Universe of Stone

Universe of Stone
Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2009-03-17
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0061970077

“[A] lively biography of Chartres Cathedral . . . Ball’s account of its construction reveals fascinating details.” —The New Yorker Chartres Cathedral, south of Paris, is revered as one of the most beautiful and profound works of art in the Western canon. But what did it mean to those who constructed it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—and why was it built at such immense height and with such glorious play of light, in the soaring manner we now call Gothic? In this work, Aventis Prize winner and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Philip Ball makes sense of the visual and emotional power of Chartres and brilliantly explores how its construction—and the creation of other Gothic cathedrals—represented a profound and dramatic shift in the way medieval thinkers perceived their relationship with their world. Beautifully illustrated, filled with astonishing insight, Universe of Stone embeds the magnificent cathedral in the culture of the twelfth century—its schools of philosophy and science, its trades and technologies, its politics and religious debates—enabling us to view this ancient architectural marvel with fresh eyes. “A terrific book . . . a lucid, thoughtful tour de force.” —The Christian Science Monitor “Engrossing . . . a resplendent account of the mysteries of Chartres Cathedral.” —Sunday Times “There is no better introduction to the subject.” —The Wall Street Journal

A Maya Universe in Stone

A Maya Universe in Stone
Author: Stephen Houston
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2021-12-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1606067451

The first study devoted to a single sculptor in ancient America, as understood through four unprovenanced masterworks traced to a small sector of Guatemala. In 1950, Dana Lamb, an explorer of some notoriety, stumbled on a Maya ruin in the tropical forests of northern Guatemala. Lamb failed to record the location of the site he called Laxtunich, turning his find into the mystery at the center of this book. The lintels he discovered there, long since looted, are probably of a set with two others that are among the masterworks of Maya sculpture from the Classic period. Using fieldwork, physical evidence, and Lamb’s expedition notes, the authors identify a small area with archaeological sites where the carvings were likely produced. Remarkably, the vividly colored lintels, replete with dynastic and cosmic information, can be assigned to a carver, Mayuy, who sculpted his name on two of them. To an extent nearly unique in ancient America, Mayuy can be studied over time as his style developed and his artistic ambition grew. An in-depth analysis of Laxtunich Lintel 1 examines how Mayuy grafted celestial, seasonal, and divine identities onto a local magnate and his overlord from the kingdom of Yaxchilan, Mexico. This volume contextualizes the lintels and points the way to their reprovenancing and, as an ultimate aim, repatriation to Guatemala.

The Seeing Stone (The Arthur Trilogy #1)

The Seeing Stone (The Arthur Trilogy #1)
Author: Kevin Crossley-Holland
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0545232082

Arthurian legend comes to life in the first novel in this remarkable, award-winning sagaThirteen-year-old Arthur de Caldicot lives on a manor, desperately waiting for the moment he can become a knight. One day his father's friend Merlin gives him a shining black stone - a seeing stone - that shows him visions of his namesake, King Arthur. The legendary dragons, battles, and swordplay that young Arthur witnesses seem a world away from his own life. And yet there is something definitely joining the Arthurs together. It will be Arthur de Caldicot's destiny to discover how his path is intertwined with a king's . . . for the past is not the only thing the seeing stone can see.

All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See
Author: Anthony Doerr
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2014-05-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1476746605

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Shabaka's Stone

Shabaka's Stone
Author: Kaba Hiawatha Kamene
Publisher: Independently Published
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2021-03-26
Genre:
ISBN:

habaka's Stone explores and explains many scientific theories on multi-dimensional levels. Shabaka's Stone tells us that we are born with everything we need to solve all of our life's challenges. Every human is born with a Messiah (Asar/Heru) and a Judas (Seten). Judas' job is to stop us from achieving our divine purpose. The Messiah's responsibility is to make sure that Judas is not successful. Life is the result of the balance of this relationship. The Messiah may fall down nine (9) times, but rises ten (10) times. The metaphor of the Asarian Drama. We are the Creator having a human experience. The Nun wanted to come into being. He/She tried countless times. Finally, one of her/his attempts succeeded and Ptah came forward and created Atum. Atum was consciousness and named all and every thing. This trinity began the beginning of time and continues to become to this day. Every day, when you wake up is like Ptah rising out of the Nun (state of unconscious). This energy conversion, waking you up initiates your simple and self-conscious state of thinking, realizing who you are coming up out of your sleep.

Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe

Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe
Author: Preston Norton
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2018-06-05
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1484798392

A “funny and sweetly oddball” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) novel about an odd-couple friendship formed by a mission to make their high school to suck less, for readers “seeking doors to the universe" (Booklist, starred review) and a razor sharp, moving, and outrageously funny read. Cliff Hubbard is a huge loser. Literally. His nickname at Happy Valley High School is Neanderthal because he’s so enormous—6’6” and 250 pounds to be exact. He has nobody at school, and life in his trailer-park home has gone from bad to worse ever since his older brother’s suicide. And there’s no one Cliff hates more than the nauseatingly cool quarterback Aaron Zimmerman, who after a near-death experience claims God gave him a list of things to do to make Happy Valley High suck less. And God said there’s only one person who can help: Neanderthal. To his own surprise, Cliff says he’s in. As he and Aaron make their way through the List, which involves a vindictive English teacher, a mysterious computer hacker, a decidedly unchristian cult of Jesus Teens, the local drug dealers, and the meanest bully at HVHS, Cliff feels like he’s part of something for the first time since losing his brother. But fixing a broken school isn’t as simple as it seems, and just when Cliff thinks they’ve completed the List, he realizes their mission hits closer to home than he ever imagined.

Cutting for Stone

Cutting for Stone
Author: Abraham Verghese
Publisher: Random House India
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2012-05-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 8184001754

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

The Pillars of the Earth

The Pillars of the Earth
Author: Ken Follett
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 1009
Release: 2010-06-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101442190

#1 New York Times Bestseller Oprah's Book Club Selection The “extraordinary . . . monumental masterpiece” (Booklist) that changed the course of Ken Follett’s already phenomenal career—and begins where its prequel, The Evening and the Morning, ended. “Follett risks all and comes out a clear winner,” extolled Publishers Weekly on the release of The Pillars of the Earth. A departure for the bestselling thriller writer, the historical epic stunned readers and critics alike with its ambitious scope and gripping humanity. Today, it stands as a testament to Follett’s unassailable command of the written word and to his universal appeal. The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known . . . of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect—a man divided in his soul . . . of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame . . . and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state and brother against brother. A spellbinding epic tale of ambition, anarchy, and absolute power set against the sprawling medieval canvas of twelfth-century England, this is Ken Follett’s historical masterpiece.

Spirits in Stone

Spirits in Stone
Author: Glenn Kreisberg
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2018-04-10
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1591438373

A ground-breaking study of ceremonial stone landscapes in Northeast America and their relationship to other sites around the world • Features a comprehensive field guide to hundreds of megalithic stone structures in northeastern America, including cairns, perched boulders, and effigies • Details the Wall of Manitou, the Hammonasset Line, landscape astronomy along the Hudson River, and a several-acre area in Woodstock, NY, with large, carefully constructed lithic formations • Analyzes the archaeoastronomy, archaeoacoustics, and symbolism of these sites to reveal their relationships to other ceremonial stone sites across America and the world Presenting a comprehensive field guide to hundreds of lost, forgotten, and misidentified megalithic stone structures in northeastern America, Glenn Kreisberg documents many enigmatic formations still standing across the Catskill Mountain and Hudson Valley region, complete with functioning solstice and equinox alignments. Kreisberg provides a first-person description of the “Wall of the Manitou,” which runs for 10 miles along the eastern slopes of the Catskill Mountains, as well as narratives about related sites that include animal effigies, reproductive organs, calendar stones, enigmatic inscriptions, and evidence of alignments. Using computer software, he plots the trajectory of the Hammonasset Line, which begins at a burial complex near the tip of Long Island and runs to Devil’s Tombstone in Greene County, New York. He shows how the line runs at the same angle that marks the summer solstice sunset from Montauk Point on Long Island, and, when extended, intersects the ancient copper mines of Isle Royal in Upper Michigan. He documents a several-acre area on Overlook Mountain in Woodstock, New York, with a grouping of very large, carefully constructed lithic formations that together create a serpent or snake figure, mirroring the constellation Draco. He demonstrates how this site is related to the Serpent Mount in Ohio and Ankor Wat in Cambodia and reveals how all of the vast, interlocking sites in the Northeast were part of an ancient spiritual landscape based on a sophisticated understanding of the cosmos, as practiced by ancient Native Americans. While modern historians consider these sites to be colonial era constructions, Kreisberg reveals how they were used to communicate with the spirit world and may be remnants of a long-vanished civilization.

The Stone Sky

The Stone Sky
Author: N. K. Jemisin
Publisher: Orbit
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2017-08-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316229253

Humanity will finally be saved or destroyed in the shattering conclusion to the post-apocalyptic and highly acclaimed NYT bestselling trilogy that won the Hugo Award three years in a row. The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women. Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe. For Nassun, her mother's mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.