A View from the Roof


Book Description

A university professor. A restaurateur. A Hollywood leading man. The Mackie Men of New Orleans have made success a family tradition. In A View from the Roof, Presidential Award-winning speaker Dr. Calvin Mackie reveals just how they did it. Through a slideshow of poignant stories involving the Mackie brothers' tough-as-nails roofer dad Willie, readers will learn the hands-on, humorous lessons that propelled Calvin and his brothers to the top of their professions. From the hot gable rooftops of New Orleans to the set of a Spike Lee film, this book will leave readers with a view they'll always remember.




The Shoe on the Roof


Book Description

Thomas Rosanoff was used by his father, an esteemed psychiatrist, as a test subject when he was a boy, being watched by researchers behind one-way glass for his entire childhood. Now a gifted med student, Thomas is the researcher, and his subjects are three homeless men, all of whom claim to be messiahs. But when Thomas's father intervenes in the experiment, events spin out of control and Thomas must confront the voices he hears in the labyrinth of his own mind.




The Museum on the Roof of the World


Book Description

For millions of people around the world, Tibet is a domain of undisturbed tradition, the Dalai Lama a spiritual guide. By contrast, the Tibet Museum opened in Lhasa by the Chinese in 1999 was designed to reclassify Tibetan objects as cultural relics and the Dalai Lama as obsolete. Suggesting that both these views are suspect, Clare E. Harris argues in The Museum on the Roof of the World that for the past one hundred and fifty years, British and Chinese collectors and curators have tried to convert Tibet itself into a museum, an image some Tibetans have begun to contest. This book is a powerful account of the museums created by, for, or on behalf of Tibetans and the nationalist agendas that have played out in them. Harris begins with the British public’s first encounter with Tibetan culture in 1854. She then examines the role of imperial collectors and photographers in representations of the region and visits competing museums of Tibet in India and Lhasa. Drawing on fieldwork in Tibetan communities, she also documents the activities of contemporary Tibetan artists as they try to displace the utopian visions of their country prevalent in the West, as well as the negative assessments of their heritage common in China. Illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this book addresses the pressing question of who has the right to represent Tibet in museums and beyond.




Four Walls and a Roof


Book Description

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A Guardian Best Architecture Book of the Year “Sharp, revealing, funny.” —The Guardian “An original and even occasionally hilarious book about losing ideals and finding them again... [De Graaf] deftly shows that architecture cannot be better or more pure than the flawed humans who make it.” —The Economist Architecture, we like to believe, is an elevated art form that shapes the world as it pleases. Four Walls and a Roof turns this fiction on its head, offering a candid account of what it’s really like to work as an architect. Drawing on his own tragicomic experiences in the field, Reinier de Graaf reveals the world of contemporary architecture in vivid snapshots: from the corridors of wealth in London, Moscow, and Dubai to the demolished hopes of postwar social housing in New York and St. Louis. We meet ambitious oligarchs, developers for whom architecture is nothing more than an investment, and layers of bureaucrats, consultants, and mysterious hangers-on who lie between any architect’s idea and the chance of its execution. “This is a book about power, money and influence, and architecture’s complete lack of any of them... Witty, insightful and funny, it is a (sometimes painful) dissection of a profession that thinks it is still in control.” —Financial Times “This is the most stimulating book on architecture and its practice that I have read for years.” —Architects’ Journal




On the Roof


Book Description

This view of a life-altering moment in our history—captured from one photographer’s Brooklyn rooftop—is a testament to human hope and resilience, and what we’ve learned about living in community. The roof of a New York apartment building, like some New York neighbors, can be elusive—you could live there for years and never see it. The unique constraints of 2020’s quarantine drove photographer and Brooklyn transplant Josh Katz up to his Bushwick rooftop and introduced him to both. What he discovered there astonished him. Families, lovers, dogs, meditators, artists, exercise fanatics, daredevils, drinkers, dancers—in this strange time the world below had found a way to continue ticking on up above, subject to new patterns and distances. And then, there were the pigeon fanciers, who had been up there for decades, watching the neighborhood change around them. Josh reached for his camera. The project grew from a man’s attempt to cope with his own isolation to a tender portrait of his community—captured entirely from his own roof—and a resonant chronicle of how some of us found new hope and space in a life-altering year. Characters as heartfelt as any in the now-classic Humans of New York accompany Josh’s keen observations on urban space, human interaction, and new ways of city living we can bring down from the roof to apply in a post-quarantine world.




Roof Life


Book Description

A celebrated art historian who has spent a lifetime looking at art writes about looking as a way of being in the world This is not a memoir. It does not take the form of a story. It is instead a kind of self-portrait, or perhaps several self-portraits. Svetlana Alpers had been keeping files: records of what she saw out the windows of her loft in New York; records of art sold, bought, or seen on her walls; records of foods found in markets and prepared in places where she lived; and records of herself seen in photographs, drawings, and paintings made by others. In solving the question of her father's place and date of birth, she reconstructs the life of her Russian grandfather in a distant and tumultuous Europe of a century ago. It was Roof Life that made it all come together. The title refers to what one discovers looking out from high windows with distant and distinctive views. In addition, it refers to the way one's attention is heightened and sharpened by confronting things that are unfamiliar, or that are made to appear unfamiliar by circumstances. It describes the immediacy of distance. Renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers assembles in these pages descriptions of things that mattered in a life that began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, continued in Berkeley, California, and is now lived in New York City. The experience of Europe informs it all.




Running on the Roof of the World


Book Description

A story of adventure, survival, courage, and hope, set in the vivid Himalayan landscape of Tibet and India. Tash lives in Tibet, where as a practicing Buddhist she must follow many rules to avoid the wrath of the occupying Chinese soldiers. Life remains peaceful as long as Tash, her family, and their community hide their religion and don’t mention its leader, the Dalai Lama. The quiet is ruptured when a man publicly sets himself on fire to protest the occupation. In the crackdown that follows, soldiers break into Tash’s house and seize her parents. Tash barely escapes, and soon she and her best friend, Sam, along with two borrowed yaks, flee across the mountains, where they face blizzards, hunger, a treacherous landscape, and the constant threat of capture. It’s a long, dangerous trip to the Indian border and safety—and not all will make it there. This action-packed novel tells a story of courage, hope, and the powerful will to survive, even in the most desperate circumstances.




Librarian on the Roof! A True Story


Book Description

2012-2013 Show Me Readers Nominee List (Missouri) When RoseAleta Laurell begins her new job at the Dr. Eugene Clark Library in Lockhart, Texas, she is surprised that the children of the town think the library is for adults. She vows to raise the money for a children's section and spends a week living and working on the library roof, even surviving a dangerous storm. With the help of the entire town, RoseAleta raises over $39,000 from within the community and across the country. Today if you look through the front window of the Eugene Clark Library, you will see shelves stacked full with children's books and tables and chairs just the right size. You will see artwork on the walls, and a row of busy computers. Best of all, you will always find crowds of children who love to read and learn inside the walls of the oldest library in Texas.




Walls Down, Roof Off


Book Description

Have you ever asked, 'Why must I go through this?' Suffering the loss of a miscarriage, Verneilia Wanza asked God that question. Through her search for God's will, she discovered an interest in Christian songwriting. Songwriting became an avenue in which she found her true calling as being an ambassador of Jesus Christ. But the steps that decision demanded required all the faith she had. In Walls Down, Roof Off, Verneilia shares her compelling account of living out her beliefs as everything crumbled around her. When she was forced to put her faith To The test, Verneilia made some unfavorable decisions in her struggle to follow God's prompting. But what she discovered changed her view of the Christian walk. Walls Down, Roof Off dispels the myth that life is 'all about me.' Follow Verneilia's path to this hard-earned truth and learn how Christians should view God.




Home Is a Roof Over a Pig


Book Description

“[A] down-to-earth memoir chronicling her family’s stint in the Chinese province of Shandong on the eve of the Beijing Olympics” (Publishers Weekly). When Aminta Arrington moves with her husband and three young children (including a daughter adopted from China) from suburban Georgia to Tai’an, a city where donkeys share the road with cars, the family is bewildered by seemingly endless cultural differences large and small. But with the help of new friends, they soon find their way. Full of humor and unexpectedly moving moments, Home Is a Roof Over a Pig recounts a transformative quest with a freshness that will delight. “A brutally honest and fascinating peek at life for an American family living in a foreign country. I was engrossed in the story as Arrington used her humor, and ultimately understanding and flexibility to survive, realize, and eventually love the contradictory land of China.” —Kay Bratt, bestselling author of Silent Tears: A Journey of Hope in a Chinese Orphanage “The power of Aminta Arrington’s Home Is a Roof Over a Pig is you can see both sides of the ‘China coin’ from it—something most people won’t get just by traveling through, or only by hearing about China in Western languages. Read it, it will help you dip into the real China.” —Xinran, author of The Good Women of China “A military wife turned ESL instructor’s sharp-eyed account of how the adoption of a Chinese baby girl led to her family’s life-changing decision to live and work in rural China . . . Candid and heartfelt.” —Kirkus Reviews