and achingly funny, Miriam Toews’s books have earned her a place at the forefront of Canadian literature. In this first monograph on Toews’s work, Sabrina Reed examines the interplay of trauma and resilience in the author’s fiction. Reed skillfully demonstrates how Toews situates resilience across key themes, including: the home as both a source of trauma and an inspiration for resilient action; the road trip as a search for resolution and redemption; and the reframing of the Mennonite diaspora as an escape from patriarchal oppression. The deaths by suicide of Toews’s father and sister stand out as the most shocking and tragic of the author’s biographical details, and Reed explores Toews’s use of autofiction as a reparative gesture in the face of this trauma. Written in an accessible style that will appeal to both scholars and devotees of Toews’s work, Lives Lived, Lives Imagined is a timely examination of Toews’s oeuvre and a celebration of fiction’s ability to simultaneously embody compassion and anger, joy and sadness, and to brave the personal and communal oppressions of politics, religion, family, society, and mental illness.
Author: Mark Brake
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 283
ISBN-13: 0521491290
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCompelling account of how ideas of alien life have evolved for general readers, amateur astronomers and undergraduate students studying astrobiology.
Author: Hilary Parsons Dick
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2018-05-01
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 1477314024
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMigration fundamentally shapes the processes of national belonging and socioeconomic mobility in Mexico—even for people who never migrate or who return home permanently. Discourse about migrants, both at the governmental level and among ordinary Mexicans as they envision their own or others’ lives in “El Norte,” generates generic images of migrants that range from hardworking family people to dangerous lawbreakers. These imagined lives have real consequences, however, because they help to determine who can claim the resources that facilitate economic mobility, which range from state-sponsored development programs to income earned in the North. Words of Passage is the first full-length ethnography that examines the impact of migration from the perspective of people whose lives are affected by migration, but who do not themselves migrate. Hilary Parsons Dick situates her study in the small industrial city of Uriangato, in the state of Guanajuato. She analyzes the discourse that circulates in the community, from state-level pronouncements about what makes a “proper” Mexican to working-class people’s talk about migration. Dick shows how this migration discourse reflects upon and orders social worlds long before—and even without—actual movements beyond Mexico. As she listens to men and women trying to position themselves within the migration discourse and claim their rights as “proper” Mexicans, she demonstrates that migration is not the result of the failure of the Mexican state but rather an essential part of nation-state building.
Author: Patti Callahan Henry
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2013-04-09
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 0312610769
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEnjoying her loving family life and career successes, Kate Vaughn anticipates a marriage proposal from her boyfriend and realises that she cannot move forward until she reconnects with a past love and the daughter they gave up for adoption years earlier.
Author: Benedict Anderson
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2006-11-17
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13: 178168359X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.
Author: Anthony S Markellis
Publisher: Shirespress
Published: 2019-11-12
Total Pages: 136
ISBN-13: 9781605715032
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLife...Real & Imagined is a collection of fourteen short stories by acclaimed bassist Tony Markellis, one of whose favorite pastimes is the observation and appreciation of his fellow humans wherever his many travels may take him. An eternal student of anthropology, he is fascinated by people and their languages, their customs, their cuisines, their origins, and their aspirations. In the preface to the book he says, "We are all alike in so many ways, but that's not what makes life interesting, is it? It's the differences between us that make life worth living. These stories deal with people of many ages, races, nationalities, religions and walks of life, and are one man's attempt to understand them. Some of these tales are eyewitness accounts of actual events (if perhaps embellished a bit); and some of them are pure fiction. I'll leave it to you to decide which ones are which."
Author: Caspar Henderson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-04-10
Total Pages: 448
ISBN-13: 022604470X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom medieval bestiaries to Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, we’ve long been enchanted by extraordinary animals, be they terrifying three-headed dogs or asps impervious to a snake charmer’s song. But bestiaries are more than just zany zoology—they are artful attempts to convey broader beliefs about human beings and the natural order. Today, we no longer fear sea monsters or banshees. But from the infamous honey badger to the giant squid, animals continue to captivate us with the things they can do and the things they cannot, what we know about them and what we don’t. With The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, Caspar Henderson offers readers a fascinating, beautifully produced modern-day menagerie. But whereas medieval bestiaries were often based on folklore and myth, the creatures that abound in Henderson’s book—from the axolotl to the zebrafish—are, with one exception, very much with us, albeit sometimes in depleted numbers. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings transports readers to a world of real creatures that seem as if they should be made up—that are somehow more astonishing than anything we might have imagined. The yeti crab, for example, uses its furry claws to farm the bacteria on which it feeds. The waterbear, meanwhile, is among nature’s “extreme survivors,” able to withstand a week unprotected in outer space. These and other strange and surprising species invite readers to reflect on what we value—or fail to value—and what we might change. A powerful combination of wit, cutting-edge natural history, and philosophical meditation, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is an infectious and inspiring celebration of the sheer ingenuity and variety of life in a time of crisis and change.
