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Imagine the North American Indians as astronomers carefully watching the heavens, charting the sun through the seasons, or counting the sunrises between successive lumar phases. Then imagine them establishing observational sites and codified systems to pass their knowledge down through the centuries and continually refine it. A few years ago such images would have been abruptly dismissed. Today we are wiser. Living the Sky describes the exciting archaeoastronomical discoveries in the United States in recent decades. Using history, science, and direct observation, Ray A. Williamson transports the reader into the sky world of the Indians. We visit the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, sit with a Zuni sun priest on the winter solstice, join explorers at the rites of the Hopis and the Navajos, and trek to Chaco Canyon to make direct on-site observations of celestial events.
A collection of legends about the stars from various North American Indian cultures, including explanations of the Milky Way and constellations such as the Big Dipper.
Native American starlore has instructed and entertained non-natives for generations. Yet until recently the importance of this extensive body of tradition and acute observation has been ignored or viewed by non-natives simply as crude means to astronomical insight. In this edited collection, seventeen folklorists and astronomers consider American starlore and its relation to specific observation of the sky in terms of its native uses and interpretations. Far from being another recount of sky mythology, this is a book that relates clear descriptions of astronomical phenomena and mechanics to interpretation and ritual usage from all areas of North America. Navajo, Seneca, Alabama, Pawnee, Lakota, Apache, and other peoples are represented. Rather than focus on pristine astronomies, the contributors to this volume consider ongoing traditions and contemporary usages. A broad perspective on the exciting new field of ethnoastronomy, as well as fascinating insight into Native American wisdom.
This superb book about Native American architecture is filled with information about Iroquois longhouses, Navajo hogans, Pawnee earth lodges, and Northwest Coast dwellings. Truly entertaining for the mind and spirit, it uses scholarship and mythology to teach young people about Native American houses and structures from around the country.
Provides optical designers, shop managers, opticians, and purchasers a concise reference explaining what the designer needs to know before making final choices and how to specify the components before they are ordered. It presents how conventional fabrication proceeds for representative components, alternative and emerging methods to optical fabrication, product evaluation, and the calculations used.
An intimate and revealing collection of photographs of astonishingly beautiful, iconic, and undiscovered mid-century interiors. Among significant mid-century interiors, none are more celebrated yet underpublished as the homes created by architects and interior designers for themselves. This collection of newly commissioned photographs presents the most compelling homes by influential mid-century designers, such as Russel Wright, George Nakashima, Harry Bertoia, Charles and Ray Eames, and Eva Zeisel, among others. Intimate as well as revelatory, Williamson’s photographs show these creative homes as they were lived in by their designers: Walter Gropius’s historic Bauhaus home in Massachusetts; Albert Frey’s floating modernist aerie on a Palm Springs rock outcropping; Wharton Esherick’s completely handmade Pennsylvania house, from the organic handcarved staircase to the iconic furniture. Personal and breathtaking by turn—these homes are exemplary studies of domestic modernism at its warmest and most creative.
Realistic, cheeky and easy-to-read, My Mind Won't Shut Up ! is a book that challenges meditation myths. It's for ordinary, stressed-out people with money worries, weird families and haemorrhoids.Written by two sturdy-legged Glaswegians with short attention spans, My Mind Won't Shut Up! is aimed at anyone who is curious about meditation but turned off by anything too woo-woo. It is not a spiritual journey, and it won't make you better at kung fu. It will help you be kinder to yourself, stop you from spinning out and make you less prone to emotional wobbles.
Once hailed by John Osborne as 'the greatest actor since Brando', latterly known as a ruined genius whose unpredictable, hellraising behaviour was legendary, Nicol Williamson always went his own way. Openly dismissive of 'technical' actors, or others who played The Bard as if 'their finger was up their arse', Williamson tore up the rule book to deliver a fast-talking canon of Shakespearean heroes, with portrayals marked by gut-wrenching passion. According to one co-star, Williamson was like a tornado on stage – 'he felt he was paddling for his life'. Fiercely uncompromising, choosy about the roles he accepted, contemptuous of the 'suits' who made money from artists, and a perfectionist who never accepted second best from himself or others, Nicol sometimes alienated those around him. But even his detractors still acknowledge his brilliance. After an extraordinary career on both stage and screen, Williamson was burnt out as an actor by the age of 60. Yet, as Gabriel Hershman explains in this authorised biography, a premature end was perhaps inevitable for an actor who always went the extra mile in every performance.
Wetherill named these people the "Basket Makers" and inaugurated a new era of understanding of the region's prehistoric past.
An eminent Southern biographer interprets one of the most famous Southern icons of popular culture.