This book evokes the romance of the rugged desert kingdom of Bikaner and its Rajput royal family. It is a richly woven tapestry encompassing five generations of an aristocratic family's past and present. Tales of valour, battles and coronations, the splendour of the royal courts, the culture and traditions that made this Rathore state preeminent in the world, all set against the backdrop of imposing palaces, rugged forts and hunting lodges, the magnificence of the gilded age of the Maharajas. The author describes her formative years during the sixties when seismic changes in the world were taking place and which were to take her on an adventurous journey from her home in Bikaner to life in London. The author brings to life a treasure trove of anecdotes and introduces us to a world of elegance, sportsmanship and cosmopolitan culture.
Witty and charming, New York Times-bestselling author Kerstin Gier's contemporary young adult novel A Castle in the Clouds follows a girl as she navigates secrets, romance, and danger in an aging grand hotel. Way up in the Swiss mountains, there's a hotel steeped in tradition and faded splendor. Once a year, when the famous New Year's Eve Ball takes place and guests from all over the world arrive, excitement returns to the vast hallways. Sophie, an intern at the hotel, is tasked with ensuring everything goes as planned. But the unexpected seems to lurk in every corner, and she soon realizes that not all the guests are as they appear to be. As Sophie finds herself embroiled in a thrilling adventure, risking not just her job but her heart, readers will be captivated by this whimsical tale of romance and mystery. Find yourself lost in the winding hallways of our grand Swiss hotel where secrets, romance, and danger coalesce into one unforgettable experience.
"If now a swell from the Deep has swept over this planetary ship of earth, and I, who alone chanced to find myself in the furthest stern, as the sole survivor of her crew . . . What then, my God, shall I do?" The Purple Cloud is widely hailed as a masterpiece of science fiction and one of the best "last man" novels ever written. A deadly purple vapor passes over the world and annihilates all living creatures except one man, Adam Jeffson. He embarks on an epic journey across a silent and devastated planet, an apocalyptic Robinson Crusoe putting together the semblance of a normal life from the flotsam and jetsam of his former existence. As he descends into madness over the years, he becomes increasingly aware that his survival was no accident and that his destiny?and the fate of the human race?are part of a profound, cosmological plan.
To his friends, family, and work colleagues, Alex is a successful senior bureaucrat, well respected and liked by those who view him as an inspirational leader. But behind the facade, Alexx is tormented by his past traumas, especially his betrayal of a young woman while on holiday in Greece in 1995. As Alex's mental health begins to rapidly deteriorate, he realises that his life has mostly been a lie and that the key to his immediate survival rests with several people he briefly met when he was a younger man. Can Alex use their belated wisdom to defeat his inner demons before he reaches the point of no return? Spanning several continents, A Season of Clouds is a book about love, conflict, friendship, redemption, and dealing with the tragic consequences of sexual assault and mental illness.
The novel tells the story of Akira Kumo, a retired couturier living in Paris, owner of the world's largest collection of books about clouds, and Virginie Latour, whom Kumo hires to help catalogue his library. While they work he tells her the story behind three figures in particular, all British, all obsessed by clouds: Luke Howard, a real-life Quaker who in 1802 wrote the first treatise classifying clouds (we still use it today); a painter named Carmichael, clearly based on John Constable, one of the most famous cloud painters of all time, and a fictional amateur meteorologist named Richard Abercrombie, who aspires to write the definitive book on cloud description, which would come to be known in cloud circles as the Abercrombie Protocol. Kumo sends Virginie Latour to London to buy the Protocol. By the end of the novel, we learn the Protocol's great secret; we understand what binds these men together; and and we learn that Kumo himself is a survivor of the Hiroshima blast, in whose cloud his family vanished.
Dreamy Emery loves doodling wild inventions . . . but when a new friend moves in next door with piles of tools and ideas, can they build a real flying machine together? This charming celebration of intergenerational friendship, creativity and the thrill of scientific discovery will delight young inventors and STEM educators alike.
This book is essentially a study of British aristocratic and artistic patronage of the arts in the under-explored period after 1850, approached through an intensive look at a single house - Clouds, known as the house of the age. It was built by the glamorous and unconventionally gifted Percy and Madeline Wyndham, and designed by Philip Webb, one of Britain's greatest architects. It became one of the centres of artistic and political life in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and set the style for a whole generation of country house living. Dakers recreates the atmosphere and the lives lived in the house, the personalities of its three generations of Wyndham owners, and the succession of distinguished guests drawn to it - Henry James, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Kipling, Whistler and Lord Alfred Douglas, amongst many others. She tracks the decline in the tradition of aristocratic patronage through a decline in the fortunes of Clouds itself - by the 1930s, the palace of art was a vast white elephant, and the house was sold to an institution, its treasures dispersed and its structure dynamited into a more usable space.
Best friends, clever and adventurous Madlen and Alen find themselves in the Kingdom of Clouds, where they meet Bul-Bul, an amazing magical creature, whose job is to sprinkle rain. In this world full of wonders, everything is different, even the lemonade, which is flavoured rainwater! While Bul-Bul desperately needs to pass a very difficult upgrading test in order to become a Rainbow Painter, the children find out that self-confidence is essential for success. Will they be able to help Bul-Bul pass the test? Everything is getting more dangerous, as they learn about the evil witch, who resides nearby with her weird creatures. Are they ever going to defeat the witch, or is the sky going to be covered in lightning forever?
Religion is universal human culture. No phenomenon is more widely shared or more intensely studied, yet there is no agreement on what religion is. Now, in Faces in the Clouds, anthropologist Stewart Guthrie provides a provocative definition of religion in a bold and persuasive new theory. Guthrie says religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism--that is, the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Many writers see anthropomorphism as common or even universal in religion, but few think it is central. To Guthrie, however, it is fundamental. Religion, he writes, consists of seeing the world as humanlike. As Guthrie shows, people find a wide range of humanlike beings plausible: Gods, spirits, abominable snowmen, HAL the computer, Chiquita Banana. We find messages in random events such as earthquakes, weather, and traffic accidents. We say a fire "rages," a storm "wreaks vengeance," and waters "lie still." Guthrie says that our tendency to find human characteristics in the nonhuman world stems from a deep-seated perceptual strategy: in the face of pervasive (if mostly unconscious) uncertainty about what we see, we bet on the most meaningful interpretation we can. If we are in the woods and see a dark shape that might be a bear or a boulder, for example, it is good policy to think it is a bear. If we are mistaken, we lose little, and if we are right, we gain much. So, Guthrie writes, in scanning the world we always look for what most concerns us--livings things, and especially, human ones. Even animals watch for human attributes, as when birds avoid scarecrows. In short, we all follow the principle--better safe than sorry. Marshalling a wealth of evidence from anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy, theology, advertising, literature, art, and animal behavior, Guthrie offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this perceptual strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience. Challenging the very foundations of religion, Faces in the Clouds forces us to take a new look at this fundamental element of human life.
A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa’s greatest houses—and the lives of its occupants When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador’s residence in Prague, returning to the land his mother had fled after the Holocaust, he was startled to discover swastikas hidden beneath the furniture in his new home. These symbols of Nazi Germany were remnants of the residence’s forgotten history, and evidence that we never live far from the past. From that discovery unspooled the twisting, captivating tale of four of the remarkable people who had called this palace home. Their story is Europe’s, and The Last Palace chronicles the upheavals that transformed the continent over the past century. There was the optimistic Jewish financial baron, Otto Petschek, who built the palace after World War I as a statement of his faith in democracy, only to have that faith shattered; Rudolf Toussaint, the cultured, compromised German general who occupied the palace during World War II, ultimately putting his life at risk to save the house and Prague itself from destruction; Laurence Steinhardt, the first postwar US ambassador whose quixotic struggle to keep the palace out of Communist hands was paired with his pitched efforts to rescue the country from Soviet domination; and Shirley Temple Black, an eyewitness to the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, who determined to return to Prague and help end totalitarianism—and did just that as US ambassador in 1989. Weaving in the life of Eisen’s own mother to demonstrate how those without power and privilege moved through history, The Last Palace tells the dramatic and surprisingly cyclical tale of the triumph of liberal democracy.
