I find it so inspiring to see people pull off something that seems impossible, for example, breaking into a Paris monument every night for a year in order to clandestinely repair its neglected antique clock. So, when an author draws me into a topic that seems to me dry as dust, I enjoy the book so much more than one I knew I’d find interesting.
A few years ago, an old friend proposed that we make the dictionary our next book club selection. An idea too ridiculous to resist. But which dictionary to choose?
Unless you're retired, good luck finishing the 22,000-page Oxford English Dictionary. We opted instead for the excellent American Heritage Dictionary, which at ~100 pages per month only took us two years.
For a guy who thought he knew a lot of words already, I was pulled up short fairly often by discoveries such as "callipygian," "relating to or having buttocks that are considered beautifully proportioned." And even when the word was familiar, the etymology could delight, for example, when I learned that "clue" derived from "Theseus's use of a ball of thread as a guide through the Cretan labyrinth."
The much-anticipated Fifth Edition of The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language is the premier resource about words for people who seek to know more and find fresh perspectives. Exhaustively researched and thoroughly revised, the Fifth Edition contains 10,000 new words and senses, over 4,000 dazzling new full-color images, and authoritative, up-to-date guidance on usage from the celebrated American Heritage® Usage Panel.
In keeping with the American Heritage tradition of cutting-edge research, the Fifth Edition represents the work of a dedicated team of experts, scholars, and contributors. Thousands of definitions have been revised in rapidly changing fields such as…
This book wryly celebrates a certain kind of found art, those things that linger in view (and are often expensively maintained) even after they’ve become entirely useless, “thomassons,” named for the professional baseball player Gary Thomasson, who went hitless for two seasons and nearly broke the strikeout record.
After I read this book, I saw my city, at the time NYC, differently. Everywhere I walked, I noticed things I’d never clocked–staircases that no longer led anywhere that were nonetheless patched and repaired, fences swallowed by trees still being repainted.
"Akasegawa is the kind of artist who inspires everybody every time he makes a new piece of art." -Yoko Ono
In the 1970s, estranged from the institutions and practices of high art, avant-garde artist and award-winning novelist Genpei Akasegawa (1937-2014) launched an open-ended, participatory project to search the streets of Japan for strange objects which he and his collaborators labeled "hyperart," codifying them with an elaborate system of humorous nomenclature. Along with "modernologists" such as the Japanese urban anthropologist Kon Wajiro and his European contemporary, Walter Benjamin, Akasegawa is part of a lineage of modern wanderers of the cityscape. His…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
When this book appeared in 1995, devoted to what was probably one of the least visited museums in Los Angeles, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California, I knew it was worth a try, given that Weschler was someone I'd already sent a rare fan letter to.
I wasn’t disappointed. He’s the perfect guide for this exquisite project (which I had to make a pilgrimage to straight away) that at first blush seems to be a recherché natural-history museum but turns out to be a fascinating provocation that upended my notions of how we decide what is actually true.
Finalist for Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit--some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins of both art and science.
I aggressively avoid reading books about animals, let alone ones devoted to a single animal (and one that had been written about before), but Hillenbrand’s brilliantly deployed, meticulous research into all of the human personalities that surrounded Seabiscuit seduced me, and many other readers.
Now that her book has become a bestseller and a feature film, it’s easy to forget how unlikely an accomplishment it was, particularly given her struggles with chronic fatigue, which she later chronicled in a poignant New Yorker essay.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of the runaway phenomenon Unbroken comes a universal underdog story about the horse who came out of nowhere to become a legend.
Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail. Three men changed Seabiscuit’s fortunes:
Charles Howard was a onetime bicycle repairman who introduced the automobile to…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
When I saw this book, translated into English in 2009, I was very skeptical. I’d never enjoyed a graphic novel, and even though I’d enjoyed math in school, I couldn’t imagine reading an entire book devoted to the history of the philosophy of mathematics.
But somehow the sheer audacity of what they had attempted made it catnip to me, and before I knew it, I’d inhaled the whole thing and felt high on the feeling that anything was possible. If this could be a graphic novel, I thought feverishly, couldn’t my old obsession, Maria Lani? If only I could find an illustrator who felt the same way….
This brilliantly illustrated tale of reason, insanity, love and truth recounts the story of Bertrand Russell's life. Raised by his paternal grandparents, young Russell was never told the whereabouts of his parents. Driven by a desire for knowledge of his own history, he attempted to force the world to yield to his yearnings: for truth, clarity and resolve. As he grew older, and increasingly sophisticated as a philosopher and mathematician, Russell strove to create an objective language with which to describe the world - one free of the biases and slippages of the written word. At the same time, he…
On April 7, 1928, Maria Lani blew into Paris, claiming to be a famous German actress, and proceeded to seduce the cultural elite with her undeniable charisma and strangely enticing enigmatic aura. She persuaded fifty artists—Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Georges-Henri Rouault, Fernand Léger, and Suzanne Valadon among them—to immortalize her in paintings and sculptures, which would appear as an important plot device in a forthcoming film.
Unveiled as an exhibition in New York, the works traveled to Chicago, London, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Paris. But, as legend eventually had it, in 1931, she and her husband, Max Abramowicz, vanished without a trace, and so did the art. This graphic novel investigates what actually happened to her and the art.
