Biography & Autobiography : Artists, Architects, Photographers

Joe Klein, best-selling author of Primary Colors and one of our most brilliant political analysts, now tackles the subject he knows best: Bill Clinton. Astute, even-handed, and keenly intelligent, The Natural is the only book to read if you want to understand exactly what happened–to the military, to the economy, to the American people, to the country–during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and how the decisions made during his tenure affect all of us today. more...

Price: $14.99

Norman Rockwell’s tremendously successful, prolific career as a painter and illustrator has rendered him a twentieth-century American icon. However, the very popularity and accessibility of his idealized, nostalgic depictions of middleclass life have caused him to be considered not a serious artist but a “mere illustrator”–a disparagement only reinforced by the hundreds of memorable covers he drew for The Sunday Evening Post. more...

Price: $16.95

This is the first biography of T. G. Jackson, an architect who transformed the image of Oxford, rebuilt public schools, and became a leading architect of the arts and crafts movement. Although many of his buildings are famous, until now he has been little known. Yet his work illuminates a whole society as well as an individual. - ;In the late nineteenth century one man changed Oxford forever. T. G. Jackson built the Examination Schools, the Bridge of Sighs, worked at a dozen colleges, and restored a score of other Oxford icons. He also built for many of the major public schools, for the University of Cambridge, and at the Inns of Court. A friend of William Morris, he was a pioneering member of the arts and crafts moment. A distinguished historian, he also restored dozens of houses and churches - and ensured. the survival of Winchester Cathedral. As an architectural theorist he was a leader of the generation that rejected the Gothic Revival and sought to develop a new and modern style of building. Drawing on extensive archival work, and illustrated with a hundred images, this is the first in-depth analysis of Jackson's career ever written. It sheds light on a little-known architect and reveals that his buildings, his books, and his work as an arts and craftsman were not just important in their own right, they were also part of a wider social change. Jackson was the architect of choice for a particular group of people, for the 'intellectual aristocracy' of late Victorian England. His. buildings were a means by which they could articulate their identity and demonstrate their distinctiveness. They reformed the universities and the schools whilst he refashioned their image. Essential reading for anyone interested in Victorian architecture and nineteenth-century society, this book will also be of interest to all those who know and love Oxford or Cambridge. - ;In this attractive book, William Whyte has wisely and ably brought Sir Thomas Graham Jackson out of th more...

Price: $150.00

Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, today astonishing sums are paid for the works of these artists, whose paintings are celebrated for their ability to capture the moment, not only in the fleeting lights of a landscape but in scenes of daily life. Their dazzling pictures are familiar—but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people? The Private Lives of the Impressionists tells their story. It is the first book to offer an intimate and lively biography of the world's most popular group of artists. In a vivid and moving narrative, biographer Sue Roe shows the Impressionists in the studios of Paris, rural lanes of Montmartre and rowdy riverside bars as Paris underwent Baron Haussmann's spectacular transformation. For more than twenty years they lived and worked together as a group, struggling to rebuild their lives after the Franco-Prussian War and supporting one another through shocked public reactions to unfamiliar canvases depicting laundresses, dancers, spring blossoms and boating scenes. This intimate, colorful, superbly researched account takes us into their homes and studios, and describes their unconventional, volatile and precarious lives, as well as the stories behind the paintings. more...

Price: $13.99

What if the protagonist in that age-old tale—boy goes to war, comes back a man—were a female? Shutterbabe, Deborah Copaken Kogan's remarkable debut, is just that: the story of a twenty-two-year-old girl from Potomac, Maryland, who goes off to photograph wars and comes back, four years and one too many adventures later, a woman. more...

Price: $13.95