Madame Alexander, the Rodney Waller Collection: Part Three

Madame Alexander, the Rodney Waller Collection: Part Three
Author: Florence Theriault
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-10-27
Genre:
ISBN: 9781944881146

Time has come for Beatrice Alexander, signature American dollmaker and designer, to take her rightful place among antique dolls. Nearly 90 years have passed since her dolls first appeared, and for more than a half century she stood as a symbol of excellence, ingenuity, and marketing mastery in the world of American dolls. Collector Rodney Waller noted this many years ago, and began a quest to find the rarest of the rarest of her dolls, prizing originality and excellence of condition as well as rarity. This is Session III of his three-part auction of Madame Alexander dolls.

The Surprise Doll

The Surprise Doll
Author: Morrell Gipson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005-06
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9781930900189

Mary's father was a sea captain who took long trips across the ocean, bringing back a doll from each journey. Soon Mary had six dolls and wished for a seventh one to become her "Sunday" doll. But Mary's father said six dolls was enough for any girl, so she set off to visit the Dollmaker, and, oh, was she in for a surprise!

The Optical Unconscious

The Optical Unconscious
Author: Rosalind E. Krauss
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 1994-07-25
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9780262611053

The Optical Unconscious is a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of "vision itself." And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction. The Optical Unconscious will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepted the foundational principles on which their aesthetic is based. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism's most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today. In order to understand why modernism had to repress the optical unconscious, Krauss eavesdrops on Roger Fry in the salons of Bloomsbury, and spies on the toddler John Ruskin as he amuses himself with the patterns of a rug; we find her in the living room of Clement Greenberg as he complains about "smart Jewish girls with their typewriters" in the 1960s, and in colloquy with Michael Fried about Frank Stella's love of baseball. Along the way, there are also narrative encounters with Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard. To embody this optical unconscious, Krauss turns to the pages of Max Ernst's collage novels, to Marcel Duchamp's hypnotic Rotoreliefs, to Eva Hesse's luminous sculptures, and to Cy Twombly's, Andy Warhol's, and Robert Morris's scandalous decoding of Jackson Pollock's drip pictures as "Anti-Form." These artists introduced a new set of values into the field of twentieth-century art, offering ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions.

Washington's Spies

Washington's Spies
Author: Alexander Rose
Publisher: Bantam
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2014-03-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 055339259X

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Turn: Washington’s Spies, now an original series on AMC Based on remarkable new research, acclaimed historian Alexander Rose brings to life the true story of the spy ring that helped America win the Revolutionary War. For the first time, Rose takes us beyond the battlefront and deep into the shadowy underworld of double agents and triple crosses, covert operations and code breaking, and unmasks the courageous, flawed men who inhabited this wilderness of mirrors—including the spymaster at the heart of it all. In the summer of 1778, with the war poised to turn in his favor, General George Washington desperately needed to know where the British would strike next. To that end, he unleashed his secret weapon: an unlikely ring of spies in New York charged with discovering the enemy’s battle plans and military strategy. Washington’s small band included a young Quaker torn between political principle and family loyalty, a swashbuckling sailor addicted to the perils of espionage, a hard-drinking barkeep, a Yale-educated cavalryman and friend of the doomed Nathan Hale, and a peaceful, sickly farmer who begged Washington to let him retire but who always came through in the end. Personally guiding these imperfect everyday heroes was Washington himself. In an era when officers were gentlemen, and gentlemen didn’ t spy, he possessed an extraordinary talent for deception—and proved an adept spymaster. The men he mentored were dubbed the Culper Ring. The British secret service tried to hunt them down, but they escaped by the closest of shaves thanks to their ciphers, dead drops, and invisible ink. Rose’s thrilling narrative tells the unknown story of the Revolution–the murderous intelligence war, gunrunning and kidnapping, defectors and executioners—that has never appeared in the history books. But Washington’s Spies is also a spirited, touching account of friendship and trust, fear and betrayal, amid the dark and silent world of the spy.

The Life Eaters

The Life Eaters
Author: David Brin
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Fantasy comic books, strips, etc
ISBN: 9781631402012

Originally published: La Jolla, CA: WildStorm, 2003.

Men of Mark

Men of Mark
Author: William J. Simmons
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1376
Release: 1887
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

TO PRESUME to multiply books in this day of excellent writers and learned book-makers is a rash thing perhaps for a novice. It may even be a presumption that shall be met by the production itself being driven from the market by the keen, searching criticism of not only the reviewers, but less noted objectors. And yet there are books that meet a ready sale because they seem like "Ishmaelites"--against everybody and everybody against them. Whether this work shall ever accomplish the design of the author may not at all be determined by its sale. While I hope to secure some pecuniary gain that I may accompany it with a companion illustrating what our women have done, yet by no means do I send it forth with the sordid idea of gain. I would rather it would do some good than make a single dollar, and I echo the wish of "Abou Ben Adhem," in that sweet poem of that name, written by Leigh Hunt. The angel was writing at the table, in his vision. The names of those who love the Lord.Abou wanted to know if his was there--and the angel said "No." Said Abou, I pray thee, then, write me as one that loves his fellow-men. That is what I ask to be recorded of me. The angel wrote and vanished. The next night It came again, with a great awakening light. And showed the names whom love of God had blessed. And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest. I desire that the book shall be a help to students, male and female, in the way of information concerning our great names. I have noticed in my long experience as a teacher, that many of my students were wofully ignorant of the work of our great colored men--even ignorant of their names. If they knew their names, it was some indefinable something they had done--just what, they could not tell. If in a slight degree I shall here furnish the data for that class of rising men and women, I shall feel much pleased. Herein will be found many who had severe trials in making their way through schools of different grades. It is a suitable book, it is hoped, to be put into the hands of intelligent, aspiring young people everywhere, that they might see the means and manners of men's elevation, and by this be led to undertake the task of going through high schools and colleges. If the persons herein mentioned could rise to the exalted stations which they have and do now hold, what is there to prevent any young man or woman from achieving greatness? Many, yea, nearly all these came from the loins of slave fathers, and were the babes of women in bondage, and themselves felt the leaden hand of slavery on their own bodies; but whether slaves or not, they suffered with their brethren because of color. That "sum of human villainies" did not crush out the life and manhood of the race. I wish the book to show to the world--to our oppressors and even our friends--that the Negro race is still alive, and must possess more intellectual vigor than any other section of the human family, or else how could they be crushed as slaves in all these years since 1620, and yet to-day stand side by side with the best blood in America, in white institutions, grappling with abstruse problems in Euclid and difficult classics, and master them? Was ever such a thing seen in another people? Whence these lawyers, doctors, authors, editors, divines, lecturers, linguists, scientists, college presidents and such, in one quarter of a century?