In 2017-18, the trustees of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass., decided to "deaccession" (sell) some of its most valuable artworks, including a painting by Norman Rockwell appraised at $25 million. The proposed sales broke long-established norms of museum collection oversight and sent shock waves through both the Berkshire community and the national art world. The broad outline of the events and alliances leading up to the sales form the nonfictional backdrop to this novel, an other...

An odometer measures the distance that you have traveled. This odometer measures moments with poems dispersed across life like mile markers. They begin when the poet was a college student of 20 in 1966 and end with the last poem written when he was 78 in 2023. This is 58 years of poetry that runs the gamut of life and transcends the gauntlet of emotions from youth to older adult. There are 403 poems scattered over 20,842 days and they begin on September 5, 1966, with this first line on day...

This is Louis' introspective memoir that spans 50 years. He first focuses on when he met his future wife, Susan, in 1969. She is a successful feminist artist in Chicago that specializes in figurative art. A year later she and Louis drive to Boulder, Colorado after camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. Susan rests while Louis takes a self-guided tour of the Columbine Collegium which is a music school founded by unemployed musicians after the depression. While crossing the campus Louis me...

There are many successful people out there who are living their life as they want to. They are working hard doing what they absolutely love to do. The most successful people are those who work toward the things they are passionate about and love. There are many reasons for this. The more you love what you do the harder you are going to work at it because you will be enjoying your work.If you feel like you are bored with your life or not doing what you should be doing with it then i...

Marcha is a multidisciplinary survey of the individuals, organizations, and institutions that have given shape and power to the contemporary immigrant rights movement in Chicago. A city with longstanding historic ties to immigrant activism, Chicago has been the scene of a precedent-setting immigrant rights mobilization in 2006 and subsequent mobilizations in 2007 and 2008.Positing Chicago as a microcosm of the immigrant rights movement on national level, these essays plumb...

Here are eight fundamental works by one of the few greatest English poets: three lyric pieces, Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel, Songs of Experience; the prose satire An Island in the Moon, the mystical prose poem The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, and three visionary poems: The French Revolution, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America, a Prophecy. William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the great relevant figures of his time, who like Beethoven in music bridges the classical and romantic...

The Austrian writer Joseph Roth's first novel, 'Das Spinnennetz', 1923, intensely chronicles the development of a fascist and the first steps in his rise to power. It is a vivid portrait of the nationalist fervor and the struggle between Right and Left in Germany during the years immediately following the end of the Great War, or First World War. Two days after its serial publication in the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung ('The Worker'), Adolf Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff set in motion the M...

This adventure story is about an African-American pioneer who experienced hardships in a strange, new Promised Land while searching for Americas soul. It is a love story about a man and his race who gave up American only to rediscover it and eventually reclaim it. It is an epic of human strength and colorless passion, capturing the Black Fever that gripped our nation in the early 1800s and is still echoed in the debate over immigration today.

Set in the 1950s, the protagonist, cal, cannot find a direction for his life. At home with his mother and brother, he feels lost as he heads into his senior year of high school. During the summer, his mother continues to compare his failures with his younger brother's successes, making Cal question her love for him.Encouraged by her brother, she encourages Cal to attend a military school in Texas in order to gain a sharper focus on his future. Reluctantly he agrees, approaching it ...

To see objects that live in the fourth dimension we humans would need to add a fourth dimension to our three-dimensional vision. An example of such an object that lives in the fourth dimension is a hyper-sphere or “3-sphere.” The quest to imagine the elusive 3-sphere has deep historical roots: medieval poet Dante Alighieri used a 3-sphere to convey his allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife in his Divine Comedy. In 1917, Albert Einstein visualized the universe as a 3-sphere, describ...

"Darkly funny and brilliantly unhinged" — Kirkus Reviews"A chaotic black comedy about a man with a messiah complex." — Kirkus ReviewsIf Fight Club, Money, and The Motorcycle Diaries had a three-way, Novelty would be their web-toed, mutant lovechild.Finn Balor is a depraved billionaire and polymath with a vendetta against fate and an insatiable appetite for hedonism. Obsessed with the idea that free will is a fallac...

Learn how to translate an executable model of your application into running code. This is not a book about theory, good intentions or possible future developments. You’ll benefit from translation technology and solid software engineering principles that are demonstrated with concrete examples using an open source tool chain.Models don’t deliver enough value if they are not on a direct path to code production. But to waste time building models that are merely pictures of your code d...