High Art

Catch-as-Catch-Can, a brutal martial art and sport, was created in England beginning in the 1490s and refined for hundreds of years. Sailors from the British Navy traveled all over Asia and the Middle East, bringing back fighting techniques from these exotic lands. Englishmen mixed these with their existing wrestling techniques sourced from all over Europe. The result was a devastating martial art known as “Catch Wrestling”. The history of Catch Wrestling makes us take a hard look at what we think we know about the martial arts and where they came from. Also included in the book is a ...

Doomed to Fail explores the heaviest music the world has ever heard, tracing doom, sludge, and post-metal as their own distinct (and incredibly loud) traditions. Anselmi covers the bands and musicians that have impacted those styles most - Black Sabbath, Candlemass, Melvins, Eyehategod, Godflesh, Neurosis, Saint Vitus, and many others - while diving into the cultural doom that has spawned such music, from the bombing of Birmingham and hurricane devastation of New Orleans to glaring economic inequality, industrial alienation, climate change, and widespread addiction.

Billy Collins, U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, plays a game called, "I can feel it coming in the air tonight", in which he responds to questions about musician Phil Collins. Al Gore tries to match his former boss’ mastery of the My Little Pony children’s show in a game called "Maybe you can beat Bill Clinton at this". Olympian Jackie Joyner-Kersee rhymes with "cursy", so she is invited to play a game called "May Thunder Blast Your Head!" about curses from around the world. Of course.

Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world.

It's one of the most revered movies of Hollywood's golden era. Starring screen legend Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in her first significant film role, High Noon was shot on a lean budget over just 32 days but achieved instant box-office and critical success. It won four Academy Awards in 1953, including a best actor win for Cooper. And it became a cultural touchstone, often cited by politicians as a favourite film, celebrating moral fortitude.

For 75 years, Wonder Woman has served as an inspiration to people everywhere. Wonder Woman Psychology: Lassoing the Truth examines this powerful superhero - who was created by famous psychologist William Moulton Marston - through 20 chapters, including some very special interviews and the previously unpublished memoir of Elizabeth Holloway Marston.

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities. This entertaining book charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers.

There's no wrong way to be a woman. There are countless wrong ways to be a man. James Breakwell should know. He's tried just about all of them. Journalism. Pig ownership. Felony lawn gnome theft. Whatever masculinity is supposed to be, this can't be it. But can you really fail at something no one can quite define? Apparently. Now, in a series of funny, sharply observed, and occasionally poignant essays, everyone's favorite internet-famous father of four daughters lays down a lifetime of lessons in what it means to be a man.

For over two decades, Donald Michael Kraig's Modern Magick has been the world's most popular step-by-step guide to working real magick. Tens of thousands of individuals and groups have used this course as their primary instruction manual. Now, greatly revised and expanded, this set of lessons is more complete and relevant to your life than ever. Modern Magick will safely guide you-even if you know little or nothing-through a progressive series of practical exercises and rituals, complemented by the knowledge, history, insights, and theory you need to become a successful ceremonial magician.

Welcome to a transformative journey through the dynamic and challenging world of angel investing. This book is your guide to shaping industries and influencing innovations by injecting capital, guidance, and vision into early-stage startups. Here, we delve deep into the principles, strategies, and experiences that define successful angel investing, offering you the opportunity to not just invest, but to grow personally and make a significant impact. Angel investors play a crucial role in the startup ecosystem. Unlike institutional investors, angel investors not only provide financial ...

Story captures our hearts and feeds our imaginations. It reminds us who we are and where we came from. Story gives meaning and direction to our lives as we learn to see it as an affirmation of God’s love. Drawing upon her own experiences, well-known tales in literature, and selected narratives from Scripture, Madeleine L’Engle gently leads the way into the glorious world of story in The Rock That Is Higher. Here she acknowledges universal human longings and considers how literature, Scripture, personal stories, and life experiences all point us toward our true home.

The celebrated author of over twenty-five books, Vollmann's equally ambitious and prolific career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter reflects the artist's deep interest in people existing on the margins, a profound empathy for his subjects, and the humility and generosity to meet them on their terms. In Shadows of Love, Shadows of Loneliness, a series of essays commissioned especially for this book lays out Vollmann's views on what photographs can and should say.

In Art of Seduction, Greene returns with a new instruction audiobook on the most subtle, elusive, and effective form of power because seduction isn't really about sex. It's about manipulating other people's greatest weakness: their desire for pleasure.

Jesse Ball has produced fourteen acclaimed works of deeply empathetic absurdism in poetry and fiction. Now, he offers listeners his first memoir, one that invites the listener into a raw and personal account of love, grief, and memory. Inspired by the memoir Édouard Leve put to paper shortly before his death, Autoportrait is an extraordinarily frank and intimate work from one of America's most brilliant young authors. Half-remembered moments are woven together with the joys and triumphs—and the mistakes and humiliations, too—that somehow tell us who we are, why we are here.

Northern Lights: High Strangeness in Sweden is the first book written in English entirely devoted to the subject of high strangeness, UFOs, and other mysteries in Sweden. While Sweden is known as a secular, rational country where stories of the paranormal are considered something of the past, the truth is quite the opposite. The country has a long history of weirdness, unexplained observations, and eerie encounters, often connected to the countryside, desolate roads, and empty fields. From gnomes, elves, and trolls of the past to UFOs and aliens in modern times. Perhaps they're all ...

This anthology contains five short stories previously published in READING for Christian Schools Grade 6 (Bob Jones University Press 1988), updated for a new generation of readers, with plenty of new illustrations. Black and White interior and a full-cover cover. “Val is For Valiant” - An ordinary boy has an extraordinary dream that changes his life. “The Monument” - A game of tag turns into a journey of discovery and danger “Brethren Nisei” - A white American boy watches his Japanese friends undergo persecution during the war “Antarctica” - Two brothers help their uncle ...

When Belle Boggs' "The Art of Waiting" was published in Orion in 2012, it went viral, leading to republication in Harper's Magazine and an interview on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show. In that heartbreaking essay, Boggs eloquently recounts her realization that she might never be able to conceive. She searches the apparently fertile world around her - the emergence of 13-year cicadas, the birth of eaglets near her rural home, and an unusual gorilla pregnancy at a local zoo - for signs that she is not alone.

For a time, Nelson Algren was America's most famous author, lauded by the likes of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. Millions bought his books. Algren's third novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, won the first National Book Award, and Frank Sinatra starred in the movie. But despite Algren's talent, he abandoned fiction and fell into obscurity. The cause of his decline was never clear. Some said he drank his talent away; others cited writer's block. The truth, hidden in the pages of his books, is far more complicated and tragic.

Albert Richardson and Junius Browne, two correspondents for the New York Tribune, were captured at the Battle of Vicksburg and spent 20 months in horrific Confederate prisons before escaping and making their way to Union territory. Their amazing, long-forgotten odyssey is one of the great escape stories in American history, packed with drama, courage, horrors and heroics, plus many moments of antic comedy.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone form Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure akin to Sarah Bakewell's book on Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but also to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind for our own age.