Center of Dreams

Center of Dreams PDF Author: Les Standiford
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 081306340X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Discover how one spectacular building project revolutionized Miami, how one man's moxie helped turn a fractious tropical city into a cultural capital of the Americas. In Center of Dreams, New York Times bestselling author Les Standiford tells the inspiring story of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. The vision for this building, which would become the most ambitious cultural arts complex since the Kennedy Center, began in an unlikely place and time. Miami in the 1970s was divided by social and ethnic tensions. The city comprised a growing population of immigrants from the Cuban revolution, a well-established African American community, Florida "crackers," and a continual influx of tourists and retirees. Critics said a cultural center would never be possible in a place of such extreme diversity. But Parker Thomson, a lawyer and Boston transplant, knew his adopted city could become a world-leading community in the twenty-first century. He believed a performing arts center was critical to this vision. Everyone said his dream was impossible, he would never succeed, it couldn't be done. Not in Miami. But Thomson persevered against political opposition, economic roadblocks, and engineering problems. It took thirty years to overcome the odds and the obstacles, but he finally made the dream a reality. With Thomson's efforts, along with help from cultural leaders, iconic design work by architect Cesar Pelli, and support from philanthropist Adrienne Arsht, the center opened its doors in 2006 with a star-studded gala. Today the Arsht Center is a cutting-edge venue of style and art, a landmark beloved by the city's residents, and a magnet for tourists from all over the world. Presenting performances that celebrate the richness of Miami's diverse population, it showcases emerging local artists and attracts international stars. Resident companies include the New World Symphony, the Florida Grand Opera, and the Miami City Ballet. Its improbable story is a testament to the influence of cultural advocacy, the importance of government support for the arts, and the power of the arts to repair and sustain communities.

Center of Dreams

Center of Dreams PDF Author: Les Standiford
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 081306340X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
Discover how one spectacular building project revolutionized Miami, how one man's moxie helped turn a fractious tropical city into a cultural capital of the Americas. In Center of Dreams, New York Times bestselling author Les Standiford tells the inspiring story of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. The vision for this building, which would become the most ambitious cultural arts complex since the Kennedy Center, began in an unlikely place and time. Miami in the 1970s was divided by social and ethnic tensions. The city comprised a growing population of immigrants from the Cuban revolution, a well-established African American community, Florida "crackers," and a continual influx of tourists and retirees. Critics said a cultural center would never be possible in a place of such extreme diversity. But Parker Thomson, a lawyer and Boston transplant, knew his adopted city could become a world-leading community in the twenty-first century. He believed a performing arts center was critical to this vision. Everyone said his dream was impossible, he would never succeed, it couldn't be done. Not in Miami. But Thomson persevered against political opposition, economic roadblocks, and engineering problems. It took thirty years to overcome the odds and the obstacles, but he finally made the dream a reality. With Thomson's efforts, along with help from cultural leaders, iconic design work by architect Cesar Pelli, and support from philanthropist Adrienne Arsht, the center opened its doors in 2006 with a star-studded gala. Today the Arsht Center is a cutting-edge venue of style and art, a landmark beloved by the city's residents, and a magnet for tourists from all over the world. Presenting performances that celebrate the richness of Miami's diverse population, it showcases emerging local artists and attracts international stars. Resident companies include the New World Symphony, the Florida Grand Opera, and the Miami City Ballet. Its improbable story is a testament to the influence of cultural advocacy, the importance of government support for the arts, and the power of the arts to repair and sustain communities.

Digital Dreams

Digital Dreams PDF Author: Paul Kunkel
Publisher: Universe Publishing(NY)
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
For the past half century, the Sony Corporation has been highly successful at tapping the seductive nature of consumer electronics. Around the globe their products are recognized as symbols of cutting-edge technology and innovative design, making Sony the undisputed leader in high tech and one of the most recognized brand names in the world. This book takes an unprecedented look inside the world's most influential design center and their products--many never before published--for the next millennium. With nearly 250 industrial designers--graphic, packaging, and logotype designers, user-interface specialists and Web designers--working in offices from Tokyo to San Francisco to Cologne, the Sony Design Center is responsible for nearly 2,000 new products, concepts, packaging schemes and design strategies every year. By shaping the most pivotal technologies of our time, the Design Center exerts a greater influence on popular culture and current trends in industrial and graphic design than any other single entity.--From publisher description.

The Anatomy of Dreams

The Anatomy of Dreams PDF Author: Chloe Benjamin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476761175
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Discover the award-winning debut novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists, a “majestic collision of sci-fi thriller and love story” (Bustle) about a young woman struggling with questions of love, trust, and ethics as the line between dreams and reality dangerously blurs. When Sylvie Patterson, a bookish student at a Northern California boarding school, falls in love with a spirited, elusive classmate named Gabe, they embark on an experiment that changes their lives. Their headmaster, Dr. Adrian Keller, is a charismatic medical researcher who has staked his career on the therapeutic potential of lucid dreaming: by teaching his patients to become conscious during sleep, he believes he can relieve stress and trauma. Over the next six years, Sylvie and Gabe become consumed by Keller’s work, following him across the country. But when an opportunity brings the trio to the Midwest, Sylvie and Gabe stumble into a tangled relationship with their mysterious neighbors—and Sylvie begins to doubt the ethics of Keller’s research. As she navigates the hazy, permeable boundaries between what is real and what isn’t, who can be trusted and who cannot, Sylvie also faces surprising developments in herself—an unexpected infatuation, growing paranoia, and a new sense of rebellion. With stirring, elegant prose, “Chloe Benjamin has crafted an eerie, compelling first novel which, like the lingering effects of a vivid dream, resonates long past its finish” (Karen Brown, The Longings of Wayward Girls).

Dreams of Totality

Dreams of Totality PDF Author: Sherry Salman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781935528456
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The kingdom of heaven, global climate meltdown and international networks of terror, the beloved who completes us, and the virtual cybervillage all have something in common. As products of our imagination, symbolic expressions of totality like these orient individual and collective life. Both panacea and poison, our dreams of totality power religious beliefs, sociopolitical programs such as capitalism and globalism, psychology's narratives of wholeness, even our ideas about individual and cultural health. When dreams of totality go bad, and they often do--becoming totalitarian or fundamentalist--they are more destructive than any plague or natural disaster. Dreams of Totality explores images of wholeness in cultures from ancient civilizations through today. It explains why symbols of totality appear without fail in response to chaos and distress, how they subsequently entomb us, and then eventually deconstruct as disenfranchised elements of psyche and society press for inclusion. Today, unmoored dreams of totality like globalization and the virtual Web community are taking over our collective imagination at the same time we are being exploited by a surfeit of image-industry spin. But as this book explains, we can't go backward into malignant nostalgia for a time when the gods spoke as one, take refuge in fractured fundamentalisms, nor should we succumb to a casual relationship to truth. Rather, preserving the creative function of dreaming of totality while at the same time loosening its often-deadening grip--an Rx for taking the medicine of totality when there's nothing at the center--is crucial as we try to cultivate an ethic of responsibility and integrity toward one another on a global scale.

Alphabet of Dreams

Alphabet of Dreams PDF Author: Susan Fletcher
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0689851529
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Mitra and her brother Babak are exiled royals living on the streets as orphaned beggars. Babak possesses a strange gift of being able to know someone's dreams, and they soon find themselves on the road to Bethlehem. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults.

Last Lecture

Last Lecture PDF Author: Perfection Learning Corporation
Publisher: Turtleback
ISBN: 9781663608192
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Hadriana in All My Dreams

Hadriana in All My Dreams PDF Author: René Depestre
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1617755559
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Legendary Haitian author Depestre combines magic, fantasy, eroticism, and delirious humor to explore universal questions of race and sexuality. “One-of-a-kind . . . [A] ribald, free-wheeling magical-realist novel, first published in 1988 and newly, engagingly translated by Glover . . . An icon of Haitian literature serves up a hotblooded, rib-ticking, warmhearted mélange of ghost story, cultural inquiry, folk art, and véritable l’amour.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “An exceptional novel . . . Depestre’s masterpiece and one of the greatest examples of Haitian literature.” —New York Journal of Books Hadriana in All My Dreams, winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, takes place primarily during Carnival in 1938 in the Haitian village of Jacmel. A beautiful young French woman, Hadriana, is about to marry a Haitian boy from a prominent family. But on the morning of the wedding, Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion and collapses at the altar. Transformed into a zombie, her wedding becomes her funeral. She is buried by the town, revived by an evil sorcerer, then disappears into popular legend. Set against a backdrop of magic and eroticism, and recounted with delirious humor, the novel raises universal questions about race and sexuality. The reader comes away enchanted by the marvelous reality of Haiti’s Vodou culture and convinced of Depestre’s lusty claim that all beings—even the undead ones—have a right to happiness and true love.

My City of Dreams

My City of Dreams PDF Author: Lisa Gruenberg
Publisher: TidePool Press
ISBN: 0997848251
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
In this carefully researched and hauntingly written memoir, Lisa Gruenberg not only records her own life, but also that of relatives long lost to darkness, terror, and murder. In dreamlike sequences she weaves known facts of the lives of those lost into tableaus of imagined family dinners, conversations and leisure activities set in the Vienna landscape. She especially brings back to life some of the girls and women whose fates remain largely unknown. Indeed, she embodies her aunt Mia as she walks in her shoes, sees with her eyes, and speaks with her voice. These flights into the past are presented within the framework of Gruenberg's own family, her husband and daughters, and her father. He escaped from Vienna in 1939 and shared few of his memories with her, and that only late in life when disease had beaten down his defenses against remembering. The trauma and feeling of guilt often described in Holocaust survivors is reflected in this memoir, also the burden shared by so many of their children and grandchildren. At the same time, this tale is one of lightness and finding balance in all these difficulties and trials. There is an endless network of cousins and friends of cousins, one more colorful than the next. They are spread all over the world and Gruenberg seeks many of them out in her search for the past. At the center stands author's ability to look at the truth unflinchingly, including truths apparent in herself. She shares her insights in all their nakedness, starkness and, yes, hilarity. This, together with the author's luminous prose, make My City of Dreams an important landmark in 21st century testimony of the Holocaust.

My (Underground) American Dream

My (Underground) American Dream PDF Author: Julissa Arce
Publisher: Center Street
ISBN: 1455540250
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
A National Bestseller! What does an undocumented immigrant look like? What kind of family must she come from? How could she get into this country? What is the true price she must pay to remain in the United States? JULISSA ARCE knows firsthand that the most common, preconceived answers to those questions are sometimes far too simple-and often just plain wrong. On the surface, Arce's story reads like a how-to manual for achieving the American dream: growing up in an apartment on the outskirts of San Antonio, she worked tirelessly, achieved academic excellence, and landed a coveted job on Wall Street, complete with a six-figure salary. The level of professional and financial success that she achieved was the very definition of the American dream. But in this brave new memoir, Arce digs deep to reveal the physical, financial, and emotional costs of the stunning secret that she, like many other high-achieving, successful individuals in the United States, had been forced to keep not only from her bosses, but even from her closest friends. From the time she was brought to this country by her hardworking parents as a child, Arce-the scholarship winner, the honors college graduate, the young woman who climbed the ladder to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs-had secretly lived as an undocumented immigrant. In this surprising, at times heart-wrenching, but always inspirational personal story of struggle, grief, and ultimate redemption, Arce takes readers deep into the little-understood world of a generation of undocumented immigrants in the United States today- people who live next door, sit in your classrooms, work in the same office, and may very well be your boss. By opening up about the story of her successes, her heartbreaks, and her long-fought journey to emerge from the shadows and become an American citizen, Arce shows us the true cost of achieving the American dream-from the perspective of a woman who had to scale unseen and unimaginable walls to get there.

Someone Builds the Dream

Someone Builds the Dream PDF Author: Lisa Wheeler
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984814346
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
Buildings, bridges, and books don't exist without the workers who are often invisible in the final product, as this joyous and profound picture book reveals from acclaimed author of The Christmas Boot Lisa Wheeler and New York Times bestselling illustrator of Love Loren Long All across this great big world, jobs are getting done by many hands in many lands. It takes much more than ONE. Gorgeously written and illustrated, this is an eye-opening exploration of the many types of work that go into building our world--from the making of a bridge to a wind farm, an amusement park, and even the very picture book that you are reading. An architect may dream up the plans for a house, but someone has to actually work the saws and pound the nails. This book is a thank-you to the skilled women and men who work tirelessly to see our dreams brought to life.