Sinan

Sinan was the greatest architect of the Ottoman Golden Age - when the Empire reached its zenith of power and magnificence. His style marks the apogee of Turkish art and this volume is a magnificent testament to the achievement of a man who stamped his imprint on an entire culture Beginning as a military engineer and designer of fortifications, he was appointed Chief Imperial Architect in 1538. While Michelangelo was working on St. Peter's, Sinan completed the greatest of Turkish mosques, the Süleymaniye and the Selimiye. Under Süleyman the Magnificent and his successor Selim II, Sinan designed hundreds of buildings: mosques, palaces, tombs, mausolea, hospitals, schools, caravanserai, bridges, aqueducts and baths. As he himself said, 'with time each edifice became - with the help of Allah and thanks to the generosity and benevolence of the State - the very image of the world in the lands ruled by the Ottoman dynasty.' In his greatest works he adapted Byzantine and Islamic styles to produce something quite new: a centralized organization of absolute space unhindered by pillars or columns and covered by a soaring dome. An architect of genius in a dynamic new empire expanding into both Asia and Europe, he was a true man of the Renaissance. Opulent colour photographs, many taken specially by Ara Güler for this publication, pay tribute to the extraordinary space and light of Sinan's buildings. Texts by the most important specialists in this field complement the handsome visual material and offer new interpretations of Sinan's art.

When Grand Sinan was conscripted into Ottoman service under the devshirme system from Kayseri Ağırnas and increased his experience by completing his observations in the Arabian and Persian territories under the service of the army and the sultan, he knew that he would build all the works the humanity would need in this wide geography, leave them as his legacy to the future and people would travel to see these works.

Mimar Sinan's Routes

The sixteenth century Ottoman architect Sinan is today universally recognized as the defining figure in the development of the classical Ottoman style. In addition to his vast oeuvre, he left five remarkable autobiographical accounts, the so-called "Adsiz Risale", the "Risaletu'l-Mi'mariyye", "Tuhfetu'l-Mi'marin", "Tezkiretu'l-Mi'mariyye" and "Tezkiretu'l-Bunyan" that provide details of his life and works. Based on information dictated by Sinan to his poet friend Mustafa Sa'i Celebi shortly before his death, they exist in multiple manuscript versions in libraries in Istanbul, Ankara, and Cairo. The present volume contains critical editions of all five texts, along with transcriptions, annotated translations, facsimiles of the most important variant versions, and an introductory essay that analyzes the various surviving manuscripts, reconstructs their histories, and establishes the relationships between them.

A landmark insider’s tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical insights into the social media trends of the 2020 election and beyond “The book might be described as prophetic. . . . At least two of Aral’s three predictions have come to fruition.”—New York NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED • LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD Social media connected the world—and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. It is paramount, MIT professor Sinan Aral says, that we recognize the outsize effect social media has on us—on our politics, our economy, and even our personal health—in order to steer today’s social technology toward its great promise while avoiding the ways it can pull us apart. Drawing on decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. He shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior influencing levers to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—from Russian hackers to brand marketers—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth, the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids. In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight.

A risky and risqué prison memoir depicts the collective nightmare of life under Saddam.

What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel’s project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel’s search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. The Book of Disappearance grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians. Presenting a narrative that is often marginalized, Antoon’s translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel.

Born into a family of corpse washers, Jawad abandons tradition by enrolling in Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts to study sculpting, but the conditions caused by Saddam Hussein's oppressive rule force a return home to the family business.