Urville
Urville

Author: Gilles Trehin

Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers

Published: 2006-02-15

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1846424852

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Urville, the capital of a large island province, has a population of nearly 12 million, making it the one of the most significant cities in Europe. It is also entirely imaginary. Gilles Tréhin, an autistic man with exceptional creative talents and an obsession with large cities, conceived and developed Urville over the course of 20 years. He shares his vision in this beautifully illustrated guide to the city, which he renders convincingly real in nearly 300 drawings of different districts of Urville. He describes, in remarkable detail, the architectural styles of its individual buildings and provides historical, geographical, economic and cultural information. This includes historical figures and cultural anecdotes grounded in historical reality - Tréhin accounts for the effects of the Vichy regime, the Second World War and globalisation on his imagined city. This book offers fascinating evidence of and insight into the creative power of the autistic mind and will be of interest to people with autism and without.

Dumont D’Urville
Dumont D’Urville

Author: Edward Duyker

Publisher:

Published: 2015-03-31

Total Pages: 680

ISBN-13:

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Explorer Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville (1790–1842) is sometimes called France's Captain Cook. Born less than a year after the beginning of the French Revolution, he lived through turbulent times. He was an erudite polymath: a maritime explorer fascinated by botany, entomology, ethnography and the diverse languages of the world. As a young ensign he was decorated for his pivotal part in France's acquisition of the famous Vénus de Milo. D'Urville's voyages and writings meshed with an emergent French colonial impulse in the Pacific. In this magnificent biography Edward Duyker reveals that D'Urville had secret orders to search for the site for a potential French penal colony in Australia. He also effectively helped to precipitate pre-emptive British settlement on several parts of the Australian coast. D'Urville visited New Zealand in 1824, 1827 and 1840. This wide-ranging survey examines his scientific contribution, including the plants and animals he collected, and his conceptualisation of the peoples of the Pacific: it was he who first coined the terms Melanesia and Micronesia. D'Urville helped to confirm the fate of the missing French explorer Lapérouse, took Charles X into exile after the Revolution of 1830, and crowned his navigational achievements with two pioneering Antarctic descents. Edward Duyker has used primary documents that have long been overlooked by other historians. He dispels many myths and errors about this daring explorer of the age of sail and offers his readers grand adventure and surprising drama and pathos.

Antarctica
Antarctica

Author: David Day

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 625

ISBN-13: 0199861455

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Explains the history of Antarctica, focusing on the explorers and sailors drawn to the continent, the scientific investigations that have taken place there, and the geopolitical implications of the landmass.