American actress Aline MacMahon's youth was spent honing her talents while performing at local events in New York City. After popular stage success on Broadway, she headlined a touring company in Los Angeles, where she was discovered by legendary Hollywood director Mervyn LeRoy and put under contract to Warner Brothers. During the 1930s and 1940s, MacMahon starred in countless films and was among the most influential actors of the era, her talent revered as highly as peers Katherine Hepburn, Paul Muni, and Bette Davis. Her pioneering use of a new acting style brought to America from Russia by Konstantin Stanlisavsky - now widely known as the Method - began a revolution on the screen and made her an industry darling. Although popular with audiences and widely lauded for her versatile, naturalistic style, MacMahon's despair at the lack of challenging roles and fallout from her political activism would soon dim her star in the most tragic of ways. Blacklisted during the Communist Red Scare of the 1950's she became the subject of covert FBI surveillance and was denied work for many years. John Stangeland's biography of this unique actress, Aline MacMahon, offers an insightful look into the life and oeuvre of this largely overlooked talent and how the atmosphere of Hollywood's golden age created an inescapable blueprint for a career nearly destroyed by politics and fear.

Critical Brass tells the story of neofanfarrismo, an explosive carnival brass band community turned activist musical movement in Rio de Janeiro, as Brazil shifted from a country on the rise in the 2000s to one beset by various crises in the 2010s. Though predominantly middle-class, neofanfarristas have creatively adapted the critical theories of carnival to militate for a more democratic city. Illuminating the tangible obstacles to musical movement building, Andrew Snyder argues that festive activism with privileged origins can promote real alternatives to the neoliberal city, but meets many limits and contradictions in a society marked by diverse inequalities. Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, Professor Emerita, NOVA University of Lisbon

Love and Rage is a deeply ethnographic account of punk in Mexico City as it is lived and practiced, connecting the sounds of punk music to different styles of political action. Through compelling first-person accounts, ethnographer Kelley Tatro shows that punk is more than music. It is a lifestyle choice that commits scene participants to experimentation with anarchist politics. Key to that process is the concept of autogestión ("self-management"), a term with deep history in local leftist politics. In detailed vignettes, grounded in historical, social, and political frames, the book shows how punk-scene sounds and practices foster autogestión through intensely affective experiences, understood as manifestations of love and rage. Drawing on the history of anarchism in Mexico City, as well as social movement scholarship, Love and Rage details the pleasures and problems of using music as a tool for creating an autonomous politics.

In Musical Resilience, Shalini Ayyagari shows how professional low-caste musicians from the Thar Desert borderland of Rajasthan, India have skillfully reinvented their cultural and economic value in postcolonial India. Before India's independence in 1947, the Manganiyar community of hereditary musicians were tied to traditional patrons over centuries and through hereditary ties. In postcolonial India, traditional patronage relations faded due to new political conditions, technological shifts, and cultural change. Ayyagari uses resilience, one of the most poignant keywords of our times, to understand how Manganiyar musicians sustain and enliven their cultural significance after the fading of traditional patronage.

For almost half a century, celebrated ventriloquist and entertainer Shari Lewis delighted generations of children and adults with the help of her trusted sock puppet sidekick Lamb Chop. For decades, the beloved pair were synonymous with children's television, educating and entrancing their young audience with their symbiotic personalities and their proclivity for song, dance, and the joy of silliness. But as iconic as their television personas were, relatively little inside knowledge has been revealed about Lewis herself and the life-changing moments that led her to the entertainment industry and perhaps, most importantly, to Lamb Chop. Renowned for her skills as a performer, Lewis was an equally skilled businesswoman. Operating in an era when women were largely left out of the conversation, she was one of the few women to run her own television production company. Whether it was singing, dancing, conducting, writing, drawing, or ventriloquism—a skill in which she was virtually unmatched – Lewis spent the entirety of her 65 years in pursuit of performative perfection. Constantly innovating and adapting to the needs of her audience and the market, Lewis extended the longevity of her career decade after decade. Her contributions, and that of Lamb Chop, and the rest of her puppet pals forever changed the history of children's television. Now, two decades after Lewis and Lamb Chop last graced television with their presence, Lewis' daughter Mallory and author Nat Segaloff have set the record straight about the iconic pair in Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop: The Team that Changed Children's Television. In this seminal biography, the pair pull the veritable wool from the eyes of audiences who adored the legendary entertainer to examine the joys, sorrows, triumphs, and sheer hard work that gave Lewis and Lamb Chop their enduring star power.

Thaddeus was a fi fteenth-century bishop of Cork who was honoured in both Ireland and Italy. He led a remarkable life – he was made bishop twice, and was beatifi ed in 1895 – but is now all but forgotten. In Searching for Thaddeus, art historian Patricia Curtin-Kelly tells the tale of this re markable man, and discusses the many works of art – found mainly in churches acro ss County Cork and in Ivrea, Italy – that bear witness to the high esteem in which he was held. Searching for Thaddeus features numerous photographs of the remarkable artworks which celebrate “Blessed Thaddeus” – painti ngs, stained-glass windows and reliquaries – and the churches in which they can be seen. It is a highly read able book about a remarkable son of Cobh.

Travels across the Roof of the World provides a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of this vast region, from the Pamir Mountains in Kyrgyzstan through Afghanistan's fabled Hindu Kush, the Karakoram in Pakistan, and the Great Himalaya Range that stretches across northern India, Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan. Unique in scope among photo books on the Himalaya, Travels across the Roof of the World chronicles William and Anne Frej's more than twenty pilgrimages throughout the area spanning forty years and 3,000 miles through some of the world's most remote and difficult-to-reach country. Inspired by the devotion to the practice of Tibetan Buddhism they encountered in the villagers they met on their first trek to Nepal in 1981, they set out on a quest to document Asia’s highest peaks as well as the lives of the resilient people living in these remote mountain communities. When they began, trekkers from the West through these regions were few. Even now, trips are demanding - but not nearly as harsh as the daily lives of the residents, who continue to exist in a kind of stunning isolation that has allowed them to maintain the rich cultural traditions and spiritual practices that have sustained them over many centuries. Edwin Bernbaum’s essay adds to the depth of the pictures, with his focus on the symbolism, religious importance, and associated legends of these sacred places. The authors also share extensive vignettes about the places they saw and how they have changed over time.

Frank Auerbach: The Sitters provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s portraiture. It reveals the special connection between the artist and his ‘sitters’ - the small group of dedicated models who have been Auerbach’s chief subject over a career spanning seven decades. A comprehensive list of his sitters has been compiled here for the first time, providing new biographical information about his models from E. O.W. to J.Y.M. and beyond. Frank Auerbach: The Sitters includes a wide range of contributors. An essay by the art critic William Feaver describes the experience of sitting for Auerbach, while a conversation from 2001 between the artist and Martin Gayford describes Auerbach’s intentions and process. Auerbach’s close friendship with the art historian Michael Podro is also explored, with a short memoir by Natasha Podro and a re-published, little known essay from 1969 by Podro himself. Forty paintings and drawings from 1956 to 2020 are illustrated in colour, with thoroughly researched catalogue entries that shed new light on the artist’s relationships and his work. The publication accompanies Piano Nobile’s exhibition Frank Auerbach: The Sitters, held in autumn 2022.

The 2021 volume of Ceramics in America features wide ranging essays and new discoveries on ceramics used and collected in the American context. Of special note is the reporting of seventeenth-century Chinese porcelain discovered in the ca. 1607 contest of Jamestown, Virginia. Another essay documents the archaeologically-recovered Chinese export porcelain of James and Dolley Madison from their home Montpelier in Virginia. Other articles explore ceramics made to commemorate historical and political events both in America and Great Britain. The subject of nineteenth-century American stonewares made in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and Virginia is covered in four important articles. A special collector’s biopic surveys a highly important American collection of eighteenth-century armorial Chinese porcelain. Other articles will include a profile of North Carolina potter David Stuempfle who continues the old-age tradition of producing wood fired stoneware and a summary of an archaeologically recovered assemblage of early nineteenth-century slip decorated earthenwares attributed to Enoch Wood and James Caldwell of Burslem, Staffordshire.

Hilma af Klint was classically trained, with a degree from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. This volume shows yet another side of Hilma af Klint’s multifaceted artistry and presents her as painter of landscapes, portraits, and botanical specimens. Although landscapes and portraits are not her most famous pieces, they remain important to her collection of works. This volume includes almost 400 works and a biographical essay written by the German author and art historian Julia Voss.

The features of humankind’s interaction with the natural enrivonment have, over the course of evolution, slowly consolidated specific models of behavior. In the social dimension, these primitive schemes of interaction between the body and the enviroment have generated the blooming of consciousness and gradually also of language. Neuroscience sheds light on the mechanism by which the artifical envionrnment – i. e. architecture – has represented a crucial moment of change in improving human beings’ cognitive capacities. This fact situates the beginning of architecture in an even more distant past. There are certain natural situations which, taken together with humankind’s actions and body, in the phase of homo erectus, which can therefore be considered the very first architecture. In particular, the technology and architecture which humankind has developed over the last two centuries, along with cultural and social transformations, have modified the environment without a sufficient awareness of the fundamental role played by nature in cognitive evolution. Today’s cities, and the entirety of our environmental conditions, are nothing other than the mirror image of this fogetting.

A comprehensive, novel reassessment of the life and work of one of America's most influential self-taught artists, John Kane. The book presents a full account of Kane's life as a working man, including his time as a steelworker, coal miner, street paver, and commercial painter in and around Pittsburgh at the height of the industrial era. How these occupations shaped his development as an artist and his breakthrough success in the modern art world is carefully explored and analyzed in this richly illustrated volume. Kane's dramatic life story demonstrates the power of perseverance and creativity: his dedication to painting resulted in a fascinating body of work that has ended up in some of America's most important museums and private collections.

This book is an academic biography of Liu Ching-chih, a renowned musicologist and translation scholar, and a prolific music critic in Hong Kong. Three Library Collections named after him are housed in the University of Hong Kong Libraries, the Hong Kong Central Library, and the Library of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the University of Heidelberg. This volume of life writing is distinguished from average biographies by its reliance on systematic analyses of an extensive array of texts and interview data. The chapters integrate chronologies, narratives, analyses and intertextual connections, with the voice of Liu foregrounded, to present a multifaceted character whose decades-long scholarship spanned across music criticism, the history of new music in China, and translation. Several chapters document Liu’s process of working on his major book projects,. One chapter portrays Liu as a scholar-music critic, and another features his leadership at the Hong Kong Translation Society. A chapter that documents Liu’s immensely rich array of academic and cultural services in Hong Kong is followed by a linguistic and cultural profile of the scholar. The ending chapter, on the biography project itself, traces the evolution of the project, explains the research methodology, and provides a metadiscoursal account of the writing of the book. The book provides a valuable reference for those who want to know about humanities scholars, public intellectuals, music criticism, music research, and civic societies in Hong Kong, for those who are curious about the academic exchange between Hong Kong and mainland China during the 1980s-1990s, and for those who are interested in an interdisciplinary approach in life writing research and the genre of life writing concerning in particular scholars.

This book intends to explore the atmospheric issue from an independent, architectural perspective. It is composed of two main sections. The first one introduces and analyzes the atmospheric concept inside the lexical scope of the architectural discipline, mapping the whole taxonomy of semantic declinations that are recognized by architecture, in addition to retracing the etymology of the term ‘atmosphere’ and its evolution. The second section studies the topic throughout the sensory-emotional filter of the perceiving subject located in the built environment, gleaning suggestions from neuroscientific knowledge. More recently, architecture and neuroscience have started to interact, both in the combination of their theories and through experiment-based investigations.

By 1920, Buenos Aires was the largest and most cosmopolitan city of Latin America due to mass immigration from Europe. Unbridled urban expansion had drastic effects on the social and cultural topography of the Argentine capital, raising ideological and aesthetic issues that shaped the modernist landscape of the country. Artists across disciplines responded to these changes with conflicting depictions of urban space. Centering these conflicts as a cognitive map of modernity’s new realities in the city and in understandings of the city itself, Buenos Aires and the Arts looks at the interaction between modernity and modernism in literature, photography, film, and painting during the interwar period. This was a time of profound change and heightened cultural activity in Argentina. Eleni Kefala analyzes works by Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, José Ferreyra, Xul Solar, Roberto Arlt, and Horacio Coppola, with a focus on the city of Buenos Aires as a playground of modernity.

In the late nineteenth century, medical educators intent on transforming American physicians into scientifically trained, elite professionals swiftly recognized the value of medical school design for their reform efforts. Between 1893 and 1940, nearly every medical college in the country rebuilt or substantially renovated its facility. In Building Schools, Making Doctors, Katherine Carroll reveals how the new buildings constructed during this fifty-year period did more than passively house a new system of medical training; they actively participated in defining and promoting a reformed pedagogy, modern science, and the new physician. Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, her study moves architecture from the periphery of medical education to the center, revealing a network of medical educators, architects, and philanthropists who believed that the educational environment itself shaped how students learned and the type of physicians they became. Carroll offers the first comprehensive study of the science and pedagogy formulated by new facilities, the influence of donors and architects, the impact of educational centers on the urban landscape and the local community, and the privileging of white men within the medical profession during this formative period for physicians and medical schools.