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Daedalus Books
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Hollywood icon, German dissident, lover, war heroine, distant mother, and eventual recluse. These are just some of the sobriquets attached to Marlene Dietrich. Ean Wood seeks to show the true Marlene Dietrich, the girl from Berlin who would find herself at the centre of world events, a supporter of the Allied cause and movie icon, meeting, working with and loving some of the most powerful and influential men of the 20th century. |
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Georgian and Regency architecture spans the years from 1714 until 1830, a period that bequeathed a rich heritage of buildings to the British landscape. From great country houses and churches to the formal city squares of Edinburgh and the graceful crescents of Bath, Georgian structures are distinguished by the elegance and harmony of their design. Georgian and Regency Architecture contains over two hundred illustrations, a chapter on the development of the concept of town planning, and biographical details of the outstanding architects of the time — from Adam and Hawkesmoor to Palladio and Wyatville. This title is part of a trilogy of books published by Chaucer press, lavishly portraying three hundred years of architecture, from the Georgian and Regency period through the Victorian and Edwardian era to the modern day. |
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was one of the most audacious and original landscape artists of his age. Throughout his career, he continually experimented with composition, light, paint handling, and pictorial structure in innovative new ways that challenged traditional and contemporary painting. He taught himself by working side-by-side with fellow Impressionist masters Monet and Sisley, and in the 1870s began to define his distinctive landscape style of quick, silvery brushstrokes. By the end of the decade he had moved decisively in the direction of unparalleled painterly freedom. This stunning book is the first to examine Renoir’s landscape art in depth, tracing its evolution from the beginning of his career through his Impressionist period and the early 1880s, when he began to incorporate new landscape motifs and new levels of coloristic intensity in paintings after traveling to Algeria and Italy. With over 200 illustrations, a detailed chronology, and bibliography, the book includes essays by highly distinguished scholars that discuss the range and importance of these works and present many fresh discoveries. They also place Renoir’s landscapes in the overall context of the genre in 19th-century France, revealing how his experiments were radical and in ways that have not yet been fully acknowledged influential on the later development of modern art. |
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Outdoor living is no longer defined as a simple patio with a few tables and chairs — today, homeowners are designing remarkable spaces in which to eat, relax, meditate, swim, and even sleep! Author Michelle Kodis reveals how to create a customized oasis in nearly any type of setting. Whether building new or redesigning an existing yard, Ultimate Backyards offers inspiration for outdoor spaces no matter the climate or budget — design is the key to creating a unique and personalized space. Learn how to connect an outdoor area architecturally to its environment, whether in the country, a suburb, or a busy urban locale. See first-hand the ways in which architects study a home's surroundings and then make them an integral part of the living space. Thirty case studies share stories, photos, and information on the challenges facing each project at its beginning, and the beautiful end result. Helpful sidebars offer suggestions and solutions on topics such as sustainability, using recycled materials, setting and staying within a budget, and what to do with a really small space. Sections include: Outdoor Rooms — outside spaces that dramatically increase the size and usable space of a home, from screened porches to outdoor family and play rooms; Indoor/Outdoor Combination — outdoor spaces designed to enhance an indoor/outdoor connection, such as a bedroom that opens directly to the outside; Water — pools, spas, ponds, and spaces that utilize water as the focal point; and, Creative Landscapes — landscapes that go beyond the ordinary to truly connect the house to its setting. |
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From the biggest notions of carefully styled rooms to the smallest comforts and delights of accessorizing a home with your favorite things, Inside Log Homes offers suggestions, understanding, and inspiration regarding the intensely personal and expressive world of log-cabin living. Author Cindy Thiede peeks through doors into hundreds of uniquely styled and personally appointed spaces. Sometimes comfortably familiar, other times surprising and unexpected, each room may plant the seed of possibility for your own emerging vision of home and hearth. Cindy Thiede has spent twenty years photographing and writing about log-home architecture in the United States. Additional titles by Ms. Thiede include Hands-On Log Homes: Cabins Built on Dreams, The Log Home Book: Design, Past and Present, American Log Homes. |
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In this follow-up to her bestselling Sex with Kings, Eleanor Herman reveals the truth about what goes on behind the closed door of a queen's boudoir. Impeccably researched, filled with page-turning romance, passion, and scandal, Sex with the Queen explores the scintillating sexual lives of some of our most beloved and infamous female rulers. She was the queen, living in an opulent palace, wearing lavish gowns and dazzling jewels. She was envied, admired, and revered. She was also miserable, having been forced to marry a foreign prince sight unseen, a royal ogre who was sadistic, foaming at the mouth, physically repulsive, mentally incompetent, or sexually impotent — and in some cases all of the above.How did queens find happiness? In courts bristling with testosterone — swashbuckling generals, polished courtiers, and virile cardinals — many royal women had love affairs.Anne Boleyn flirted with courtiers; Catherine Howard slept with one. Henry VIII had both of them beheaded.Catherine the Great had her idiot husband murdered, and ruled the Russian empire with a long list of sexy young favorites.Marie Antoinette fell in love with the handsome Swedish count Axel Fersen, who tried valiantly to rescue her from the guillotine.Empress Alexandra of Russia found emotional solace in the mad monk Rasputin. Her behavior was the spark that set off the firestorm of the Russian revolution.Princess Diana gave up her palace bodyguard to enjoy countless love affairs, which tragically led to her early death. When a queen became sick to death of her husband and took a lover, anything could happen — from disgrace and death to political victory. Some kings imprisoned erring wives for life; other monarchs obligingly named the queen's lover prime minister.The crucial factor deciding the fate of an unfaithful queen was the love affair's implications in terms of power, money, and factional rivalry. At European courts, it was the politics — not the sex — that caused a royal woman's tragedy — or her ultimate triumph. |
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«From one of America's most beloved and bestselling authors, a wonderfully useful and readable guide to the problems of the English language most commonly encountered by editors and writers. What is the difference between «immanent» and «imminent?» What is the singular form of graffiti? What is the difference between «acute» and «chronic?» What is the former name of «Moldova?» What is the difference between a cardinal number and an ordinal number? One of the English language's most skilled writers answers these and many other questions and guides us all toward precise, mistake-free usage. Covering spelling, capitalization, plurals, hyphens, abbreviations, and foreign names and phrases, Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors will be an indispensable companion for all who care enough about our language not to maul, misuse, or contort it. This dictionary is an essential guide to the wonderfully disordered thing that is the English language. As Bill Bryson notes, it will provide you with «the answers to all those points of written usage that you kind of know or ought to know but can't quite remember».» |
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The most complete compendium of mythology ever published. 'Bulfinch's Mythology' includes the stories of: Apollo and Daphne, Pygmalion, Cupid and Psyche, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Hercules, Theseus and Daedalus, The Trojan War, Ulysses, and more... |
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Kenzie and Gennaro are private investigators in the blue-collar neighborhoods and ghettos of South Boston-they know it as only natives can. Working out of an old church belfry, Kenzie and Gennaro take on a seemingly simple assignment for a prominent politician: to uncover the whereabouts of Jenna Angeline, a black cleaning woman who has allegedly stolen confidential state documents. Finding Jenna, however, is easy compared to staying alive once they've got her. The investigation escalates, implicating members of Jenna's family and rival gang leaders while uncovering extortion, assassination, and child prostitution extending from bombed-out ghetto streets to the highest levels of government. A Drink Before the War, the first in Lehane's acclaimed series with Boston detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, is a remarkable debut that is at once a pulsating crime thriller and a mirror of our world, one in which the worst human horrors are found closest to home, and the most vicious obscenities are committed in the name of love. |
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«From the day her first Vampire Chronicle was published, critics and readers — readers by the hundreds of thousands — have been mesmerized by the writings of Anne Rice. And with the publication of The Witching Hour, she created for us yet another world and legend, and both the chorus of praise and the multitudes of her readers once more increased. Now, Anne Rice brings us again — even more magically — into the midst of the dynasty of witches she introduced in The Witching Hour. At the center: the brilliant an beautiful Rowan Mayfair, queen of the coven, and Lasher, the darkly compelling demon whom she finds irresistible and from whose evil spell and vision she must now flee. She takes with her their terrifying and exquisite child, one of «a brood of children born knowing, able to stand and talk on the first day». Rowan's attempt to escape Lasher and his pursuit of her and their child are at the heart of this extraordinary saga. It is a novel that moves around the globe, backward and forward through time, and between the human and demonic worlds. Its many voices — of women, of men, of demons and angels, present and past — haunt and enchant us. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us through twilight paths, telling a chillingly hypnotic story of occult and spiritual aspirations and passion.» |
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We are in Paris on the Left Bank. The time is now. David meets Pandora in a crowded café, where she recounts her vampire tale — Pandora, two thousand years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to write for him the story of her life. We see Pandora from her mortal girlhood as the daughter of aristocrats in the peaceful Rome of Caesar Augustus through her perilous journey towards the vampire Marius, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift, and the tale of their two centuries together before they are tragically lost to each other. |
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The novel begins when Max Carver's father — a watchmaker and inventor — decides to move his family to a small town on the Atlantic coast. They move into a house that was built for a prestigious surgeon, Dr Richard Fleischmann and his wife but was abandoned when the couple's son drowned in a tragic accident. Behind the house Max spies an overgrown garden full of statues surrounded by a metal fence topped with a six-pointed star. When he goes to investigate, Max finds that the statues seem to consist of a kind of circus troop. In the centre of the garden is the large statue of a clown set in another six-pointed star. Max has the curious sensation that the statue is beckoning to him. As the family settles in they grow increasingly uneasy: they discover a box of old films belonging to the Fleischmanns; his sister has unsettling dreams and his other sister hears voices whispering to her from an old wardrobe. But Max spends most of his time with his new friend Roland, who takes him diving to the wreck of a boat that sank close to the coast in a terrible storm. Everyone on board perished except for one man — an engineer who built the lighthouse at the end of the beach.During the dive, Max sees something that leaves him cold — on the old mast floats a tattered flag and on it is the symbol of the circle and six-pointed star. As they learn more about the wreck, the chilling story of a legendary figure called Prince of the Mists begins to emerge. |
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Meet Mr. Ash, quiet-spoken, tall, unfailingly kind — sole survivor of an ancient species, the Taltos — thriving among humankind as he has always done, now the head of a great corporate empire. As the novel opens, he is stunned to learn from an old and mysterious friend that another Taltos has been seen — in the very same Scottish glen where centuries ago, long before the coming of the Romans, Ash ruled his clan. At once he is propelled into the world of Rowan Mayfair, and into the mysteries of the Mayfair family — the New Orleans dynasty of witches forever besieged by ghosts, spirits, and the dizzying powers of his own species — a family intimately involved with the heritage of the Taltos, a family of unique, brilliant, and troubled souls struggling as they have for centuries to use both science and magic in their battle for greatness, even survival. At the heart of the novel is the Talamasca, a secular order of psychic scholars, the only organization in existence which may understand Ash, his Taltos past, and the dilemma of the Mayfair witches. The story of the Mayfair family continues, moving from London to Donnelaith, Scotland, to New Orleans, back and forth through time — from the origins of the Taltos and their mythic Lost Land to the moral crises of the present day. |
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A passenger train hurtling through the night. An unwed teenage mother headed to Moscow to seek a new life. A cruel-hearted soldier looking furtively, forcibly, for sex. An infant disappearing without a trace. So begins Martin Cruz Smith's masterful Three Stations, a suspenseful, intricately constructed novel featuring Investigator Arkady Renko. For the last three decades, beginning with the trailblazing Gorky Park, Renko (and Smith) have captivated readers with detective tales set in Russia. Renko is the ironic, brilliantly observant cop who finds solutions to heinous crimes when other lawmen refuse to even acknowledge that crimes have occurred. He uses his biting humor and intuitive leaps to fight not only wrongdoers but the corrupt state apparatus as well. In Three Stations, Renko's skills are put to their most severe test. Though he has been technically suspended from the prosecutor's office for once again turning up unpleasant truths, he strives to solve a last case: the death of an elegant young woman whose body is found in a construction trailer on the perimeter of Moscow's main rail hub. It looks like a simple drug overdose to everyone — except to Renko, whose examination of the crime scene turns up some inexplicable clues, most notably an invitation to Russia's premier charity ball, the billionaires' Nijinksy Fair. Thus a sordid death becomes interwoven with the lifestyles of Moscow's rich and famous, many of whom are clinging to their cash in the face of Putin's crackdown on the very oligarchs who placed him in power. Renko uncovers a web of death, money, madness and a kidnapping that threatens the woman he is coming to love and the lives of children he is desperate to protect. In Three Stations, Smith produces a complex and haunting vision of an emergent Russia's secret underclass of street urchins, greedy thugs and a bureaucracy still paralyzed by power and fear. |
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With Tigger as their guide, youngsters are sure to relish an adventure featuring letters, numbers, animals, shapes, opposites, and more on pages packed with surprises hidden under flaps. Full color. |
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On a hot summer afternoon in 1972, three teenagers drove into an unfamiliar neighborhood and six lives were altered forever. Thirty five years later, one survivor of that day reaches out to another, opening a door that could lead to salvation. But another survivor is now out of prison, looking for reparation in any form he can find it. THE TURNAROUND takes us on a journey from the rock-and-soul streets of the '70s to the changing neighborhoods of D.C. today, from the diners and auto garages of the city to the inside of Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, where wounded men and women have returned to the world in a time of war. A novel of fathers and sons, wives and husbands, loss, victory and violent redemption, THE TURNAROUND is another compelling, highly charged novel from George Pelecanos, the best crime novelist in America. |
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In the grand manner of Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice's new novel moves across time and the continents, from nineteenth-century Vienna to a St. Charles Greek Revival mansion in present-day New Orleans to the dazzling capitals of the modern-day world, telling a story of two charismatic figures bound to each other by a passionate commitment to music as a means of rapture, seduction, and liberation. At the novel's center: a uniquely fascinating woman, Triana — who once dreamed of becoming a great musician — and the demonic fiddler Stefan, tormented ghost of a Russian aristocrat, who begins to prey upon her, using his magic violin first to enchant, then to dominate and draw her into a state of madness through the music she loves. But Triana understands the power of the music perhaps even more than does Stefan — and she sets out to resist Stefan and to fight not only for her sanity but for her life. The struggle draws them both into a terrifying supernatural realm where they find themselves surrounded by memories, by horrors, and by overwhelming truths. Battling desperately, they are at last propelled towards the novel's astonishing and unforgettable climax. Violin is crowded with the history, the drama, the invention, and the romantic intensity that have become synonymous with Anne Rice at her incomparable best. |
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An acclaimed historian presents a revelatory look at the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. For eminent historian Paul Johnson, Winston Churchill remains an enigma in need of unraveling. Soldier, parliamentarian, Prime Minister, orator, painter, writer, husband, and leader all of these facets combine to make Churchill one of the most complex and fascinating personalities in history. In Churchill, Johnson applies a wide lens and an unconventional approach to illuminate the various phases of Churchill's career. From his adventures as a young cavalry officer in the service of the Empire to his role as an elder statesman prophesying the advent of the Cold War, Johnson shows how Churchill's immense adaptability combined with his natural pugnacity to make him a formidable leader for the better part of a century. Johnson's narration of Churchill's many triumphs and setbacks, rich with anecdote and quotation, illustrates the man's humor, resilience, courage, and eccentricity as no other biography before. Winston Churchill's hold on contemporary readers has never slackened, and Paul Johnson's lively, concise biography will appeal to historians and general nonfiction readers alike. |
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The world's most curious monkey investigates new words in this lively picture dictionary for young children. Curious George's Dictionary is an engaging picture dictionary specially designed for children from preschool through first grade. Both entertaining and educationally sound, it features charming illustrations and reflects recent research in early childhood literacy, setting it apart from other picture dictionaries. The main part of the dictionary is an A-Z section containing approximately six hundred words, six words to a page. Each word is illustrated with a full-color drawing, most of which have been created for this book by the popular illustrator Mary O'Keefe Young. More than half the illustrations include a sample sentence that puts the word in a familiar context. A four-page illustrated story at the front of the book shows George learning how to look up words in his dictionary, drawing children in while introducing them to dictionary skills. At the end of the book, seven one-to two-page illustrations present groups of words related by simple themes such as colors, shapes, and numbers. Developed in collaboration with educational consultants, the word list includes not only concrete objects but many more abstract concepts, like discover and enough, than do other picture dictionaries. Such words are essential for vocabulary development, and Curious George's antics bring them alive, making them easy and fun for children to learn. |
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#1 New York Times — bestselling author J. D. Robb takes us to the New York City of 2060, where Lieutenant Eve Dallas faces down a cop killer. Amarylis Coltraine may have recently transferred to the New York City police force from Atlanta, but she's been a cop long enough to know how to defend herself against an assailant. When she's taken down just steps away from her apartment, killed with her own weapon, for Eve the victim isn't just one of us. Dallas's friend Chief Medical Examiner Morris and Coltraine had started a serious relationship, and from all accounts the two were headed for a happy future together. But someone has put an end to all that. After breaking the news to Morris, Eve starts questioning everyone from Coltraine's squad, informants, and neighbors, while Eve's husband, Roarke, digs into computer data on Coltraine's life back in Atlanta. To their shock, they discover a connection between this case and their own painful, shadowy pasts. The truth will need to be uncovered one layer at a time, starting with the box that arrives at Cop Central addressed to Eve containing Coltraine's guns, badge, and a note from her killer: You can have them back. Maybe someday soon, I'll be sending yours to somebody else. But Eve Dallas doesn't take too kindly to personal threats, and she is going to break this case, whatever it takes. And that's a promise. |
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