Searching for Beauty

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Author : Khaled Abou El Fadl
Genre : Political Science

Summary : Abou El Fadl (Islamic law, UCLA School of Law) wrote the 62 brief essays here over the course of five years. Through a combination of musings and critical reflections on classical Muslim authors, he both traces Muslim intellectual history and also confronts questions of ethics, faith, law, politics, culture, and modern identity. He ranges over many facets of Islam in the contemporary world, exploring censorship, political oppression, terrorism, the veil and the treatment of women, marriage, parental rights, the dynamics between law and morality, the character of the prophet Muhammad, and other topics. About half the essays first appeared in The minaret magazine. c. Book News Inc.

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Author : Terry Tempest Williams
Genre : Nature

Summary : "Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision," Terry Tempest Williams tells us. "Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together." Ranging from Ravenna, Italy, where she learns the ancient art of mosaic, to the American Southwest, where she observes prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, to a small village in Rwanda where she joins genocide survivors to build a memorial from the rubble of war, Williams searches for meaning and community in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation. In her compassionate meditation on how nature and humans both collide and connect, Williams affirms a reverence for all life, and constructs a narrative of hopeful acts, taking that which is broken and creating something whole.

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Author : Khaled Abou El Fadl
Genre : Law

Summary : Khaled Abou El Fadl is a classically-trained Islamic jurist, an American lawyer and law professor, and one of the most important Islamic thinkers today. In this updated and expanded edition of The Search for Beauty in Islam, Abou El Fadl offers eye-opening and enlightening insights into the contemporary realities of the current state of Islam and the West. Through a "conference of the books," an imagined conference of Muslim intellects from centuries past, Abou El Fadl examines the ugliness that has come to plague Muslim realities and attempts to reclaim what he maintains is a core moral value in Islam-the value of beauty. Does Islamic law allow, or even call for, the gruesome acts of ugliness that have become so commonly associated with Islam today? Has Islam become a religion devoid of beauty, compassion and love? Based on actual cases, this book tackles different issues and problems in each chapter through a post-9/11 lens, discussing such topics as marriage, divorce, parental rights, the position of women, the veil, sexual abuse, wife-beating, terrorism, bigotry, morality, law, and the role of tradition. Abou El Fadl argues that the rekindling of the forgotten value of beauty is essential for Muslims today to take back what has been lost to the fundamentalist forces that have denigrated their religion.

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Author : Cho Kyo
Genre : Social Science

Summary : While a slender body is a prerequisite for beauty today, plump women were considered ideal in Tang Dynasty China and Heian-period Japan. Starting around the Southern Song period in China, bound feet symbolized the attractiveness of women. But in Japan, shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth long were markers of loveliness. For centuries, Japanese culture was profoundly shaped by China, but in complex ways that are only now becoming apparent. In this first full comparative history of the subject, Cho Kyo explores changing standards of feminine beauty in China and Japan over the past two millennia. Drawing on a rich array of literary and artistic sources gathered over a decade of research, he considers which Chinese representations were rejected or accepted and transformed in Japan. He then traces the introduction of Western aesthetics into Japan starting in the Meiji era, leading to slowly developing but radical changes in representations of beauty. Through fiction, poetry, art, advertisements, and photographs, the author vividly demonstrates how criteria of beauty differ greatly by era and culture and how aesthetic sense changed in the course of extended cultural transformations that were influenced by both China and the West.

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Author : Kyō Chō
Genre : Electronic books

Summary : For centuries, Japanese culture, including ideals of feminine beauty, was profoundly shaped by China. In this first full comparative history on the subject, Cho Kyo explores changing standards of beauty in China and Japan, ranging from plumpness to bound feet to blackened teeth. Drawing on a rich array of sources gathered over a decade of research, he considers which Chinese representations were rejected or accepted and transformed in Japan. He then traces the introduction of Western aesthetics into Japan starting in the Meiji era, leading to slowly developing but radical changes in the repres.

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Author : Cherie Burns
Genre : Biography & Autobiography

Summary : A fascinating portrait of the Standard Oil heirerss and legendary American trendsetter Millicent Rogers Nobody knew how to live the high life like Millicent Rogers. Born into luxury, she lived in a whirl of beautiful homes, European vacations, exquisite clothing and handsome men. In Searching for Beauty, Cherie Burns chronicles Rogers's glittering life from her days as a young girl afflicted with rheumatic fever to her debutante debut and her Taos finale. A rebellious icon of the age, she eloped with a penniless baron, danced tangos in European nightclubs, divorced, remarried and romanced, among others, Clark Gable. Her romantic conquests, though, paled in comparison to her triumph in the fashion world where she electrified the fashionistas by becoming the muse to designer Charles James, appearing in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and - at the end of her life - retreating to Taos, New Mexico where she popularized Southwestern style. With Searching for Beauty, Millicent Rogers enters the pantheon of great American women who, like Diana Vreeland and Babe Paley, put their distinctive stamp on American Style.

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Author : Voldemar Smilga
Genre : Mathematics

Summary : This is a popular book that chronicles the historical attempts to prove the fifth postulate of Euclid on parallel lines that led eventually to the creation of non-Euclidean geometry. To absorb the mathematical content of the book, the reader should be familiar with the foundations of Euclidean geometry at the high school level. But besides the mathematics, the book is also devoted to stories about the people, brilliant mathematicians starting from Pythagoras and Euclid and terminating with Gauss, Lobachevsky and Klein. For two thousand years, mathematicians tried to prove the fifth postulate (whose formulation seemed to them too complicated to be a real postulate and not a theorem, hence the title In the Search for Beauty). But in the 19th century, they realized that such proof was impossible, and this led to a revolution in mathematics and then in physics. The two final chapters are devoted to Einstein and his general relativity which revealed to us that the geometry of the world we live in is not Euclidean.Also included is an historical essay on Omar Khayyam, who was not only a poet, but also a brilliant astronomer and mathematician.