Friday, October 1, 2004

The Civil War Art of Mort Kunstler

The Civil War Art of Mort Kunstler

The Civil War Art of Mort Kunstler

Mort Kunstler, the premier historical artist in America today, has focused on the Civil War for over twenty years. Immersed in a life-long research of the subject, he works closely with historians and scholars to ensure the historical accuracy of each painting. Collected in this volume, for the first time in his career, are more than 175 of Mort Kunstler's major paintings chronicling the Civil War, in addition to numerous portraits, sketches, and studies. The text includes commentary by Rod Gragg, Mort Kunstler, James M. McPherson, and James I. Robertson, Jr.
Many of his most dramatic paintings depict critical battles--there are more than thirty-five paintings on the Battle of Gettysburg alone--but Kunstler also humanizes the defining conflict of the United States. The portrayal of encamped leaders as they plot strategy, the struggles of daily life for soldiers far from home, and the romance of antebellum life, all contribute texture and detail to our understanding of Civil War.

ISBN: 0867130911
Author: Mort Künstler
Publisher: The Greenwich Workshop Press
Rating: 4.67

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Saturday, September 25, 2004

Marriage Fitness: 4 Steps to Building Maintaining Phenomenal Love

Marriage Fitness: 4 Steps to Building   Maintaining Phenomenal Love

Marriage Fitness: 4 Steps to Building Maintaining Phenomenal Love

Revolutionary step by step system marriage success.

ISBN: 0974448001
Author: Mort Fertel
Publisher: Reminders of Faith
Rating: 4.02

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Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Earthborn

Earthborn

Earthborn

Nesta Gwynn has always known that her parents are different. She thinks it’s because they’re from Boston instead of the little town in England, where Nesta was born and where she’s always lived. But at the age of 12, Nesta discovers that her parents aren’t really from Boston. In fact, they’re not from Earth at all. They’re aliens from a planet named Ormingat and, even though she was born on Earth, Nesta is an alien too. To make matters worse, her parents’s mission on Earth has come to an abrupt end because of a boy named Thomas Derwent. They will have one chance to return to Ormingat and it’s only seven days away. Nesta quickly devises a plan so that she’ll miss the deadline and not have to leave Earth. But if she stays behind, will her parents choose to stay with her or will they go back to Ormingat without her?


From the Hardcover edition.

ISBN: 0440418380
Author: Sylvia Waugh
Publisher: Yearling
Rating: 3.62

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Tuesday, March 16, 2004

The Bride Stripped Bare

The Bride Stripped Bare

The Bride Stripped Bare

A woman disappears, leaving behind an incendiary diary chronicling a journey of sexual awakening. To all who knew her, she was the Good Wife: happy, devoted, content. But the diary reveals a secret self, one who's discovered that her new marriage contains mysteries of its own. Inspired by a manuscript written by an anonymous Elizabethan woman who dared to speak of what women truly desire, she tastes for the first time the intoxicating power of knowing what she wants and how to get it. The question is, How long can she sustain a perilous double life?

In writing The Bride Stripped Bare, the author decided to remain anonymous so she would feel absolutely free to explore a woman's inner world. As she writes in her afterword, "That doesn't mean this book is a memoir; it's many things to me, fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and fact, a quilt pieced together not only from my stories but those of my friends."

Coolly impassioned, The Bride Stripped Bare tells startling truths about love and sex. It will make you question whether it is ever entirely possible to know another person.

ISBN: 000716226X
Author: Nikki Gemmell
Publisher: Harper
Rating: 3.10

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Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture

Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture

Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture

Both the Prophet Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon have been characterized as ardently, indeed evangelically, anti-Masonic. Yet in this sweeping social, cultural, and religious history of nineteenth-century Mormonism and its milieu, Clyde Forsberg argues that masonry, like evangelical Christianity, was an essential component of Smith's vision. Smith's ability to imaginatively conjoin the two into a powerful and evocative defense of Christian, or Primitive, Freemasonry was, Forsberg shows, more than anything else responsible for the meteoric rise of Mormonism in the nineteenth century.

This was to have significant repercussions for the development of Mormonism, particularly in the articulation of specifically Mormon gender roles. Mormonism's unique contribution to the Masonic tradition was its inclusion of women as active and equal participants in Masonic rituals. Early Mormon dreams of empire in the Book of Mormon were motivated by a strong desire to end social and racial discord, lest the country fall into the grips of civil war. Forsberg demonstrates that by seeking to bring women into previously male-exclusive ceremonies, Mormonism offered an alternative to the male-dominated sphere of the Master Mason. By taking a median and mediating position between Masonry and Evangelicism, Mormonism positioned itself as a religion of the people, going on to become a world religion.

But the original intent of the Book of Mormon gave way as Mormonism moved west, and the temple and polygamy (indeed, the quest for empire) became more prevalent. The murder of Smith by Masonic vigilantes and the move to Utah coincided with a new imperialism--and a new polygamy. Forsberg argues that Masonic artifacts from Smith's life reveal important clues to the precise nature of his early Masonic thought that include no less than a vision of redemption and racial concord.

ISBN: 0231126409
Author: Clyde R. Forsberg Jr.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Rating: 2.67

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Tuesday, January 6, 2004

Black is brown is tan

Black is brown is tan

Black is brown is tan

Brown-skinned momma, the color of chocolate milk and coffee pumpkin pie, whose face gets ginger red when she puffs and yells the children into bed. White-skinned daddy, not white like milk or snow, lighter than brown, With pinks and tiny tans, whose face gets tomato red when he puffs and yells their children into bed. Children who are all the colors of the race, growing up happy in a house full of love. This is the way it is for them; this is the way they are, but the joy they feel extends to every reader of this book.

Black is brown is tan is a story poem about being, a beautiful true song about a family delighting in each other and in the good things of the earth.

ISBN: 0064436446
Author: Arnold Adoff
Publisher: Amistad
Rating: 4.05

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Monday, January 5, 2004

Wakefield

Wakefield

Wakefield

What is the connection between breast enlargement and building renovation, yoga retreats and gourmet restaurants, cell phones and globalization? Wakefield, both the title of Andrei Codrescu's hilariously absurd and brilliantly observed novel and the name of its alienated hero, examines these and other perplexities of the late twentieth century.

Picture Wakefield: He's divorced, lives alone in a comfortable, book-filled apartment in a sophisticated city. A motivational speaker, his talks leave audiences dispirited and anxious. But for this peculiar talent, he's nicely paid by corporate America, and he's in demand. Then one day the Devil shows up, walks right into Wakefield's tasteful living room, and says, "Time's up."

Just as literary Fausts have done for centuries, Wakefield makes a bargain with Satan, who as it turns out, is having his own existential crisis due to bureaucratic headaches and younger upstart demons in the afterworld. The Devil gives Wakefield a year to find an authentic life—or else it's curtains. So Wakefield travels across the country meeting New Age gurus, billionaire techno-geeks, global pioneers, gambling addicts and models who look like heroin addicts, venture capitalists, art collectors, rainforest protectors, and S and M strippers.

Andrei Codrescu brings his unique vision to the American character: our desire to change, renovate, and improve both our inner and outer worlds; to remodel not only our buildings but our bodies and minds.

Wakefield is an inspired novel—part metaphysical mystery, part travel adventure, part architectural romp—by turns funny and deadly serious.

ISBN: 1565123727
Author: Andrei Codrescu
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Rating: 3.07

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