SKU: 33914567037

Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50

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Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50An incandescent group portrait of the midcentury artists and thinkers whose lives, loves, collaborations, and passions were forged against the wartime destruction and postwar rebirth of Paris. In this fascinating tour of a celebrated city during one of its most trying, significant, and ultimately triumphant eras, Agn s Poirier unspools the stories of the poets, writers, painters, and philosophers whose lives collided to extraordinary effect between

An incandescent group portrait of the midcentury artists and thinkers whose lives, loves, collaborations, and passions were forged against the wartime destruction and postwar rebirth of Paris.

In this fascinating tour of a celebrated city during one of its most trying, significant, and ultimately triumphant eras, Agn s Poirier unspools the stories of the poets, writers, painters, and philosophers whose lives collided to extraordinary effect between 1940 and 1950. She gives us the human drama behind some of the most celebrated works of the 20th century, from Richard Wright's Native Son, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Saul Bellow's Augie March, along with the origin stories of now legendary movements, from Existentialism to the Theatre of the Absurd, New Journalism, bebop, and French feminism.

We follow Arthur Koestler and Norman Mailer as young men, peek inside Picasso's studio, and trail the twists of Camus's, Sartre's, and Beauvoir's epic love stories. We witness the births and deaths of newspapers and literary journals and peer through keyholes to see the first kisses and last nights of many ill-advised bedfellows. At every turn, Poirier deftly hones in on the most compelling and colorful history, without undermining the crucial significance of the era. She brings to life the flawed, visionary Parisians who fell in love and out of it, who infuriated and inspired one another, all while reconfiguring the world's political, intellectual, and creative landscapes.

With its balance of clear-eyed historical narrative and irresistible anecdotal charm, Left Bank transports readers to a Paris teeming with passion, drama, and life.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 09/17/2019
ISBN: 9781250231468
Pages: 368
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 0.90d
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SKU: 33914567037

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Tanya McHenry
Lake Worth, US
★★★★★ 4
Interesting Material For The Space Inclined
Format: Hardcover
Okay, so I should start by saying that I am not a space exploration expert or really enthusiast. I am curious though. What this means is I don't have a lot of books on space exploration, and I haven't spent large amount of time looking at that kind of information. This review is from someone who is, well as I said, curious about it. So let's kind of start with what this book covers, very early theory kind of things, lie Greek BCE space models all the way through possible future exploration and challenges with future development. It's very dry, very factual. It reminds me of kind of a textbook approach where it takes ideas like thee Space Lab, spy satellites (Corona Reconnaissance), and launch vehicles from Asia and just lays out what happened and key facts about the topic. These are not stories persay. They're not meant to grip someone not already interested and while I am sure someone deep into the topic might feel perfectly adequate to some, I wish I had more incentive to read it from start to end. Instead I largely jumped around looking at specific topics like the the First Flight, Columbia, which I had a basic foundation of information for already. This made it an easy read. In that same section, there is a topic called out about New Astronauts where women, diversity and non-military personnel like engineers and scientists became astronauts. For sections like these I wish there was... well more. So it took me a really long time to go through the book because it consist of several topics that didn't draw me in and several that did but didn't provide as much information as I wanted. The book promises the history of the space exploration, from ancient time and to the future, and largely it delivers on the promise, in brief snippets, and maybe it the ambition of that massive amount of time that it left me feeling wanting about topics I already had interest in, like Mining the Solar system. Think of this is a way to touch on nearly every topic, an tiny introduction to each one because very few topics have more than one or two pages covering it which means if you really want to know who is wants to go mine those 2 to 3k mineral rich asteroids, for what, and what the challenges are.. you'll need to find another book. Finally, I'll touch on the pictures. Yes, you can find a lot of these online, probably even bigger ones, but have them all in one place. There are so many of them that you really could just thumb through the pages and see iconic as well as pleasantly surprising ones, and each one has a caption that gives some key details, like one that is the Boeing made shuttle main engine you can find at, well one of the museums of course! There was also a basic schematic for one of the engines which I was not expecting, and the same thing for a voyager probe. It won't bee something I will ever browse again for casual reading, but for a space lover, this might be just thing they want to start with.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2019
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Ivan's Dad
Belleville, US
★★★★★ 5
Could be a text book.
Format: Hardcover
Best reading, detailed, a real cool diary of when the USA dreamed and reached for the stars.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2021
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John F. Steeves
San Leandro, US
★★★★★ 5
Received in good shape. Thanks!
Format: Hardcover
The quality of the photos is, shall I say, "Out of the is world"! A thousand thanks!
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Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2018
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walter hoefer
Charlottesville, US
★★★★★ 5
This is a 5***** book !!!
Format: Hardcover
This is a beautiful book every space lover should own. I highly recommend it !!!
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Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2019
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Tony Fross
Lowell, US
★★★★★ 5
Important reading for every working woman!
Format: Hardcover
Let me start by saying that this isn't a genre I am normally drawn to. I usually am a fiction reader, but a trusted friend recommended this book so highly that I felt I should give it a chance. I'm so glad I put aside my hesitation, as I really feel this is a book that every woman in the American workforce should read. It is a fascinating primer in how we got where we are, and how much effort it took to gain even our somewhat compromised equality. While the legal issues involved can be a little complex, Thomas does an excellent job of breaking them down into straightforward concepts. I also really appreciated her ability to make the whole process of moving a case up through the Court of Appeals and eventually to the Supreme Court come to life. For those of us who are not in the legal profession, this process can seem mysterious, but this book made it easy to understand. By clearly and patiently laying out the facts of each case, Thomas also gives the reader the opportunity to test their own assumptions and think through the logic of the cases for themselves. For me, it was a fascinating opportunity to weigh my assumptions about my political leanings against my intellectual analysis of the facts, and I often surprised myself. All in all, I think this is an important book, and also a surprisingly accessible and engaging one. You will feel smarter and much more informed after reading it. And if you are a woman, you may well also feel grateful for those brave women (and men) who fought and struggled to make your experience in the workplace fairer.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2016

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