Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings and Drawings (2 vols.)

Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings & The Graphic Work
by Frank Zöllner and Johannes Nathan

ND 623 .L5 Z65 2011 v.1 & 2

“Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) possessed one of the greatest minds of all time; his importance and influence are inestimable. This two-volume, midsize format comprehensive survey is the most complete book ever made on the subject of this Italian painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist and all-around genius. With huge, full-bleed details of Leonardo’s masterworks, this highly original publication allows the reader to inspect the subtlest facets of his brushstrokes.” – publisher description

 

Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood

Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood
edited by Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil

NC 1766 .U5 F86 2011

“This collection of essays explores the link between comedy and animation in studio-era cartoons, from filmdom’s earliest days through the twentieth century.  Written by a who’s who of animation authorities, Funny Pictures offers a stimulating range of views on why animation became associated with comedy so early and so indelibly and illustrates how animation and humor came together at a pivotal stage in the development of the motion picture industry.” – publisher description

 

33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, From Billie Holiday to Green Day

33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, From Billie Holiday to Green Day
by Dorian Lynskey

ML 3780 .L97 2011

“When pop music meets politics, the results are often thrilling, sometimes life-changing, and never simple.  The protest songs of such great artists as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, U2, Public Enemy, Fela Kuti, R.E.M., Rage Against the Machine, and the Clash represent pop music at its most charged and relevant, providing the soundtrack and informing social change since the 1930s.  They capture the attention and passions of listeners, force their way into the news, and make their presence felt from the streets to the corridors of power.

33 Revolutions Per Minute is a history of protest music embodied in 33 songs that span seven decades and four continents, from Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit” before a shocked audience to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young paying tribute to the Vietnam protesters killed at Kent State in “Ohio,” to Green Day railing against President Bush and twenty-first-century media in “American Idiot.”  With the aid of exclusive new interviews, Dorian Lynskey explores the individuals, ideas, and events behind each song.  This expansive survey examines how music has engaged with racial unrest, nuclear paranoia, apartheid, war, poverty, and oppression, offering hope, stirring anger, inciting action, and producing songs that continue to resonate years down the line, sometimes at great cost to the musicians involved.

For the audience who embraced Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, or Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again, 33 Revolutions Per MInute is an absorbing and moving account of 33 songs that made history.” – publisher description

 

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty by Andrew Bolton

TT 505 .M37 M37 2011

“Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) was one of the most influential, imaginative, and provocative designers of his generation.  His clothing both challenged and expanded the conventional parameters of fashion to express ideas about culture, politics, and identity.  Rare among designers, McQueen saw beyond clothing’s physical constraints to its ideological and conceptual possibilities, addressing questions related to race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, and the environment.

Featuring the most iconic and radical designs of his prolific career, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty examines the designer’s evolution from the start of his fledgling label, to his years as creative director at Givenchy in Paris, and finally to the collections of his own world-renowned London house.  It reveals how McQueen adapted and combined the fundamentals of Savile Row tailoring, the specialized techniques of haute couture – such as lacework, embroidery, and featherwork – and technological innovation to achieve his distinctive aesthetic.  It also focuses on the highly sophisticated narrative structures found in McQueen’s collections and in his extravagant runway presentations, which suggested the most avant-garde installation and performance art.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, this stunning book includes a preface by curator Andrew Bolton; an introduction by Susannah Frankel; an interview with Sarah Burton, creative director of the house of Alexander McQueen, conducted by Tim Blanks; and illuminating commentary from the designer himself.  Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty celebrates the astounding creativity and originality of a designer who relentlessly questioned and confronted the requisites of fashion.” – publisher description

 

Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon

Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon by Martin Kemp

N 72 .S6 K32 2012

“Image, branding, and logos are obsessions of our age.  Iconic images dominate the media.  Christ to Coke is the first book to look at all the main types of visual icons.  It does so via eleven supreme and mega-famous examples, both historical and contemporary, to see both how they arose and how they continue to exercise their enduring appeal.  Along the way we encounter the often weird and wonderful means by which they become transformed, in an astonishing variety of contexts.  How, for example, has the communist revolutionary Che become a romantic hero for middle-class teenagers?

The stock image of Christ’s face is the founding icon – literally, since he was the central subject of early icon painting.  Some of the icons that follow are general, like the cross, the lion, and the heart-shape.  Some are specific, such as the Mona Lisa, Che Guevara, and the famous photograph of the napalmed girl in Vietnam.  The American flag, the ‘Stars and Stripes’, does not quite fit into either category.  Modern icons come from commerce, led by the Coca-Cola bottle, and from science, most notably the double helix of DNA and Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2.

These eleven iconic stories, researched using the skills of one of the world’s leading visual historians, are told in a vivid and personal manner.  Some are funny; some are deeply moving; some are highly improbable; some center on popular fame; others are based on the most profound ideas in science.  The diversity is extraordinary.  There is no set formula, but do the images share anything in common?

So famous are these images that every reader is an expert in their own right – and all should be entertained and challenged by the narratives that Martin Kemp skillfully weaves around them.” – publisher description

 

Moonwalking with Einstein

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

BF 385 .F64 2011

“On average, people squander forty days annually compensating for things they’ve forgotten.  Joshua Foer used to be one of those people.  But after a year of memory training, he found himself in the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship.  Even more important, Foer found a vital truth we too often forget: In every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.

Moonwalking with Einstein draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of memory, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human remembering.  Under the tutelage of top “mental athletes,” Foer learns ancient techniques once employed by Cicero to memorize his speeches and by medieval scholars to memorize entire books.  Using methods that have been largely forgotten, he discovers that we can all dramatically improve our memories.

Immersing himself obsessively in a quirky subculture of competitive memorizers, Foer learns to apply techniques that call on imagination as much as determination – showing that memorization can be anything but rote.  From the PAO system, which converts numbers into lurid images, to the memory palace, in which memories are stored in the rooms of imaginary structures, Foer’s experience shows that the memory championships are less a test of memory than of perseverance and creativity.

Foer takes his inquiry well beyond the arena of mental athletes – across the country and deep into his own mind.  In San Diego, he meets an affable old man with one of the most severe cases of amnesia on record and learns that memory is at once more elusive and more reliable than we might think.  In Salt Lake City, he swaps secrets with a savant who claims to have memorized more than nine thousand books.  At a high school in the South Bronx, he finds a history teacher using twenty-five-hundred-year-old memory techniques to give his students an edge in the state Regents exam.

Moonwalking with Einstein brings Joshua Foer to the apex of the U.S. Memory Championship and readers to a profound appreciation of a gift we all possess but that too often slips our minds.” – publisher description

 

Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don’t Have in Search of Happiness We Can’t Buy

Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don’t Have in Search of Happiness We Can’t Buy
by James A. Roberts

HC 110 .C6 R626 2011

“The American Dream was founded on the belief that anyone dedicated to thrift and hard work could create opportunities and achieve a better life.  Now that dream has been reduced to a hyperquantified desire for fancier clothes, sleeker cars, and larger homes.  We’ve lost our way, but James Roberts argues that it’s not too late to find it again.  In Shiny Objects, he offers us an opportunity to examine our day-to-day habits, and once again strive for lives of quality over quantity.

Mining his years of research into the psychology of consumer behavior, Roberts gets to the heart of the often-surprising ways we make our purchasing decisions.  What he and other researchers in his field have found is that no matter what our income level, Americans believe that we need more to live a good life.  But as our standard of living has climbed over the past forty years, our self-reported “happiness levels” have flatlined.

Roberts isn’t merely concerned with the GDP or big-ticket purchases – damaging spending habits play out countless times a day, in ways big and small: he demonstrates that even the amount we spend at our favorite fast-food joint increases anywhere from 60 to 100 percent when we use a credit card instead of cash.  Every time we watch TV or turn on a radio we’re exposed to marketing messages (experts estimated up to 3,000 of them daily).  Consumption is king, and its toll is not just a financial one: relationships are suffering, too, as materialism encroaches on the time and value we give the people around us.

By shedding much-needed light on the science of spending, Roberts empowers readers to make smart changes, improve self-control, and curtail spending.  The American Dream is still ours for the taking, and Shiny Objects is ultimately a hopeful statement about the power we each hold to redefine the pursuit of happiness.”
- publisher description

 

A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown

A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown by Julia Scheeres

BP 605 .P46 S34 2011

“In 1954, a pastor named Jim Jones opened a church in Indianapolis called Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church.  He was a charismatic preacher with idealistic beliefs, and he quickly filled his pews with an audience eager to hear his sermons on social justice.  After Jones moved his church to Northern California in 1965, he became a major player in politics there; he provided vital support in electing friendly political candidates to office, and they in turn offered him a protective shield by refusing to heed calls to investigate the Temple.  As Jones’s behavior became more erratic and his message more ominous, his followers found it increasingly difficult to pull away from the church.  By the time Jones relocated the Peoples Temple a final time to a remote jungle in Guyana and the U.S. government decided to investigate allegations of abuse and false imprisonment in Jonestown, it was too late.

A Thousand Lives follows the experiences of five Peoples Temple members who went to Jonestown: a middle-class English teacher from Colorado, an elderly African American woman raised in Jim Crow Alabama, a troubled young black man from Oakland, and a working-class father and his teenage son.  These people joined Jones’s church for vastly different reasons.  Some, such as eighteen-year-old Stanley Clatyon, appreciated Jones’s message of racial equality and empowering the dispossessed.  Others, like Hyacinth Thrash and her sister Zipporah, were dazzled by his claims of being a faith healer – Hyacinth believed Jones had healed a cancerous tumor in her breast.  Edith Roller, a well-educated white progressive, joined Peoples Temple because she wanted to help the less fortunate.  Tommy Bogue, a teen, hated Jones’s church, but was forced to attend  services – and move to Jonestown – because his parents were members.

A Thousand Lives is the story of Jonestown as it has never been told before.  New York Times bestselling author Julia Scheeres drew from thousands of recently declassified FBI documents and audio-tapes, as well as rare videos and interviews, to piece together an unprecedented and compelling history of the doomed camp, focusing on the people who lived there.  Her own experiences at an oppressive reform school in the Dominican Republic, detailed in her unforgettable debut memoir Jesus Land, gave her unusual insight into this story.

The people who built Jonestown wanted to forge a better life for themselves and their children.  They sought to create a truly egalitarian society.  In South America, however, they found themselves trapped in Jonestown and cut off from the outside world as their leader goaded them toward committing “revolutionary suicide” and deprived them of food, sleep, and hope.  Yet even as Jones resorted to lies and psychological warfare, Jonestown residents fought for their community, struggling to maintain their gardens, their school, their families, and their grip on reality.

Vividly written and impossible to forget, A Thousand Lives is a story of blind loyalty and daring escapes, of corrupted ideals and senseless, haunting loss.” – publisher description

 

Eva Braun: Life with Hitler

Eva Braun: Life with Hitler by Heike B. Görtemaker

DD 247 .B66 G67 2011

“In this groundbreaking biography of Eva Braun, German historian Heike B. Görtemaker delves into the startlingly neglected historical truth about Adolf Hitler’s mistress.  More than just the vapid blonde of popular cliché.  Eva Braun was a capricious but uncompromising, fiercely loyal companion to Hitler; theirs was a relationship that flew in the face of the Führer’s proclamations that Germany was his only bride.  Görtemaker paints a portrait of Hitler and Braun’s life together with unnerving quotidian detail – Braun chose the movies screened at their mountaintop retreat (propaganda, of course); he dreamed of retiring with her to Linz one day after relinquishing his leadership to a younger man – while weaving their personal relationship throughout the fabric of one of history’s most devastating regimes.  Though Braun gradually gained an unrivaled power within Hitler’s inner circle, her identity was kept a secret during the Third Reich, until the final days of the war.  Faithful to the end, Braun committed suicide with HItler in 1945, two days after their marriage.

Through exhaustive research, newly discovered documentation, and anecdotal accounts, Görtemaker has meticulously built a surprising portrait of Hitler’s bourgeois existence outside of the public eye.  Though Eva Braun had no role in Hitler’s policies, she was never as banal as she was previously painted; she was privy to his thoughts, ruled life within his entourage, and held his trust.  As horrifying as it is astonishing, Eva Braun will undoubtedly be referenced in all future accounts of this period.” – publisher description

 

And Nothing But the Truthiness

And Nothing but the Truthiness: The Rise (and Further Rise) of Stephen Colbert by Lisa Rogak

PN 2287 .C5695 R85 2011

“No other Comedian can generate headlines today the way Stephen Colbert can.  With his appearance at a Congressional hearing, his rally in Washington, D.C., his bestselling book, his creation of the now-accepted word truthiness, and of course his popular TV show, nearly everyone (except the poor Congressional fools who agree to be interviewed on his show) has heard of him.

Yet all these things are part of a character also named Stephen Colbert.  Who is he really?  In And Nothing But the Truthiness, biographer Lisa Rogak examines the man behind the character.  She reveals the roots of his humor, growing up as the youngest of eleven siblings, and the tragedy that forever altered the family.  She charts his early years earning his chops first as a serious acting student and later a budding improv comic, especially his close connection with Amy Sedaris, which led to the cult TV show Strangers with Candy.  And Rogak offers a look inside how The Daily Show works, and the exclusive bond that Colbert and Jon Stewart formed that would lead to Colbert’s own rise to celebrity.

A behind-the-scenes look into the world of one of the biggest comedians in America, And Nothing But the Truthiness is an illuminating read for any resident of Colbert Nation.” – publisher description