A unique and hopeful story of how one woman and her family were transformed by her child's multiple disabilities and inability to talk and how she, in turn, transformed a community. This intimate, no-holds barred memoir shares one family's experiences with a child who is both autistic and physically disabled. It is a story of infectious laughter, blood on the floor, intense physical conflict, and of two little girls growing up in the shadow of their charming and fitful brother. And it is the story of a mother and writer and the illuminating effect of imagining the world through the eyes of her beautiful, charismatic, and nonverbal son, Felix. Felix and his sisters inspire Eliza to start Extreme Kids, a community center that connects families with children with disabilities through the arts and play, and transform how she saw herself and the world. She writes of the joy this project brings her, as well as the disconnect of being lauded for helping others at the same time that she cannot help her own son. As Felix grows bigger and stronger, his assaults against himself grow more destructive. When his bruised limbs and face prompt Child Services to investigate the Factors for abuse, Eliza realizes how dangerous her home has become. Strange Beauty is a personal story, but it shines a light on the combustible conditions many families are living in at this moment. The United States offers parents whose children are prone to violence very little help. That Eliza's story ends happily, with Felix thriving at Crotched Mountain School, is due more to luck than policy. There are few such schools and many such children. When children are violent, we fail to account for the internal and external pressures that lead to violence. This is both cruel and counterproductive, for people with disabilities have much to teach us, if we will only listen.

With a New Afterword "Our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann."--Richard Feynman Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way. Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-Mann's prodigious talent was evident from an early age--he entered Yale at 15, completed his Ph.D. at 21, and was soon identifying the structures of the world's smallest components and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe. Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour-de-force of both science writing and biography.

"A study of reliquaries as a form of representation in medieval art. Explores how reliquaries stage the importance and meaning of relics using a wide range of artistic means from material and ornament to metaphor and symbolism"--Provided by publisher.

Strange Beauty provides a new perspective on early Celtic stories of the Otherworld and their relevance to today's ecological concerns, arguing for a contemporary re-reading of the Otherworld trope in relation to physical experience.

For his photographs and films, the Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf creates a world that has been staged down to its smallest detail. It seems very similar to ours, but its artificiality give it an enigmatic sense. Still, with their visuals borrowed from the film and advertising industries, the works are only flawlessly striking on the surface; in fact, they deal with questions of democracy, equality, or self-determination. Marking Olaf's first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany, the companion publication deals with essential aspects of Olaf's art and offers an attractive survey of his multifaceted oeuvre from the past forty years. Olaf's most recent works, some of which were created especially for the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Munich, will also be shown.

This compact, indispensable overview answers a vexed question: Why do so many works of modern and postmodern literature and art seem designed to appear 'strange', and how can they still cause pleasure in the beholder? To help overcome the initial barrier caused by this 'strangeness', the general reader is given an initial, non-technical description of the 'aesthetic of the strange' as it is experienced in the reading or viewing process. There follows a broad survey of modern and postmodern trends, illustrating their staggering variety and making plain the manifold methods and strategies adopted by writers and artists to 'make it strange'. The book closes with a systematic summary of the theoretical underpinnings of the 'aesthetic of the strange', focussing on the ways in which it differs from both the earlier 'aesthetic of the beautiful' and the 'aesthetic of the sublime'. It is made amply clear that the strangeness characteristic of modern and postmodern art has ushered in an entirely new, 'third' kind of aesthetic – one that has undergone further transformation over the past two decades. Beyond its usefulness as a practical introduction to the 'aesthetic of the strange', the present study also takes up the most recent, cutting-edge aspects of scholarly debate, while initiates are offered an original approach to the theoretical implications of this seminal phenomenon.

In an age dominated by nationalism and ethnic conflict, Charles Jencks argues that these reactionary tendencies can be countered by an equally powerful drive - heterophilia: the love of difference, the desire to seek out new experience and curiosity. All of these are essential to the creation of a new form of city, the heteropolis, epitomized by Los Angeles. With over one hundred ethnic groups, forty different lifestyle clusters, eighty languages spoken in the schools, and extraordinarily different flora and fauna, Los Angeles' diversity has now become one of its main drawing points, and problems. Precariously balanced between civil unrest and the creative enjoyment of difference, it is something towards which other world cities, with their mass-migration and global trade are heading. The hetero-architecture of Los Angeles suggests a way beyond the present impasse between the fundamentalists and the multiculturalists, a third position which diffuses confrontation with creative displacement and inclusive eclecticism. The strange beauty of hetero-architecture embraces variety, its informality allows marginalized groups to feel at home and its unusual metaphors suggest our connection to the natural world. Frank Gehry, Eric Owen Moss, Morphosis, Frank Israel and Charles Moore are its visible leaders, but there is also a vernacular and funk version of the genre as well as the populist versions of Jon Jerde and Disneyland. The philosophy of hetero-architecture accepts difference as a necessity and turns it into a virtue with an informal aesthetic at once polyglot, abstract and representational - that is radically eclectic and inclusive in an understated way. The 'L.A. Style', as it is known, bears affinities with other aesthetics such as the Wabi and Sabi style of the Japanese. With many world cities now facing increasing pluralization, the heteropolis is bound to become a major urban form of the future.