Last time we saw Benjamin Franklin Gates, the cunning, impassioned lead character of Walt Disney Pictures' National Treasure, he had succeeded in evading shady characters, fulfilling his family's destiny, and discovering an unimaginable trove of treasures beneath Manhattan's oldest church./DIV DIVNow, Ben is back. In National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, the hero finds an all-new set of dangers, conflicts, double-crossings, and of course...treasure!
"The introductory text of this book traces Georgia's long cultural history from its archaeological beginnings to the present. Twenty-three essays by scholars from all over the world give a vivid portrayal of Georgia's heritage in history, literature and manuscript production, archaeology and art throughout prehistoric, classical and Christian periods up to the Early Modern Era. Over 150 objects are presented and their range is vast: Neolithic ceramics, intricately worked Bronze and Iron Age gold and silver, Greek and Roman jewellery, richly illuminated manuscripts, medieval paintings, cloisonne enamel and gold repousse work, and embroidery are illustrated."--Jacket.
Defending National Treasures explores the fate of art and cultural heritage during the Nazi occupation of France. The French cultural patrimony was a crucial locus of power struggles between German and French leaders and among influential figures in each country. Karlsgodt examines the preservation policy that the Vichy regime enacted in an assertion of sovereignty over French art museums, historic monuments, and archeological sites. The limits to this sovereignty are apparent from German appropriations of public statues, Jewish-owned art collections, and key "Germanic" works of art from French museums. A final chapter traces the lasting impact of the French wartime reforms on preservation policy. In Defending National Treasures, Karlsgodt introduces the concept of patrimania to reveal examples of opportunism in art preservation. During the war, French officials sought to acquire coveted artwork from Jewish collections for the Louvre and other museums; in the early postwar years, they established a complicated guardianship over unclaimed art recovered from Germany. A cautionary tale for our own times, Defending National Treasures examines the ethical dimensions of museum acquisitions in the ongoing noble quest to preserve great works of art.
A man puts pieces of his life up for auction. An antique chess set played with a troubled brother ($99.99), number plates from a crashed stolen car ($20), Chuck Taylor trainers worn in a riot in Seattle ($8.99). Along with a short description, he tells their stories, how they fit into the tapestry of his life. In National Treasures men and women measure out their lives in tattoos, sharpened fragments of a moose's hoof, autumn leaves, scribbled phone numbers, the red eyes of a heron. This is the America we never see - it's not in the movies, or on the news. National Treasures is about people trying to get by and get on. These can be tough lives of tough love and tough luck but they are full of poignancy and intensity, and Charles McLeod writes about them thrillingly. 'These stories are a portrait of America in all its breadth... Charles McLeod knows the whole country through its ill-fitting parts and people. There are moments of wild candor and insight that crack the surface of daily life' Salvatore Scibona, author of The End 'Charles McLeod's writing is very special - crisp and rhythmical, sometimes almost poetic' Evening Standard
Stories in this book reflect how history has woven itself into the fabric of the present. The stories are intimate and told by the artists, by family members, by friends in their own words. The telling will make you feel as though you are fortunate enough to sit in the presence of the Cherokee artists, who intimately share the story of themselves, of their art, who their family was, how they came to be artists, who and what influenced them, and how their art reflects who they are as Cherokee people. They are the Cherokee National Treasures.
'Geeks triumph over the forces of darkness: nothing could have given me greater pleasure. Combining an exciting story with scrupulous research, Caroline Shenton has done her unlikely heroes proud' - Lucy Worsley As Hitler prepared to invade Poland during the sweltering summer of 1939, men and women from across London's museums, galleries and archives formulated ingenious plans to send the nation's highest prized objects to safety. Using stately homes, tube tunnels, slate mines, castles, prisons, stone quarries and even their own homes, a dedicated bunch of unlikely misfits packed up the nation's greatest treasures and, in a race against time, dispatched them throughout the country on a series of top-secret wartime adventures. National Treasures highlights a moment from our history when an unlikely coalition of mild-mannered civil servants, social oddballs and metropolitan aesthetes became the front line in the heritage war against Hitler. Caroline Shenton shares the interwoven lives of ordinary people who kept calm and carried on in the most extraordinary of circumstances in their efforts to save the Nation's historic identity.
A major scholarly work, published in conjunction with the exhibition titled "Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei" (on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during 1996, and scheduled for several other American cities during 1996-1997). Written by scholars of both Chinese and Western cultural backgrounds and conceived as a cultural history, the book synthesizes scholarship of the past three decades to present the historical and cultural significance of individual works of art and analyses of their aesthetic content, as well as reevaluation of the cultural dynamics of Chinese history. Includes some 600 illustrations, 436 in color. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
With his storyteller's gift, Jameson relates episodes from early explorers through the colonial period, the Civil War, the settling of the West, and the roaring 1920s. As a professional treasure hunter, he has followed the trails of many of the lost mines and buried treasures he describes. Sample treasures include Sir Francis Drake Treasure, Benedict Arnold Treasure, Lafayette's Sunken Riches, Maryland's Lost Silver Mine, The Wandering Confederate Treasury, Lost Treasure of the Gray Ghost, Oklahoma Outlaw Cache, and Lost Spanish Gold in the Sandia Mountains.
This is not the first book written about quantum mechanics, but it just might be the last. The theory presented inside these pages is so revolutionary that it has stunned the scientific community into reconsidering centuries of thought about the behavior of energy and matter. Prepare to have your mind blown. Sorry, that's the introduction to Willie Geist's next book--the culmination of his life's work. Look for it next spring, just in time for Mother's Day. This book is about his other passion: freaks. When he's not in the lab, Geist spends his time on MSNBC's Morning Joe sifting through the wreckage of American politics and popular culture. These days, that's a big job. With an Alaska hockey mom turning, almost overnight, into a national icon and threatening to move from Wasilla to the White House, with the world's most famous athlete now associated less with the Masters and more with the strippers, and with reality TV working around the clock to ensure the constitutional right of every man, woman, and child to fifteen minutes of fame, Geist's business is thriving. In his hilarious first book, American Freak Show, Geist takes the smart, biting observation loved by his television audience to new satirical extremes. The real-life characters who now haunt our daily lives are cast as stars in completely made-up scenes that, frankly, are not all that far from reality. Geist treats us to the first look at President Sarah Palin's unconventional inaugural address, performed live on WWE's Monday Night Raw after her renegade victory in the 2012 election. We go inside the ballroom for a Dean Martin-style welcome roast of Bernie Madoff upon his arrival in Hell, with Pol Pot serving as sidesplitting roastmaster. Geist provides us with never-before-seen FBI wiretap transcripts of the more mundane, but equally profane, telephone conversations of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. And George W. Bush's batting-cage-and-waterslide-themed plans for a presidential library are laid out publicly for the first time. From Obama to Oprah, Afghanistan to Lohan, and Snooki to the Salahis, Willie Geist spares no one as our host of this wild American Freak Show. You'll laugh out loud while weeping for the future of America.
As war raged across the jagged Afghan countryside, the staff of the Afghan National Museum spirited away, piece by piece, to hiding places all over the Kabul region, each time risking their lives, sworn to silence, it was a secret they kept until the fall of the Taliban--almost thirty years of deadly danger, courage, and fierce honor.
