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Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
Rebecca Solnit, Ben Pease, Shizue Seigel · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorAnd the Pursuit of Happiness
Maira Kalman · 471 pages
Filled with original art and photographs by the author who is also an illustrator and designer, each chapter represents a month of Kalman's yearlong travel across the U.S. and her reflections on democracy. She starts with a celebration of Barack Obama's Presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., continues with the month of February and Abraham Lincoln, and explores democracy and the pursuit o
Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
Robert Hughes · 534 pages
The founding of Rome is shrouded in legend, but current archaeological evidence supports the theory that Rome grew from pastoral settlements and coalesced into a city in the 8th century BC. It developed into the capital of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and finally the Roman Empire. For almost a thousand years, Rome was the most politically important, richest and largest city in the Western
Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
Peter Geoffrey Hall · 632 pages
"Peter Hall's seminal Cities of Tomorrow remains an unrivalled account of the history of planning in theory and practice, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it. Now comprehensively revised, the fourth edition offers a perceptive, critical, and global history of urban planning and design throughout the twentieth-century and beyond. A revised and updat
Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo
Margot Mifflin · 160 pages
The White Road: Journey into an Obsession
Edmund de Waal · 416 pages
"An intimate narrative history of porcelain, structured around five journeys through landscapes where porcelain was dreamed about, fired, refined, collected, and coveted"--
A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century
Witold Rybczynski · 480 pages
In a collaboration between writer and subject, the author of Home and City life illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure and a man at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history. We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes - among them, New York's Central Park, California's Stanford University campus, Boston's Back Bay Fens, Illinois's
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
Timothy Egan · 368 pages
How a lone man's epic obsession led to one of America's greatest cultural treasures: Prizewinning writer Timothy Egan tells the riveting, cinematic story behind the most famous photographs in Native American history and the driven, brilliant man who made them. Edward Curtis was charismatic, handsome, a passionate mountaineer, and a famous photographer, the Annie Leibovitz of his time. He moved in
Rembrandt's Eyes
Simon Schama · 750 pages
"Rembrandt's Eyes, about which Simon Schama has been thinking for more than twenty years, shows that the true biography of Rembrandt is to be discovered in his pictures. Through a succession of descriptions and interpretations of Rembrandt's paintings threaded into this narrative, he allows us to see Rembrandt's life clearly and to think about it afresh."--BOOK JACKET. "Rembrandt's Eyes shows us
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I
Roger Shattuck · 397 pages
The modernism of our times explained through a study of four significant men.
Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery
David Attenborough, Susan Owens · 223 pages
Describes the methods by which selected European artists, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Mark Catesby, portrayed the natural world during the Age of Discovery.
Blue: The History of a Color
Michel Pastoureau · 216 pages
"Blue has had a long and topsy-turvy history in the Western world. Once considered a hot color, it is now icy cool. The ancient Greeks scorned it as ugly and barbaric, but most Americans and Europeans now pick it as their favorite color. In this history, the renowned medievalist Michel Pastoureau traces the changing meanings of blue from its rare appearances in prehistoric art to its international
Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture
Ross King · 193 pages
The superb story of the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and the design and construction of the Great Cathedral in Florence - one of the most magnificent achievements of the Italian Renaissance.Even in an age of soaring skyscrapers and cavernous sports stadiums, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, with its immense, terracotta-tiled cupola, still retains a rare power to astonish. Yet
Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran
Jason Elliot · 440 pages
"Drawing on three years of travel and research, Jason Elliot's Mirrors of the Unseen is a portrait of Iran, a much-misrepresented country and once home to the world's earliest superpower." "In Mirrors of the Unseen we are introduced to the urban contradictions of the capital, Tehran, and invited to ponder the sublime architecture of Isfahan; we travel on horseback through the forests of the north
Face Paint: The Story of Makeup
Lisa Eldridge · 240 pages
"Make-up, as we know it, has only been commercially available in the last 100 years, but applying decoration to the face and body may be one of the oldest global social practices. Lisa Eldridge, one of the world's foremost make-up artists--with a very large and loyal public following of her own--has written the first real history of the subject. Face Paint will explore the reasons behind make-up's
The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
Robert M. Edsel · 473 pages
At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised.In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museu
Data by Design
Lauren F. Klein with Tanvi Sharma, Jay Varner, Margy Adams, Shiyao Li, Nicholas Yang, Dan Jutan, Jianing Fu, Anna Mola, Zhou Fang, Yang Li, and Silas Munro
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Bill Bryson · 560 pages
"As I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how glorious it was that this was exactly how this land must have looked to centuries of people, quietly going about their daily business – eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavouring to be amused – and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mo
The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles
Martin Gayford · 352 pages
From October to December 1888, Paul Gauguin shared a home in Arles with Vincent van Gogh. This was, without doubt, the most celebrated cohabitation in art history: never, before or since have two such towering artistic talents been penned up in so small a space. They were the Odd Couple of art history. Predictably, the results were explosive. The dénouement of their life together has entered into
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
Mike Davis · 462 pages
Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet
Jennifer Homans · 672 pages
Unique among the arts, ballet has no written texts or standardized notation. It is a storytelling art passed on from teacher to student. A ballerina dancing today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to sixteenth-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and