World Art History

In The World According to Tom Hanks, through deep research and interviews, Gavin Edwards will explore and celebrate how Tom Hanks lives his life, mirroring the way that he embodies optimism and integrity in his movie roles. This book will give insight into the actor by collecting the best stories about how he behaves in the world, providing a loving retrospective of his film career, and putting it all into the context of his all-American philosophy.

From young artists trying to elbow their way in to those working hard at dropping out, White's essential audiobook offers a once-in-a-generation glimpse of the inner workings of the American art world at a moment of unparalleled ambition, uncertainty, and creative exuberance.

In 1940 Edmund Wilson was the undisputed big dog of American letters. Vladimir Nabokov was a near-penniless Russian exile seeking asylum in the States. Wilson became a mentor to Nabokov, introducing him to every editor of note, assigning to him book reviews for the New Republic, engineering a Guggenheim. Their intimate friendship blossomed over a shared interest in all things Russian, ruffled a bit by political disagreements. But then came Lolita, and suddenly Nabokov was the big (and very rich) dog.

The Art of War and The Book of Five Rings are two of the most iconic works of literature ever written, regardless of genre. The perceptiveness with which Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Musashi analyzed human behavior and tendencies apply to strategy in virtually any context, from warfare to business and beyond. In The Master of Strategy Collection, AOG brings you both of these timeless works in full and unabridged, along with extensive supplemental study and discussion materials.

Between 1965 and 1985, the world underwent profound social, political, and technological transformations. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States achieved key victories, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but racial tensions and systemic inequalities persisted. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War escalated, igniting widespread anti-war protests and fracturing American trust in government. This disillusionment culminated in the Watergate scandal, leading to President Nixon's resignation in 1974 and reshaping public perception of political leadership.

All the Knowledge in the World is a history and celebration of those who created the most groundbreaking and remarkable publishing phenomenon of any age. It tracks the story from Ancient Greece to Wikipedia, from modest single-volumes to the 11,000-volume Chinese manuscript that was too big to print. It looks at how Encyclopaedia Britannica came to dominate the industry, how it spawned hundreds of competitors and how an army of ingenious door-to-door salesmen sold their wares to guilt-ridden parents.

For centuries, blue powders and dyes were some of the most sought-after materials in the world. Ancient Afghan painters ground mass quantities of sapphire rocks to use for their paints, while snails were harvested in Eurasia for the tiny amounts of blue that their bodies would release.

A World on Edge is the story of the aftermath of World War I, a transformative time when a new world seemed possible - told from the vantage of people, famous and ordinary, who lived through the turmoil..

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British institution, and its story during the Second World War is also our story. This was a period of remarkable voices: Churchill’s speeches, de Gaulle’s broadcasts from exile, Richard Dimbleby and Vera Lynn. Radio offered an incomparable tool for propaganda while at the same time eyewitness testimonies gave a voice to everyone, securing the BBC’s reputation as a purveyor of truth.

A Thousand Cuts is a candid exploration of one of America's strangest and most quickly vanishing subcultures. It is about the death of physical film in the digital era and about a paranoid, secretive, eccentric, and sometimes obsessive group of film-mad collectors who made movies and their projection a private religion in the time before DVDs and Blu-rays.

In TEARING DOWN THE ORANGE CURTAIN, journalists Nate Jackson and Daniel Kohn explore the trajectory of punk and ska from their humble beginnings to their peak popularity years, where their cultural impact could be felt in music around the world. Delving deep into the personal and professional lives of bands like Social Distortion, The Adolescents, The Offspring, and their ska counterparts No Doubt, Sublime, Reel Big Fish, Save Ferris, and more, this book gives listeners a deeper look into the very human stories of these musicians.

On New Year's Eve, 1941, just three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were bombing the Philippine capital of Manila, where journalists Mel and Annalee Jacoby had married just a month earlier. The couple had worked in China as members of a tight community of foreign correspondents with close ties to Chinese leaders; if captured by invading Japanese troops, they were certain to be executed. Racing to the docks just before midnight, they barely escaped on a freighter.

Samuel Pepys's meticulous chronicles of life in 17th-century England are an exacting record of a unique historical era. Pepys lived through one of the most colorful periods of British history. He witnessed - and recorded detailed accounts of - the execution of Charles I, a civil war, the Restoration, a plague, and the Great Fire of London. His entries also record the minutiae of everyday life - scandals, intrigues, infidelities and vulgarities - presenting a comprehensive portrait of a fascinating era.

Best-selling, award-winning writer Simon Garfield returns with an enthralling investigation of humans’ peculiar fascination with small things - and what small things tell us about our larger world.

Vincent Van Gogh curses the stare of the blank canvas. Salvador Dali contemplates mailing a piece of his "lobster-colored pajamas" to Federico Lorca. Hollis Frampton, to the MoMA, demands that artists be paid. The dean of students at San Francisco Art Institute argues to Alicia McCarthy, in very stern words, that graffiti is not art but, rather, a "pain in the ass". In a letter to the editor, Martin Scorsese defends and celebrates Fellini's filmmaking.

In this collection of musical portraits, jazz pianist and radio host Marian McPartland pays sparkling tribute to such beloved and legendary figures as Benny Goodman, Bill Evans, Joe Morello, Paul Desmond, Alec Wilder, Mary Lou Williams, and others.

This friendly, fun biography series focuses on the traits that made our heroes great - the traits that kids can aspire to in order to live heroically themselves. Each book tells the story of an icon in a lively, conversational way that works well for the youngest nonfiction listeners and that always includes the hero's childhood influences. This book features Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance artist and inventor.

Rocking in the Free World explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the truth about rock 'n' roll, a truth shaped by the Cold War anxieties of the fifties, the countercultural revolutions (and counter-revolutions) of the sixties and seventies, and the end-of-history triumphalism of the eighties.

Thirty thousand years ago our prehistoric ancestors painted perfect images of animals on walls of tortuous caves, most often without any light. How was this possible? Scholars and archaeologists have for centuries pored over these works of art, speculating and hoping to come away with the key to the mystery. David and Lefrre give us a new understanding of an art lost in time, revealing what had until recently remained unexplainable - the oldest enigma in humanity has been solved.

Bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama—where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form.