The book explores the importance of free speech in America by telling the stories of its chief antagonists - the censors.

How do we appreciate a work of art? Why do we like some artworks but not others? Is there no accounting for taste? Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to explore connections between art, mind, and brain, Shimamura considers how we experience art. In a thoughtful and entertaining manner, the book explores how the brain interprets art by engaging our sensations, thoughts, and emotions. It describes interesting findings from psychological and brain sciences as a way to understand our aesthetic response to art. Beauty, disgust, surprise, anger, sadness, horror, and a myriad of other emotions can occur as we experience art. Some artworks may generate such feelings rather quickly, while others depend on thought and knowledge. Our response to art depends largely on what we know--from everyday knowledge about the world, from our cultural backgrounds, and from personal experience. Filled with artworks from many traditions and time points, "Experiencing Art" offers insightful ways of broadening one's approach and appreciation of art.

"One of the most remarkable combinations of a private-eye novel and psychological suspense story, with an entirely new slant, that has ever been published." — The New York Times Book Review At the center of this genre-bending tale of sex, death, and parental love is a private investigator known as The Eye, who has been seeking his missing daughter for many years. In the course of his search, he encounters a mysterious femme fatale who routinely attracts, robs, and murders wealthy men. The Eye knows perfectly well that this woman is not his long-lost daughter, yet he's compelled to follow her, destroying the evidence of her murders, covering her tracks, and taking an active — though silent — role in her crimes. This offbeat mystery's portrait of a pair of despondent loners presents a haunting tale of obsession. "A pivotal work in the history of mystery fiction." — The Guardian

The remarkable story of how an artist and a scientist in seventeenth-century Holland transformed the way we see the world. On a summer day in 1674, in the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek—a cloth salesman, local bureaucrat, and self-taught natural philosopher—gazed through a tiny lens set into a brass holder and discovered a never-before imagined world of microscopic life. At the same time, in a nearby attic, the painter Johannes Vermeer was using another optical device, a camera obscura, to experiment with light and create the most luminous pictures ever beheld. “See for yourself!” was the clarion call of the 1600s. Scientists peered at nature through microscopes and telescopes, making the discoveries in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and anatomy that ignited the Scientific Revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses, mirrors, and camera obscuras, creating extraordinarily detailed paintings of flowers and insects, and scenes filled with realistic effects of light, shadow, and color. By extending the reach of sight the new optical instruments prompted the realization that there is more than meets the eye. But they also raised questions about how we see and what it means to see. In answering these questions, scientists and artists in Delft changed how we perceive the world. In Eye of the Beholder, Laura J. Snyder transports us to the streets, inns, and guildhalls of seventeenth-century Holland, where artists and scientists gathered, and to their studios and laboratories, where they mixed paints and prepared canvases, ground and polished lenses, examined and dissected insects and other animals, and invented the modern notion of seeing. With charm and narrative flair Snyder brings Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek—and the men and women around them—vividly to life. The story of these two geniuses and the transformation they engendered shows us why we see the world—and our place within it—as we do today. Eye of the Beholder was named "A Best Art Book of the Year" by Christie's and "A Best Read of the Year" by New Scientist in 2015.

The cries of infants and children are familiar to essentially all adults, and we all have our own common sense notions of the meanings of various cries at each age level. As is often the case, in the study of various aspects ofhuman behavior we often investigate what seems self evident to the general public. For example,if an infant cries, he or she needs atttention;if the cry is different than usual, he or she is sick; and when we areupsetby othermatters, children's crying can be very annoy ing. As a pediatric clinician often faced with discussing with parents their concerns or lack of them with respect to their children's crying, these usual commonsense interpretations were frequently inadequate. As this book illustrates, when we investigate such everyday behaviors as children's crying and adults' responses to crying, the nature of the problem becomes surprisingly complex. As a pediatrician working in the newborn nursery early in my career, I knew from pediatric textbooks and from nursery nurses, that newborn infants with high, piercing cries were often abnormal. In order to teach this interestingphenomenon to others and tounderstand under what circumstances it occurred, I found I needed to know what consti tuted a high-pitched cry or even a normal cry, for that matter, and how often this occurred with sick infants. Certainly I saw sick infants who did not have high-pitched cries, but I still wonderedif their cries were deviant in some other way.

A hard-edged businessman and a beautiful art expert make a tantalizing mind-body connection at a new age resort until a killer threatens their piece of paradise in this “fun-filled and sensational tale by the incomparable Jayne Ann Krentz” (RT Book Reviews). Alexa Chambers has a flair for style, an eye for art, and a reputation in tatters after blowing the whistle on an employer who was selling fakes to wealthy clients. Now she runs a shop in her Arizona hometown, but she’s determined to rebuild her career even if it means taking risks. She begins secretly consults on an exquisite art collection being installed at the new Avalon Resorts. Her scheme might just work—if she can steer clear of the resort’s owner, the enigmatic and possibly dangerous J. L. Trask. Alexa was a scared teenager the last time she saw Trask, the man who accused her stepfather of murder. Insisting his dad’s fatal car crash had been no accident, Trask vowed one day he’d come back to Avalon for revenge. Now, twelve years later, their meeting is inevitable. Their attraction is immediate. And their chances of bliss are infinitesimal. Trask wants to piece together the past with Alexa’s help and get closer to this dazzling deco diva. Alexa wants to protect her family and figure out Trask’s real motivations. But when a killer emerges from the shadows, they have no choice but to team up to solve a deadly crime from long ago. As they trade sizzling sparks and snappy repartee, their trail leads to a trendy spa called the Dimensions Institute, whose flaky denizens and strange atmosphere suggest there is more hidden there than meets the eye. They don’t need a crystal ball to see that their survival—and relationship—depends on more than tantric breathing or a heavenly passion. They need a little help from a higher power: a true and trustworthy love.