This book is neither a History nor a Topography of the Territory of Utah in the early seventies of the last century. The volume is due to the experiences of an outsider who tried to be impartial in his views and sympathies. The personal note, of course, rings in this record of those past days. No onslaught is made on the "wild and woolly" west, nor on the eccentric religion of the majority of the people. Through much peril and privation, the wild wastes of the Territory had been occupied b...

"Tenderfoot Days" is a memoir written by George Robert Bird that tells the story of his youth in the American West during the late 19th century.Born in Iowa in 1862, Bird moved with his family to Kansas and then to Colorado as a young boy. Growing up in the rugged and untamed wilderness of the West, Bird had many adventures and experiences that shaped his life and worldview."Tenderfoot Days" is a collection of stories and anecdotes from Bird's youth, including his encounters with Native Am...

In the last thirty years of the Soviet Communist project, Viktor Koretsky's art struggled to solve an enduring riddle: how to ensure or restore Communism's moral health through the production of a distinctively Communist vision. In this sense Koretsky's art demonstrates what an "avant-garde late Communist art" would have looked like if we had ever seen it mature. Most striking of all, Koretsky was pioneering the visual languages of Benetton and MTV at a time when the iconography of interra...

In the last thirty years of the Soviet Communist project, Viktor Koretsky's art struggled to solve an enduring riddle: how to ensure or restore Communism's moral health through the production of a distinctively Communist vision. In this sense Koretsky's art demonstrates what an “avant-garde late Communist art” would have looked like if we had ever seen it mature. Most striking of all, Koretsky was pioneering the visual languages of Benetton and MTV at a time when the iconography of interra...

This is a memoir by a non-Mormon about his experiences in the prospecting camps of Utah at the turn of the 19th century. Written as a first-person perspective by an outsider, it gives a sympathetic account of the Mormons, but also brings up some darker aspects about their history. It's also pretty racist towards Native Americans, so, as always with these old books, please bear in mind the context and the era in which it was written.

Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Demons, The Idiot – the complex and prolific Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is responsible for some of our greatest literary works and most enduring characters. He is acknowledged by critics as a pre-eminent writer of psychological fiction and a precursor of twentieth-century existentialism.Set in the troubled political and social world of nineteenth-century Russia, this book describes how Dostoevsky’s...

The films of Andrei Tarkovsky have been revered as ranking on a par with the masterpieces of Russia's novelists and composers. His work, from films such as Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Nostalgia and Sacrifice, has had an enormous influence on the style of contemporary European film, with its open narrative structures and slow, pensive mood; yet Tarkovsky has remained an elusive subject for reflection and analysis. T...

After Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union dismantled the enormous system of terror and torture that he had created. But there has never been any Russian ban on former party functionaries, nor any external authority to dispense justice. Memorials to the Soviet victims are inadequate, and their families have received no significant compensation. This book's premise is that late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, haunted by its past, has produced a unique set of memorial practices. More tha...

With humour, wit and insight David Carter provides an account of the trials and tribulations of the Nobel Prize in Literature, together with tongue-in-cheek guidelines for the would-be laureate. There are acclaimed writers - James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain - who never won the Nobel Prize - and others, less well-known, such as Henryk Sienkiewicz, Paul Heyse and Wladyslaw Reymont, who did. What do you have to do to impress, or be snubbed by the Nobel Committee? Using the ...

Two works by George Washington Sears (Nessmuk) in one collection with an active table of contents.

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary ...

Raqs sharqi, the Egyptian dance form also known as belly dance, has for generations captured imaginations around the globe. Yet its origins have been obscured by misinformation and conjecture, rooted in Orientalist attitudes about the Middle East--a widely accepted narrative suggests the dance was created in response to Western influences and desires. Drawing on an array of primary sources, the author traces the early development of raqs sharqi in the context of contempor...