|
Showing 1 - 25 of
26 matches in All Departments
For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved
writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and
more. But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental
matter, one he had often meditated on in The New Yorker: How do
masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a
museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could
anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental
mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it? In The Real
Work—the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes
for a great trick—Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several
masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing
instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Rejecting self-help
bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top
people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods.
For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and
building up—of identifying and perfecting the small constituent
parts of a skill and the combining them for an overall effect
greater than the sum of those parts. For another, mastery almost
always involves intentional imperfection—as in music, where
vibrato, a way of not quite landing on the right note, carries
maximum expressiveness. Gopnik’s simplest and most invigorating
lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery. Far from
rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from
the parent who can whip up a professional strudel to the social
worker who—in one of the most personally revealing passages
Gopnik has ever written—helps him master his own demons. Spirited
and profound, The Real Work will help you understand how mastery
can happen in your own life—and, significantly, why each of us
relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place.
For decades, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers,
a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But
recently, he became obsessed by a fundamental matter: How did the
people he was writing about learn their outlandish skill, whether
it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf? In The Real
Work-his title the term magicians use for the accumulated craft
that makes for a great trick-Gopnik apprentices himself to an
artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor (from the
DMV), among others, trying his late-middle-age hand at things he
assumed were beyond him. He finds that mastering a skill is a
process of methodically breaking down and building up, piece by
piece-and that true mastery, in any field, requires mastering other
people's minds. Exuberant and profound, The Real Work is ultimately
about why we relentlessly seek to better ourselves in the first
place.
Bestselling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik embarks on a
wildly creative inquiry into perhaps the oldest question: how do we
learn a new skill? For decades, Adam Gopnik has been one of our
most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food,
France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a fundamental
matter: how did the people he was writing about learn their
outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a
sourdough loaf? In The Real Work-the term magicians use for the
accumulated craft that makes for a great trick-Gopnik apprentices
himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving
instructor (from the DMV), among others, trying his late-middle-age
hand at things he assumed were beyond him. He finds that mastering
a skill is a process of methodically breaking down and building up,
piece by piece-and that true mastery, in any field, requires
mastering other people's minds. Exuberant and profound, The Real
Work is ultimately about why we relentlessly seek to better
ourselves in the first place. PRAISE FOR ADAM GOPNIK 'A real treat
. . . Heartening proof of a life lived fully, and fully savoured'
Claire Lowdon, Times Literary Supplement 'Gopnik has written with
entrancing penetration on just about everything' Christopher Bray,
Spectator 'Witty and wise. Gopnik is a sleek stylist, and a
high-minded, big-hearted moralist into the bargain' Peter Conrad,
Observer 'Adam Gopnik is a dazzling talent - hilarious, winning and
deft' Malcolm Gladwell
'WITTY, HUMANE, LEARNED' NEW YORK TIMES The New York
Times-bestselling author offers a stirring defence of liberalism
against the dogmatisms of our time Not since the early twentieth
century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless
attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our
era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and,
even worse, in liberal thought. A Thousand Small Sanities is a
manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended
the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from
Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that
liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for
free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is
something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by
humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great
moral adventures in human history--and why, in an age of autocracy,
our lives may depend on its continuation.
From the earliest years of the American republic, Paris has
provoked an extraordinary American literary response. An almost
inevitable destination for writers and thinkers, Paris has been
many things to many Americans: a tradition-bound bastion of the old
world of Europe; a hotbed of revolutionary ideologies in politics
and art; and a space in which to cultivate an openness to life and
love thought impossible at home. Including stories, letters,
memoirs, and journalism, "Americans in Paris" distills three
centuries of vigorous, glittering, and powerfully emotional writing
about the place that Henry James called ?the most brilliant city in
the world.?
American writers came to Paris as statesmen, soldiers, students,
tourists, and sometimes they stayed as expatriates. This anthology
ranges from the crucial early impressions of Thomas Jefferson and
Benjamin Franklin to the latter-day reflections of writers as
varied as James Baldwin, Isadora Duncan, and Jack Kerouac. Along
the way we encounter the energetic travelers of the nineteenth
century?Emerson, Mark Twain, Henry James?and the pilgrims of the
twentieth: Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings,
Cole Porter, Henry Miller. Come along as Thomas Paine takes a
direct and dangerous part in the French Revolution; Harriet Beecher
Stowe tours the Louvre; Theodore Dreiser samples the sensual
enticements of Parisian night life; Edith Wharton movingly
describes Paris in the early days of World War I; John Dos Passos
charts the gathering political storms of the 1930s; Paul Zweig
recalls the intertwined pleasures of language and sex; and A. J.
Liebling savors the memory of his culinary education in delicious
detail.
"Americans in Paris" is a diverse and constantly engaging
mosaic, full of revealing cultural gulfs and misunderstandings,
personal and literary experimentation, and profound moments of
self-discovery.
Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson
Memorial Prize "Witty and full of fascinating details." -Los
Angeles Times Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider
eating alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be
an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us
back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not
a place to eat but a quasi-medicinal bouillon not unlike the bone
broths of today. This is a book about the French revolution in
taste-about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food,
changing the social life of the world in the process. We see how
over the course of the Revolution, restaurants that had begun as
purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In
the early nineteenth century, the new genre of gastronomic
literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic state to
transform restaurants yet again, this time conferring star status
upon oysters and champagne. "An ambitious, thought-changing
book...Rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true
stories." -Adam Gopnik, New Yorker "[A] pleasingly spiced history
of the restaurant." -New York Times "A lively, engrossing,
authoritative account of how the restaurant as we know it
developed...Spang is...as generous in her helpings of historical
detail as any glutton could wish." -The Times
'Engaging, witty, thoughtful, clever, casual, ebullient, erudite
and thoroughly modern' Spectator 'A dazzling talent - hilarious,
winning and deft' Malcolm Gladwell In Mid-Air is a collection of
short essays by the acclaimed writer and speaker, Adam Gopnik.
Known for his ability to perceive 'the whole world in a grain of
sand', he uses this format to take a dizzying range of subjects and
intricately explore their meaning to our lives - as people, as
citizens and as families. From how he works so that his daughter
can have holes in her clothes, to why appropriation is more
empowering than oppressing; from French sex to binge-watching TV,
from the secret of a happy marriage to why we should mention the
war - each topic is illuminated by his erudition and wit. As in
their original form on the radio, Gopnik's essays - each one a
pleasure garden of wry confessions, self-deprecating asides,
wordplay and striking insights - feel like the most intimate of
conversations between writer and reader; yet at the same time they
capture a public forum of pithy debate and tender persuasion. Above
all, In Mid-Air initiates a sense of wonder in the ordinary that
yearns to be shared.
On every page of this delicious book you will meet characters and
situations that tell you this could only be New York. The parents
who are determined to get their children literally to fly at the
school production of Peter Pan - the Cambodian cashier at the local
deli who is more Jewish than Gopnik's grandfather - his gloriously
peculiar analyst who argues that a name can be damaging to the
human psyche, saying Adam's name is very ugly - the birder who
takes Adam to see the huge flock of feral parrots that have taken
over Flatbush. No one knows how they got there or how they survive
the brutal winters, but they do. And flourish on it. 'These birds
are so bold. They are real New Yorkers. They have so much
attitude'. Through the Children's Gate is written with Gopnik's
signature mix of mind and heart, elegantly and exultantly alert to
the minute miracles that bring a place to life.
"What is abstract art good for? What's the use--for us as
individuals, or for any society--of pictures of nothing, of
paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to
show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of
abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk
Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the
Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly
confronts the uncertainties we may have about the
nonrepresentational art produced in the last five decades. He makes
a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H.
Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in "Art and
Illusion," another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing
that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of
them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the
culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical
approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and
reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at
the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003,
just months before his death.
With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the
skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to
our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he
makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us
that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the
self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by
decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the
art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions
between abstraction and representation, modernism and
postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating
and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art,
concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's
favorite works.
Bestselling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik embarks on a
wildly creative inquiry into perhaps the oldest question: how do we
learn a new skill? For decades, Adam Gopnik has been one of our
most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food,
France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a fundamental
matter: how did the people he was writing about learn their
outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a
sourdough loaf? In The Real Work-the term magicians use for the
accumulated craft that makes for a great trick-Gopnik apprentices
himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving
instructor (from the DMV), among others, trying his late-middle-age
hand at things he assumed were beyond him. He finds that mastering
a skill is a process of methodically breaking down and building up,
piece by piece-and that true mastery, in any field, requires
mastering other people's minds. Exuberant and profound, The Real
Work is ultimately about why we relentlessly seek to better
ourselves in the first place.
'A dazzling talent' Malcolm Gladwell When Adam Gopnik and his
soon-to-be-wife, Martha, left the comforts of home in Montreal for
New York, the city then, much like today, was a pilgrimage site for
the young, the arty, and the ambitious. But it was also becoming a
city of greed, where both life's consolations and its necessities
were increasingly going to the highest bidder. At the Strangers'
Gate builds a portrait of this particular moment in New York
through the story of this couple's journey--from their excited
arrival as aspiring artists to their eventual growth into a New
York family. Gopnik transports us to his tiny basement room on the
Upper East Side, and later to SoHo, where he captures a unicorn: an
affordable New York loft. He takes us through his professional
meanderings, from graduate student-cum-library-clerk to the
corridors of Conde Nast and the galleries of MoMA. Between tender
and humorous reminiscences, including affectionate portraits of
Richard Avedon, Robert Hughes, and Jeff Koons, among many others,
Gopnik discusses the ethics of ambition, the economy of creative
capital, and the peculiar anthropology of art and aspiration in New
York, then and now.
Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans.
In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light. Gopnik is a longtime New Yorker writer, and the magazine has sent its writers to Paris for decades--but his was above all a personal pilgrimage to the place that had for so long been the undisputed capital of everything cultural and beautiful. It was also the opportunity to raise a child who would know what it was to romp in the Luxembourg Gardens, to enjoy a croque monsieur in a Left Bank café--a child (and perhaps a father, too) who would have a grasp of that Parisian sense of style we Americans find so elusive.
So, in the grand tradition of the American abroad, Gopnik walked the paths of the Tuileries, enjoyed philosophical discussions at his local bistro, wrote as violet twilight fell on the arrondissements. Of course, as readers of Gopnik's beloved and award-winning "Paris Journals" in The New Yorker know, there was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with day-to-day, not-so-fabled life. Evenings with French intellectuals preceded middle-of-the-night baby feedings; afternoons were filled with trips to the Musée d'Orsay and pinball games; weekday leftovers were eaten while three-star chefs debated a "culinary crisis."
As Gopnik describes in this funny and tender book, the dual processes of navigating a foreign city and becoming a parent are not completely dissimilar journeys--both hold new routines, new languages, a new set of rules by which everyday life is lived. With singular wit and insight, Gopnik weaves the magical with the mundane in a wholly delightful, often hilarious look at what it was to be an American family man in Paris at the end of the twentieth century. "We went to Paris for a sentimental reeducation-I did anyway-even though the sentiments we were instructed in were not the ones we were expecting to learn, which I believe is why they call it an education."
The Lost Estate is Robin Buss's translation of Henri
Alain-Fournier's poignant study of lost love, Le Grand Meaulnes. 'I
read it for the first time when I was seventeen and loved every
page. I find its depiction of a golden time and place just as
poignant now as I did then' Nick Hornby When Meaulnes first arrives
at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good
looks, daring and charisma. But when Meaulnes disappears for
several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a
mysterious house - and his love for the beautiful girl hidden
within it, Yvonne de Galais - his life has been changed forever. In
his restless search for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found
there, Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk
losing everything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration
and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries
the reader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal
of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence. Robin Buss's
translation of Le Grand Meaulnes sensitively and accurately renders
Alain-Fournier's poetically charged, expressive and deceptively
simple style. In his introduction, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik
discusses the life of Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the First
World War after writing this, his only novel. If you liked Le Grand
Meaulnes, you might enjoy Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education,
also available in Penguin Classics.
|
E Block (Paperback)
Mark Perrott, Adam Gopnik
|
R972
Discovery Miles 9 720
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
In 2005 photographer Mark Perrott learned that Pittsburgh’s
Western Penitentiary, located just downriver from the city center,
was about to close. He requested permission to visit the 1885
Gothic sandstone structure, and ended up touring the site with a
former Pennsylvania Department of Corrections administrator. They
walked through spaces of confinement and institutional organization
like the Mess Hall, Laundry, Commissary, Chapel, Death Row, and the
cellblocks. Mark recalls, "None of this prepared me for the
experience of E Block - the row of cells dedicated to the housing
of newly-arrived prisoners. Prisoners spent three days to two weeks
on E Block, until the system `classified’ them and moved them
along to other cellblocks, or to other institutions. Each cell had
whitewashed walls, most often covered with graffiti. I read every
square inch of each wall. These were the unfiltered voices of men
in their first days of separation and incarceration. As I moved
from cell to cell, these voices became a chorus of shame, rage,
bravado, advice, hate, humor, confession, and contrition. Over the
next year I wrote down each word and photographed every surface."
Here you will find the finest essays "judiciously selected from
countless publications" (Chicago Tribune), ranging from The New
Yorker and Harper's to Swink and Pinch. In his introduction to this
year's edition, Adam Gopnik finds that great essays have "text and
inner text, personal story and larger point, the thing you're
supposed to be paying attention to and some other thing you're
really interested in." David Sedaris's quirky, hilarious account of
a childhood spent yearning for a home where history was properly
respected is also a poignant rumination on surviving the passage of
time. In "The Ecstasy of Influence," Jonathan Lethem ponders the
intriguing phenomenon of cryptomnesia: a person believes herself to
be creating something new but is really recalling similar,
previously encountered work. Ariel Levy writes in "The Lesbian
Bride's Handbook" of her efforts to plan a party that accurately
reflects her lifestyle (which she notes is "not black-tie!") as she
confronts head-on what it means to be married. And Lauren Slater is
off to "Tripp Lake," recounting the one summer she spent at camp--a
summer of color wars, horseback riding, and the "wild sadness" that
settled in her when she was away from home.
In the end, Gopnik believes that the only real ambition of an
essayist is to be a master of our common life. This latest
installment of The Best American Essays is full of writing that
reveals, in Gopnik's words, "the breath of things as they are."
In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the
familiar comforts and hassles of New York for the urbane glamour of
Paris. Charmed by the beauties of the city, Gopnik set out to
experience for himself the spirit and romance that has so
captivated American writers throughout the twentieth century. In
the grand tradition of Stein and Hemingway, Gopnik planned to walk
the paths of the Tuilleries, to enjoy philosophical discussion in
cafes - in short, to lead the fabled life of an American in Paris.
Of course, there was also the matter of raising a child and
carrying on with everyday, not-so-fabled life.
Winter takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets,
composers, writers, explorers, scientists and thinkers who helped
shape a new and modern idea of winter. We learn how literature
heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to
existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the
race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a
blank space. Offering a kaleidoscopic take on the season, Winter is
a homage to an idea of a season and a journey through the modern
imagination.
|
The Wrong Side of Paris (Paperback)
Honore De Balzac; Translated by Jordan Stump; Introduction by Adam Gopnik
bundle available
|
R428
R361
Discovery Miles 3 610
Save R67 (16%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
"The Wrong Side of Paris, " the final novel in Balzac's "The Human
Comedy, " is the compelling story of Godefroid, an abject failure
at thirty, who seeks refuge from materialism by moving into a
monastery-like lodging house in the shadows of Notre-Dame. Presided
over by Madame de La Chanterie, a noblewoman with a tragic past,
the house is inhabited by a remarkable band of men--all scarred by
the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolution--who have devoted
their lives to performing anonymous acts of charity. Intrigued by
the Order of the Brotherhood of Consolation and their uplifting
dedication to virtuous living, Godefroid strives to follow their
example. He agrees to travel--incognito--to a Parisian slum to save
a noble family from ruin. There he meets a beautiful, ailing Polish
woman who lives in great luxury, unaware that just outside her
bedroom door her own father and son are suffering in dire poverty.
By proving himself worthy of the Brotherhood, Godefroid finds his
own spiritual redemption.
This vivid portrait of the underbelly of nineteenth-century Paris,
exuberantly rendered by Jordan Stump, is the first major
translation in more than a century of Balzac's forgotten
masterpiece" L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine." Featuring an
illuminating Introduction by Adam Gopnik, this original Modern
Library edition also includes explanatory notes.
"From the Hardcover edition."
'Adam Gopnik has taken a coincidence and turned it into a theory of
everything, or at least of everything important ... Outstanding' -
Andrew Marr On February 12th, 1809, two men were born an ocean
apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles
Darwin on an English country estate. Each would see his life's work
transform mankind's understanding of itself. In this bicentennial
twin portrait, Adam Gopnik shows how these two giants, who never
met, changed the way we think about the very nature of existence,
and that their great achievements proceeded from the same source:
argument from reason. The revolutions they effected shaped the
world we live in, while the intellectual heritage and method that
informed their parallel lives has profound implications for our
present age. Filled with little-known stories and unfamiliar
characters, Angels and Ages reveals these men in a new, shared
light, and provides a fascinating insight into the origins of our
modern vision and liberal values.
|
You may like...
Saviors
Green Day
CD
R167
Discovery Miles 1 670
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R383
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R383
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
|