From All Sides

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition 'From All Sides: Tansaekhwa on Abstraction', September 13-November 8, 2014, Blum & Poe"--Page 167.

The international bestseller 'Hysterical, harrowing, honest... I really loved this book' Jarvis Cocker 'A brilliant, jangling opus to Rhodes's frantic mind... I cannot write anything more affecting about Rhodes than he can write himself.' Katie Glass, Sunday Times 'Brave and unflinching... Excellent reading... [Rhodes] deserves an ovation for this courageous work.' Helen Davies, Sunday Times 'What [Rhodes] describes in Fire On All Sides, writing with the same passion and energy he has when talking, are less destructive, more life-enhancing avenues to cope with anxiety, depression and trauma that he has found effective... An earlier generation might have referred to Rhodes as a tortured genius and left it at that, but his life defies such casual, catch-all labels.' Daily Telegraph 'Rhodes writes like he plays - with power and intensity... Deeply stirring' Evening Standard For many of us who suffer from depression or anxiety, the simple act of endurance, of having to appear normal, is a daunting, painful and heroic task. Getting out of bed, packing the kids off to school, showing up for work, preparing dinner... These can be astonishing achievements when it sometimes takes a superhuman effort simply to stand upright. How do you keep going? How do you do what you do, day in, day out, conforming to people's idea of you and functioning in the way society expects you to, when all you want to do is disappear and hide? In Fire On All Sides, Rhodes attempts to find how to make the unbearable bearable in the most exposing circumstances imaginable. As he embarks on a gruelling five-month concert tour, performing in front of thousands of people, the tortuous voices in his mind his constant companions, he has no choice but to face these wild, mad ramblings head on. Luckily, there is the music. There is always the music. Bach, Chopin, Beethoven - they are his holy grail, his mechanism for survival. Just. This is an important, urgent book. It's about going through your day feeling like you can't find a way out of the crazy, it's about not setting the happiness bar too high, it's about accepting the messy imperfection that is life. Rhodes explodes the myths surrounding depression, anxiety and stress - the plagues of our society - into a million pieces, then sticks them back together again with his characteristic thought-provoking, laser sharp and humorous style. The really good news? It's going to be OK. Just.

From the author of A Place at the Table and A Soft Place to Land, an “intense, complex, and wholly immersive” (Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author) multigenerational novel that explores the complex relationship between two very different women and the secrets they bequeath to their daughters. Eve Whalen, privileged child of an old-money Atlanta family, meets Daniella Gold in the fall of 1962, on their first day at Belmont College. Paired as roommates, the two become fast friends. Daniella, raised in Georgetown by a Jewish father and a Methodist mother, has always felt caught between two worlds. But at Belmont, her bond with Eve allows her to finally experience a sense of belonging. That is, until the girls’ expanding awareness of the South’s systematic injustice forces them to question everything they thought they knew about the world and their places in it. Eve veers toward radicalism—a choice pragmatic Daniella cannot fathom. After a tragedy, Eve returns to Daniella for help in beginning anew, hoping to shed her past. But the past isn’t so easily buried, as Daniella and Eve discover when their daughters are endangered by secrets meant to stay hidden. Spanning more than thirty years of American history, from the twilight of Kennedy’s Camelot to the beginning of Bill Clinton’s presidency, We Are All Good People Here is “a captivating…meaningful, resonant story” (Emily Giffin, author of All We Ever Wanted) about two flawed but well-meaning women clinging to a lifelong friendship that is tested by the rushing waters of history and their own good intentions.

A New Yorker Best Book of the year An Esquire Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 From Insomniac City author Bill Hayes, "who can tackle just about any subject in book form, and make you glad he did" (SF Chronicle)-a cultural, scientific, literary, and personal history of exercise. Exercise is our modern obsession, and we have the fancy workout gear and fads from HIIT to spin classes to hot yoga to prove it. Exercise-a form of physical activity distinct from sports, play, or athletics-was an ancient obsession, too, but as a chapter in human history, it's been largely overlooked. In Sweat, Bill Hayes runs, jogs, swims, spins, walks, bikes, boxes, lifts, sweats, and downward-dogs his way through the origins of different forms of exercise, chronicling how they have evolved over time, dissecting the dynamics of human movement. Hippocrates, Plato, Galen, Susan B. Anthony, Jack LaLanne, and Jane Fonda, among many others, make appearances in Sweat, but chief among the historical figures is Girolamo Mercuriale, a Renaissance-era Italian physician who aimed singlehandedly to revive the ancient Greek “art of exercising” through his 1569 book De arte gymnastica. Though largely forgotten over the past five centuries, Mercuriale and his illustrated treatise were pioneering, and are brought back to life in the pages of Sweat. Hayes ties his own personal experience-and ours-to the cultural and scientific history of exercise, from ancient times to the present day, giving us a new way to understand its place in our lives in the 21st century.

"Intense and absorbing... If you buy only one book on the Vietnam War, this is the one you want." -Chicago Tribune Christian G. Appy's monumental oral history of the Vietnam War is the first work to probe the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. These vivid testimonies of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict, from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, they allow us to see and feel what this war meant to people literally on all sides: Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policymakers and protesters, guerrillas and CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people. By turns harrowing, inspiring, and revelatory, Patriots is not a chronicle of facts and figures but a vivid human history of the war. "A gem of a book, as informative and compulsively readable as it is timely." -The Washington Post Book World

From the New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers, a chronicle of the extraordinary feats of heroism by Marines called on to do the impossible during the greatest battle of the Korean War. "Superb ... A masterpiece of thorough research, deft pacing and arresting detail...This war story—the fight to break out of a frozen hell near the Chosin Reservoir—has been told many times before. But Sides tells it exceedingly well, with fresh research, gritty scenes and cinematic sweep." —The Washington Post On October 15, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of UN troops in Korea, convinced President Harry Truman that the Communist forces of Kim Il-sung would be utterly defeated by Thanksgiving. The Chinese, he said with near certainty, would not intervene in the war. As he was speaking, 300,000 Red Chinese soldiers began secretly crossing the Manchurian border. Led by some 20,000 men of the First Marine Division, the Americans moved deep into the snowy mountains of North Korea, toward the trap Mao had set for the vainglorious MacArthur along the frozen shores of the Chosin Reservoir. What followed was one of the most heroic--and harrowing--operations in American military history, and one of the classic battles of all time. Faced with probable annihilation, and temperatures plunging to 20 degrees below zero, the surrounded, and hugely outnumbered, Marines fought through the enemy forces with ferocity, ingenuity, and nearly unimaginable courage as they marched their way to the sea. Hampton Sides' superb account of this epic clash relies on years of archival research, unpublished letters, declassified documents, and interviews with scores of Marines and Koreans who survived the siege. While expertly detailing the follies of the American leaders, On Desperate Ground is an immediate, grunt's-eye view of history, enthralling in its narrative pace and powerful in its portrayal of what ordinary men are capable of in the most extreme circumstances. Hampton Sides has been hailed by critics as one of the best nonfiction writers of his generation. As the Miami Herald wrote, "Sides has a novelist's eye for the propulsive elements that lend momentum and dramatic pace to the best nonfiction narratives."

In Listening on All Sides, Richard Deming finds an intersection of literature and philosophy in the poetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams that offers aesthetic models for the construction of community. Building on the work of Stanley Cavell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin, Deming challenges current trends in American literary studies and advances the newly developing field of ordinary language criticism. Continental literary theory and Anglo-American philosophy work together in this book to uncover the role literary texts play in the way that language use creates and defines culture.

Perhaps no other nation is or has ever been as religiously diverse as the United States. For elected officials, school principals, corporate leaders, and many others, this diversity poses unique challenges. Leaders bring their own faiths to public life, and they daily encounter followers of similar and different faiths. Good leadership must draw together people from varied backgrounds in order to achieve something in common. This is no simple task. How should leaders deal with menorahs and crosses, veils and turbans, prayers and holidays? How do they and their followers turn the cacophony of beliefs and practices into a kind of citizenship worthy of the American tradition of religious freedom? How can they honor the religious convictions of all Americans? In With God on All Sides, Douglas A. Hicks provides a roadmap for leaders as they traverse the post-9/11 landscape. Although the devout possess moral and spiritual resources that can enrich civic life, leaders must also be prepared to cope with nearly inevitable conflicts between people of different faiths. Yet wise leaders can find ways to transform the problem of diversity into an opportunity. Drawing on their moral and spiritual resources, Americans of all creeds have the capacity to enhance the quality of our civic debate. Their faith-based practices create occasions for mutual learning. Hicks tells the stories of how diverse Americans have transformed public controversies into cases of cooperation. The key to good leadership, Hicks writes, is to engage one another across lines of difference with a spirit of humility, build communication and trust, and offer an inclusive vision that is true to America's principles. Based on years of research and practical experience, With God on All Sides provides an invaluable and thought-provoking guide to leadership--and citizenship--in our devout and diverse nation.

In the 1970s, a young man, eager to experience life like Thoreau and Walden, takes his wife and moves to a rural Idaho log cabin in this memoir. When Bill Gruber left Philadelphia for graduate school in Idaho, he and his wife decided to experience true rural living. His longing for the solitude and natural beauty that Thoreau found on Walden Pond led him to buy an abandoned log cabin and its surrounding forty acres in Alder Creek, a town considered small even by Idaho standards. But farm living was far from the bucolic wonderland he expected: he now had to rise with the sun to finish strenuous chores, cope with the lack of modern conveniences, and shed his urban pretensions to become a real local. Despite the initial hardships, he came to realize that reality was far better than his wistful fantasies. Instead of solitude, he found a warm, welcoming community; instead of rural stolidity, he found intelligence and wisdom; instead of relaxation, he found satisfaction in working the land. What began as a two-year experiment became a seven-year love affair with a town he'll always consider home. Winner of the Bakeless Prize, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Praise for On All Sides Nowhere “While Gruber’s writing is a gift, even better are the simple but profound truths he shares: “We sometimes forget that the most important thing we can do with our lives is to make them models for somebody else to follow.” Gruber’s Idaho is like the Troy first and famously uncovered by 19th-century German archeologist Schliemann: in actuality, there isn’t a whole lot there, but the author makes it seem full and magical, all the same.” —Publishers Weekly “What was intended to be a deep immersion in study for graduate school—in the silence and solitude of a northern Idaho backwoods cabin—becomes a deep immersion instead in a place and its people, sharply etched . . . . Engaging particulars of an essential life, pared to the core.” —Kirkus Reviews

This is the second edition of the only book dedicated to the Geometry of Polycentric Ovals. It includes problem solving constructions and mathematical formulas. For anyone interested in drawing or recognizing an oval, this book gives all the necessary construction, representation and calculation tools. More than 30 basic construction problems are solved, with references to Geogebra animation videos, plus the solution to the Frame Problem and solutions to the Stadium Problem. A chapter (co-written with Margherita Caputo) is dedicated to totally new hypotheses on the project of Borromini’s oval dome of the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. Another one presents the case study of the Colosseum as an example of ovals with eight centres as well as the case study of Perronet’s Neuilly bridge, a half oval with eleven centres. The primary audience is: architects, graphic designers, industrial designers, architecture historians, civil engineers; moreover, the systematic way in which the book is organised could make it a companion to a textbook on descriptive geometry or on CAD. Added features in the 2nd edition include: the revised hypothesis on Borromini’s project for the dome of the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome, an insight into the problem of finding a single equation to represent a four-centre oval, a suggestion for a representation of a four-centre oval using Geogebra, formulas for parameters of ovals with more than 4 centres and the case study of the eleven-centre half-oval arch used to build the XVIII century Neuilly bridge in Paris.