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Body Art and Abjection
- Studies in World Art, Book 1
- Narrated by: Rick Paradis
- Length: 22 mins
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Publisher's summary
The first body art performer, as well as the first professional bodybuilder, was the showman Eugene Sandow (1867-1925). Though Sandow’s heyday occurred before the birth of the Modern Movement, there are compelling reasons for giving the primacy to him.
Sandow, born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller in Prussia in 1867, left his native country in 1885 in order to avoid military service and first appeared on the London stage in 1885. His real celebrity began when the American impresario Florenz Ziegfield hired him, on a profit-sharing basis, to appear at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Ziegfield soon discovered that audiences were more interested in the perfection of Sandow’s body than they were in the weights he was lifting, so he encouraged him to give "muscle display performances". One of these is preserved in a short film made by Edison Studios in 1894. The clip, which lasts for just 42 seconds, can be seen today on the web.
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Story
The Art Instinct combines two of the most fascinating and contentious disciplines, art and evolutionary science, in a provocative new work that will revolutionize the way art itself is perceived. Aesthetic taste, argues Denis Dutton, is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. It's not, as almost all contemporary art criticism and academic theory would have it, "socially constructed".
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A breath of fresh air!
- By Michael on 02-19-14
By: Denis Dutton
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Dark Star Rising
- Magick and Power in the Age of Trump
- By: Gary Lachman
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Within the concentric circles of Trump's regime lies an unseen culture of occultists, power-seekers, and mind-magicians whose influence is on the rise. In this unparalleled account, historian Gary Lachman examines the influence of occult and esoteric philosophy on the unexpected rise of the alt-right.
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Step Right This Way!
- By Brad on 06-03-18
By: Gary Lachman
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Da Vinci's Ghost
- Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image
- By: Toby Lester
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Toby Lester, author of the award-winning The Fourth Part of the World, masterfully crafts yet another century-spanning saga of people and ideas in this epic story of Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic drawing of a man inscribed in a circle and a square. Over time, the nearly 550-year-old ink-on-paper sketch has transformed into a collective symbol of the nature of genius, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit.
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Haunting Expierience
- By Paul on 02-10-12
By: Toby Lester
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Cultural Amnesia
- Notes in the Margin of My Time
- By: Clive James
- Narrated by: Clive James
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
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Very enjoyable and well narrated
- By Larbi on 05-18-08
By: Clive James
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Existentialism and Excess
- The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre
- By: Gary Cox
- Narrated by: Matt Addis
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the undisputed giants of 20th-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism, combined with his creative and artistic flair, have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high-profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion.
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a capitalista biography of Sartre
- By Anonymous User on 01-24-20
By: Gary Cox
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The War on the West
- By: Douglas Murray
- Narrated by: Douglas Murray
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn’t we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?
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Every Human (seriously, everyone) Read This!
- By aaron on 04-27-22
By: Douglas Murray
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What Are You Looking At?
- The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art
- By: Will Gompertz
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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What is modern art? Who started it? Why do we either love it or loathe it? And why is it such big money? Join BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz on a dazzling tour that will change the way you look at modern art forever. From Monet's water lilies to Van Gogh's sunflowers, from Warhol's soup cans to Hirst's pickled shark, hear the stories behind the masterpieces, meet the artists as they really were, and discover the real point of modern art.
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A simply wonderful book with a serious flaw
- By 11104 on 05-02-21
By: Will Gompertz
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Orientalism
- By: Edward Said
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 19 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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This landmark book, first published in 1978, remains one of the most influential books in the Social Sciences, particularly Ethnic Studies and Postcolonialism. Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism Said claimed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."
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We're lucky to have this on audio
- By Delano on 02-27-13
By: Edward Said
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Making History
- The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past
- By: Richard Cohen
- Narrated by: Richard Cohen
- Length: 26 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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There are many stories we can spin about previous ages, but which accounts get told? And by whom? Is there even such a thing as “objective” history? In this “witty, wise, and elegant” (The Spectator), book, Richard Cohen reveals how professional historians and other equally significant witnesses, such as the writers of the Bible, novelists, and political propagandists, influence what becomes the accepted record. Cohen argues, for example, that some historians are practitioners of “Bad History” and twist reality to glorify themselves or their country.
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Missing 20 pages from book
- By Rick, Austin on 04-23-22
By: Richard Cohen
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell