The beauty of Soviet brutalism: A photographic record of 90 weird and wonderful buildings from the last decades of the USSR  Photographer Frédéric Chaubin reveals 90 buildings sited in fourteen former Soviet Republics which express what he considers to be the fourth age of Soviet architecture. His poetic pictures reveal an unexpected rebirth of imagination, an unknown burgeoning that took place from 1970 until 1990. Contrary to the 1920s and 1950s, no “school” or main trend emerges here. These buildings represent a chaotic impulse brought about by a decaying system. Their diversity announced the end of the Soviet Union.

Taking advantage of the collapsing monolithic structure, the holes in the widening net, architects went far beyond modernism, going back to the roots or freely innovating. Some of the daring ones completed projects that the Constructivists would have dreamt of (Druzhba Sanatorium, Yalta), others expressed their imagination in an expressionist way (Palace of Weddings, Tbilisi). A summer camp, inspired by sketches of a prototype lunar base, lays claim to Suprematist influence (Prometheus youth camp, Bogatyr). Then comes the "speaking architecture" widespread in the last years of the USSR: a crematorium adorned with concrete flames (Crematorium, Kiev), a technological institute with a flying saucer crashed on the roof (Institute of Scientific Research, Kiev), a political center watching you like Big Brother (House of Soviets, Kaliningrad). This puzzle of styles testifies to all the ideological dreams of the period, from the obsession with the cosmos to the rebirth of identity. It also outlines the geography of the USSR, showing how local influences made their exotic twists before the country was brought to its end.

Frédéric Chaubin’s Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed was elected best book on architecture of the year 2010 by the International Artbook and Film Festival in Perpignan/France (Festival International du Livre d’Art & du Film Perpignan).   Text in English, French, and German

With more than three million copies sold, this perennial bestseller by James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Kevin Zraly is the most popular wine guide on the market. 

“When it comes to beginners’ wine guides, Windows on the World Complete Wine Course is one of the perennial best.” —Wall Street Journal
In the clear, engaging style that has made this comprehensive book a national and international favorite for more than three decades, Kevin Zraly—America's ultimate wine educator and the creator of the Windows on the World Wine School—demystifies every aspect of wine: from grape varieties and their flavors, different types and styles of wines, and how they’re produced, to the latest winemaking developments, how to read a wine label, and the physiology of smell and taste. Covering the world of wine from the renowned reds of Bordeaux and California to the cutting-edge whites of Washington State and New Zealand, this essential volume features lush new photographs, a wealth of enlightening infographics, clear maps of each region, guided tastings, the best 500 wines in the world under $30, and hundreds of labels to help you identify wines worth tasting. Completing this must-have guide are notes on food pairings, frequently asked questions, a directory of resources, and a glossary of select terms. This newly revised and expanded 2017 edition introduces a fresh new interior design, the latest vintages to savor, and much more for beginners and experts alike. The Windows on the World Complete Wine Course will give you all the tools you need to discover and enjoy the perfect wines for you.

Brick City is a model builder's festival in book form. What lends special distinction to the models is the way they're constructed. Each is made entirely of LEGO bricks! Known for decades as a favorite children's toy, LEGO bricks have entered the adult model builder's repertoire in recent years. Author and model maker Warren Elsmore presents instructions for neophyte LEGO modelers plus plans for constructing specific buildings and landmarks, along with vivid photos of completed LEGO models. The models represent landmarks from all over the world, and include—

St. Basil's CathedralNew York's New World Trade CenterThe Arc de TriompheRome's ColosseumA London taxicabHong Kong ferriesBuckingham Palace. . . and many others

Featuring amazing photos of LEGO models, and scale drawings of structural details to guide model builders, Brick City presents a modeler's panorama of contemporary urban landscapes. More than 400 illustrations in color and black and white.

BONUS POSTERS: Enclosed with the book are two dramatic posters featuring LEGO® model photos of architectural world landmarks. The posters, which are suitable for framing, unfold to 17 1/2" x 24 3/4"

An indispensable and distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means for them to be writing, from widely admired writer and teacher Verlyn Klinkenborg.
 
Klinkenborg believes that most of our received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but an obstacle to our ability to write. In Several Short Sentences About Writing, he sets out to help us unlearn that “wisdom”—about genius, about creativity, about writer’s block, topic sentences, and outline—and understand that writing is just as much about thinking, noticing, and learning what it means to be involved in the act of writing. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. Instead it is a gathering of starting points in a journey toward lively, lucid, satisfying self-expression.

For years, pundits have trumpeted the earthshattering changes that big data and smart networks will soon bring to our cities. But what if cities have long been built for intelligence, maybe for millennia? In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative argument that our urban spaces have been “smart” and mediated for thousands of years.

Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt goes far beyond the standard historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Mattern shows that in their architecture, laws, street layouts, and civic knowledge—and through technologies including the telephone, telegraph, radio, printing, writing, and even the human voice—cities have long negotiated a rich exchange between analog and digital, code and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore. 

Mattern’s vivid prose takes readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, synthesizing a new narrative for our urban spaces. Taking media archaeology to the city’s streets, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt reveals new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.

Fear has a color. It’s the gruesome glow of yellow, wielded by the totalitarian tyrant Sinestro and his Yellow Lanterns. And now the entire universe is bathed in its sinister light. The Sinestro Corps have replaced the Green Lanterns as the peacekeepers of the galaxy. 
 
Oa, the homeworld of the Guardians and their Green Lantern Corps, is no more. In its place at the center of the universe orbits Warworld, Sinestro’s home base. The Green Lanterns have vanished, leaving no one to oppose the Sinestro Corps’ reign of terror.
 
No one, that is, except the last Lantern: Hal Jordan.
 
Convicted of crimes he didn’t commit, reduced to a being of pure thought and will, Hal must now battle back from the brink to reform the Corps and free all of creation from his archenemy’s iron fist. 
 
Sinestro’s word is law…but Hal Jordan is the lawbreaker!
 
Collects issues #1-7 and the HAL JORDAN AND THE GREEN LANTERN CORPS: REBIRTH one-shot special.

A part of DC Rebirth!

Hal Jordan is about to go from the head of the Green Lantern Corps to an army of one. Jordan's long, illustrious—and tumultuous—tenure with the Corps takes several hairpin turns. At lightspeed. Toward a black hole. In a blender!

For starters, the Green Lantern Corps has disappeared, and now Sinestro's own Corps enforces his uniquely brutal brand of law and order in the universe. As a result, Jordan has no ring to sling, or Sector 2814 (a.k.a. Earth) to protect. (So more of the usual for Hal!)

Green Lantern veteran Robert Venditti teams up with Rafa Sandoval and Ethan Van Sciver to pilot HAL JORDAN & THE GREEN LANTERN CORPS VOL. 2! Collects HAL JORDAN & THE GREEN LANTERN CORPS #8-13.

Rebirth honors the richest history in comics, while continuing to look towards the future. These are the most innovative and modern stories featuring the world's greatest superheroes, told by some of the finest storytellers in the business.

Honoring the past, protecting our present, and looking towards the future. This is the next chapter in the ongoing saga of the DC Universe. The legacy continues.

The acclaimed creative team of writer Sam Humphries and artists Robson Rocha and Eduardo Pansica  take Earth’s newest Green Lanterns on thrilling adventures around the Earth and across the cosmos in GREEN LANTERNS VOL. 3: POLARITY!
 
Simon Baz—the Green Lantern who carries a gun. Jessica Cruz—the Green Lantern who struggles with crippling anxiety. They’re unlikely Lanterns, unlikely partners and even unlikelier members of the mighty Justice League.
 
But being members of the world’s greatest superhero team also means having to deal with their enemies. Enemies like Dr. Polaris, the master of magnetism, who has just been freed from his imprisonment at the hands of Amanda Waller. Now it’s up to Earth’s Green Lanterns to stop him before he unleashes his revenge on the entire world.
 
Collects GREEN LANTERNS #15-21.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

Goodreads Choice Awards Semifinalist!

B&N Editor's Pick - Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2017 

From bestselling author Neal Stephenson and critically acclaimed novelist Nicole Galland comes a captivating and complex near-future thriller combining history, science, magic, mystery, intrigue, and adventure that questions the very foundations of the modern world.

When Melisande Stokes, an expert in linguistics and languages, accidently meets military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons in a hallway at Harvard University, it is the beginning of a chain of events that will alter their lives and human history itself. The young man from a shadowy government entity approaches Mel, a low-level faculty member, with an incredible offer. The only condition: she must swear herself to secrecy in return for the rather large sum of money.

Tristan needs Mel to translate some very old documents, which, if authentic, are earth-shattering. They prove that magic actually existed and was practiced for centuries. But the arrival of the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment weakened its power and endangered its practitioners. Magic stopped working altogether in 1851, at the time of the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace—the world’s fair celebrating the rise of industrial technology and commerce. Something about the modern world "jams" the "frequencies" used by magic, and it’s up to Tristan to find out why.

And so the Department of Diachronic Operations—D.O.D.O.—gets cracking on its real mission: to develop a device that can bring magic back, and send Diachronic Operatives back in time to keep it alive . . . and meddle with a little history at the same time. But while Tristan and his expanding operation master the science and build the technology, they overlook the mercurial—and treacherous—nature of the human heart.

Written with the genius, complexity, and innovation that characterize all of Neal Stephenson’s work and steeped with the down-to-earth warmth and humor of Nicole Galland’s storytelling style, this exciting and vividly realized work of science fiction will make you believe in the impossible, and take you to places—and times—beyond imagining.

An instant classic of American sportswriting—the tennis essays of David Foster Wallace, “the best mind of his generation” (A. O. Scott) and “the best tennis-writer of all time” (New York Times)
 
Gathered for the first time in a deluxe collector's edition, here are David Foster Wallace's legendary writings on tennis, five tour-de-force pieces written with a competitor's insight and a fan's obsessive enthusiasm. Wallace brings his dazzling literary magic to the game he loved as he celebrates the other-worldly genius of Roger Federer; offers a wickedly witty disection of Tracy Austin's memoir; considers the artistry of Michael Joyce, a supremely disciplined athlete on the threshold of fame; resists the crush of commerce at the U.S. Open; and recalls his own career as a "near-great" junior player.

Whiting Award-winning writer John Jeremiah Sullivan provides an introduction.

Laughs abound in this bestselling Christmas classic by Barbara Robinson! The Best Christmas Pageant Ever follows the outrageous shenanigans of the Herdman siblings, or “the worst kids in the history of the world.” The siblings take over the annual Christmas pageant in a hilarious yet heartwarming tale involving the Three Wise Men, a ham, scared shepherds, and six rowdy kids.

Ralph, Imogene, Leroy, Claude, Ollie, and Gladys Herdman are an awful bunch. They set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s toolshed, blackmailed Wanda Pierce to get her charm bracelet, and smacked Alice Wendelken across the head. And that’s just the start! When the Herdmans show up at church for the free snacks and suddenly take over the Christmas pageant, the other kids are shocked. It’s obvious that they’re up to no good. But Christmas magic is all around and the Herdmans, who have never heard the Christmas story before, start to reimagine it in their own way.

This year’s pageant is definitely like no other, but maybe that’s exactly what makes it so special.

You enter the classroom as a subject-matter expert—but not necessarily as a teaching expert. You face the daunting prospect of quickly getting up to speed on teaching’s myriad responsibilities.

To compound the challenge, formal training for adjuncts is often scarce or spotty at best.

What are you to do, then, to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for classroom success?

Essential Teaching Principles: A Resource Collection for Adjunct Faculty was created to meet that very need. It provides a wealth of both research-driven and classroom-tested best practices to help adjuncts develop the knowledge and skills required to run a successful classroom.

A collection of dozens of articles drawn from the pages of The Teaching Professor newsletter, this helpful guide was compiled and edited to ensure student success by Maryellen Weimer, PhD, the newsletter’s longtime editor and an award-winning professor emerita of teaching and learning at Penn State Berks.

Featuring contributions from an exceptional assembly of experienced educators, Essential Teaching Principles: A Resource Collection for Adjunct Faculty is organized into seven chapters, each focused on a core aspect of teaching: Mastering instruction essentialsDesigning coursesAdvancing student learningCreating an optimal learning climateConstructing meaningful assessmentsGiving students feedbackTeaching online

Throughout the guide, you will find careful examinations of a wide range of issues critical to classroom success. These include: Build a syllabusUse active learning to keep students engaged“Right-size” course contentDevelop meaningful assignmentsManage a classroomDevelop a “teaching persona”Create a good climate for learningDevelop effective exams and quizzesProtect academic integrityMake grading both meaningful and manageable

For those whose work also takes them into the online classroom, there is an entire chapter devoted to the fundamentals of teaching in that space as well.

Compact and reader-friendly, Essential Teaching Principles: A Resource Collection for Adjunct Faculty is conveniently organized to serve as a ready reference whenever a new teaching challenge arises—whether it’s refreshing older course design, overcoming a student’s objection to a grade, or fine-tuning assessments. And because each of its dozens of articles include references and resource lists, it’s easy to pursue a given subject in even greater depth.

Essential Teaching Principles: A Resource Collection for Adjunct Faculty lets you enter the classroom as confident in your teaching ability as you are in your subject-matter knowledge. It’s an important step forward in your professional development.

Bulk Purchases

To purchase multiple print copies of this book, visit www.MagnaGroupBooks.com

Part of a series, this updated guide contains information on all of the city's major and lesser-known monuments, churches and museums. Coverage is given to the recent excavations and restorations in the Forum, on the Palatine and the Circus of Maxentius on the Appian Way. The restoration of Michelangelo's frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is also described in full. Alta Macadam is also the author of "Blue Guides Northern Italy, Florence and Sicily".

DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Florence & Tuscany will lead you straight to the best attractions the charming city of Florence and awe-inspiring Tuscany region has to offer.

You'll find detailed listings of the best hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops for all budgets in this fully updated guide, plus in-depth coverage of all the unforgettable sights in Florence and Tuscany. This uniquely visual travel guide to Florence and Tuscany also includes illustrated cutaways of floor plans and reconstructions of the region's stunning architecture.

The pull-out map, clearly marked with sights from the guidebook, includes detailed street views of all the key areas. Transportation maps and information on the most useful tickets to buy for your stay help you get the most out of your trip. There's even a chart showing the walking distances between major sights and attractions.

DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Florence & Tuscany shows you what others only tell you.