Book Description
Zen and Art of Quilting is an exploration of what quilters know in their hearts: Their favorite craft is so much more than a means to an end-it is a process filled with meaning, community, spirituality, family, and love. A quilt is simultaneously a work of art and a comfort on a cold night; it is infused with its creator's story and with the story of women; it sets the creative imagination free and delves into the depths of our souls.
From America's earliest memories, quilting has been a way for people to come together, to share and to celebrate, to stitch the pieces of their lives from one generation to the next. Zen and the Art of Quilting explores the spiritual side of this hugely popular craft, deepening its meaning in the lives of contemporary quilters.
Customer Reviews:
Zen and the Art of Quilting.......2006-11-10
Another Christmas present read before Christmas! This is perfect for the travelling Quilter to while away a plane trip.
Not Just for Quilters.......2006-03-04
Like the author's "Zen and the Art of Needlecraft," this book is both educational and inspiring. It relates the basic tenets of Zen to quilting, but you don't have to be a quilter or Buddhist to enjoy it. If you appreciate the history and the personal stories of the craft, this book is for you, providing insight into your ancestors' art or your friend's latest blanket. If you are a quilter, it will give you plenty to think about throughout the creative process!
Intro to Zen, History of Quilting.......2005-10-24
This was an interesting look at the emotions, history, and personal stories in quilting. Inspirational: I'm ready to start projects of my own now.
Disappointing.......2005-04-26
In a word, this book was disappointing. It lacks the spirituality promised in the introduction and is full of sweeping and often inaccurate generalities about quilting. It is also quite judgmental about those who don't finish their quilt projects without exploring the Zen behind that. In fact drawing connections between Zen and quilting seems to have been forgotten after the first chapter. The author talks a lot about her own past projects and making blocks for the book, (which we never see) but not much about other peoples experiences other than to mention names. I wanted their stories and deeper meanings behind their quilting experiences. What we got was superficial, cursory, and unsatisfing. It was clear that insufficient research was done to do the subject justice. I also suspect that Sarah Winchester, if she were still alive, would be quite surprised to find Mrs. Remington (page 180) being given credit for the design of the Winchester Mystery House. As a spritual book it misses the mark, and as a quilting book it's inadequate. Quilters, you'll feed your soul better if you save your money and buy fabric instead.
Book Description
The architecture of great homes became a fascinating and significant art form in twentieth-century America with such icons of modernism as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, Philip Johnson's Glass House, and Frank Gehry's personal residence. This lavishly illustrated
volume, the newest title in the Universe architecture series, is a condensed and updated edition of the bestselling book of the same name. Twenty-five of America's finest masterpieces of modern residential architecture are presented with rich color photographs, accompanied by text that explores each house in depth and discusses its place in the progression of American architecture. Compact and very reasonably priced, this book is ideal for students and all enthusiasts of twentieth-century design.
Customer Reviews:
Thirty-three American residential masterpieces.......2000-08-28
This book successfully captures the vast architectural contributions achieved in the Twentieth Century in American residential design by spotlighting 33 masterpieces located across the country.
The book begins with stunning photographs and drawings of remarkable homes built early in the century, including the Greene and Greene Gamble House in Pasadena, Ca., Rudolph Schindler's Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach, Ca., and Richard Neutra's Lovell Heath House in Los Angeles, Ca. Then, homes are featured that embody "the triumph of the modern American house," including Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Bear Run, Pa. The final and largest section of the book highlights "blueprints for modern living," such as Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Ct., Louis Kahn's Korman House in Fort Washington, Pa., and Frank Gehry's house in Santa Monica, Ca.
The book lets the images of the homes, exterior and interior, speak for themselves through extra-large photographs. The accompanying commentary focuses well on the architects' contributions to architecture.
I very highly recommend this book. It is the best compilation of American residential masterpieces of the Twentieth Century that I've seen, and even more importantly, the authors have put the differing styles in perspective with the evolution of American architecture.
Book Description
A spectacular visual narrative and guide, this paperback edition of this title details the explosion in styles and exciting technical progress that characterize the rapid evolution of design over the past 100 years.
Customer Reviews:
20th Century Furniture.......2007-09-15
This was a very helpful book to determine furniture in different periods of time. It's a good resource.
A good overview........2006-07-20
Overall, a pretty good book. Starting a little earlier than most modern books, it begins with some examples of Arts & Crafts, Nouveau and Deco which help give some interesting perspective.
The photos are large, but of varying quality. Some pics surprised me with new angles and views than I am used to. (There is a shot of a Nelson Marshmallow couch in a very large size that I had never heard of.) Some of the shots show some aging and wear and tear which is refreshing to see and sometimes adds some nice character to the pieces.
Average customer rating:
- A superb summary of 20th century house design
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Home: The Twentieth-Century House
Deyan Sudjic , and
Tulga Beyerle
Manufacturer: Watson-Guptill Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 General
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
Residential
| Building Types & Styles
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Interior Design
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
General
| International
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Home Design
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Interior Design
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0823023303 |
Book Description
Examining the broad spectrum of home design as well as house architecture, this book documents the relationship between interior and exterior space, the evolution of furniture, domestic appliances, and other factors that have shaped twentieth-century houses around the globe. Landmark homes by architects such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames, and other famous and influential designers lead the review of scores of remarkable living environments built in North and South America, Europe India, Japan, and Australia. An engaging survey or fifty contemporary house designs from around the world completes the book. 200 color illustrations.
Deyan Sudjic is the founder of Blueprint, and is currently director of Glasgow 1999.
Customer Reviews:
A superb summary of 20th century house design.......1999-10-28
With his typical readable and informed style, Sudjic gives a design precis of the innovative house designs of this century, often relating them to allied domestic product design. Excellent photography and invaluable floor plans clarify the spirit of the designs, and captions contextualise the background to many buildings in an informed and entertaining manner.
The latter half of the book inspires with its choice of innovative contemporary architecture and interiors, emphasising superb form and volume, simplicity and honesty of finishes and function, and elegant use of light. This book is a beautiful lake, reflecting the best current approaches to House design, yet has depth and substance to be savoured.
Book Description
What it was like to be as rich as Rockefeller: How a house gave shape and meaning to three generations of an iconic American family
One hundred years ago America’s richest man established a dynastic seat, the granite-clad Kykuit, high above the Hudson River. Though George Vanderbilt’s 255-room Biltmore had recently put the American country house on the money map, John D. Rockefeller, who detested ostentation, had something simple in mind—at least until his son John Jr. and his charming wife, Abby, injected a spirit of noblesse oblige into the equation. Built to honor the senior Rockefeller, the house would also become the place above all others that anchored the family’s memories. There could never be a better picture of the Rockefellers and their ambitions for the enormous fortune Senior had settled upon them.
The authors take us inside the house and the family to observe a century of building and rebuilding—the ebb and flow of events and family feelings, the architecture and furnishings, the art and the gardens. A complex saga, The House the Rockefellers Built is alive with surprising twists and turns that reveal the tastes of a large family often sharply at odds with one another about the fortune the house symbolized.
Customer Reviews:
Rockerfellers House.......2007-08-02
I read this book from an architect's viewpoint, and it squares with my experience that there is something about homebuilding that is intensely personal. Much has been written about visionary Designers. In fact, it is the clients who hire and steer those designers who are writing their world views large. I visited Kykuit once and thought the design was quirky for a pile from the mansion age...quirky but with vim & vigor, bold but not bombastic. Now I know how it got to be that way.
Book Description
The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant career,
A House for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettable story inspired by Naipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels.
In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous–and endless–struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy of manners,
A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.
Customer Reviews:
Incomparable.......2006-11-29
Naipaul is a genius.This book is above and beyond.If after reading this book you don't acknowledge Naipaul's genius, you can feel free to consider yourself a functional illiterate who has no love for the english language or understandig of the human condition.
Good Grief This Was Bad!.......2006-03-08
I am an AVID reader, pretty intelligent and read at least 1-2 books a week (more when on vacation). I have read books about all kinds of people in all cultures...and this book turned into a quest...a quest to FINISH it!!! I never stop reading a book once I start it, but I was about ready to shoot myself in order to end my distress. If you want to read a REALLY, REALLY good book about desperation in the Indian culture, you simply MUST, MUST, MUST read "A Fine Balance"...one of the best books I have ever read. It's always on my suggested reading list when people ask me for the name of a good book...along with "Life of Pi." I simply don't understand all the wonderful remarks about this book. It went on and on and on and on with the same thing happening to this man over and over...with only a change in his location. It would pick up every now and again, and I would think "now it's going to start to get interesting" but I was only entertained for a page or two before Mr. Biswas returned to his same ol' depressing self, repeating the same mistakes over and over and over and over and over and over...well you get the point. Boring, boring book. I would have given it 0 stars but that wasn't an option.
The Tragic Of The Commonplace.......2006-02-27
A rich, almost moment-to-moment depiction in the life of a hapless Trinidadian Indian, "A House For Mr. Biswas" is V.S. Naipaul's answer to "David Copperfield," a novel that uses his real-life experiences as showcase for his art and his darkly complex view of humanity.
Mohun Biswas didn't get many breaks in his life. Born into a miserable family made destitute by the freakish death of his father, he lost his vocation to be a holy man when forced to eat too many bananas, then took to sign painting, which landed him into a loveless marriage, not to mention a set of in-laws who browbeat him mercilessly.
All this is by means of saying "A House For Mr. Biswas" is a comedy that depends on your frame of reference. If you get worked up about butchered puppies, conniving solicitor's clerks, communist brothers-in-law who slap children for mishandling hands of cards, etc., you may find this book a long, difficult read. But if you approach it as a work of fiction, you may enjoy it for the rich gumbo it offers.
"She talked with pride of the beatings she had received from her short-lived husband," is Naipaul's description of one minor character, one of Biswas' in-laws. "She regarded them as a necessary part of her training and often attributed the decay of Hindu society in Trinidad to the rise of the timorous, weak, non-beating class of husband."
Few characters come off well, including Biswas, a drip who whines about the in-laws even as he eats their food. His one hope for redemption, it seems, is to find a house to call his own, but each effort to do this brings only greater grief and ruin, financial and otherwise.
I can see why people find this a tough slog, but of course Naipaul isn't writing to schmooze his readers with ideas of what a humanitarian he is. He may be the most dyspeptic Nobel laureate in history, though his uncompromising vision is also the source of much of his power. That's not to say "A House For Mr. Biswas" is without grace, just lacking sentimentality as it roots through the various passages of Mr. Biswas's life with pinpoint precision and pinprick candor. By the end, you feel much like you lived his life with him minute-by-minute, which may be Naipaul's most impressive feat in this very impressive book.
The absence of a central plot as well as the length makes this a harder read than other Naipaul tomes, and those wanting more of a story and less of a character piece may want to start with something like "A Bend In The River," which has other things going for it, too.
Sure, I found this heavy-going, but I was glad to read it, and read it again. At one point, Biswas's son, a stand-in for Naipaul himself, talks about Eliot's poem "Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufock," and there is a similar theme running through both that classic comic poem and this novel, something about the tragic of the commonplace and of the unique perspective of life's futility one reaches at middle age.
There is beauty as well as misery in such a view, of Naipaul making peace with an unhappy past. The same novel that throws up a rogue's gallery of misery makers, which torment our feckless protagonist with disconcerting ease, also dishes out lines that make you understand why life is worth living after all, why it has a nobility: "So later, and very slowly, in securer times of different stresses, when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give back the past."
A masterpiece without question........2006-02-19
It has been too long since I read this book [probably 15 years ago] for me to offer an erudite and detailed analysis. But I do remember vividly that when I read it that the word "masterpiece" came repeatedly to my mind. In a league with Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" and Paul Scott's "The Raj Quartet". Find the time to read it; you won't regret it.
The Life of a Looser.......2005-11-03
Big Book with no plot, the thing that makes it a classic is that Naipaul seems to write without any prejudice, from a very cold perspective this book changed my life like any other book. It is simply amazing.
Average customer rating:
- Outclassing all alternatives
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The Inspiration of the Past: Country House Taste in the Twentieth Century
John Cornforth
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
Decorating
| Interior Design
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
Decoration & Ornament
| Interior Design
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Interior Design
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
General
| England
| Europe
| History
| Subjects
| Books
20th Century
| England
| Europe
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0670801801 |
Customer Reviews:
Outclassing all alternatives.......2003-10-30
This is a book for the serious historian of design or architecture -- while the many photographs are all oustanding, and, in particular, the photos from Country Life are truly some of the most extraordinary interior photos of the 20th century [notwithstanding the complaints of the prior reviewer] --- this is not in the least a coffee table book and those seeking such should look elsewhere. Rather, this superlative volume is a landmark in the intellectual history of Anglo-American design aesthetics and will likely not be equalled in the future. Of course, it's not at all surprising that the book is OOP --- the sophisticated audience for this subject is quite distinct from the acquisition-minded, typical subscriber to Architectural Digest.
Average customer rating:
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The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home
Steven Gdula
Manufacturer: Bloomsbury USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
History
| Gastronomy
| Cooking, Food & Wine
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Cooking, Food & Wine
| Subjects
| Books
General
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Social History
| Historical Study
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Kitchens
| Remodeling & Renovation
| Home Design
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Parenting & Families
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1582343551
Release Date: 2007-12-26 |
Book Description
Thomas Jefferson once wrote that if you really want to understand the workings of a society, you have to “look into their kettles” and “eat their bread.” Steve Gdula gives us a view of American culture from the most popular room in the house: the kitchen. Examining the relationship between trends and innovations in the kitchen and the cultural attitudes beyond its four walls, Gdula creates a lively portrait of over 350 years of American domestic life. The Warmest Room in the House explores major historic themes, including the challenges of procurement in the seventeenth century, preservation in the eighteenth century, industrialization and enlightenment in the nineteenth century, and modernization in the twentieth. Gdula traces the evolution of American foods, recipes, trends, and styles of cooking, beginning with the exchanges that took place between the Powhatan Indians and the Jamestown settlers about nutrition through today’s polyglot international cuisine. Filled with fun facts about food trends, from Hamburger Helper to The Moosewood Cookbook, and food personalities, from Catherine Beecher to Martha Stewart, The Warmest Room in the House is the perfect addition to any well-rounded kitchen larder.
Books:
- 88 Keys - The Making of a Steinway Piano
- ABC Go!: a Completely New Selection of Outstanding Children's Stories and Poems Compiled for Enrichment Reading By a Distinguished Editorial Board of Children's Librarians: Collier's Junior Classics Young Folks Shelf of Books Volume ONE (1962 Green Hardcover Edition, THIS BOOK AND THIS BOOK ONLY)
- Antique Trader Clocks Price Guide: Including All Types of Clocks-17th Through 20th Century (Antique Trader Clocks Price Guide)
- Antiques at Home: Cherchez's Book of Collecting and Decorating with Antiques
- Arrowheads and Projectile Points (Identification & Values (Collector Books))
- ASPCA Complete Cat Care Manual: The Ultimate Illustrated Guide to Caring for Your Cat
- Baby Booky: Honey Bunny (Baby Booky)
- Be-Dazzled: 50+ Projects for You and Your Home Made With the Original Be-Dazzler Machine
- Bf 109 Defence of the Reich Aces (Aircraft of the Aces)
- Blue Ribbon Afghans from America's State Fairs: 40 Prize-Winning Crocheted Designs
Books Index
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Quilting Lessons: Notes from the Scrap Bag of a Writer and Quilter
Quilting Lessons: Notes from the Scrap Bag of a Writer and Quilter
Ruth B. McDowell's Piecing Workshop: Step-by-Step Visual Guide, Indispensable Reference for Quilters, Bonus Projects
Art Quilts: A Celebration: 400 Stunning Contemporary Designs
Circle of Quilters: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (Elm Creek Quilts Novels)
