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The Colors of Infamy

Author: Albert Cossery

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2011-11-23

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13: 0811217957

A gentleman pickpocket, elegant to the bone, plies the best cafes of Cairo. Ossama is a thief: "not a minister, banker or real estate developer - a modest thief". His country may be a disaster but he is a hedonist, convinced that "nothing on this Earth is tragic for an intelligent man". In one fat victims wallet, he discovers a highly compromising letter, revealing bribery, corrupt ministers, and lethally shoddy building practices. He decides he must act...

A Splendid Conspiracy

Author: Albert Cossery

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2010-05-25

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0811221261

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Three friends in a small Egyptian city celebrate idleness, elegance, and joie de vivre. Summoned home to Egypt after a long European debauch (disguised as “study”), our hero Teymour—in the opening line of A Splendid Conspiracy—is feeling “as unlucky as a flea on a bald man’s head.” Poor Teymour sits forlorn in a provincial café, a far cry from his beloved Paris. Two old friends, however, rescue him. They applaud his phony diploma as perfect in “a world where everything is false” and they draw him into their hedonistic rounds as gentlemen of leisure. Life, they explain, “while essentially pointless is extremely interesting.” The small city may seem tedious, but there are women to seduce, powerful men to tease, and also strange events: rich notables are disappearing. Eyeing the machinations of our three pleasure seekers and nervous about the missing rich men, the authorities soon see—in complex schemes to bed young girls—signs of political conspiracies. The three young men, although mistaken for terrorists, enjoy freedom, wit, and romance. After all, though “not every man is capable of appreciating what is around him,” the conspirators in pleasure certainly do.

Proud Beggars

Author: Albert Cossery

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2011-12-27

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1590174631

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Early in Proud Beggars, a brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel. But the real mystery at the heart of Albert Cossery’s wry black comedy is not the cause of this death but the paradoxical richness to be found in even the most materially impoverished life. Chief among Cossery’s proud beggars is Gohar, a former professor turned whorehouse accountant, hashish aficionado, and street philosopher. Such is his native charm that he has accumulated a small coterie that includes Yeghen, a rhapsodic poet and drug dealer, and El Kordi, an ineffectual clerk and would-be revolutionary who dreams of rescuing a consumptive prostitute. The police investigator Nour El Dine, harboring a dark secret of his own, suspects all three of the murder but finds himself captivated by their warm good humor. How is it that they live amid degrading poverty, yet possess a joie de vivre that even the most assiduous forces of state cannot suppress? Do they, despite their rejection of social norms and all ambition, hold the secret of contentment? And so this short novel, considered one of Cossery’s masterpieces, is at once biting social commentary, police procedural, and a mischievous delight in its own right.

Laziness in the Fertile Valley

Author: Albert Cossery

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2013-11-19

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0811218740

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A portrait of a family of proud layabouts who avoid work and sleep all day by the Egyptian writer often referred to as "the Voltaire of the Nile" Laziness in the Fertile Valley is Albert Cossery’s biting social satire about a father, his three sons, and their uncle — slackers one and all. One brother has been sleeping for almost seven years, waking only to use the bathroom and eat a meal. Another savagely defends the household from women. Serag, the youngest, is the only member of the family interested in getting a job. But even he — try as he might — has a hard time resisting the call of laziness.

Kentuckians and Pearl Harbor

Author: Berry Craig

Publisher: South Limestone

Published: 2020-11

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9781949669275

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When the air raid alarm sounded around 7:55 a.m. on December 7, 1941, Gunner's Mate Second Class James Allard Vessels of Paducah was preparing to participate in morning colors aboard the USS Arizona. In the scramble for battle stations, Vessels quickly climbed to a machine gun platform high atop the mainmast as others descended below decks to help pass ammunition up to gunners. At 8:06, a bomb exploded and the Arizona sank. Vessels's lofty perch saved his life, but most of his shipmates were not so lucky. In Kentuckians and Pearl Harbor, Berry Craig employs an impressive array of newspapers, unpublished memoirs, oral histories, and official military records to offer a ground-up look at the day that Franklin D. Roosevelt said would "live in infamy," and its aftermath in the Bluegrass State. In a series of vignettes, Craig uncovers the untold, forgotten, or little-known stories of ordinary people -- military and civilian -- on the most extraordinary day of their lives. Craig concludes by exploring the home front reaction to this pivotal event in American history. Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor swept away any illusions Kentuckians had about being able to stay out of World War II. From Paducah to Pikeville, people sprang to action. Their voices emerge and come back to life in this engaging and timely history.

The House of Certain Death

Author: Albert Cossery

Publisher:

Published: 1949

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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Green

Author: Michel Pastoureau

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-08-24

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 069115936X

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In this beautiful and richly illustrated book, the acclaimed author of Blue and Black presents a fascinating and revealing history of the color green in European societies from prehistoric times to today. Examining the evolving place of green in art, clothes, literature, religion, science, and everyday life, Michel Pastoureau traces how culture has profoundly changed the perception and meaning of the color over millennia—and how we misread cultural, social, and art history when we assume that colors have always signified what they do today. Filled with entertaining and enlightening anecdotes, Green shows that the color has been ambivalent: a symbol of life, luck, and hope, but also disorder, greed, poison, and the devil. Chemically unstable, green pigments were long difficult to produce and even harder to fix. Not surprisingly, the color has been associated with all that is changeable and fleeting: childhood, love, and money. Only in the Romantic period did green definitively become the color of nature. Pastoureau also explains why the color was connected with the Roman emperor Nero, how it became the color of Islam, why Goethe believed it was the color of the middle class, why some nineteenth-century scholars speculated that the ancient Greeks couldn’t see green, and how the color was denigrated by Kandinsky and the Bauhaus. More broadly, Green demonstrates that the history of the color is, to a large degree, one of dramatic reversal: long absent, ignored, or rejected, green today has become a ubiquitous and soothing presence as the symbol of environmental causes and the mission to save the planet. With its striking design and compelling text, Green will delight anyone who is interested in history, culture, art, fashion, or media.

Practical Handbook of Thematic Cartography

Author: Nicolas Lambert

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2020-05-10

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1000061809

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Maps are tools used to understand space, discover territories, communicate information, and explain the results of geographical analysis. This practical handbook is about thematic cartography. With more than 120 colorful amazing illustrations, numerous boxed texts, definitions, and helpful tools, this step-by-step introduction to cartography is both the art of understanding the world and a powerful tool for explaining it. Through many hands-on tests, the reader will learn how to produce an interesting and communicative map applied to any spatial theme. Written by experienced scholars and experts in cartography, this book is an excellent resource for undergraduate students and non-cartographers interested in designing, understanding, and interpreting maps. It includes practical exercises explained in the form of a game and provides a concise, accessible, and current address of cartographic principles, allowing readers to go deeper into cartographic design. It can be read from beginning to end like an essay or just by dipping into it for information as needed.

Colors Demonic and Divine

Author: Herman Pleij

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 9780231130226

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Including a wealth of vivid detail and ranging over theology, poetry, painting, heraldry, fashion, and daily life, this book elucidates the attitudes toward color in medieval times and the effect these attitudes still have on modern society.

Saracens, Demons, & Jews

Author: Debra Higgs Strickland

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780691057194

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These images, which reached a broad and socially varied audience across Western Europe, appeared in virtually all artistic media, including illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, sculpture, metalwork, and tapestry.".