Anyone who has ever had the privilege of watching Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals knows the sound of a hit. It's the sound his bat makes when it connects with the ball. It's a sound that's been heard countless times since his 2001 rookie season. That year, he took the league by storm by posting some of the most fantastic offensive stats of any rookie ever-and he's been doing the same ever since, shattering records & helping his team win games, including the 2006 World Series, with clutch hits & amazing home runs.

This biography offers an up-close look at this superstar's life & the most memorable moments of his outstanding career to date.

...

Albert Speer was Hitler's architect before the Second World War. Through Hitler's great trust in him & Speer's own genius for organisation he became, effectively from 1942 overlord of the entire war economy, making him the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Sentenced to twenty years imprisonment in Spandau Prison at the Nuremberg Trails, Speer attempted to progress from moral extinction to moral self-education. How he came to terms with his own acts & failures to act & his real culpability in Nazi war crimes are the questions at the centre of this book. The author had access to Speer, his family & friends & his private papers. ...

A picture book about making new friends from the award-winning Jenni Desmond. Waa! Waa! Waa! Albert's favourite tree won't stop crying. What can be the matter? How can the bear cheer up his old friend? A funny & charming picture book about making friends in the most unexpected places from the award-winning Jenni Desmond. ...

Alberto Giacometti's attenuated figures of the human form are among the most significant artistic images of the 20th century. Sartre, Breton, & Winnicott are just some of the great thinkers who have drawn upon the graceful, harrowing work of Giacometti, which has continued to resonate with artists, writers, & audiences. In this book, Timothy Mathews explores the themes of fragility, trauma, space, & relationality in Giacometti's art & the texts that respond or refer to them: the novels of W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett & Cees Nooteboom, & the theories of Bertolt Brecht, which recasts the iconic L' Homme qui marche as Walter Benjamin's Angel of History. During his lifelong quest to represent the human form, & to locate the humanity at the heart of conflicting conceptions of modernity, Giacometti returned to the key notions of depth & flatness, memory & attachment, through his sculptures & writings. Both a critical study of Giacometti's life & work, & an investigation of their affective power, this book asks what encounters with Giacometti's pieces can tell us about the history of our own time, & our ways of looking; about the nature of human attachment, & the humility of relating to art. ...

Fifty years after the passing of Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), this major new monograph illuminates the fundamental aspects of his oeuvre & technique in sculpture. It is based on years of extensive research & restoration work on seventy-five plasters that came to the collection of Kunsthaus Zurich as a bequest from Bruno Giacometti, Alberto's youngest brother. For Giacometti, plaster was of great importance as a material, far more than just an intermediate stage between clay model & bronze cast. It allowed him to paint or rework his objects in a vast variety of ways. A significant number of his sculptures indeed exist just in a plaster version. Featuring masterpieces from every stage of his career, this book focuses on Giacometti's artistic approach to the material nature of his chosen media, offering an insight into the creative process of one of the 20th century's greatest artists. With the plasters as a core, the selection also comprises works in other materials, such as marble, wood & bronze. ...

Alberto Giacometti, most famous for his sculptures of emaciated figures isolated in space, throughout his career also kept to drawing & watercolour. Drawing is the basis of everything, was his strong belief. This new book presents a collection of around 100 previously unpublished drawings & watercolours bequeathed to Kunsthaus Zurich by Alberto's youngest brother Bruno Giacometti (1907-2012). This well-guarded family treasure represents Alberto's entire life, from his youth in Stampa, Switzerland to his late years in Paris. The collection

Includes:: very early copies of works by old masters as well as studies of ancient Egyptian & Roman sculptures from the 1920s. It also shows how Alberto closely looked at the art of Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne & Auguste Rodin, leading to highly individual interpretations. It also comprises important portraits of some of the artist's relatives, & self-portraits, alpine landscapes from his native Val Bregaglia & masterful figure studies from the 1950s & 60s. This slim, beautiful new book presents the entire collection alongside an essay on their history & significance.

...

Spectacular specimens. This is Albertus Seba's unrivaled catalog of animals, insects & plants. Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities is one of the 18th century's greatest natural history achievements & remains one of the most prized natural history books of all time. Though scientists of his era often collected natural specimens for research purposes, Amsterdam-based pharmacist Seba (1665-1736) was unrivaled in his passion. His amazing collection of animals. plants & insects from all around the world gained international fame during his lifetime. In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned careful & often scenic illustrations of every specimen. With these meticulous drawings. he arranged the publication of a four-volume catalog. covering the entire collection from strange & exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, birds. & butterflies, as well as now extinct creatures. This reproduction is taken from a rare, h&-colored original. The introduction supplies background information about the fascinating tradition of natural collections to which Seba's curiosities belonged. ...

Features the stories ranging from Beowulf to King Arthur & the Knights of the Round Table, via Chaucer & Shakespeare, to the Bronte sisters, ' Alice through the Looking Glass' & ' Lord of the Rings'. This work takes the reader from medieval mystery plays to music hall & pantomime; painting; & music, with Purcell & Vaughan Williams. ...

Highly original & magnificent in scope, Ackroyd's latest work discovers the roots of English cultural history in the Anglo-Saxon period, & traces it through the centuries. What does it mean to be English? This dazzling book demonstrates that a quintessentially English quality can be discovered in all forms of English culture, not only in literature but also in painting, music, architecture, philosophy & science. Just as " London: The Biography" guided the reader through the capital city with a mixture of narrative & theme, so " Albion", employing the same techniques, engages the reader with stories & surprises
- from Beowulf to King Arthur & the Knights of the Round Table, via Chaucer & Shakespeare, to the Bronte sisters, ' Alice through the Looking Glass' & ' Lord of the Rings'. " Albion" moves from medieval mystery plays to music hall & pantomime; painting is here, with Hogarth & Turner; & music, with Purcell & Vaughan Williams. Even the English obsession with gardening is represented. Witty, provocative & anecdotal, this is Peter Ackroyd at his most brilliant & exuberant.
...

These beautifully-produced colouring books present over four volumes, thirty county maps of England & Wales. The maps were produced in the early 17th century by the cartographic engraver William Hole to accompany the vast landscape poem Poly-Olbion by Michael Drayton, one of the most famous poets of his age. Arguably the strangest maps of Britain ever designed, they depict the familiar rolling countryside as a playful fairyl&, bustling with otherworldly beings. Every topographical feature is anthropomorphised, a form of depiction known asprosopopeia: hills are represented as stout country gentlemen, rivers as water nymphs, forests as elegant huntresses. The poetry & maps of Poly-Olbion came out of the Renaissance vogue for chorography, the art of describing place, & together they provide one of the most detailed overviews of the rich landscape, history, & legends of Early Modern England & Wales. This is a colouring book to keep & treasure as a complex, endlessly rewarding work of art. ...