Loved On A Grander Scale

A biography of Sir Christopher Wren from one of Britain's best writers and historians

The Kingdome, John (“Jack”) Christiansen’s best-known work, was the largest freestanding concrete dome in the world. Built amid public controversy, the multipurpose arena was designed to stand for a thousand years but was demolished in a great cloud of dust after less than a quarter century. Many know the fate of Seattle’s iconic dome, but fewer are familiar with its innovative structural engineer, Jack Christensen (1927–2017), and his significant contribution to Pacific Northwest and modernist architecture. Christiansen designed more than a hundred projects in the region: public schools and gymnasiums, sculptural church spaces, many of the Seattle Center’s 1962 World’s Fair buildings, and the Museum of Flight’s vast glass roof all reflect his expressive ideas. Inspired by Northwest topography and drawn to the region’s mountains and profound natural landscapes, Christiansen employed hyperbolic paraboloid forms, barrel-vault structures, and efficient modular construction to echo and complement the forms he loved in nature. Notably, he became an enthusiastic proponent of using thin shell concrete—the Kingdome being the most prominent example—to create inexpensive, utilitarian space on a large scale. Tyler Sprague places Christiansen within a global cohort of thin shell engineer-designers, exploring the use of a remarkable structural medium known for its minimal use of material, architectually expressive forms, and long-span capability. Examining Christiansen’s creative design and engineering work, Sprague, who interviewed Christiansen extensively, illuminates his legacy of graceful, distinctive concrete architectural forms, highlighting their lasting imprint on the region’s built environment. A Michael J. Repass Book

This is a follow up to Sibling Rivalry on a Grand Scale: Jacob & Esau. In Volume 1 the foundation was laid regarding this family feud that started about 4,000 years ago. Here in Volume 2 more details are given revealing just how current the Edomite's vendetta is with Jacob's descendants, and how it involves everyone.

This book is compiled of short versus that expresses the Majesty of love. It's power. It's enormous influence on the human race since the beginning of time. These verses are short, yet powerful and very meaningful, each one carries a very special method that can be applied, the love that the world needs.

Quintessentially fascinating, love intrigues and perplexes us, and drives much of what we do in life. As wary as we may be of its illusions and disappointments, many of us fall blindly into its traps and become ensnared time and again. Deliriously mad excitement turns to disenchantment, if not deadening repetition, and we wonder how we shall ever break out of this vicious cycle. Can psychoanalysis – with ample assistance from philosophers, poets, novelists, and songwriters – give us a new perspective on the wellsprings and course of love? Can it help us fathom how and why we are often looking for love in all the wrong places, and are fundamentally confused about “what love really is”? In this lively and wide-ranging exploration of love throughout the ages, Fink argues that it can. Taking within his compass a vast array of traditions – from Antiquity to the courtly love poets, Christian love, and Romanticism – and providing an in-depth examination of Freud and Lacan on love and libido, Fink unpacks Lacan’s paradoxical claim that “love is giving what you don’t have.” He shows how the emptiness or lack we feel within ourselves gets covered over or entwined in love, and how it is possible and indeed vital to give something to another that we feel we ourselves don’t have. This first-ever commentary on Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference, provides readers with a clear and systematic introduction to Lacan’s views on love. It will be of great value to students and scholars of psychology and of the humanities generally, and to analysts of all persuasions.

'A kind of blissography, teeming with bon mots' Sunday Times A celebrated modern classic that has revolutionised our understanding of the Bloomsbury group and remains the definitive biography of the group's gloriously eccentric patron, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Met with widespread acclaim and translated into fifteen languages, this seminal book provoked a rethinking of the traditional Bloomsbury narrative and the rewriting of some major biographies. For decades, Ottoline Morrell was grossly misunderstood. The artists and writers who benefited from her generous patronage and friendship helped to create the false and vicious image of a nymphomanical aristocrat with cultural aspirations. This landmark literary biography presents Morrell in an entirely new light, rightly setting her centre-stage as the brilliant and courageous lynchpin of the Bloomsbury group. She counted T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Siegfried Sassoon, Augustus John, Katherine Mansfield and W.B. Yeats among her closest friends and houseguests. A legendary and agonisingly protracted love-affair with Bertrand Russell never undermined this unlikely couple's deep and understanding friendship. Ottoline's loyalty to her own promiscuous husband survived public humiliation and private crises. Overhauling the long-held conventional view of Morrell as a victim, a creature of her class who was born to be exploited and derided by her wittier friends, Seymour repaints the world of the Bloomsberries and rescues the grand life of Ottoline Morrell from the depths of historical obscurity.

Spiritual poetry ON MAKING LOVE: Spiritual Testimony to the Gift Life Is., is the eighth book in Jim Young's MY SPIRITUAL AWARENESS SERIES. This book of spiritual inference, expressed in the form of poetic verse, depicts some of the many ways of seeing life through spiritual eyes. For those on a spiritual venture who wish to plunge the depths to deeper meaning, this devout collection can awaken you to the inherent awareness of the perfection of Being you really are. Indeed, these verses can be revered as contemplative nourishment, the proverbial Word that speaks to the reader within, at the seat of Truth for each. Read and listen carefully for the resonance you will surely hear-and take this resonance as sure evidence that you, too, are a divine, spiritual being.