Beauty in a Box


Book Description

One of the first transnational, feminist studies of Canada’s black beauty culture and the role that media, retail, and consumers have played in its development, Beauty in a Box widens our understanding of the politics of black hair. The book analyzes advertisements and articles from media—newspapers, advertisements, television, and other sources—that focus on black communities in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and Calgary. The author explains the role local black community media has played in the promotion of African American–owned beauty products; how the segmentation of beauty culture (i.e., the sale of black beauty products on store shelves labelled “ethnic hair care”) occurred in Canada; and how black beauty culture, which was generally seen as a small niche market before the 1970s, entered Canada’s mainstream by way of department stores, drugstores, and big-box retailers. Beauty in a Box uses an interdisciplinary framework, engaging with African American history, critical race and cultural theory, consumer culture theory, media studies, diasporic art history, black feminism, visual culture, film studies, and political economy to explore the history of black beauty culture in both Canada and the United States.




Beauty of Cannabis


Book Description

Beauty of Cannabis is a visual journey into the spectacular marijuana strains being grown in the 21st Century. Award-winning photographer Spurs Broken takes us as deep as the lens will allow by directing light into the valleys between the leaves and through fissures full of crystal trichomes to reveal the beautiful strands, strings, and balls of earthly delight. Readers will learn to direct light inside each bud so it can reflect off the crystals to reveal beautiful colors and will discover the rewards of alternating the depth of field by a few microns to find the deep-orange pistils and the saturated brilliance that manifests from the contrast when a shot is done just right. Cannabis connoisseurs will delight in intimate views of what they’re smoking, as Spurs’ signature style of macro-photography reveals the makeup of each plant’s personality and characteristics of the individual strains in all their glory.




The Box Turtle


Book Description

An irresistibly cute story about finding the confidence to be yourself, starring a turtle in search of the perfect shell. Terrance the turtle was born without a shell, so he uses a cardboard box instead. Terrance loves his box. It keeps him dry on soggy days, safe from snooping strangers, and is big enough to cozy up with a friend. But when another turtle points out that Terrance's shell is, well, weird, he begins to wonder whether there might be a better shell out there... Eventually, and through much trial and error, Terrance learns that there's nothing wrong with being different--especially when it comes to being yourself.




100 Thimbles in a Box


Book Description

Korean handicrafts are often overshadowed by those of China and Japan, preventing them from being recognized for their unique charm and cultural value. Frustrated with this widespread ignorance of Korean crafts, two American authors set out to write 100 Thimbles in a Box: The Spirit and Beauty of Korean Handicrafts, hoping that an English-language book on the topic would help bring some deserving global attention to Korea s strong crafting history. The book s title draws from a tradition dating back to the Joseon Dynasty in which a bride would present handmade thimbles to her husband s female relatives to wish them good fortune and a long life. The stunning beauty of 44 of Korea s traditional crafts sorted into ceramics, fiber arts, paper, inlay, metal, wood, and painting is presented in detail with over 400 pictures found in the book. While other publications have focused on one or two of these handicraft categories, this is the first English-language guide that brings these diverse genres together in a single volume.




Beauty and the Beast


Book Description

Age: 8-9 years old Reading Level: 3rd grade The best illustrated fairytales for children! Once upon a time, there was a merchant who had three daughters. One day, he was arrested by a monstruous creature during a business trip. The monster agreed to let the merchant live only if he sent Beauty, one of his daughters, to live with him. The merchant did not know what to do but Beauty decided to honour her father's word and went to the Beast. The collection "Once Upon a Time" offers a new and richly illustrated version of the most famous fairytales. EXCERPT Once upon a time was a merchant who had three daughters. One day, while preparing to go on his travels, he promised to bring each one of them a gift. Beauty, the youngest and the kindest, asked her father to bring her only a red rose, because she loved roses very much. When the merchant was returning home, he was caught in a sudden storm and got lost in the forest. He saw a huge castle and, as the door was opened, he went inside to shelter. “Anybody home?” said the merchant but no one responded. Nobody was there, but he noticed a huge table laid with delicious food. The merchant had been travelling for a long time and was hungry so he sat and ate a hearty meal. In the same collection: • Thumbelina • The Ugly Duckling • The Brave Little Tailor • The Tin Soldier • The Musicians of Bremen • Hansel and Gretel • Three Little Pigs • Goldilocks and the 3 Bears • The Little Thumb • Puss in Boots • Little Red Riding Hood • Sleeping Beauty • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs • Cinderella • Peter Pan




The Beauty in Breaking


Book Description

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A New York Times Notable Book “Riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring.” —The New York Times Book Review “An incredibly moving memoir about what it means to be a doctor.” —Ellen Pompeo As seen/heard on Fresh Air, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Weekend Edition, and more An emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself. Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman. In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken—physically, emotionally, psychically. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process. The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper’s journey toward self-healing. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery. How to let go of fear even when the future is murky: How to tell the truth when it’s simpler to overlook it. How to understand that compassion isn’t the same as justice. As she shines a light on the systemic disenfranchisement of the patients she treats as they struggle to maintain their health and dignity, Harper comes to understand the importance of allowing ourselves to make peace with the past as we draw support from the present. In this hopeful, moving, and beautiful book, she passes along the precious, necessary lessons that she has learned as a daughter, a woman, and a physician.




Poke the Box


Book Description

"A one-two punch! Half kick in the ass, half cheerleading encouragement." —Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art If you are happy being just a dreamer, perhaps you don’t need this book. If you’re enjoying the status quo, don’t even consider reading this book. If you are content waiting for success to find you, please put this book down and go find something else to read. Why has Poke the Box become a cult classic? Because it’s a book that dares readers to do something they’re afraid of. It could be what you need, too. "Is Seth Godin the Pied Piper for however many of us have been afraid to fail? Will I answer his call? Will you?" —Peter Shermeta, reviewing the original edition of Poke the Box




Finding Beauty in a Broken World


Book Description

"Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision," Terry Tempest Williams tells us. "Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together." Ranging from Ravenna, Italy, where she learns the ancient art of mosaic, to the American Southwest, where she observes prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, to a small village in Rwanda where she joins genocide survivors to build a memorial from the rubble of war, Williams searches for meaning and community in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation. In her compassionate meditation on how nature and humans both collide and connect, Williams affirms a reverence for all life, and constructs a narrative of hopeful acts, taking that which is broken and creating something whole.




Performing Beauty in Participatory Art and Culture


Book Description

This book investigates the notion of beauty in participatory art, an interdisciplinary form that necessitates the audience’s agential participation and that is often seen in interactive art and technology-driven media installations. After considering established theories of beauty, for example, Plato, Alison, Hume, Kant, Gadamer and Santayana through to McMahon and Sartwell, Heinrich argues that the experience of beauty in participatory art demands a revised notion of beauty; a conception that accounts for the performative and ludic turn within various art forms and which is, in a broader sense, a notion of beauty suited to a participatory and technology-saturated culture. Through case studies of participatory art, he provides an art-theoretical approach to the concept of performative beauty; an approach that is then applied to the wider context of media and design artefacts.