Download Free Visible Worlds Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Visible Worlds and write the review.

Gerhard and Albrecht Storr are twins, though they share little in common beyond an eccentric upbringing. Raised by a father devoted to the powers of “Personal Magnetism” and a German-immigrant mother unhappy with life in Winnipeg and obsessed with the ghosts of her past, the two brothers grow further and further apart, eventually fighting on opposite sides of the Second World War. Exhaustion is overwhelming Fika, a young Soviet woman crossing the Polar icecap bound for Canada. It’s midwinter 1960, and she’s lost her companions to a frosty death, can barely carry her own supplies, and must ski for another month to reach civilization. How these two gripping tales on their separate sides of the globe unfold and come together is one of the many accomplishments of this extraordinary story. With Marilyn Bowering’s superb gift for storytelling, finely realized characters, and lyrical language, Visible Worlds resonates with the mystery and mysticism of the worlds we see and those we can only imagine.
In The Threshold of the Visible World Kaja Silverman advances a revolutionary new political aesthetic, exploring the possibilities for looking beyond the restrictive mandates of the self, and the normative aspects of the cultural image-repertoire. She provides a detailed account of the social and psychic forces which constrain us to look and identify in normative ways, and the violence which that normativity implies.
How did painters and their public speak about art in Rembrandt's age? This book about the writings of the painter-poet Samuel van Hoogstraten, one of Rembrandt's pupils, examines a wide variety of themes from painting practice and theory from the Dutch Golden Age. It addresses the contested issue of 'Dutch realism' and its hidden symbolism, as well as Rembrandt's concern with representing emotions in order to involve the spectator. Diverse aspects of imitation and illusion come to the fore, such as the theory behind sketchy or 'rough' brushwork and the active role played by the viewer's imagination. Taking as its starting point discussions in Rembrandt's studio, this unique study provides an ambitious overview of Dutch artists' ideas on painting.
'My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake.' As a boy growing up in New York, the narrator's parents' memories of their Czech homeland seem to belong to another world, as distant and unreal as the fairy tales his father tells him. It is only as an adult, when he makes his own journey to Prague, that he is finally able to piece together the truth of his parents' past: what they did, whom his mother loved, and why they were never able to forget.
The flying life has always demanded a passage across the razor's edge. At any moment you could slip to the other side: a gas leak, weather, fire in the cockpit. Sometimes what made the risks particularly horrible was that you could watch your mistakes play out in front of you, as a chorus of guilt followed you down. Usually you survived and could describe this music to others, but none of you -- not even with a long and growing trail of dead friends -- ever stopped flying. That was the truly unthinkable thing. In a good year aerobatics is one of the most beautiful sports imaginable. Pilots pull through impossibly elegant figures, twisting their planes at hundreds of miles an hour. The stress on their bodies reaches ten times the force of gravity, but this is nothing compared to the strain on their minds and the tension in their souls. In a bad year no sport kills more of its participants. To fly really well and to win you must depart the land of the possible and enter a place of pure faith. In this stunning literary debut, Joshua Cooper Ramo has crafted a meditation on the seduction of flight and a passionate love letter to a life of risk. It is partly the story of his own decision, after a decade of casual aerobatics, to transform himself into a serious competitive pilot aiming to finish high at the U.S. national competition. He introduces us to some of the greatest aerobatic pilots in the world: geniuses like Leo Loudenslager, a mild-mannered American Airlines pilot who spent his weekends redefining what it was possible to do in the air with a plane, flying figures so hard they made his eyes bleed as he whimpered with pain in the cockpit; or Kirby Chambliss, the Arizona pilot who performed figures just inches off the runway and sent his plane shooting through holes in cliffs. The classics of flight and extreme adventure, West With the Night; Wind, Sand, and Stars; and Into Thin Air have brought a poetic vision to their subjects. No Visible Horizon is an elegant and thrilling exploration, not simply of a pilot's physical battle against gravity, but of his dream of perfection and his quest for faith.
A vividly original literary novel based on the astounding true-life story of Laura Bridgman, the first deaf and blind person who learned language and blazed a trail for Helen Keller. At age two, Laura Bridgman lost four of her five senses to scarlet fever. At age seven, she was taken to Perkins Institute in Boston to determine if a child so terribly afflicted could be taught. At age twelve, Charles Dickens declared her his prime interest for visiting America. And by age twenty, she was considered the nineteenth century's second most famous woman, having mastered language and charmed the world with her brilliance. Not since The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has a book proven so profoundly moving in illuminating the challenges of living in a completely unique inner world. With Laura—by turns mischievous, temperamental, and witty—as the book's primary narrator, the fascinating kaleidoscope of characters includes the founder of Perkins Institute, Samuel Gridley Howe, with whom she was in love; his wife, the glamorous Julia Ward Howe, a renowned writer, abolitionist, and suffragist; Laura's beloved teacher, who married a missionary and died insane from syphilis; an Irish orphan with whom Laura had a tumultuous affair; Annie Sullivan; and even the young Helen Keller. Deeply enthralling and rich with lyricism, What is Visible chronicles the breathtaking experiment that Laura Bridgman embodied and its links to the great social, philosophical, theological, and educational changes rocking Victorian America. Given Laura's worldwide fame in the nineteenth century, it is astonishing that she has been virtually erased from history. What is Visible will set the record straight.
Collects the author's recent poems
Plötzlich diese Übersicht by the Swiss artists Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946-2012), a loose collection of over 350 hand-sculpted, unfired clay figures, is one of those artworks that is very familiar even to those who are not all that interested in art. The artists have created a masterpiece, using an entirely unspectacular material to form sculptural snapshots that sparkle with cheerful wit : sketched models of everyday situations and objects ; clay reproductions that reveal the absurdity and artificial normality of the ordinary. Alongside them are semi-freely imagined scenes and events from history, culture, entertainment, sport and assorted memories from their own biographies, immortalised in emblematic scenarios. The titles, with their characteristic subtle mockery, fragmentary encyclopaedic knowledge and serious irony, are an integral part of the work.
Analyzing the intersection between Sufism and philosophy, this volume is a sweeping examination of the mystical philosophy of Muḥyī-l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 637/1240), one of the most influential and original thinkers of the Islamic world. This book systematically covers Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ontology, theology, epistemology, teleology, spiritual anthropology and eschatology. While philosophy uses deductive reasoning to discover the fundamental nature of existence and Sufism relies on spiritual experience, it was not until the school of Ibn al-ʿArabī that philosophy and Sufism converged into a single framework by elaborating spiritual doctrines in precise philosophical language. Contextualizing the historical development of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s school, the work draws from the earliest commentators of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oeuvre, Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274), ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī (d. ca. 730/1330) and Dawūd al-Qayṣarī (d. 751/1350), but also draws from the medieval heirs of his doctrines Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī (d. 787/1385), the pivotal intellectual and mystical figure of Persia who recast philosophical Sufism within the framework of Twelver Shīʿism and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492), the key figure in the dissemination of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ideas in the Persianate world as well as the Ottoman Empire, India, China and East Asia via Central Asia. Lucidly written and comprehensive in scope, with careful treatments of the key authors, Philosophical Sufism is a highly accessible introductory text for students and researchers interested in Islam, philosophy, religion and the Middle East.