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The Gates of Hell: Rodin’s Passion in Stone is not just another biography of Rodin. There are many excellent ones already. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the sculptor, after immersion in his works, by listening to his own words and those spoken about him. For Rodin was more than a sculptor of genius. He had the imagination and the courage to search for the truth, not only with his artist’s hands, but with the penetrating gaze and mastery of the word that define the writer. His book Les Cathedrals de France and his hundreds of letters offer a new close-up of the artist, both visual and verbal. His musings on art and on life, and his contemporaries’ views of him, form a biographer’s trove. This rich assemblage of words, like a hoard of tiny fragments of stone and glass, when pieced together, form a mosaic likeness of an artist who was himself a story teller in stone.
Those interested in the development of scientific theory and in the nature of academic life will appreciate this intellectual autobiography written by one of America's leading sociologists. Following his family tradition (The Education of Henry Adams was written by his great-uncle), George Caspar Homans describes how his ideas about the proper nature of theory in social science, both in form and content, have developed over time. The chief interest of the book lies in the description of this process.Homans' career has spanned many of the key periods of development in social research, and his own work has been central to the process. He was the first major sociologist to outline the sociologi...
"Covers the key people, movements, institutions, practices, and doctrines of Roman Catholicism from its earliest origins."--Résumé de l'éditeur.
By the end of the Civil War, barely four million Catholics lived on American soil. A century later, more than 43 million Americans were Catholic, making the Church a dominant force in American culture and politics. The twentieth century was a springtime for the American Church, which witnessed the dramatic expansion of American dioceses, with towering new churches erected even blocks apart. Catholic schools were swiftly built to accommodate the influx of Catholic schoolchildren, and convents and monasteries blossomed as vocations soared. The Catholic hierarchy and laity factored into many of the great stories of twentieth-century America, which are told here by one of our country's foremost experts on Catholic American history, Fr. Charles Connor. In these informative and entertaining pages, you'll learn: What motivated the virulent
A revelatory life of Clover Adams, casting a lens on her iconic marriage to historian Henry Adams and her fatal embrace of photography in her last months.
A family of his own covers Edwin O'Connor's comfortable upbringing in Rhode Island, his formation at Notre Dame, his obscure years in radio and the Coast Guard during World War II, his adoption of Boston, his long association with his publishers at "Atlantic Monthly" and Little, Brown and Company, his toil in journalism and television reviewing, his several sojourns in Ireland, and his extraordinary dedication to his craft while living close to poverty. For the years after "The Last Hurrah," Duffy examines O'Connor's handling of newfound wealth and celebrity, his growing loneliness, the surprise and fulfillment of a late marriage, his failure on Broadway, and his return to fiction. Throughout his writing O'Connor's major subject was the family, especially the gains, losses, and conflicts within assimilated Irish America. Duffy examines the complex ways by which O'Connor's own experience of family and friendship formed essential patterns in his works.
The Five of Hearts, who first gathered in Washington in the Gilded Age, included Henry Adams, historian and scion of America's first political dynasty; his wife, Clover, gifted photographer and tragic victim of depression; John Hay, ambassador and secretary of state; his wife, Clara, a Midwestern heiress; and Clarence King, pioneering geologist, entrepreneur, and man of mystery. They knew every president from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and befriended Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and a host of other illustrious figures on both sides of the Atlantic.
'Every generalisation that we settled forty years ago, is abandoned' As a journalist, historian and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment. An immediate bestseller awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, his The Education of Henry Adams (1918) recounts his own and the country's education from 1838, the year of his birth, to 1905, incorporating the Civil War, capitalist expansion and the growth of the United States as a world power. Exploring America as both a success and a failure, contradiction was the very impetus that compelled Adams to write the Education, in which he was also able to v...
This book analyzes what many critics consider to be the three best examples of modern American political fiction—Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, and Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place—to address a specific problem in American governance: how the intense competition for power among elite factions often results in their ignoring major groups of their constituents, thereby providing political bosses with a rationale to seize authoritarian control of the government in the name of constituent groups who feel ignored or neglected, promising them more democratic rule, but in the process, excluding other groups, so that the bosses themselves become elitist, ruling only for the sake of some constituents and not others.
In the wake of feminist and poststructuralist contributions to literary study, how can we read images of women in literature written by men? Is it possible to read anything other than appropriation or misrepresentation in these male portraits of women? Starting with these questions, Van Oostrum looks for openings in a debate that seems to be firmly locked into traditional gender roles. While contemporary literary theory works hard to dismantle oppressive binaries, questions about the representation of an other' often lead back to a dizzying number of rigid identities. Through an examination of Henry Adams's and Henry James's attempts to write about American women, Van Oostrum tries to have i...