Art Study

Scandal, shock, and rivalry all have negative connotations, don't they? They can be catastrophic to businesses and individual careers. A whiff of scandal can turn a politician into a smoking ruin. But these potentially disastrous "negatives" can and have spurred the world of fine art to new heights. A look at the history of art tells us that rivalries have, in fact, not only benefited the course of art, from ancient times to the present, but have also helped shape our narrative of art, lending it a sense of drama that it might otherwise lack.

"Her technique was simple: aim for the top", an envious colleague wrote of Clare Boothe Luce. No American woman of the twentieth century aimed so accurately or rose so far as this legendary playwright, politician, and social seductress.

Did you ever think about where your jeans come from? How about the people who made your T-shirt, or what happens to the clothes you grow out of when you're done wearing them? The fabrics clothes are made of, the way they are designed and sewn and shipped around the world, and the way we consume them and get rid of them - every step in this process has a big impact on our environment, on the people who work in clothing factories, and on our cultures.

Wissenschaftlich geprüfter Stoff für alle Serienjunkies: Wie reagiert man nach neusten wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen am besten auf eine Zombie-Epidemie à la Walking Dead? Könnte jeder Chemielehrer einfach so Crystal Meth produzieren wie Walter White in Breaking Bad? Wann ermöglicht die Wissenschaft das Teleportieren wie in Star Trek? Und was für eigentümliche klimatische Bedingungen herrschen eigentlich in Game of Thrones?

Fans of the eccentric and edgy films of the Coen brothers know there's more going on in their films than meets the eye. Award-winning author and columnist Cathleen Falsani is the perfect guide for Coen fans, inviting them to take a deeper look at the popular films, from their debut Blood Simple to the recent Burn After Reading and all the strange and wonderful films in between.

¿Estuvo casado Jesús? ¿Es la Iglesia una organización nacida para ocultar la verdad sobre Cristo? ¿Son los evangelios una fabricación encargada por el emperador romano Constantino para obtener mayor poder? ¿Qué es el Priorato de Sión? ¿Y el culto a la diosa? Millones de personas han leído El Código da Vinci y han quedado capturados por el intenso ritmo y por los asombrosos datos que revela la novela. ¿Hasta dónde llega la ficción y dónde comienza la realidad?

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series The Get Down, this passionate and provocative book tells the complete story of Black music in the last 50 years, and in doing so, outlines the perilous position of Black culture within white American society. In a fast-paced narrative, Nelson George’s book chronicles the rise and fall of “race music” and its transformation into the R&B that eventually dominated the airwaves, only to find itself diluted and submerged as crossover music.

I 2013 flygter den kurdiske journalist Behrouz Boochani ud af sit fødeland Iran. Efter en farefuld færd over havet bliver han samlet op og indespærret på Manus Island, en ø i Stillehavet nord for Papua Ny Guinea. I fem år holdes han ulovligt interneret i asylcentret Manus Fængsel. "Kun bjergene er min ven" er hans vidnesbyrd. Smuglet ud af lejren én sms ad gangen er bogen en unik insiderfortælling og en litterær kraftpræstation i mange genrer. Den er også en oprørsk stemme, der vidner om trods, håb og menneskelighed i et umenneskeligt system.

Chris Dubbs tells the fascinating stories of Edith Wharton, Nellie Bly, and more than 30 other American women who worked as war reporters. As Dubbs shows, stories by these journalists brought in women from the periphery of war and made them active participants - fully engaged and equally heroic, if bearing different burdens and making different sacrifices. Women journalists traveled from belligerent capitals to the front lines to report on the conflict. But their experiences also brought them into contact with social transformations, political unrest, labor conditions, and more.

Over his 30-year career at Condé Nast, Nicholas Coleridge has witnessed it all. From the anxieties of the Princess of Wales to the blazing fury of Mohamed Al-Fayed, his story is also the story of the people who populate the glamorous world of glossy magazines. With relish and astonishing candour, he offers the inside scoop on Tina Brown and Anna Wintour, David Bowie and Philip Green, Kate Moss and Beyonce and a surreal weekend away with Bob Geldof and William Hague.

Raised by powerful women in a restrictive, sheltered Christian community in New England, Ryan Dostie never imagined herself on the front lines of a war halfway around the world. But then a conversation with an Army recruiter in high school changes the course of her life. Hired as a linguist, she quickly has to find a space for herself in the testosterone-filled world of the Army barracks, and has been holding her own until the unthinkable happens: she is raped by a fellow soldier. Struggling with PTSD and commanders who don't trust her story, Dostie finds herself....

As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. Twenty years later, Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness.

In this engaging and deeply informed audiobook, Stephen Knight looks at the different manifestations of Robin Hood at different times and places in a mythic biography with a thematic structure. The best way to get at the essence of the Robin Hood myth, Knight believes, is in terms not of chronological and generic progression but of the purposes served by heroes.

At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the US State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism.

Written in the tradition of works by Joan Didion, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Eve Ensler, this “profoundly insightful and brilliantly inciting” (Dominique Morisseau, Obie Award-winning playwright) exploration of the soul of the United States - the past, the present, and the future Kevin Powell wants for us all, through the lens and lives of three major figures: his mother, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.

Since 1949, when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Max Frankel began to write for The New York Times, readers have looked to his work as a lens through which they could witness America's role in a rapidly changing world. In this vivid and unforgettable memoir, Frankel chronicles the times of his extraordinary life as he experienced them...within the context of the news stories that defined an era.

In this crackling memoir, the journalist and novelist Michael Idov recounts the tempestuous years he spent living alongside - and closely observing - the media and cultural elite of Putin's Russia. After accepting a surprise offer to become the editor in chief of GQ Russia, Idov and his family arrive in a Moscow still seething from a dubious election and the mass anti-Putin rallies that erupted in response. Idov is fascinated by the political turmoil but nonetheless finds himself pulled in unlikely directions.

To many who have discovered his books, C. S. Lewis is more than simply a writer; he has been a spiritual mentor. Here, over 50 Christians share how meeting the mind and imagination of Lewis in his books sparked the beginning or changed the course of their spiritual journey. These inspiring reflections have been shared by ordinary laypeople as well as many well-known leaders and writers.

The average American watches five hours of TV every day. Collectively, we spend roughly $30 billion on movies each year. Simply put, we're entertainment junkies. But can we learn something from our insatiable addiction to stories? Mike Cosper thinks so. From horror flicks to rom-coms, the tales we tell and the myths we weave inevitably echo the narrative underlying all of history: the story of humanity's tragic sin and God's triumphant salvation.

Since the publication of her prize-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake, writer and artist Kim Mahood has been returning to the Tanami desert country in far north-western Australia where, as a child, she lived with her family on a remote cattle station. The land is timeless, but much has changed: the station has been handed back to its traditional owners, the mining companies have arrived and Aboriginal art has flourished.