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This dictionary provides an authoritative and accessible guide to the lives, labours and achievements of the men and women who have shaped the world of science. The in-depth biographies are comprehensive in their coverage of scientists and provide a wealth of information about the great scientists and their idiosyncrasies - for example, the effect of Humphrey Davy's jealousy of his former protege Michael Faraday, the prejudice against women that barred Lize Meitner from working in a major laboratory, and why the astronomer Tycho Brahe wore a false nose. The dictionary covers all of the major scientists and provides readable reviews of each scientist's early life, career, major discoveries and significant publications. This edition has been updated to include over 80 more biographies, focusing particularly on contemporary scientists, such as Stanley Prusiner, the US winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize of Physiology or Medicine. In addition, a glossary of 2000 terms and chronologies of the major sciences place individual's achievements within the context of their own time, while offering an overview of the growth of each particular field of scientific enquiry. ... Read more

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Ideal for students, picture researchers, and enthusiasts of all kinds, this third edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Art reaffirms the unrivalled position held by this authoritative one-volume guide to the art of the Western world. Covering Western art from the ancient world to the present day, the Dictionary provides a careful balance of fact and critical appraisal ranging across painting, sculpture, drawing, and the applied arts. Over 3000 entries provide the reader with information on a wide range of people and subjects, including artists, critics, collectors, dealers, patrons, museums, art schools, materials, and techniques. This third edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded, with over 200 new entries on contemporary artists, such as Damien Hirst, Julian Schnabel, Antony Gormley; new forms, such as video art; museums, patrons, and collectors. The Dictionary also includes an updated contextual chronology of major works, as well as a practical directory of museums and galleries around the world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A MUST HAVE
This is a must have for any art history person or anyone in sales for art.It's a complete who's who and what's what of art.It has useful information and is a great resource.
I highly recommend this book.

Excellent guide to the field
Over the past few years, Oxford University Press has continued to develop its line of excellent reference works, revising older volumes and adding new subjects. The latest edition of "The Oxford Dictionary of Art" carries on that tradition.

The guide offers to the general reader an excellent grounding in the facts and philosophies that underlie the media. The entries cover artists, movements, museums (with addresses and websites), materials and, in the back, a chronology listing key works and when they were completed.

While it sometimes falls into the thicket of scholarly jibber-jabber -- and one should recognize the possibility exists while trying to describe visual art using only words, in a book which contains no pictures -- the dictionary is even-handed in describing the critical reaction to a work. With its wide range of descriptions, both geographically and chronologically, this revised guide allows armchair art appreciators to brush up on their learning.

Handy and useful articles onart terms and artist bios
This is a very handy and informative dictionary of terms you will likely encounter in reading about painting and sculpture.If you think of the definitions as short articles on a topic you will be closer to the mark.There are also many short biographies of important historical artists.One of the nice conventions is an asterisk before terms used in the articles that are also themselves the subject of articles.

There are no illustrations, plates, or diagrams in the book.However, there is a short foreword and an introduction.

All in all, this is quite a useful handbook and I use it with some frequency.
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The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a collection of 50,000 specially written biographies of men and women who have shaped all aspects of the British past, from the earliest times to the end of the year 2000, from the ancient (explorer Pytheas of the 4th Century BC) to the modern (Princess Diana). For this new edition, all 36,000 lives from the first edition have been completely rewritten or revised-with over 13,500 new biographies added representing all historical periods and including 3,000 new entries on women.

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Readers of all ages will find engaging biographical information on the lives of more than 235 African Americans who have made significant contributions in American history.

This A-to-Z guide covers important African Americans and their accomplishments in all fields sincecolonial times, including the arts, entertainment, politics, science, sports, the military, literature, education, the media, religion, and many other areas. Designed to illuminate the importance of each figure's work, this updated edition provides inviting, easy-to-read entries that include each individual's date and place of birth and the highlights of his or her career. Illustrative photographs complement each entry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

THIS ONE IS FOR THE AGES
Jonathan Anderson
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Afternoon Reading Lab

The Biographical Dictionary of African-americans is about African americans that became famous celebrities off of their hard work and achieved success. This book talks about great successors like Michael Jackson, Oprhrah Winfrey, O. J. Simpson, Malcolm, Martin Luther King JR. etc...Our great achievers aren't always white, there are also African Americans who kept going till they reached their dreams. The achiever in this book I think has a strong character is Martin Luther King JR. He is 5'11'', brown eyes, brown skin, black hair 160pounds, and has plump cheeks. He is non-violent because when he was doing marches all over the south, white people threw rocks at him and he kept going like nothing was wrong. He is faithful because he started to try to get to get equal rights for black people and didn't'[stop till he got it. The government ruled that blacks could sit wherever they wanted on the bus.I would rate this book 1-5 with 5 being the highest I rate it a 5. I rated this book 5 stars, because this book gives me a clear understanding on great African Americans. Some of my favorite heroes were written about inside of this book to show me the way of a true man. The book basically tells you about all blacksucceeding celeberties.
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"Nobody yawned when Hart was about."-Malcolm CowleyHart Crane's life was notoriously turbulent, persistently nonconformist, and tragically short. Born in 1899, Crane became one of the most significant modernist American poets, yet his self-destructive tendencies-violent outbursts, massive drinking binges, and dangerous sexual pursuits-came to a catastrophic conclusion when at only thirty-two he threw himself from the stern of an ocean liner into the Gulf of Mexico. This new biography presents for the first time a full, frank portrait of the real Hart Crane, a poet attractive both for his flamboyance and passion for life, and for the magnificent sonorities of his work.Clive Fisher mines every extant document left behind by Crane to recount the intertwined stories of the poet's life: his work and the intellectual climate in which he wrote, his urgent and intractable relations with his parents, and his tortured yet incessant quest for emotional stability and love. The book considers the autobiographical application of Crane's poems and recreates settings in London, Paris, Cleveland, Cuba, and Mexico where the poet found inspiration. Fisher redresses injustices to the reputation of Crane's father, Clarence; reintroduces Crane's important friends and their achievements; and without the constraints that hindered previous biographers presents Crane's promiscuity, positioning his activities in the context of the New York gay underworld of his time. The book also takes up the suicidal tendencies of Grace Crane, Hart's mother, and recreates the scene of the poet's death with fresh material from documents of those aboard the ship. This absorbing biography at last provides an authoritative portrait of Hart Crane, a poet whose remarkable work places him among the most important American writers of the twentieth century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Splendid Biography of a Great Poet
Having read Paul Mariani's excellent biography of Hart Crane some years ago, I wasn't sure whether we needed another telling of the life story of the doomed poet whose fondness for alcohol and sailors contributed to his tragic suicide in his early 30s.

But Clive Fisher's new biography is superb, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wishes to find out more about this brilliant writer's tragic life.

Hart Crane came from a family that gave new meaning to the word "dysfunctional," and the fact that he was homosexual (and self-destructively promiscuous -- "Poor Hart Crane," Ernest Hemingway once said of him, "always trying to pick up the wrong sailor") didn't help matters. He was also one of the worst alcoholics of that notoriously hard-drinking era. It made for a short and unhappy life, but a productive one. Crane wrote some of the most brilliant (and difficult) poetry ever written by an American.

Fisher isn't much of a literary critic, and his attempts to explicate such notoriously knotty texts as "The Bridge" are not notably incisive. But when it comes to telling the story of a tawdry but fascinating life, he does a tremendous job. While much of Crane's literary remains were destroyed by his termangent of a mother after his suicide in an attempt to sanitize his reputation, Fisher has found enough to flesh out the picture of an unhappy, self-educated man with a passion for poetry, alcohol and rough trade into an absorbing, if somewhat depressing, narrative. Mariani's is the shorter book of the two, and I'd still recommend it highly, but I think Fisher's is the one to go to if you want to know what this man was all about.

The book does have its flaws, though. Fisher mentions Crane's famous Greenwich Village meeting with Charlie Chaplin (the subject of Crane's poem "Chaplinesque"), but seems not to realize that Chaplin described the meeting himself in his "Autobiography" and even quoted the poem in full (Fisher's bibliography doesn't list Chaplin's book). Also, on page 193 Fisher inaccurately refers to Chaplin's film "A Woman of Paris" as "A Woman of Darkness."

These minor caveats aside, however, I would recommmend this book to anyone who is curious about the life and work of one of America's finest poets. ... Read more

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Edited by Leslie Stephen. This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1885 edition by Smith, Elder, & Co., London. ... Read more

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Edited by Leslie Stephen. This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1887 edition by Smith, Elder, & Co., London. ... Read more

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A collection of Missouri biographies features the life stories of Count Basie, Walt Disney, Redd Fox, Betty Grable, Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Langston Hughes, Daniel Boone, George Washington Carver, Harry S Truman, and other state luminaries. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Missourians
Biographies of 700+ individuals who have contributed significantly to the development of the state of Missouri with many achieving national fame as well.The book draws from all fields of activities--politics, business,science, religion, art, etc. without regard to race, gender, etc.Althoughthe book seems a little pricy at first glance, I wasn't disappointed--thethoroughness and quality makes it well worth the price. ... Read more

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"An informative and scholarly survey by Donald Mullin, Victorian Actors and Actresses in Review, compiles extensive critical assessments by contemporary reviewers of some 250 British and American players who performed between 1837 and 1901." Backstage ... Read more

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This text presents a historical and alphabetical record of painters of sport over the last 300 years. It covers a wide subject area - over 200 actively played sports (throughout the period studied) and some 7,000 artists. This Dictionary provides a source of information on the 7,000 or so artists - British or those working in Britain - who over the last 300 years have illustrated the 200 or more sports and pastimes ranging from otter hunting to table tennis and from bear baiting to golf. Where sports have been played mostly abroad, such as American football, the principal specialist artists have been included. Thus the book provides a compendium of illustrated sport as well as a mine of information. "The Dictionary of Sporting Artists 1650-1990", in common with other Antique Collectors' Club dictionaries, provides additional help for the collector. Where confusion between artists is likely, the author points out the dangers. Where there are peculiarities of dating or signature, these are spelt out. Where examples have been auctioned the dates are given.In most cases the artist is or has been a participant in the sport depicted and, in addition to the information mentioned above, the book contains a list of artists who painted each sport. ... Read more

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The year 1995 marks the 90th anniversary of Einstein's first description of the theory of relativity. In this unique reference book, Einstein's multi-disciplinary contributions to science and society are presented in an easy-to-read dictionary format. The book is a synthesis of existing literature on Einstein including his own writings, biographies, and the secondary literature published during the past 40 years. The author presents all facets of Einstein's life, which began in Ulm, Germany, and came to an end in Princeton, New Jersey, spanning a tumultuous period marked by two world wars and the dawn of the atomic age. ... Read more

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The Jewish Encyclopaedia, the monumental ten-volume resource on all aspects of Judaism, was originally published at the turn of the twentieth century. Introduced and compiled by Jacob Neusner, the Dictionary of Ancient Rabbis selects every entry from The Jewish Encyclopaedia devoted to the rabbis of the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmuds. TodayÂ’s scholars, students, clergy, and laity will find this a valuable companion volume to JudaismÂ’s classical texts. ... Read more