Michelangelo's genius is revealed as never before by the man who became Michelangelo's last apprentice- an American artist and art historian whose family helped carve Mount Rushmore. Many believe Michelangelo's talent was miraculous and untrained, the product of "divine" genius-a myth that Michelangelo himself promoted by way of cementing his legacy. But the young Michelangelo studied his craft like any Renaissance apprentice, learning from a master, copying, and experimenting with materials and styles. In this extraordinary book, Alan Pascuzzi recounts the young Michelangelo's journey from student to master, using the artist's drawings to chart his progress and offering unique insight into the true nature of his mastery. Pascuzzi himself is a practicing artist in Florence, Michelangelo's city. When he was a grad student in art history, he won a Fulbright to "apprentice" himself to Michelangelo: to study his extant drawings and copy them to discern his progression in technique, composition, and mastery of anatomy. Pascuzzi also relied on the Renaissance treatise that "Il Divino" himself would have been familiar with, Cennino Cennini's The Craftsman's Handbook (1399), which was available to apprentices as a kind of textbook of the period. Pascuzzi's narrative traces Michelangelo's development as an artist during the period from roughly 1485, the start of his apprenticeship, to his completion of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1512. Analyzing Michelangelo's burgeoning abilities through copies he himself executed in museums and galleries in Florence and elsewhere around the world, Pascuzzi unlocks the transformation that made Michelangelo great. At the same time, he narrates his own transformation from student to artist as Michelangelo's last apprentice.

The untold story of Michelangelo's final decades-and his transformation into the master architect of St. Peter's Basilica As he entered his seventies, Michelangelo despaired that his productive years were over. Anguished by the death of friends and discouraged by the loss of commissions to younger artists, this supreme Renaissance painter and sculptor began carving his own tomb. It was at this unlikely moment that Michelangelo was given charge of the most ambitious and daunting project of his long creative life-the design and construction of St. Peter's Basilica. In this richly illustrated book, William Wallace tells for the first time the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades-and of how the artist transformed himself into one of the greatest architects of the Renaissance.

A femme fatale named Janice cooked up Redi-Money, the multi-million dollar robbery of a lightly guarded check-cashing outfit that catered to down-and-outers. On the surface, it sounded like the heist of a lifetime. But then dead bodies began piling up and the only question that remained was: whose lifetime were we talking about? Sometimes the stakes are so high that a crime seems too good to be true. That's the way Redi-Money seemed to Frank when he returned to Oakland from Colorado. Complicating things were the fact that the heist was the brainchild of his best friend's "fiance," a femme fatale who oozed sex from every pore and seemed to be dead set on pitting Frank's crew members against each other. Add a crooked cop to the mix and a payroll from the robbery that was too good to be true and you have the ingredients for disaster. Read "I Wait to Die " a crime novella by William E. Wallace.

Private eye Jack Burial's picture should appear in Funk and Wagnall's next to the entry for "loser: " Burial drives a clapped-out Chevy station wagon, is being divorced by his lawyer wife and has so few clients as an investigator that he's on the verge of eviction. He's so down-and-out that his cell phone has even been cut off. So when Burial gets hired to locate a businessman suspected of embezzling from his business partners, things seem to be looking up. All he has to do is find the fugitive -- while ducking the Mafia, a trigger-happy outlaw motorcycle gang and a federal prosecutor who wants to throw him in prison for interfering with her case. Will Burial succeed in finding the Judas he is tracing or end up betraying his own threadbare code of ethics? Cross is piled on double cross as the body count climbs in The Judas Hunter. "An utterly satisfying crime caper tale that left me wanting more. Buy it; it might encourage the author to pen more Jack Burial stories." Tim Stevens, author of Ratcatcher and Annihilation Myths " 'The Judas Hunter' is an absolute pleasure to read . . . One can only hope that Wallace writes more about Mr. Burial and his splendid misadventures." K. Patrick Conner, author of Dying Words

A war profiteer, a missing girl and a precious antiquity: Mickey Lynch, private eye, is up to his armpits in intrigue and murder in 1947 Oakland, California. While checking the background of a millionaire tapped for a White House job, Lynch, a former U.S. Marine and Honolulu cop, discovers a real estate scam, political corruption, drugs and treason. He crosses paths with a U.S. Marshal, two crooked FBI agents and a mysterious Brazilian who is a martial arts expert. At the same time, he has to disprove allegations he conspired to commit perjury in a "Dear John" homicide case. As his investigation proceeds, he learns one reason why 127,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up and imprisoned on the U.S. West Coast during the war, and uncovers a plot to wipe out the African-American blues and jazz scene in Bohemian West Oakland. And Lynch discovers that the object that ties all these threads together is a 600-year-old relic of feudal Japan: a funerary urn made of precious gemstone: the Jade Bone Jar

The certification of the absolute molecular mass distribution (MMD) of an n-octyl-initiated, proton-terminated, low mass, atactic polystyrene (PS) by matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) is fully described. This polymer has been designated Standard Reference Material (SRM) 2881. The material constituting SRM 2881 was prepared commercially for the NIST Polymers Division specifically for use as a narrow-distribution polymer standard. Anticipated uses include calibration of mass spectrometers and size exclusion chromatographs (SEC) in accordance with various international standards (described below), as well as any other application where quantitative knowledge of the entire MMD is necessary. The work described here, and in related references, provides a means to create absolute molecular mass distribution standards of any low mass, narrow polydispersity polymer including proprietary materials.