The full and definitive biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, influential abolitionist, ardent social reformer and conservationist, and the visionary designer of Central Park Frederick Law Olmsted is arguably the most important historical figure that the average American knows the least about. Best remembered for his landscape architecture, from New York's Central Park to Boston's Emerald Necklace to Stanford University's campus, Olmsted was also an influential journalist, early voice for the environment, and abolitionist credited with helping dissuade England from joining the South in the Civil War. This momentous career was shadowed by a tragic personal life, also fully portrayed here.Most of all, he was a social reformer. He didn't simply create places that were beautiful in the abstract. An awesome and timeless intent stands behind Olmsted's designs, allowing his work to survive to the present day. With our urgent need to revitalize cities and a widespread yearning for green space, his work is more relevant now than it was during his lifetime. Justin Martin restores Olmsted to his rightful place in the pantheon of great Americans.

Until recently most discussions of William Faulkner have centered exclusively on his novels. Yet no chronicle of Faulkner's Growth as a literary artist, perhaps America’s foremost in this century, can afford to overlook the years he spent struggling to establish himself as a writer of short stories. To trace in detail Faulkner's personal and artistic growth during the prolific years 1925-1931, when he was approaching artistic ripeness and earning belated recognition, has hitherto been impossible. There seemed to be no means of dating the innumerable drafts, the false starts and fumbling revisions, among the thousands of sheets left behind when he died in 1962. Max Putzel’s critical study of these crucial formative years fills this gap—assigning dates to the sketches and drafts of stories and relating them both to Faulkner’s jealously guarded private life and the several critical histories of the novels that have recently appeared. Putzel maintains there is a necessary, a “symbiotic” relation between the novels and the stories. He also finds that the short story form Faulkner found so hard to master liberated a lyrical power that had been stifled during his confused dilettante period as a poet in a provincial southern town. Yet his turbulent, ambivalent feelings about that town and its inhabitants were essential to his development, however slowly and reluctantly he surrendered to their benign influence—the genius of his homeplace. Faulkner also was sensitive to the monumental revolutionary changes, even the trivial fads and foibles, of his own time—the changes that swept the world outside of Oxford, Mississippi, after the Great War he so regretted having missed. Faulkner’s maturing vision of man, history, and class and caste relations was affected by Einstein’s theory of relativity, Freud’s probing into the hidden wellsprings of human behavior, Eliot’s borrowings from anthropology, Joyce’s new rhetoric, Diaghilev’s eclecticism, Picasso’s ventures in cubism and classicism---not to mention the Treaty of Versailles, Prohibition, jazz, free love, free spending, gang violence, false prosperity, the crash, and the depression. These factors also helped shape a style capable of evoking passion and tenderness, anger and laughter, and every intermediate shade of feeling---a style demanding the creative effort of readers. Genius of Place takes all this into account while seeking to determine what is likely to endure and reward future readers of works like “Carcassonne” and The Sound and the Fury, the Snopes trilogy and As I Lay Dying, “Dry September” and Sanctuary.

The Genius of Place examines how, after the War of 1812, concerns about the scale of the nation resulted in a fundamental reorientation of American identity away from the Atlantic or global ties that held sway in the early republic and toward more localized forms of identification. Instead of addressing the sweep of the nation, American authors, artists, geographers, and politicians shifted from the larger reach of the globe to the more manageable scope of the local and sectional. Paradoxically, that local representation became the primary mode through which early Americans construed their emerging national identity. This newfound cultural obsession with locality impacted the literary consolidation and representation of key American imagined places - New England, the plantation, the West - in the decades between 1816 and 1836. Apap's examination of the intersections between local and national representations and exploration of the myths of space and place that shaped U.S. identity through the nineteenth century will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary readership.

A garden classic, The Genius of the Place reveals that the history of landscape gardening is much more than a history of design and style; it opens up a wide perspective of English cultural history, showing how landscape gardening was gradually transformed over two centuries into an art that has been widely imitated throughout Europe and North America. The English landscape garden is richly documented in this anthology. Over 100 illustrations accompany writings that range from Francis Bacon to Jane Austin; from the early 1600s, when Englishmen began to determine their own concept and form of the garden, through the first half of the eighteenth century when its distinctive feature emerged, to the heyday of the landscape garden under "Capability" Brown and the reactions to his pure formalism under Repton and Loudon in the 1800s. This edition contains a new introduction and bibliography covering the many developments in garden history during the last dozen years.

Thoroughly revised and updated, this text introduces students of human geography and allied disciplines to the fundamental concept of place, combining discussion about everyday uses of the term with the complex theoretical debates that have grown up around it. A thoroughly revised and updated edition of this highly successful short introduction to place Features a new chapter on the use of place in non-geographical arenas, such as in ecological theory, art theory and practice, philosophy, and social theory Combines discussion about everyday uses of the term 'place' with the more complex theoretical debates that have grown up around it Uses familiar stories drawn from the news, popular culture, and everyday life as a way to explain abstract ideas and debates Traces the development of the concept from the 1950s through its subsequent appropriation by cultural geographers, and the linking of place to politics

Faith and Place takes knowledge of place as a basis for thinking about the relationship between religious belief and our embodied life. Recent epistemology of religion has appealed to various secular analogues for religious belief - especially analogues drawn from sense perception and scientific theory construction. These approaches tend to overlook the close connection between religious belief and our moral, aesthetic and otherwise engaged relationship to the material world. By taking knowledge of place as a starting point for religious epistemology, Mark Wynn aims to throw into clearer focus the embodied, action-orienting, perception-structuring, and affect-infused character of religious understanding. This innovative study understands the religious significance of a site in terms of i. its capacity to stand for some encompassing truth about human life; ii. its conservation of historical meanings, where these meanings make a practical claim upon those located at the place at later times; and iii. its directing of the believer's attention to a sacred meaning, through enacted appropriation of the site. Wynn proposes that the notion of 'God' functions like the notion of a 'genius loci', where the relevant locus is the sum of material reality. He argues that knowledge of God consists in part in a storied and sensuous appreciation of the significance of particular places.

This book sheds light on the contemporary status of phenomenological discourse in architecture and investigates its current scholastic as well as practical position. Starting with a concise introduction to the philosophical grounds of phenomenology from the points of view of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, it presents a critical reading of the works of some leading figures of architectural phenomenology in both theory and practice, such as Christian Norberg-Schultz, Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Steven Holl. Highlighting the main challenges of the current phenomenological discourse in architecture, this book formulates a more articulated method of 'phenomenological interpretation' – dubbed 'phenomenal phenomenology' − as a new and innovative method of interpreting the built environment. Finally, using Tadao Ando's Langen Foundation Museum as a case study, it investigates the architect's contribution to phenomenological discourse, interprets and analyzes the Museum building using the new heuristic method, and thus provides a clear example of its applicability. By introducing a clear, articulated, and practical method of interpretation, this book is of interest to academics and students analyzing and studying architecture and the built environment at various scales.

How to Unlock Your Child's Genius is a book for parents and educators that shows them 11 simple steps on how to help support their child's learning.Written by the award winning author and educationalist, this book uses empowerment literature, poetry, short stories, autobiographical writing and essays to inspire all who are involved in unlocking the genius of children.