Author: Elias Butler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 486
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Book Description
Legendary Grand Canyoneer Harvey Butchart climbed, hiked, floated and bushwhacked 12,000 pioneering miles below the rim during a 42-year obsession with the world-famous gorge. Here for the first time is Harvey's life story: his years as a fatherless child in the mountains of China, his struggles in America during the Great Depression, and finally, his all-consuming drive for greatness by exploring one of the West's last unknown wildernesses. Lace up your boots and follow along as the authors retrace Harvey's footsteps on dangerous cliff edges while chronicling his thrilling exploits, heart-breaking tragedies, and lasting triumphs. Part biography, part modern-day adventure, Grand Obsession will take you deeper into the soul of this fascinating man - and Grand Canyon - than you have ever been before. Contains over 170 photographs, many never-before-published, and Harvey Butchart's hand-stenciled maps showing his treks in Grand Canyon.
Author: Alasdair McGregor
Publisher: Lanter/Penguin Books
ISBN: 9781920989385
Category : Architects
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
On 23 May 1912, American Walter Burley Griffin was announced to the world as the winner of the international design competition for the new Australian capital to be built on a sheep paddock they called Canberra. Almost a century later, Griffin's design - but most of all its implementation - is still hotly debated. Who was this man and what was his vision? How did he come to Canberra, what happened once the Australian establishment tore him to shreds, and what was the role of his wife, helpmate, fellow architect and equal creative partner, Marion Mahony Griffin? In this definitive new biography of Griffin husband and wife, Alasdair McGregor delineates the role each played in the production of their greatest works - Canberra, Castlecrag, Newman College and the rest - and charts their lives, from their childhoods and meeting in Chicago in the employ of the larger than life Frank Lloyd Wright, to their battles in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney, and their swansong in India. This is a tale of many parts. It traces the lives of two individuals of great talent and vision and their fight against mediocrity. It is the story of the birth of Canberra, one that tells us as much about the Griffins as it does about ourselves and the troubled birth of the Australian national identity. It is a portrait of a pioneering woman who achieved extraordinary things but was rarely credited with that achievement. And it is an examination of the nature of fame in a young country uncertain of its position in the world. The Griffins' story resonates through the years, and their fight to see their idealistic vision realised is one that goes on in Australia today. 'This biography . . . is a treasure.' Dimity Reed, Sunday Age 'This handsome book . . . is the latest in a growing line of books about the Griffins, and it is perhaps the most successful to date.' Roger Pegrum, Canberra Times 'a meticulously detailed account of the Griffins' professional output.' Annabel Lawson, Australia Coast to Coast Country Style 'This belongs on every architect's bookshelf.' Susan Hewitt, West Magazine
Author: Robert L. Dorman
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816599432
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
The American West has taken on a rich and evocative array of regional identities since the late nineteenth century. Wilderness wonderland, Hispanic borderland, homesteader’s frontier, cattle kingdom, urban dynamo, Native American homeland. Hell of a Vision explores the evolution of these diverse identities during the twentieth century, revealing how Western regionalism has been defined by generations of people seeking to understand the West’s vast landscapes and varied cultures. Focusing on the American West from the 1890s up to the present, Dorman provides us with a wide-ranging view of the impact of regionalist ideas in pop culture and diverse fields such as geography, land-use planning, anthropology, journalism, and environmental policy-making. Going well beyond the realm of literature, Dorman broadens the discussion by examining a unique mix of texts. He looks at major novelists such as Cather, Steinbeck, and Stegner, as well as leading Native American writers. But he also analyzes a variety of nonliterary sources in his book, such as government reports, planning documents, and environmental impact studies. Hell of a Vision is a compelling journey through the modern history of the American West—a key region in the nation of regions known as the United States.
Author: Deborah Lawrence
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587297302
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
For a long time, the American West was mainly identified with white masculinity, but as more women’s narratives of westward expansion came to light, scholars revised purely patriarchal interpretations. Writing the Trail continues in this vein by providing a comparative literary analysis of five frontier narratives---Susan Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, Sarah Royce’s A Frontier Lady, Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters, Eliza Farnham’s California, In-doors and Out, and Lydia Spencer Lane’s I Married a Soldier---to explore the ways in which women’s responses to the western environment differed from men’s. Throughout their very different journeys---from an eighteen-year-old bride and self-styled “wandering princess” on the Santa Fe Trail, to the mining camps of northern California, to garrison life in the Southwest---these women moved out of their traditional positions as objects of masculine culture. Initially disoriented, they soon began the complex process of assimilating to a new environment, changing views of power and authority, and making homes in wilderness conditions. Because critics tend to consider nineteenth-century women’s writings as confirmations of home and stability, they overlook aspects of women’s textualizations of themselves that are dynamic and contingent on movement through space. As the narratives in Writing the Trail illustrate, women’s frontier writings depict geographical, spiritual, and psychological movement. By tracing the journeys of Magoffin, Royce, Clappe, Farnham, and Lane, readers are exposed to the subversive strength of travel writing and come to a new understanding of gender roles on the nineteenth-century frontier.
Author: Annette Kolodny
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822352869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447
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Book Description
A radically new interpretation of two medieval Icelandic tales, known as the Vinland sagas, considering what the they reveal about native peoples, and how they contribute to the debate about whether Leif Eiriksson or Christopher Columbus should be credited as the first "discoverer" of America.
Author: Various Various
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
ISBN: 0522859526
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
If you missed the first eight titles in MUP's acclaimed Little Books on Big Themes series, this is your chance to collect the whole set. Released in time for Christmas, the ON-nibus brings together eight 10,000-word essays on the big themes in life by leading Australian thinkers. Featured authors are Germaine Greer ('On Rage'), David Malouf ('On Experience'), Blanche d'Alpuget ('On Longing'), Barrie Kosky ('On Ecstasy'), Don Watson ('On Indignation'), Gay Bilson ('On Digestion'), Malcolm Knox ('On Obsession') and Anne Summers ('On Luck').
Author: Steffen Wöll
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110690136
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Western expansion in North America has mainly been described as either a linear sequence energized by nineteenth-century nation-building processes at a moving frontier, or as the practice of settler colonialism and its exploitation of resources and displacement of nonwhite peoples. This book suggests that shifting the focus from this binary pattern towards spatial imaginations and spatialization processes—a new theoretical framework developed at SFB 1199—provides novel insights into the placemaking dynamics of the American West. It brings to light a discursive diversity that often contradicts unidirectional interpretive patterns. It becomes clear that while some discourses solidified into spatial metanarratives like the character-shaping clash of civilizations at the frontier or manifest destiny, alternative spatial imaginations exist juxtaposed to or obfuscated by canonical interpretations. Making use of a variety of sources (including works of literature, poetry, newspapers, paintings, and speeches) to access spatialization processes on several sociocultural scales, the book presents a careful exploration of the parameters that inform(ed) the creation, affirmation, and subversion of spatial imagination of the American West throughout the nineteenth century from the perspective of American Studies.
Author: Robert S. Levinson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780765302311
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
This non-stop, pulse-jangling thrill ride has more heart-pounding twists and turns than an out-of-control roller coaster, as L.A. newspaper columnist Neil Gulliver and his ex-wife, Stevie Marriner, chase after priceless art masterpieces stolen almost seventy years ago and believed lost forever. In fact, these treasures have never been lost, only hidden in the secret galleries and vaults of greedy art dealers and wealthy private collectors. They are an ugly breed prepared to pay any sum to acquire more great works by the masters. When power and wealth fail them, violence is readily available. The gift of a suite of Andy Warhol silkscreens plunges Neil and Stevie into this nasty, dangerous underworld. They escape more than one brush with death as they decipher the secret of each print and try to keep one step ahead of paid killers, among them Clegg, a terrifying, tormented man who has his private reasons for the murders he commits.
Author: Donald E. Morse
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786485213
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
Robert Holdstock was a prolific writer whose oeuvre included horror, fantasy, mystery and the novelization of films, often published under pseudonyms. These twelve critical essays explore Holdstock's varied output by displaying his works against the backdrop of folk and fairy tales, dissecting their spatiotemporal order, and examining them as psychic fantasies of our unconscious life or as exempla of the sublime. The individual novels of the Mythago Wood sequence are explored, as is Holdstock's early science fiction and the Merlin Codex series.
Author: Bernard W. Quetchenbach
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813919546
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Many poets writing after World War II have found the individual focus of contemporary poetics poorly suited to making statements directed at public issues and public ethics. The desire to invest such individualized poetry with greater cultural authority presented difficulties for Vietnam-protest poets, for example, and it has been a particular challenge for nature writers in the Thoreau tradition who have attempted to serve as advocates for the natural world. Examining the implications of this dilemma, Bernard W. Quetchenbach locates the poets Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry within two traditions: the American nature-writing tradition, and the newer tradition of contemporary poetics. He compares the work of two other twentieth-century poets, Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Roethke, to illustrate how the "contemporary shift" toward a poetics focused on the poet's life has affected portrayals of nature and the "public voice" in poetry. Turning back to the work of Bly, Snyder, and Berry, Quetchenbach assesses their attempts to reinvent the public voice in the context of contemporary poetics and what effect these attempts have had on their work. He argues that these poets have learned from their postwar generation techniques for adapting a personalized poetics to environmental advocacy. In addition to modifying what critics have called the "poetics of immediacy," these poets have augmented their poetic output with prose and identified themselves with long-standing traditions of poetic, ethical, and spiritual authority. In doing so, Bly, Snyder, and Berry have attempted to solve not only a problem inherent in contemporary poetics but also the larger problem of the role of the poet in a society that does not recognize poetry. While it would be an overstatement to suggest that these three figures have found a place for the poet in American life, they have reached audiences that extend beyond traditional readers of poetry. At the end of the twentieth century, Quetchenbach concludes, poets have begun to identify, and direct their writing to, specific audiences defined less by aesthetic preferences and more by a shared interest in and dedication to the work's subject matter. Whether revealing a disturbing trend for poetry or an encouraging one for environmentalism and other political causes, it is one of many provocative conclusions Quetchenbach draws from his examination of postwar nature poetry.
