Redwoods Are the Tallest Trees in the World (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science Books)

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Redwoods Are the Tallest Trees in the World (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science Books)
David A. Adler , and Kazue Mizumura
Manufacturer: Harpercollins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding

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A well researched book that should grace the bookshelves of every sports car racing enthusiast.

A History of French Passions 1848-1945: Volume II: Intellect, Taste, and Anxiety (Oxford History of Modern Europe)

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A History of French Passions 1848-1945: Volume II: Intellect, Taste, and Anxiety (Oxford History of Modern Europe)
Theodore Zeldin
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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An award-winning art historian, Corbett contends that from 1848-1914, English artists confronted a world in which the rise of science and decline in religion deprived painting of many of its traditional functions and powers. Yet these same changes, according to Corbett, presented the possibility that painting could become a crucial means of mediating the widely decried materialism of industrial society. It could expose the values that had been lost, reveal hidden spiritual and emotional resources, or, alternatively, welcome and champion the dynamics of modernism.

Corbett makes persuasive use of a wide range of sources, including contemporary art criticism, artists' letters, literature, and, not surprisingly, the torrent of publicity touched off by the Whistler vs. Ruskin trial of 1877. However, what gives his book its originality is its incisive discussion of aesthetic issues that art historians, intent on social history, have generally overlooked. Corbett puts readers in contact with debates about the expectations brought to visual experience and experiments in the handling of paint, codes of beauty, and strategies of representation that were directed towards questions of meaning.

My main reason for contributing this review is that I don't think it is clear from other reviews here that Sked's book is not a narrative or comprehensive history of the Habsburg Empire from the Congress of Vienna until its fall. It is rather a series of essays which reflect on other historians' treatment of some of the major themes in Habsburg historiography. These are interesting, challenging, occasionally repetitive, but are not, and do not pretend to be, a substitute for a general history of the period (such as C.A. Macartney's great work).

As an example of his inability to rewrite his own words (which he takes as sacrosanct) there is an aside that refers to the USSR and the eastern european satellites. He makes a referral to what would happen in eastern europe if the USSR were to go multi-party, hinting at chaos on the terms of Yugoslavia. Where has he been for the last ten years? No chaos, some nations in NATO and others being accepted into the EU.

Lastly, he shows a pronounced weakness in his understanding of military matters. In his discussion of the failure of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, he dismisses the treatment of other nationalities in the Hungarian Crown Lands as being self-defeating but not disasterous. He especially discounts the Croats. Napoleon, not a bad general, described the Croat Cavalry
as the best in Europe, both for their bravery and ability to endure hardship. He used them as his scouts for his intelligence services and gave them credit for helping to secure many of his victories. They would not have won the was for the Hungarians, but they could have been a thorn in the side of both the Austrians and Russians. Instead the helped to defeat the Hungarians at every major battle.

Reading this book is informational, but you must be prepared to spend a lot of time searching around Professor Sked's opinions and biases to get to the facts.

The reason I see this as a very political text is that the history of the fall of the Habsburgs has been put to ideological use for a long time now. The Habsburg Empire was dismembered by that crusading moralist professor, Woodrow Wilson, in the name of "Democracy", "Progress", and other "enlightened" ideals for which he was willing to kill and send others to die.

It has been argued that the fall of the Habsburgs was a kind of bellwether, proving the inevitable progress of modernity and modern politics over the face of the whole Earth as a reactionary dionsaur of an empire finally died under the weight of it's own anachronism and decrepitude. The author of this book disproves that thesis totally. He demonstrates definitively that the Habsburg Empire was not weak or inept, and that in fact it faced it's worse crisis in 1848, and, having survived that, was viable as a political unit right up until the end of it's life. There was no mass longing for democracy, no mass discontent with the ancient Monarchy of the House of Habsburg, no demand for "national sovereignty" or "self-determination" on the part of the many nationalities of the Empire. They were fiercely loyal to the Monarchy right up until the end of it's existence. The Habsburgs fell, not because of the "turning of the tides of history" against them, but because they picked the wrong side in WWI. Period.

The fact that this is so undermines most of the cherished myths of the modern West. It proves that history has no inevitable current ending up with us, since it shows that the way history turned out was in fact the result of the individual choices of men, rather than the effect of some kind of powerful underlying trend that men could not have shaped. It proves that democratic gov't's are not the only ones capable of being seen as legitimate in the eyes of their people and that a nation of highly cultured and relatively wealthy people (the Austrians) could happily and freely choose to live under a radically different form of gov't, namely a hereditary monarchy. It proves that a powerful multi-ethinc state can be built, if ethnicity is carefully divorced from political power and protected (the Empire of the Habsburgs was virutally a microcosm of Europe in it's vast ethnic diversity). It proves that religion can be effectively joined to gov't - the Habsburg Empire was a confessional Catholic state until the end.

In short, it proves that the supposedly axiomatic modern truths about how politics just has to be are really just so many lies. There was, once upon a time, a strong, viable, multi-ethnic, confessional, hereditarily monarchical empire, that was a living force in world politics right up until the First World War, and that only ceased to be so after it was deliberately destoryed by the victors of that war, who sought to impose their ideology at all costs on the conquered, even if it meant destroying an ancient state and everything that was based on it. We know the results of this well: the wellspring of nationalisms this created has turned the Balkans into a killing field, and it left no strong power in the Germanic world that might have checked the Nazis after Germany itself was raped by the vitorious Allies; thus, the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire cleared the way for Hitler and every horror to follow him in Central Europe. This was the price foreigners were made to pay so that professor Wilson could "Make the world safe for democracy". No amount of foreign blood is too much, apparently, for the ideals of a progressive intellectual.

Gloria Victis! Victors and Vanquished in French Art 1848-1910

This book focuses on the conflict between the old and the new in French painting and sculpture in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Modern art history has hailed the avant-garde as winners and labelled the academic artists losers. However Gloria Victis! (Honour the Vanquished) allows victors and vanquished to meet in open dialogue over the changes in artistic taste through the ages.

The last half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a multifaceted avant-garde, comprising Realism, Impressionism, and many other "Modernistic" trends. These were accompanied by a new aesthetic which came into open conflict with the Classical-Academic tradition. On their side the Academics greeted the new directions in art with mistrust. There quickly developed a view of the new painting as decadent, immoral and provocative: in consequence it rapidly became the target of extreme value judgements by the academically-minded contemporary art critics. But towards the end of the nineteenth century taste changed in favour of the avant-garde. Consequently art history, which has since been written from a modern perspective, has branded the Salon artists as hopelessly out-moded and consigned them to a shadowy existence in the storage vaults of museums.

In recent years, however, Salon art has been allowed back into the light after a long absence from public exhibition.

Gloria Victis! should be seen as an attempt at a serious analysis, in the spirit of the last twenty years' reevaluation of the art of the second half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is, after all, not so simple to distinguish tradition from avant-garde-- and the reverse. It is our hope that the "lost" traditionalists will be seen as more than just dead copyists, who have been denied the validity of their artistic endeavours. By the same token the artists of the Modern will appear in a more subtle light.

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
With a Beauty All Its Own

"I called this collection the Glyptotek to demonstrate that it was not a museum with the usual need for scientific order and completeness, where art works often stand freezing, alien to each other in a heterogeneous mixture. No, it was to be a place 'wo Marmorbilder stehen und sehen dich an', where the statues are displayed in festivity and harmony, to grace the life of the living." (Carl Jacobsen, founder of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, June 1906).

The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek is an art museum of international standing situated in central Copenhagen, next to the Tivoli Gardens. It houses rich and diverse collections in its two main departments, one of which is devoted to ancient art of the Mediterranean area, the other to French and Danish art of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The museum was named after Ny Carlsberg, the brewery owned by the founder, brewer Carl Jacobsen (1842-1914). He added the word Glyptotek, "a collection of sculpture", to indicate the pride of place taken by that art form and in recognition of his debt to the older namesake, the Glyptothek in Munich. Originally one of the largest private art collections of its time, the Glyptotek was donated to the public by Carl Jacobsen by deeds of gift in 1888 and 1899. He subsequently established the New Carlsberg Foundation, in 1902, to ensure the financial well-being of the museum. Since 1954, the Glyptotek has been an independent institution supported not only by the Foundation, but by the City of Copenhagen and the Danish State as well.

The collection of French sculpture presents the stars of the late nineteenth-century Parisian Salon together with Auguste Rodin, the ground-breaking contemporary of the French Impressionists. Nowhere outside France is a comparable collection to be seen. As for the Salon, Carpeaux is particularly well represented, having a whole loggia on the "Danish" side of the building to himself. His studies for the group La Dance, for the façade of the Paris Opera, and the agonizing Ugolino and his Sons, taken from Dante's Divine Comedy, are outstanding.

The collection of French painting features the predecessors of the Impressionists (Courbet, Corot and Manet) along with the Impressionists proper-- Monet, Sisley, Cézanne, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot, and Renoir. A large section of the Modern Department is devoted to the Post-Impressionists: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Signac, Bonnard and others. It is what you might describe as a great, small collection, or a small, great collection. The Degas Bronzes, the complete oeuvre of seventy works, is shown, otherwise only to be seen in two other museums in the world. Paul Gauguin is represented with an excess of forty paintings and sculptures.

Label Design 3: The Best U.S. & International Design

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Label Design 3: The Best U.S. & International Design

Manufacturer: Rockport Pub
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1564960056