Inyo County Free Library - New Acquisitions
November 2020 - December 2020
These are books and media new to the library and cataloged by the Inyo County Free Library.
Additional information about each title can be found in the catalog (click on the title). For older acquisition lists choose from Select another list. To request any of these titles please contact your local library branch.
The Laws guide to nature drawing and journaling By Laws, John Muir Publishing Date: [2016] Classification: 700 Call Number: 743.83 LAW In straightforward text complemented by step-by-step illustrations, dozens of exercises lead the hand and mind through creating accurate reproductions of plants and animals as well as landscapes, skies, and more. Laws provides clear, practical advice for every step of the process for artists at every level, from the basics of choosing supplies to advanced techniques. |
Celtic art: the methods of construction By Bain, George Publishing Date: 1973 Classification: 700 Call Number: 745.4 BAI The construction principles of Celtic art were re-discovered in the middle of the 20th century by George Bain. Until his writing, the intricate knots, interlacings, and spirals used in illuminating The Book of Kells and in decorating craftwork and jewelry seemed almost impossible, "the work of angels." In this pioneering work, George Bain shows how simple principles, no more difficult than those used in needlecraft, were used to create some of the finest artistic works ever seen. He also explains how you can use these principles in re-creating artifacts and in creating your own Celtic designs for art and craft work or even for recreational use. Step-by-step procedures carefully introduce the simple rules and methods of Celtic knot work and the well-known designs from the great manuscripts and stone work. Later chapters build up to complex knot work, spiral work, and key pattern designs, with special coverage of alphabets and the stylized use of animals, humans, and plants. Altogether over 225 different patterns are presented for your use, with hundreds of modification suggestions, 110 historical and modern artifacts showing designs in use, a great number of letters including six complete alphabets and 25 decorative initials, and a number of animal and human figures used in the original Celtic works. Artists, students, craftspeople, even children can work with these patterns and instructions for creating dynamic designs for use in leather work, in embroidery and other needle work, in metalwork, jewelry making, card design, borders, panels, illuminations, and in countless other ways. Mathematicians will find a great deal of pleasure in the geometric principles on which the patterns are based. Art historians and others interested in studying Celtic art will find a great number of outstanding art works and the best presentation in English for understanding Celtic design.- (Dover Pubns) |
On the fringe: a life in decorating By Taylor, Imogen Publishing Date: 2016 Classification: 700 Call Number: 747.092 TAY "Imogen Taylor started work at Colefax & Fowler in 1949, and spent many years as assistant to John Fowler. She went on to become one of the most prominent interior decorators of the latter part of the twentieth century, working in Britain and the Middle East and extensively in the United States. She retired in 1999, after fifty years at Colefax & Fowler. On the Fringe is a unique chronicle of the twentieth-century decorative scene and the changing social world"--Cover. |
American canvas: the art, eye, and spirit of pioneer artists By Tyler, Ronnie C. Publishing Date: 1990, ©1983 Classification: 700 Call Number: 759.13 TYL Paintings, drawings, prints, and excerpts from the accounts of artists, writers, and travelers offer a description of the United States, both wilderness and town, prior to 1876 - (Baker & Taylor) |
No way but this: in search of Paul Robeson By Sparrow, Jeff Publishing Date: 2018 Classification: 700 Call Number: 782.0092 SPA Paul Robeson was an actor and performer, a champion athlete, a committed communist, a brilliant speaker, and a passionate activist for social justice in America, Europe, and Australia. Hailed as the most famous African American of his time, he sang with a voice that left audiences weeping, and, for a period, had the entire world at his feet́ and then lost everything for the sake of his principles. Robeson's storied life took him from North Carolina plantations to Hollywood; from the glittering stages of London to the coal-mining towns of Wales; from the violent frontiers of the Spanish Civil War to bleak prison cells in the Soviet Union; from Harlem's jazz-infused neighbourhoods to the courtroom of the McCarthy hearings. Yet privately Robeson was a troubled figure, burdened by his role as a symbol for the African American people and an international advocate for the working class. His tragedy was to battle ambition and uncertainty, ultimately clinging to his beliefs even as the world changed around him. As optimistic ideals of communism turned to repression under the Cold War, his public decline mirrored that of the world around him. Today Robeson is largely unknown, a figure lost to footnotes and grainy archival footage. But his life, which followed the currents of the twentieth century, reveals how the traumas of the past still shape the present. |
By Slate, Jenny Publishing Date: 2019 Classification: 700 Call Number: 791 SLA Contains short autobiographical essays, musings, stories, observations, and advice. |
A little history of literature By Sutherland, John Publishing Date: c2013 Classification: 800 Call Number: 809 SUT This "little history" takes on a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' to 'Harry Potter.' John Sutherland is perfectly suited to the task. He has researched, taught, and written on virtually every area of literature, and his infectious passion for books and reading has defined his own life. Now he guides young readers and the grown-ups in their lives on an entertaining journey "through the wardrobe" to a greater awareness of how literature from across the world can transport us and help us to make sense of what it means to be human. Sutherland introduces great classics in his own irresistible way, enlivening his offerings with humor as well as learning: 'Beowulf,' Shakespeare, 'Don Quixote,' the Romantics, Dickens, 'Moby Dick,' 'The Waste Land,' Woolf, "1984," and dozens of others. He adds to these a less-expected, personal selection of authors and works, including literature usually considered well below 'serious attention.' |
By Zweig, Stefan Publishing Date: 2015 Classification: 800 Call Number: 809 ZWE 'He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.' Stefan Zweig was already an emigre - driven from a Europe torn apart by brutality and totalitarianism - when he found, in a damp cellar, a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne would become Zweig's last great occupation, helping him make sense of his own life and his obsessions-with personal freedom, with the sanctity of the individual. Through his writings on suicide, he would also, finally, lead Zweig to his death. With the intense psychological acuity and elegant prose so characteristic of Zweig's fiction, this account of Montaigne's life asks how we ought to think, and how to live. It is an intense and wonderful insight into both subject and biographer. |
In the wilderness: coming of age in unknown country By Barnes, Kim Publishing Date: c1996 Classification: 800 Call Number: 811.54 BAR Poet Kim Barnes grew up in Northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a home for her husband and two children. Their lives were short on material wealth, but long on the riches of family and friendship, and the great sheltering power of the wilderness. But in the mid-1960s, as automation and a declining economy drove more and more loggers out of the wilderness and into despair, Kim's father dug in, determined to stay. It was then the family turned fervently toward Pentecostalism. It was then things changed. . In the Wilderness is the story of this poet's journey toward adulthood, set against an interior landscape every bit as awesome, as wondrous, and as fraught with hidden peril as the great Idaho forest itself. It is an examination of how both geography and faith can shape the heart and soul, and of the uncharted territory we must all enter to face our own demons. It is the clear-eyed and deeply moving story of a young woman's coming to terms with her family, her homeland, her spirituality, and herself. |
Readings: essays and literary entertainments By Dirda, Michael Publishing Date: c2000 Classification: 800 Call Number: 814.54 DIR In these playful, erudite, and idiosyncratically personal essays from the Washington Post Book World, Michael Dirda shares some of the pleasures of the reading life. His subjects range from classics in translation to fantasy and crime fiction; from children's books to American and European literature; from innovative writing to neglected novels; from the dark joys of collecting first editions to the untroubled pleasure of P.G. Wodehouse. Dirda is a writer's reader and a reader's writer. He is a sure guide to good reading from the casual to the scholarly, and his columns are always diverting and informative, always worth coming back to. Readings presents many of his most memorable essays, including "The Crime of His Life" (a youthful caper), "Bookman's Saturday" (the scheming of a book collector), an annotated list of 100 comic novels, "Heian Holiday" (on The Tale of Genji), reflections on sex in literature, "Mr. Wright" (an exemplary high school teacher), "Listening to My Father," "Turning Fifty," and "Millennial Readings." In all these, and in 40 other pieces, Michael Dirda shows us books as sources of aesthetic bliss, comfort, and not least, amusement. |
By Moser, Benjamin Publishing Date: [2019] Classification: 800 Call Number: 818.5409 MOS "Benjamin Moser's Sontag, a biography of Susan Sontag, is a portrait of the iconoclastic and prolific essayist, novelist, and critic and her role in the history of American intellectualism" -- |
Sidetracks: explorations of a romantic biographer By Holmes, Richard Publishing Date: c2000 Classification: 800 Call Number: 820.9 HOL Holmes, a literary biographer and author of Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer , presents 20 essays on his research into major and minor Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities, revealing the unexpected directions and tantalizing side trips that biographical research can uncover. Holmes received the Somerset Maugham Prize for his book Shelley: The Pursuit . Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) - (Book News) |
By Nestor, Pauline Publishing Date: 2002 Classification: 800 Call Number: 823.8 NES George Eliot was one of the great thinkers of her time, a figure central to the main currents of thought and belief in the nineteenth century. Yet when this distinguished public intellectual turned to fiction writing at the age of thirty-six, she regarded it not as a lesser pursuit, but as the distillation of all of her knowledge and ideas. For Eliot, fiction enabled the consideration of life 'in its highest complexity', and had the capacity not merely to elicit, but actually to create, moral sentiment by surprising readers into the recognition of realities other than their own. In this new study, Pauline Nestor offers a challenging reassessment of Eliot's contribution to the critical debates, both of her age and of her own era. In particular, she examines the author's literary expolration of ethics, especially in relation to the negotiation of difference. Nestor argues compellingly that, through a reading of their sophisticated drama of otherness, Eliot's novels can be seen as freshly relevant to contemporary theoretical debates in feminism, moral philosophy, post-colonial studies and psychoanalysis. Covering the writer's complete body of major fiction, this is an indispensable voume for anyone studying the work of one of the most important and influential novelists of the nineteenth century. - (McMillan Palgrave) |
By Mantel, Hilary Publishing Date: 2003 Classification: 800 Call Number: 823.914 MAN In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel is a fierce, self-possessed child, schooling herself in "chivalry, horsemanship, and swordplay" and convinced that she will become a boy at age four. Catholic school comes as a rude distraction from her rich inner life. At home, where a father and a stepfather come and go at strange, overlapping intervals, the keeping of secrets becomes a way of life. Her late teens bring her to law school in London and then to Sheffield with a lover who becomes her husband. She soon acquires a persistent pain, which over the next decade will subject her to destructive drugs, patronizing psychiatry, and, finally, at age twenty-seven, to an ineffective and irrevocable surgery. There will be no children; instead she has "a ghost of possibility, a paper baby, a person who slipped between the lines." Hormone treatments alter her body beyond recognition. And in the middle of it all she begins one novel, and then another, drawing on deep gifts of memory and imagination. - (Blackwell North Amer) |
Driving home: an American journey By Raban, Jonathan Publishing Date: c2010 Classification: 800 Call Number: 828 RAB Spanning two decades, Driving home charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history, and current events as witnessed by "a super-sensitive, all-seeing eye." (Newsweek). Frank, witty, and provocative, Driving home is part essay collection, part diary--and irresistibly insightful about America's character, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies. |
Great books of China: from ancient times to the present By Wood, Frances Publishing Date: [2017] Classification: 800 Call Number: 895.1300 WOO "Great Books of China invites readers to discover--or rediscover--some of the major achievements of Chinese culture and civilization. The literature of China remains largely unknown in the West, yet it offers much insight into Chinese life. The long continuity of Chinese culture means that texts created more than two thousand years ago are still part of the education and background of today's China. Great Books of China introduces outstanding works of various genres, from fiction, drama, and poetry to history, science, and travel; they were written by philosophers and artists, government officials and scholars, by men and women across many centuries and from every part of China. These great books are presented in their historic, cultural, and social context, with a focused summary of content and author."--Back cover. |
The annotated Two years before the mast By Dana, Richard Henry Publishing Date: [2013] Classification: 900 Call Number: 910.4 DAN Two Years Before the Mast is a classic travel narrative which inspired canonical works like Moby Dick and Sailing Alone Around the World. As he follows Richard Henry Dana (a Harvard dropout-turned-sailor) on his voyages around North America (encountering racial injustices and struggling through the battered life of a foremast crewman), Rod Scher annotates his tale with critiques, compliments, tie-ins to today, and little-known facts about both the book and the milieu of Dana's time. - (NBN) |
Two years before the mast and other voyages By Dana, Richard Henry Publishing Date: c2005 Classification: 900 Call Number: 910.4 DAN This volume collects three sea-going travel narratives by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., that span twenty-five years of maritime history, from the age of sail to the age of steam. Suffering from persistent weakness in his eyes, Dana left Harvard at age nineteen and sailed from Boston in 1834 as a common seaman. Two Years Before the Mast (1840) is the classic account of his voyages around Cape Horn and time ashore in California in the decade before the Gold Rush. Written with an unprecedented realism that challenged the romanticism of previous maritime literature, Dana’s narrative vividly portrays the daily routines and hardships of life at sea, the capriciousness and brutality of merchant ship captains and officers, and the beauty and danger of the southern oceans in winter. Included in an appendix is “Twenty-Four Years After” (1869), in which Dana describes his return to California in 1859–1860 and the immense changes brought about by American annexation, the frenzy of the Gold Rush, and the growing commerce of “a new world, the awakened Pacific.” Dana first visited Cuba in the winter of 1859 while the possible annexation of the island was being debated in the U.S. Senate. To Cuba and Back (1859) is his entertaining and enthusiastic account of his trip, during which he toured Havana and a sugar plantation; attended a bullfight; visited churches, hospitals, schools, and prisons; and investigated the impact on Cuban society of slavery and autocratic Spanish rule. Journal of a Voyage Round the World, 1859–1860 records the fourteen-month circumnavigation that took Dana to California, Hawaii, China, Japan, Malaya, Ceylon, India, Egypt, and Europe. Written with unflagging energy and curiosity, the journal provides fascinating vignettes of frontier life in California, missionary influence in Hawaii, the impact of the Taiping Rebellion and the Second Opium War on China, and the opening of Japan to the West, while capturing the transition from the age of sail to the faster, smaller world created by the steamship and the telegraph. |
The daughters of Yalta: the Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans : a story of love and war By Katz, Catherine Grace Publishing Date: 2020 Classification: 900 Call Number: 940.5314 KAT "The story of the fascinating and fateful "daughter diplomacy" of Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman, three glamorous young women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta Conference with Stalin in the waning days of World War II"-- |
By Jenkins, McKay Publishing Date: c2003 Classification: 900 Call Number: 940.54 JEN When World War II broke out in Europe, the American army had no specialized division of mountain soldiers. But in the winter of 1939–40, after a tiny band of Finnish mountain troops brought the invading Soviet army to its knees, an amateur skier named Charles Minot “Minnie” Dole convinced the United States Army to let him recruit an extraordinary assortment of European expatriates, wealthy ski bums, mountaineers, and thrill-seekers and form them into a unique band of Alpine soldiers. These men endured nearly three years of grueling training in the Colorado Rockies and in the process set new standards for both soldiering and mountaineering. The newly forged 10th Mountain Division finally faced combat in the winter of 1945, in Italy’s Apennine Mountains, against the seemingly unbreakable German fortifications north of the Gothic Line. There, they planned and executed what is still regarded as the most daring series of nighttime mountain attacks in U.S. military history, taking Mount Belvedere and the sheer, treacherous face of Riva Ridge to smash the linchpin of the German army’s lines. Drawing on unique cooperation from veterans of the 10th Mountain Division and a vast archive of unpublished letters and documents, The Last Ridge is written with enormous warmth, energy, and honesty. This is one of the most captivating stories of World War II, a blend of Band of Brothers and Into Thin Air. It is a story of young men asked to do the impossible, and succeeding. - (Random House, Inc.) |