A distinguished dance critic offers an enchanting introduction to the art of ballet As much as we may enjoy Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, for many of us ballet is a foreign language. It communicates through movement, not words, and its history lies almost entirely abroad -- in Russia, Italy, and France. In Celestial Bodies, dance critic Laura Jacobs makes the foreign familiar, providing a lively, poetic, and uniquely accessible introduction to the world of classical dance. Combining history, interviews with dancers, technical definitions, descriptions of performances, and personal stories, Jacobs offers an intimate and passionate guide to watching ballet and understanding the central elements of choreography. Beautifully written and elegantly illustrated with original drawings, Celestial Bodies is essential reading for all lovers of this magnificent art form.
This book describes over 300 celestial wonders that can be viewed with common binoculars and low-power "backyard" telescopes incorporating refractors and reflectors. In addition to such showpieces as the Andromeda Galaxy, the largest and brightest of all galaxies after the Milky Way, and the Blue Snowball, one of the autumn sky's outstanding planetary nebulas, over 20 other special objects are listed and characterized, many of which are visible to the unaided eye on a dark, clear night. The sun, moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and other members of the earth’s solar system are also described, as are such bright asteroids as Ceres, Juno, and Vesta; open star clusters, diffuse nebulas, supernova remnants, spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies, and a host of other astronomical phenomena. An abbreviated descriptive format is used to accommodate as much information on observation as possible for both field and armchair use.
In 1919, the United States made its boldest attempt at social reform: Prohibition. This "noble experiment" was aggressively promoted, and spectacularly unsuccessful, in New York City. In the first major work on Prohibition in a quarter century, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most vibrant city, Lerner describes a battle between competing visions of the United States that encompassed much more than the freedom to drink.
A poignant, uplifting, heartbreaking love story from the beloved bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author: "To read a novel by Anne Tyler is to fall in love" (PEOPLE). Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His elderly mother putters in the rooms below, until her death. And it is then that Jeremy is forced to take in Mary Tell and her child as boarders. Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jeremy to look her in the eye. For Jeremy, like one of his paper creations, is fragile and easily torn—especially when he's falling in love....
Celestial Bodies is the International Booker-winning and internationally bestselling novel from Jokha Alharthi. Set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present. Elegantly structured and taut, Celestial Bodies is a coiled spring of a novel, telling of Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s losses and loves. PRAISE FOR CELESTIAL BODIES "An innovative reimagining of the family saga . . . Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets” NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "The great pleasure of reading Celestial Bodies is witnessing a novel argue, through the achieved perfection of its form, for a kind of inquiry that only the novel can really conduct. The ability to move freely through time, the privileged access to the wounded privacies of many characters, the striking diversity of human beings across a relatively narrow canvas, the shock waves as one generation heaves, like tectonic plates, against another, the secrets and lapses and repressions, at once intimate and historical, the power, indeed, of an investigation that is always political and always intimate―here is the novel being supremely itself, proving itself up to the job by changing not its terms of employment but the shape of the task." THE NEW YORKER "Breathtaking. The tale is replete with history, poetry, and philosophy, but also slavery, broken marriages, passion, and not-so-secret lovers." THE ATLAN
In ninety-two days, the feathered appendages that link me to the people I loathe finally come off. Dear, winglets, you will not be missed. Celeste has spent the last four years building a life outside of angelic guilds-parties, check-pursuing human ambitions instead of celestial ones-college, check-and shedding feathers across Parisian cobblestones and more recently New York sidewalks-speaking her mind, always check. She swore off angels, but the death of the woman who took her in the night Leigh died brings them soaring back into her life . . . and not just any angel but the most detestable one, the one complicit in Leigh's death-Seraph Asher. Although Celeste tells the archangel to feather off, the unreasonably pretty and obstinate man doesn't leave her alone. He returns and insists she complete her wings. When she asks him for one good reason to do so, he gives her an unbeatable one: what he did with Leigh's soul. Asher never meant to share his damning secret, but he knows it's the only way to save Celeste-the rebellious Fletching he can't get out of his head . . . or heart.
When Prince Rodolfo's monsters attack her, Petra Kronos is spirited away to London. As she struggles to escape, Neel and Tomik sail the high seas, in search of her. Though separated by many miles, the three friends draw closer together in this sequel to The Cabinet of Wonders, called "astonishingly accomplished" by Publishers Weekly. Readers will not be disappointed in this adventure-filled novel that includes man-made monsters, the unraveling of a murder mystery, and the hunt for the Celestial Globe, which the prince of Bohemia will do anything to own.
Throughout history, the mysterious dark skies above us have inspired our imaginations in countless ways, influencing our endeavours in science and philosophy, religion, literature and art. Heavenly Treasures is a truly beautiful book showing the richness of astronomical theories and illustrations in Western civilization through the ages, exploring their evolution, and comparing ancient and modern throughout. From Greek verse, mediaeval manuscripts and Victorian poetry to spacecraft photographs and computer-generated star charts, the unprecedented wealth of these portrayals is quite breathtaking.
