With bibliography of globes made in the Low Countries, ca. 1525-1800.

"Hila was born in Shkodra in 1944, and lives and works in Tirana. During his studies in the 1960s he experimented timidly with deformation. In 1972 he painted "Planting of Trees", a pleasant picture rendered slightly unreal through the use of color, which because of its departure from the approved socialist realist doctrine, soon became a pretext for ordering him to work in a poultry processing plant, where his main task was hauling sacks. In the evenings he secretly created a series of drawings documenting the life of the workers (the "Poultry" series, 1975-76), harrowing in their raw realism. In the 1990s, seeking a path back to painting, Hila carefully observed life evolving after the fall of Enver Hoxha's regime and tried to depict the realities of the Albanian transformation. In Hila's view the Eastern European experience is stripped of accident or adventure typical of many presentations of this time, giving it instead the weight of distilled general truths, as if he were its final chronicler. An influential teacher, Edi Hila was formerly professor at the Tirana Academy of Fine Arts where he taught the well-regarded contemporary artists Anri Sala and Adrian Paci, as well the artist, writer, politician, and current Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama."--Site Web du musée

Almost the only indisputable fact about Colonel Tom Parker is that he was the manager of the greatest performer in popular music: Elvis Presley. His real name wasn’t Tom Parker †“ indeed, he wasn’t an American at all, but a Dutch immigrant called Andreas van Kujik. And he certainly wasn’t a proper military colonel: he purchased his title from a man in Louisiana. But while the Colonel has long been acknowledged as something of a charlatan, this book is the first to reveal the extraordinary extent of the secrets he concealed, and the consequences for the career, and ultimately the life, of the star he managed. As Alanna Nash’ prodigious research has discovered, the Colonel left Holland most probably because, at the age of twenty, he bludgeoned a woman to death. Entering the US illegally, he then enlisted in the army as ‘Tom Parker’. But, with supreme irony for someone later styling himself as Colonel, Parker’s military career ended in desertion, and discharge after a psychiatrist had certified him as a psychopath. He then became a fairground barker, working sideshows with a zeal for small-scale huckstering and the casual scam that never left him. And by the height of Elvis’s success, Parker had become a pathological gambler who, at the same time as he was taking, amazingly, a full 50% of Presley’s earnings, frittered away all his wealth in the casinos of Las Vegas. As Nash shows, therefore, the often baffling trajectory of Elvis Presley’s career makes perfect sense once the secret imperatives of the Colonel’s life are known. Parker never booked Presley for a tour of Europe because of the dark secret that ensured he himself could never return there. Even at his most famous, Elvis was still being booked to play out-of-the-way towns in North Carolina †“ because the former fairground barker (who shamelessly negotiated as such even with top record company and film executives) knew them from his days on the circus circuit. And Elvis was trapped playing years of arduous seasons in Las Vegas †“ two shows nightly, seven days a week, until boredom and despair brought on the excessive drug use that killed him †“ because for Parker he was “an open chit†? whose huge earnings prevented his manager’s losses at the gambling tables being called in. Alanna Nash knew Parker towards the end of his life, and has now uncovered the whole story, improbable, shocking, and never less than compelling, of how this larger-than-life man made, and then unmade, popular music’s first and greatest superstar.

The Blaeu atlases.