borzoi alfred a knopf random house new york ny (8 results)

Hardcover. Condition: NEW - COLLECTIBLE. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. First American Edition. BRAND NEW & Collectible. Bi-color boards/Fine. DJ/Fine. Novel following the format of a memoir. First published 1997 in Italian under the title Incantesimi; this is this First Printing of the English translation. Recollections of a young Italian girl, growing up in Paris, sometime after World War II. 131 pgs, in 25 short chapters of vignettes recounting moments of betraying a younger sister, losing a pet, to learning about love and boys.

First US edition. Octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in papered boards with silver-gilt spine titling; 288pp. untrimmed. Dustwrapper. Remainder. New. Postage quoted is for a standard format octavo book. Final charges may vary depending on size and weight. 9780307957054.

First edition: octavo; hardcover, with illustrated boards; 342pp., with 4pp. of monochrome plates and other decorations likewise. Minor wear; a small tear to the fore-edge of page 145; previous owner's ink inscription to the flyleaf. Dustwrapper mildly rubbed and edgeworn; lightly sunned along the spine panel. Very good. Postage quoted is for a standard format octavo book. Final charges may vary depending on size and weight.

Octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in papered boards with gilt spine-titling and illustrated endpapers; 486pp., untrimmed, with maps, diagrams, many monochrome illustrations and 8pp. of full-colour plates. Dustwrapper. Remainder. New. Postage quoted is for a standard format octavo book. Final charges may vary depending on size and weight. Built in the fifth century B.C., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West's ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it? In this revolutionary book, Joan Breton Connelly challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. Beginning with the natural environment and its rich mythic associations, she re-creates the development of the Acropolis the Sacred Rock at the heart of the city-state from its prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a constellation of temples among which the Parthenon stood supreme. In particular, she probes the Parthenon's legendary frieze: the 525-foot-long relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper reaches before it was partially destroyed by Venetian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and most of what remained was shipped off to Britain (in the nineteenth century), along with the Elgin marbles. The frieze's vast enigmatic procession a dazzling pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and maidens has for more than two hundred years been thought to represent a scene of annual civic celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the discovery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenistic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book's intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered a long-buried meaning, a story of human sacrifice set during the city's mythic founding. In a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual, this story was at the core of what it meant to be Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars our popular notions of Athens as a city of staid philosophers, rationalists, and rhetoricians, a world in which our modern secular conception of democracy would have been simply incomprehensible. The Parthenon's full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze's dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent. 9780307593382.

First US edition: octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in papered boards with bronze spine titles; 342pp., untrimmed. Minor wear. Dustwrapper very lightly sunned along the spine panel. Very good to near fine and wrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Postage quoted is for a standard format octavo book. Final charges may vary depending on size and weight.

Octavo; hardcover; 514pp., untrimmed, with 8pp. of full-colour plates and many monochrome illustrations. Dustwrapper. Remainder. New. Postage quoted is for a standard format octavo book. Final charges may vary depending on size and weight. From Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic Paul Goldberger: an engaging, nuanced exploration of the life and work of Frank Gehry, undoubtedly the most famous architect of our time. This first full-fledged critical biography presents and evaluates the work of a man who has almost single-handedly transformed contemporary architecture in his innovative use of materials, design, and form, and who is among the very few architects in history to be both respected by critics as a creative, cutting-edge force and embraced by the general public as a popular figure. "Building Art" shows the full range of Gehry's work, from early houses constructed of plywood and chain-link fencing to lamps made in the shape of fish to the triumphant success of such late projects as the spectacular art museum of glass in Paris. It tells the story behind Gehry's own house, which upset his neighbors and excited the world with its mix of the traditional and the extraordinary, and recounts how Gehry came to design the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, his remarkable structure of swirling titanium that changed a declining city into a destination spot. "Building Art" also explains Gehry's sixteen-year quest to complete Walt Disney Concert Hall, the beautiful, acoustically brilliant home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Although Gehry's architecture has been written about widely, the story of his life has never been told in full detail. Here we come to know his Jewish immigrant family, his working-class Toronto childhood, his hours spent playing with blocks on his grandmother's kitchen floor, his move to Los Angeles when he was still a teenager, and how he came, unexpectedly, to end up in architecture school. Most important, "Building Art" presents and evaluates Gehry's lifetime of work in conjunction with his entire life story, including his time in the army and at Harvard, his long relationship with his psychiatrist and the impact it had on his work, and his two marriages and four children. It analyzes his carefully crafted persona, in which a casual, amiable "aw, shucks" surface masks a driving and intense ambition. And it explores his relationship to Los Angeles and how its position as home to outsider artists gave him the freedom in his formative years to make the innovations that characterize his genius. Finally, it discusses his interest in using technology not just to change the way a building looks but to change the way the whole profession of architecture is practised. At once a sweeping view of a great architect and an intimate look at creative genius, "Building Art" is in many ways the saga of the architectural milieu of the twenty-first century. But most of all it is the compelling story of the man who first comes to mind when we think of the lasting possibilities of buildings as art. 9780307701534.

First edition: octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in papered boards with gilt spine-titling; 584pp., with 32pp.of colour plates and many monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; previous owner's name in ink to the title page. Dustwrapper a little edgeworn. Very good. Postage quoted is for a standard format octavo book. Final charges may vary depending on size and weight. "Karl With, the German art critic who published a life of Marc Chagall in 1923, began his book with two definitions: 'Chagall is Russian' and 'Chagall is an eastern Jew (Ostjude)'. He went on, 'One part of him is reserved . . . melancholic and eaten up inside by burning passion . . . The other side of him is sensual, worldly, sensory, baroque, and blooming. He is lithe as an animal, agile, given to tantrums like a child, soft and charming, amiably sly mixed with a peasantlike coarseness and the delight of a provincial in everything colourful, dazzling and moving.' Making allowances for the period language, it was a shrewd analysis - and although Chagall was to live for another 62 years (he died in 1985), it never ceased to be true. The paradoxes of Chagall's personality only became clearer with time. He was an introvert who delighted in the world. He was a dreamer and a manipulator. He was instinctively selfish, yet lavishly kind with his eye. Jackie Wullschlager shows us all this and more, in her beautifully produced book. She has talked to Chagall's surviving friends, she has a sharp sense of what is gorgeously original in the paintings and also of what is tediously self-cannibalising, and she writes prose that registers intense feeling yet is coolly well organised. Furthermore, she has had the cooperation of Chagall's estate, so has been able to draw on Chagall's correspondence with his first wife Bella, who was the mainspring of his greatest work and a profoundly interesting spirit in her own right (her autobiography is wonderful). As had to be the case if Wullschlager was going to do her subject justice, her book tells the painter's story while also giving a compelling account of modernism in general, and of the 20th century political turmoil that both fed and frustrated it." - Andrew Motion.

First American edition: octavo hardcover; quarter-bound in blue papered boards with green spine and silver-gilt spine-titling; 473pp., untrimmed, with maps and 8pp. of monochrome plates. Remainder spot on lower text block edge. Minor wear only. Very good to near fine in like, slightly rubbed dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Postage quoted is for a standard format octavo book. Final charges may vary depending on size and weight. The Taiping Rebellion (or "Revolution" as it became known under the Communists) was a twisted agglomeration of incidents which led to outright warfare and destroyed the lives of millions - perhaps tens of millions - of lives. In Stephen Platt's hands it becomes a "Civil War", which pretty much describes the permanent state of affairs in China from about 1860 through to 1949. The Taiping Rebellion was started by a crazed individual who failed to attain a government position and meshed his psychosis with half-remembered dogma from Christian missionaries. Backed by secret societies who used his charismatic address to foment pro-Ming, anti-Qing Dynasty hatred amongst the peasantry, they rose up in conflict and handily rolled the presence of foreigners in their country onto the list of enemies at hand. The result was decades of senseless and destructive war which weakened the country in the onset of the twentieth century and the horrors which it would bring to bear. If the Communist takeover and the grim brutalities of Mao's domination were China's Winter, then this truly was the Celestial Empire's bloody red Autumn.