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'I love this city, and always shall. I write about it. I dream about it. I walk its streets and see something new each day - traces of faded lettering on the stone, still legible, but just; some facade that I have walked past before and not noticed; an unregarded doorway with the names, in brass, of those who lived there sixty years ago, the bell-pulls sometimes still in place, as if one might summon long-departed residents from their slumbers.'Edinburgh is a city of stories - a place that has witnessed everything from great historical upheavals, to the individual lives of a remarkable cast of characters. Every spire, cobblestone, bridge, close and avenue has a tale to tell.In this sumptuous new book, Alexander McCall Smith curates his own, distinctive story of Edinburgh - combining his affectionate, incisive wit with a wealth of stunning imagery drawn from Scotland's national collection of architecture and archaeology. Through a series of photographs, maps, drawings and paintings - many never before published - he takes the reader on a unique tour. Just like the city's architecture, the book can move in an instant from sweeping views to secret, hidden vignettes. This is a story of famous landmarks and lost buildings; the people who made them; the people who lived in them.A Work of Beauty is an intimate portrait of a city by one of Scotland's greatest storytellers.
At age seventeen, Gia Carangi was working the counter at her father's Philadelphia luncheonette, Hoagie City. Within a year, Gia was one of the top models of the late 1970's, gracing the covers of Cosmopolitan and Vogue, partying at New York's Studio 54 and the Mudd Club, and redefining the industry's standard of beauty. She was the darling of moguls and movie stars, royalty and rockers. Gia was also a girl in pain, desperate for her mother's approval—and a drug addict on a tragic slide toward oblivion, who started going directly from $10,000-a-day fashion shoots to the heroin shooting galleries on New York's Lower East Side. Finally blackballed from modeling, Gia entered a vastly different world on the streets of New york and Atlantic City, and later in a rehab clinic. At twenty-six, she became on of the first women in America to die of AIDS, a hospital welfare case visited only by rehab friends and what remained of her family. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Gia's gamily, lovers, friends, and colleagues, Thing of Beauty creates a poignant portrait of an unforgettable character—and a powerful narrative about beauty and sexuality, fame and objectification, mothers and daughters, love and death.
A best book of the year from New York Public Library, NPR, the Financial Times, Book Riot, and the Sunday Times (London). A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard. Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew. To his surprise and the reader’s delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns. In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.
Debra Gimlin focuses on four sites where she conducted in-depth research--a beauty salon, aerobics classes, a plastic surgery clinic, and a social and political organization for overweight women. The honest and provocative interviews included in this book uncover these women's feelings about their bodies, their reasons for attempting to change or come to terms with them, and the reactions of others in their lives. These interviews show that women are redefining their identities through their participation in body work, that they are working on their self-images as much as on their bodies. Plastic surgery, for example, ultimately is an empowering life experience for many women who choose it, while hairstyling becomes an arena for laying claim to professional and social class identities.
In a book that is itself beautifully written, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores this timeless concept, asking what makes an object--either in art, in nature, or the human form--beautiful.--From publisher description.
Brooklyn-based design studio Workstead masterfully combines traditional inspiration with contemporary elegance. Workstead designs one-of-a-kind interiors and pieces that balance beauty with necessity, and this book presents a special blend of their tour-de-force historic renovations and innovative yet elegant new constructions. Over the past decade, the multidisciplinary design firm has earned rapid and wide acclaim for both their residential interiors as well as for larger-scale projects, such as the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn and the Rivertown Lodge in Hudson, New York. In all their projects, Workstead considers both clients and community, working with local artisans to create meticulously crafted modern interiors, architecture, and furniture designs inflected by history. As T: The New York Times Style Magazine put it, Workstead “are known as sophisticated pack rats who surround themselves with objects that have a story to tell,” and described their collective design philosophy as “a cozy, updated version of early Americana, with wood plank floors and a mix of vintage and refined custom-built furniture pieces that are almost Scandinavian in their restraint.”
This volume approaches questions about gender and the politics of appearance from a new perspective by developing the notion of aesthetic labour. Bringing together feminist writing regarding the ‘beauty myth’ with recent scholarship about new forms of work, the book suggests that in this moment of ubiquitous photography, social media, and 360 degree surveillance, women are increasingly required to be 'aesthetic entrepreneurs’, maintaining a constant state of vigilance about their appearance. The collection shows that this work is not just on the surface of bodies, but requires a transformation of subjectivity itself, characterised by notions of personal choice, risk-taking, self-management, and individual responsibility. The book includes analyses of online media, beauty service work, female genital cosmetic surgery, academic fashion, self-help literature and the seduction community, from a range of countries. Discussing beauty politics, postfeminism, neoliberalism, labour and subjectivity, the book will be of interest to scholars and students with an interest in Gender, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Social Psychology and Management Studies. “This highly engaging, smart, and wide-ranging collection analyzes how, under the self-governing mandates of neoliberalism, the demands that girls and women regulate and control their bodies and appearance have escalated to new, unforgiving levels. A special strength of the book is its emphasis on the rise of ‘aesthetic labour’ as a global, transnational and ever-colonizing phenomenon that seeks to sweep up women of all races, ages and locales into its disciplinary grip. Highly recommended.” -Susan J Douglas, University of Michigan, USA the inherited responsibility that remains women’s particular burden to manage.” -Melissa Gregg, Intel Corporation, USA “This book incisively conceptualizes how neo-liberalist and postfeminist tendencies are ramping up pressures for glamour, aesthetic, fashion, and body work in the general public. In a moment when YouTube ‘makeup how to’ videos receive millions of hits; what to wear and how to wear it blogs clock massive followings; and staying ‘on brand’ is sold to us as the key to personal and financial success, ‘aesthetic entrepreneurship’ is bound to become a go-to concept for anyone seeking to understand the profound shifts shaping labor and life in the 21st century.” -Elizabeth Wissinger, City University of New York, USA
The first monograph of MASS Design Group, the internationally lauded firm creating some of the most powerful and humane works of architecture today. Founded in 2008, MASS Design Group collaborated with Partners In Health and the Rwanda Ministry of Health to design and build the Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda, a masterwork of architecture that also uniquely serves a community in need. Since then, MASS has grown into a dynamic collaborative of architects, planners, engineers, filmmakers, researchers, and public health professionals working in more than a dozen countries in the fields of design, research, policy, education, and strategic planning. Amid ongoing recognition (the 2018 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, the 2017 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture), MASS's most recent project, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, has been featured in more than 400 publications, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post. Mark Lamster of Dallas Morning News called the memorial "the single greatest work of American architecture of the twenty-first century." Justice Is Beauty highlights MASS's first decade of designing, researching, and advocating for an architecture of justice and human dignity. With more than thirty projects built or under construction and some 200,000 people served, MASS has pioneered an immersive approach in the practice of architecture that provides the infrastructure, buildings, and physical systems necessary for growth, dignity, and well-being, while always engaging local communities with attention to the specifics of cultural context and social needs.
This advice book to women details rules of hygiene and beauty and reflects the values placed on maintaining the image of the "lady."
"Whitefield-Madrano ... examines the relationship between appearance and science, social media, sex, friendship, language, and advertising to show how beauty actually affects us day to day. Through ... research and interviews with dozens of women across all walks of life, she reveals surprising findings, like that wearing makeup can actually relax you, that you can convince people you're better looking just by tweaking your personality, and the ways beauty can be a powerful tool of connection among women"--Amazon.com.