Fallen Idols


Book Description

An Economist Best Book of the Year In this timely and lively look at the act of toppling monuments, the popular historian and author of Blood and Sand explores the vital question of how a society remembers—and confronts—the past. In 2020, history came tumbling down. From the US and the UK to Belgium, New Zealand, and Bangladesh, Black Lives Matter protesters defaced, and in some cases, hauled down statues of Confederate icons, slaveholders, and imperialists. General Robert E. Lee, head of the Confederate Army, was covered in graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. Edward Colston, a member of Parliament and slave trader, was knocked off his plinth in Bristol, England, and hurled into the harbor. Statues of Christopher Columbus were toppled in Minnesota, burned and thrown into a lake in Virginia, and beheaded in Massachusetts. Belgian King Leopold II was set on fire in Antwerp and doused in red paint in Ghent. Winston Churchill’s monument in London was daubed with the word “racist.” As these iconic effigies fell, the backlash was swift and intense. But as the past three hundred years have shown, history is not erased when statues are removed. If anything, Alex von Tunzelmann reminds us, it is made. Exploring the rise and fall of twelve famous, yet now controversial statues, she takes us on a fascinating global historical tour around North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, filled with larger than life characters and dramatic stories. Von Tunzelmann reveals that statues are not historical records but political statements and distinguishes between statuary—the representation of “virtuous” individuals, usually “Great Men”—and other forms of sculpture, public art, and memorialization. Nobody wants to get rid of all memorials. But Fallen Idols asks: have statues had their day?




Fallen Idol


Book Description

SOMETIMES SUICIDE IS JUST A FACADE When a disgraced former pop star plummets to her death from her Osaka apartment, all signs paint a picture of a troubled young woman who took her own life. But once her parents hire Kyoko Nakamura to learn the truth, the private detective discovers not everything is as it seems. Kyoko’s investigation will lead her into a world of drugs and prostitution, face to face with dangerous criminals, and through the seedy underbelly of Japan’s music industry. With all odds against her, can Kyoko redeem herself for a past failure by finding justice for a fallen idol? From Percival Constantine comes a thrilling new mystery series, set in one of the world's most intriguing locales! “In FALLEN IDOL, the harsh shadows cast by the twisty neon of Osaka hide bad intent but it’s where the answers lie, and for resourceful PI Kyoko Nakamura there’s no turning away.” – Gary Phillips, author of Batman: The Killing Joke novelization




A Fallen Idol


Book Description




Fallen Idols


Book Description

Its a scandal! How often we use that phrase and what a catalogue of sins it covers. Thats what this book is all about. It is literally a catalogue of sins committed by some of the most celebrated names on the planet.Within these covers are startling stories of scandals during a century when screen idols seemed to vie with each other in outraging public decency. It was an age when fan fever was at its height and an endless supply of shocking revelations emerged to fuel the frenzy.Because of the perpetrators superstar status, the shame of exposure was often heightened, not only wrecking reputations but often harming careers and, at least, ensuring very public humiliation.The lessons learned from these cases of celebrity scandal (though often, it seems, not by the celebrities themselves) is that the bigger the star, the harder the fall and that deceit and intrigue so often turn hard-won fame into instant infamy.




Women in Hispanic Literature


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Fallen Idols


Book Description

This rollicking thriller is being reissued to coincide with its sequel, Fatal Secrets. Publisher Willy Hanson has just acquired a most important property--a manuscript expose that can bring down a powerful senator. Because of it, he will be hunted by contract killers, the FBI, and the senator himself.




Fallen Idols


Book Description

Prominent archaeologists Walt and Jocelyn Gaines had just completed the latest phase of excavation of a fabulous Mayan ruin when they were waylaid by bandits.




Fallen Idols (lacrimae Rerum)


Book Description

Fallen Idols is a memoir that begins in the radical sixties in Greenwich Village. The author, the young Leonard Schulman, is living on West Fourth street, just two blocks away from the young emigre from Duluth, Minn.. Bob Dylan.... The author of this charming and engaging memoir, already knows of the young genius, Mr. Dylan, having been exposed to early Dylan by his first love at Brooklyn College. The songs and life of Dylan are to affect our hero in curious ways. In the course of this book he comes to know two photographers--David Gahr and Barry Feinstein--who were close to Mr. Dylan. They tell him stories unheard of before the the great bard. Schulman comes to know other important people too--mostly through his work at Time magazine. How a Brooklyn street kid, got the job and his work at the magazine (for nearly 30 years) is a big part of the book. In the course of his life he meets many people whom he comes to see as 'fallen idols." One of the most important is James Wilde, Time magazine's most intrepid war correspondent. Mr. Wilde becomes a friend and mentor. In the nineties he travels to work for Wilde in Time's Nairobi office as a stringer. Here many adventures occur (worthy of a movie). There are other fallen idols. Too numerous to enumerate. But let me mention at least one--Vittorio Fiorucci--the monstre sacre and great Montreal artist. The creator of Juste Pour Rire's little green man. The book follows in the great literary tradition of Kerouac and Cormac McCarthy as he (Schulman) traverses--over a lifetime--wide areas of the globe--seeking and finding moments of joy and passion and nirvana. It is a journey that will excite you with the tears of things, as he seeks to find, along with all of us--permanence and love. (Another of his fallen idols is Norman Mailer and. . . oh, you'll just have to read the book.) But reader beware, Mr. Schulman's book is not for the faint of heart. So be careful. . . this book may knock you out. Like Hamlet advised "t'were as if a mirror were held up to nature." Human nature, that is. And it ain't always pretty.




Fallen Idol


Book Description




A Fallen Idol Is Still a God


Book Description

A Fallen Idol Is Still a God elucidates the historical distinctiveness and significance of the seminal nineteenth-century Russian poet, playwright, and novelist Mikhail Iurevich Lermontov (1814-1841). It does so by demonstrating that Lermontov's works illustrate the condition of living in an epoch of transition. Lermontov's particular epoch was that of post-Romanticism, a time when the twilight of Romanticism was dimming but the dawn of Realism had yet to appear. Through close and comparative readings, the book explores the singular metaphysical, psychological, ethical, and aesthetic ambiguities and ambivalences that mark Lermontov's works, and tellingly reflect the transition out of Romanticism and the nature of post-Romanticism. Overall, the book reveals that, although confined to his transitional epoch, Lermontov did not succumb to it; instead, he probed its character and evoked its historical import. And the book concludes that Lermontov's works have resonance for our transitional era in the early twenty-first century as well.