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The Real Work - On the Mystery of Mastery: Adam Gopnik The Real Work - On the Mystery of Mastery
Adam Gopnik
R483 R408 Discovery Miles 4 080 Save R75 (16%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

A Thousand Small Sanities - The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (Paperback): Adam Gopnik A Thousand Small Sanities - The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (Paperback)
Adam Gopnik
R421 R353 Discovery Miles 3 530 Save R68 (16%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Cloudland Revisited - A Misspent Youth in Books and Film: S.J. Perelman Cloudland Revisited - A Misspent Youth in Books and Film
S.J. Perelman; Introduction by Adam Gopnik
R422 R333 Discovery Miles 3 330 Save R89 (21%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days
The Real Work - On the Mystery of Mastery (Hardcover): Adam Gopnik The Real Work - On the Mystery of Mastery (Hardcover)
Adam Gopnik
R751 R577 Discovery Miles 5 770 Save R174 (23%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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.

The Real Work - On the Mystery of Mastery (Paperback): Adam Gopnik The Real Work - On the Mystery of Mastery (Paperback)
Adam Gopnik
R372 Discovery Miles 3 720 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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

The Sleeve Should Be Illegal - & Other Reflections on Art at the Frick (Hardcover): Michaelyn Mitchell The Sleeve Should Be Illegal - & Other Reflections on Art at the Frick (Hardcover)
Michaelyn Mitchell; Foreword by Adam Gopnik; Preface by Ian Wardropper
R699 Discovery Miles 6 990 Ships in 12 - 17 working days
A Thousand Small Sanities - The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (Paperback): Adam Gopnik A Thousand Small Sanities - The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (Paperback)
Adam Gopnik 1
R326 R264 Discovery Miles 2 640 Save R62 (19%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days

'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.

Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology - A Library of America Special Publication (Hardcover, New): Adam Gopnik Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology - A Library of America Special Publication (Hardcover, New)
Adam Gopnik
R1,053 R878 Discovery Miles 8 780 Save R175 (17%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

Moliere: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations, Volume 1 - The Bungler / Lover's Quarrels / The Imaginary Cuckhold /... Moliere: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations, Volume 1 - The Bungler / Lover's Quarrels / The Imaginary Cuckhold / The School for Husbands / The School for Wives / Don Juan (Hardcover)
Moliere, Richard Wilbur; Introduction by Adam Gopnik
R1,006 R803 Discovery Miles 8 030 Save R203 (20%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days
Moliere: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations, Volume 2 - The Misanthrope / Amphitryon / Tartuffe / The Learned Ladies... Moliere: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations, Volume 2 - The Misanthrope / Amphitryon / Tartuffe / The Learned Ladies (Hardcover)
Moliere, Richard Wilbur; Introduction by Adam Gopnik
R996 R792 Discovery Miles 7 920 Save R204 (20%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days
The Invention of the Restaurant - Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, With a New Preface (Paperback, 2nd edition): Rebecca L.... The Invention of the Restaurant - Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, With a New Preface (Paperback, 2nd edition)
Rebecca L. Spang; Foreword by Adam Gopnik
R611 Discovery Miles 6 110 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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

In Mid-Air - Points of View from over a Decade (Paperback): Adam Gopnik In Mid-Air - Points of View from over a Decade (Paperback)
Adam Gopnik 1
R388 R316 Discovery Miles 3 160 Save R72 (19%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days

'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.

Through The Children's Gate - A Home in New York (Paperback): Adam Gopnik Through The Children's Gate - A Home in New York (Paperback)
Adam Gopnik
bundle available
R347 Discovery Miles 3 470 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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.

Pictures of Nothing - Abstract Art since Pollock (Hardcover): Kirk Varnedoe Pictures of Nothing - Abstract Art since Pollock (Hardcover)
Kirk Varnedoe; Preface by Adam Gopnik; Foreword by Earl A Powell
R1,371 Discovery Miles 13 710 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

"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.

The Real Work - On the Mystery of Mastery: Adam Gopnik The Real Work - On the Mystery of Mastery
Adam Gopnik
R335 R275 Discovery Miles 2 750 Save R60 (18%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days

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.

At the Strangers' Gate (Paperback): Adam Gopnik At the Strangers' Gate (Paperback)
Adam Gopnik 1
bundle available
R376 R296 Discovery Miles 2 960 Save R80 (21%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

'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.

S.j. Perelman: Writings (loa #346) (Hardcover): S.J. Perelman, Adam Gopnik S.j. Perelman: Writings (loa #346) (Hardcover)
S.J. Perelman, Adam Gopnik
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R1,004 R800 Discovery Miles 8 000 Save R204 (20%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days
Paris to the Moon (Paperback, 1st trade pbk. ed): Adam Gopnik Paris to the Moon (Paperback, 1st trade pbk. ed)
Adam Gopnik
bundle available
R447 R343 Discovery Miles 3 430 Save R104 (23%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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 (Le Grand Meaulnes) (Paperback): Henri Alain-Fournier The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) (Paperback)
Henri Alain-Fournier; Introduction by Adam Gopnik; Translated by Robin Buss
bundle available
R268 R219 Discovery Miles 2 190 Save R49 (18%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days

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 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."

The Best American Essays (Paperback, 2008 ed.): Adam Gopnik, Robert Atwan The Best American Essays (Paperback, 2008 ed.)
Adam Gopnik, Robert Atwan
R500 R445 Discovery Miles 4 450 Save R55 (11%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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."

Paris to the Moon - A Family in France (Paperback): Adam Gopnik Paris to the Moon - A Family in France (Paperback)
Adam Gopnik
bundle available
R388 R316 Discovery Miles 3 160 Save R72 (19%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days

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 - Five Windows on the Season (Paperback): Adam Gopnik Winter - Five Windows on the Season (Paperback)
Adam Gopnik
R347 Discovery Miles 3 470 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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 The Wrong Side of Paris (Paperback)
Honore De Balzac; Translated by Jordan Stump; Introduction by Adam Gopnik
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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."

Angels and Ages - A short book about Darwin, Lincoln and modern life (Paperback): Adam Gopnik Angels and Ages - A short book about Darwin, Lincoln and modern life (Paperback)
Adam Gopnik 1
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R289 Discovery Miles 2 890 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

'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.

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