The Splendid Century

The Splendid Century
Author: W. H. Lewis
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2016-08-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1787200566

“The Splendid Century,” penned by the brother of famous author C. S. Lewis (“Alice in Wonderland”), is a depiction of various aspects of life in France during the reign of Louis XIV, gleaned through the author’s thorough research of records, correspondence, and journals of the time. Using anecdotal evidence, the book probes in detail various facets of life in France during this time, including the lives of nobles (particularly those at court) as well as commoners, religious institutions and conflicts, the organization of the French army and its restructuring, rural life and city life, what life was like on galley ships and passenger sailing ships, how doctors were trained, and the state of women’s education. The author also discusses the background behind Louis XIV’s policies, illustrating their impact on French civilization, both during this time and for generations to come. A must-read for anyone interested in French history.

The Splendid Blond Beast

The Splendid Blond Beast
Author: Christopher Simpson
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1504043499

From a National Jewish Book Award–winning author: The “revelatory and shocking” investigation into the CIA’s liberation of Nazi war criminals (Kirkus Reviews). How did Gen, Karl Wolff, one of the highest-ranking members of the Nazi Party’s Waffen-SS, who personally oversaw the deportation of three hundred thousand Jews to the Treblinka extermination camps, escape prosecution at the Nuremberg trials? As revealed in this groundbreaking investigation—culled from recently uncovered archival documents—the answer lies within the US government, which buried reports on the Final Solution and was complicit in the recruitment of Nazi war criminals, all to protect the world economy. Among the key players was CIA director Allen Dulles, who was not only instrumental in Wolff’s exoneration but also responsible for installing former slave-labor specialists into positions of power in postwar Germany. In this damning exposé of American government malfeasance, author Christopher Simpson traces the roots of mass murder as an instrument of financial gain and state power, from the Armenian genocide during World War I to Hitler’s Holocaust through the practice of genocide today. Detailing how the existing structures of international law and commerce have encouraged mass killings, corporate looting, and profiteering at the expense of innocent victims, The Splendid Blond Beast is a disturbing and profound book about the success of evil in our time. The award-winning author of Blowback and Science of Coercion, Simpson also served as research director for Marcel Ophüls’s Oscar-winning documentary, Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie.

A Century of Artists Books

A Century of Artists Books
Author: Riva Castleman
Publisher: ABRAMS
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1997-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9780810961814

Published to accompany the 1994 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this book constitutes the most extensive survey of modern illustrated books to be offered in many years. Work by artists from Pierre Bonnard to Barbara Kruger and writers from Guillaume Apollinarie to Susan Sontag. An importnt reference for collectors and connoisseurs. Includes notable works by Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Strange Revelations

Strange Revelations
Author: Lynn Wood Mollenauer
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0271029153

The Affair of the Poisons was the greatest court scandal of the seventeenth century. From 1679 to 1682 the French crown investigated more than 400 people&—including Louis XIV&’s official mistress and members of the highest-ranking circles at court&—for sensational crimes. In Strange Revelations, Lynn Mollenauer brings this bizarre story to life, exposing a criminal magical underworld thriving in the heart of the Sun King&’s capital. The macabre details of the Affair of the Poisons read like a gothic novel. In the fall of 1678, Nicolas de la Reynie, head of the Paris police, uncovered a plot to poison Louis XIV. La Reynie&’s subsequent investigation unveiled a loosely knit community of sorceresses, magicians, and renegade priests who offered for sale an array of services and products ranging from abortions to love magic to poisons known as &“inheritance powders.&” It was the inheritance powders (usually made from powdered toads steeped in arsenic) that lent the Affair of the Poisons its name. The purchasers of the powders gave the affair its notoriety, for the scandal extended into the most exalted ranks of the French court. Mollenauer adroitly uses the Affair of the Poisons to uncover the hidden forms of power that men and women of all social classes invoked to achieve their goals. While the exercise of state power during the ancien r&égime was quintessentially visible&—ritually displayed through public ceremonies&—the affair exposes the simultaneous presence of other imagined and real sources of power available to the Sun King&’s subjects: magic, poison, and the manipulation of sexual passions. Highly entertaining yet deeply researched, Strange Revelations will appeal to anyone interested in the history of court society, gender, magic, or crime in early modern Europe.

The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta

The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta
Author: John Rollin Ridge
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
Total Pages: 111
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1513288431

The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854) is a novel by John Rollin Ridge. Published under his birth name Yellow Bird, from Cheesquatalawny in Cherokee, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta was the first novel from a Native American author. Despite its popular success worldwide—the novel was translated into French and Spanish—Ridge’s work was a financial failure due to bootleg copies and widespread plagiarism. Recognized today as a groundbreaking work of nineteenth century fiction, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta is a powerful novel that investigates American racism, illustrates the struggle for financial independence among marginalized communities, and dramatizes the lives of outlaws seeking fame, fortune, and vigilante justice. Born in Mexico, Joaquin Murieta came to California in search of gold. Despite his belief in the American Dream, he soon faces violence and racism from white settlers who see his success as a miner as a personal affront. When his wife is raped by a mob of white men and after Joaquin is beaten by a group of horse thieves, he loses all hope of living alongside Americans and turns to a life of vigilantism. Joined by a posse of similarly enraged Mexican-American men, Joaquin becomes a fearsome bandit with a reputation for brutality and stealth. Based on the life of Joaquin Murrieta Carrillo, also known as The Robin Hood of the West, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta would serve as inspiration for Johnston McCulley’s beloved pulp novel hero Zorro. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta is a classic work of Native American literature reimagined for modern readers.

The Sun King

The Sun King
Author: Nancy Mitford
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2012-05-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1590174917

A “devastatingly witty” biography of Louis XIV and the Court of Versailles—at once a historical record of late 17th- and early 18th-century France and a gossip-filled narrative of lovers and rivals, artists and warriors (The New York Times) The Sun King is a dazzling double portrait of Louis XIV and Versailles, the opulent court from which he ruled. With characteristic élan, Nancy Mitford reconstructs the daily life of king and courtiers during France’s golden age, offering vivid sketches of the architects, artists, and gardeners responsible for the creation of the most magnificent palace Europe had yet seen. Mitford lays bare the complex and deadly intrigues in the stateroom and the no less high-stakes power struggles in the bedroom. At the center of it all is Louis XIV himself, the demanding, mercurial, but remarkably resilient sovereign who guided France through nearly three quarters of the Grand Siècle. Brimming with sumptuous detail and delicious bons mots, and written in a witty, conversational style, The Sun King restores a distant glittering century to vibrant life.

Reading the Splendid Body

Reading the Splendid Body
Author: Nandini Bhattacharya
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1998
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780874136128

This book surveys an underlying discourse on female and oriental consumerism in nearly four centuries of British colonialist narratives on India. It examines some of the significant ways in which the subaltern and female body was constructed by Western ethnographers within early modern British colonialist discourses. The book offers a genealogy of colonialist spectatorship, and examines the ideologies originating within both public and private colonial spheres. Through a comparison of the discourses about and by women one can see the continuation of patriarchal injunctions within Western protofeminist discourses. Economic, ethical, colonial, patriarchal, and protofeminist polemics thus reached to and shaped one another, and this book is a record of the complex ways in which gender discourses and colonialist discourses intersected to create a colonialist spectatorship that constituted non-Western and female subjects as spectacular and needing discipline. The insights on Western protofeminists and their crisis of self-representation as subjects versus objects of discourse also further the examination of women's history in the colonial arena.

The Triumph of Pleasure

The Triumph of Pleasure
Author: Georgia Cowart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2008-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226116387

With a particular focus on the court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera, and opera-ballet, Georgia J. Cowart tells the long-neglected story of how the festive arts deployed an intricate network of subversive satire to undermine the rhetoric of sovereign authority.