High Art

"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was a man of many talents - a sculptor, painter, architect, writer, and scholar - but he is best known for Lives of the Artists, which singlehandedly established the canon of Italian Renaissance art. Before Vasari's extraordinary book, art was considered a technical skill, and artists were mere decorators and craftsmen. It was through Vasari's visionary writings that Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo came to be regarded as great masters of life as well as art, their creative genius celebrated as a divine gift.

In this cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion's influence through the lens of American mythmaking. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her early years continued to influence her work as a magazine writer and film critic in New York, offering glimmers of the many stories Didion told herself that would come to unravel over the course of her career. But out west, show business beckoned.

This anthology contains five short stories previously published in READING for Christian Schools Grade 6 (Bob Jones University Press 1988), updated for a new generation of readers, with plenty of new illustrations. Black and White interior and a full-cover cover. “Val is For Valiant” - An ordinary boy has an extraordinary dream that changes his life. “The Monument” - A game of tag turns into a journey of discovery and danger “Brethren Nisei” - A white American boy watches his Japanese friends undergo persecution during the war “Antarctica” - Two brothers help their uncle ...

In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.

Alexandra Fuller tells the idiosyncratic story of her life growing up white in rural Rhodesia as it was becoming Zimbabwe. The daughter of hardworking, yet strikingly unconventional English-bred immigrants, Alexandra arrives in Africa at the tender age of two. She moves through life with a hardy resilience, even as a bloody war approaches. Narrator Lisette Lecat reads this remarkable memoir of a family clinging to a harsh landscape and the dying tenets of colonialism.

There's no wrong way to be a woman. There are countless wrong ways to be a man. James Breakwell should know. He's tried just about all of them. Journalism. Pig ownership. Felony lawn gnome theft. Whatever masculinity is supposed to be, this can't be it. But can you really fail at something no one can quite define? Apparently. Now, in a series of funny, sharply observed, and occasionally poignant essays, everyone's favorite internet-famous father of four daughters lays down a lifetime of lessons in what it means to be a man.

Jesse Ball has produced fourteen acclaimed works of deeply empathetic absurdism in poetry and fiction. Now, he offers listeners his first memoir, one that invites the listener into a raw and personal account of love, grief, and memory. Inspired by the memoir Édouard Leve put to paper shortly before his death, Autoportrait is an extraordinarily frank and intimate work from one of America's most brilliant young authors. Half-remembered moments are woven together with the joys and triumphs—and the mistakes and humiliations, too—that somehow tell us who we are, why we are here.

Billy Collins, U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, plays a game called, "I can feel it coming in the air tonight", in which he responds to questions about musician Phil Collins. Al Gore tries to match his former boss’ mastery of the My Little Pony children’s show in a game called "Maybe you can beat Bill Clinton at this". Olympian Jackie Joyner-Kersee rhymes with "cursy", so she is invited to play a game called "May Thunder Blast Your Head!" about curses from around the world. Of course.

UNLOCK YOUR AUTHENTIC DIVINE SELF AND EMBRACE TRUE LUXURY LIVING Discover the revolutionary approach to high-frequency living that transforms ordinary existence into an extraordinary journey of spiritual abundance and authentic luxury. In this transformative guide, spiritual coach Ammanuel Santa Anna reveals the profound connection between your divine essence and the life you create. DISCOVER: ✓ How to recognize and embody your authentic divine light ✓ The spiritual essence of true luxury beyond material possessions ✓ Practical rituals to strengthen your connection to source energy ...

El camino del artista nos enseña a crear con mayor libertad a través de la utilización consciente de una serie de herramientas que nos ayudarán a terminar con el bloqueo creativo. Su efecto es similar al yoga y la práctica constante de la escritura diaria -páginas matutinas-, los encuentros con el artista, el juego y una exhaustiva introspección guiada harán que modifiquemos nuestra conciencia y nos abramos a un nuevo horizonte imaginativo.

The idea of American musical theater often conjures up images of bright lights and big city, but its lifeblood is found in amateur productions at high schools, community theaters, after-school programs, summer camps, and dinner theaters. In Beyond Broadway, author Stacy Wolf looks at the widespread presence and persistence of musical theater in US culture and examines it as a social practice - a live, visceral experience of creating, watching, and listening.

The Monks of New Skete are known for their unique approach to raising and training dogs; they maintain the philosophy that "understanding is the key to communication, compassion, and communion" with your dog.

When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of 300 people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period - people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards.

Charmed or cursed? Doomed by their royal birthright and their parents' marital misery? Or destined to live out the best of their late mother's legacy by selflessly involving themselves in real-world problems? Only time can tell how Prince William and his brother, Harry, will play the extraordinary hands that fate has dealt them.

Why would the multimillionaire producer of Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon take his limo from Manhattan to the struggling former steel town of Levittown, Pennsylvania, to see a high school production of Les Misérables? To see the show performed by the astoundingly successful theater company at Harry S Truman High School, run by its legendary director, Lou Volpe. Broadway turns to Truman High when trying out controversial shows such as Rent and Spring Awakening before they move on to high school theater programs across the nation. Volpe’s students from this blue-collar town go on to become Emmy-winning producers, entertainment executives, newscasters, and community-theater founders.

From merely managing to boldly leading: Take your skills (and your career) to the next level with just 7 simple, yet highly effective strategies! Being a manager is a role filled with a lot of responsibility. It can be a heavy load to bear, knowing that your team members’ productivity, your company’s success, and your own career could be affected by your actions and decisions. But while this is a difficult undertaking, you also have a unique opportunity as a manager to inspire, transform, and take your team to new heights.

From 1965 to 1995, the Grateful Dead flourished as one of the most beloved, unusual, and accomplished musical entities to ever grace American culture. The creative synchronicity among Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan exploded out of the early 60s roots and folk scene, providing the soundtrack for the Dionysian revels of the counterculture. Dennis McNally, the band's historian and publicist for more than 20 years, takes listeners back through the Dead's history.

Beyond the sainted Rembrandt—who harbored a startling darkness—and the mysterious Vermeer, whose true subject, it turned out, was lurking in plain sight, Moser got to know a whole galaxy of geniuses: the doomed virtuoso Carel Fabritius, the anguished wunderkind Jan Lievens, the deaf prodigy Hendrik Avercamp. Year after year, as he tried to make a life for himself in the Netherlands, Moser found friends among these centuries-dead artists. And he found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions that he was.

Ready for college? Take a confident approach to college admissions with this definitive guide – all without stressing yourself out. Getting into college is a magnificent stepping stone that can definitely give you an edge in your professional career and in your life. Unfortunately, the part that comes before all this is not so easy.