I’ve spent my life tracing the first 20,000 years of our drive to dress ourselves, and this book adds unique knowledge to that search.
Aslan traces the development of the three great natural fibers, wool, silk, and cotton, in Central Asia, a remarkably convoluted and fascinating story ranging from handmaking gorgeous textiles to the destruction of people and environments that the growing of water-thirsty cotton for vast markets has caused. Indeed, cotton recently swallowed the entire inland Sea of Azov and its tributaries, leaving the marooned docks and ships stuck in this new desert.
His well-paced page-turner draws from decades of personal experience living and working there, helping rebuild local lives through reconsidered textile industries. The bottom line is we must stop wasting this wonderful but destructive fiber.
Three textile roads tangle their way through Central Asia. The famous Silk Road united east and west through trade. Older still was the Wool Road, of critical importance when houses made from wool enabled nomads to traverse the inhospitable winter steppes. Then there was the Cotton Road, marked by greed, colonialism and environmental disaster.
At this intersection of human history, fortunes were made and lost through shimmering silks, life-giving felts and gossamer cottons. Chris Aslan, who has spent fifteen years living and working in the region, expertly unravels the strands of this tangled history and embroiders them with his own…
I find off-the-rack clothing boring. I’m also allergic to synthetic fibers and work to make my now-rare 100% cotton clothes last. So, this book was a godsend and funny!
Sekules notes that our culture despises mending as indicating poverty, then details a zillion ways to not just mend but mend ostentatiously! Make them say, this is me! I’m unique!
I now keep embroidery thread and her book next to the TV so I can artfully cover rips and stains to my heart’s content when not actually staring at the screen. (Sometimes, a little paint helps.)
It’s fun, saves money, and helps save the environment by not wasting reusable cotton cloth—something we carelessly destroy now at an appalling rate.
A hands-on manual and a history and celebration of clothes tending--and its remarkable resurgence as art form, political statement, and path to healing the planet.
“For Fans of NBC’s Making It, Bravo’s Project Runway, or shopping vintage: A sweater gets a hole? Sew it closed... Part history and part how-to, Mend! traces the task’s evolution from a 1950s chore to a DIY sustainability movement.” —Marie Claire
For thousands of years, mending was a deep craft that has for too long been a secret history. But now it's back, bigger and better than ever. In this book Kate Sekules introduces the…
This is the most faithful translation I’ve found (and quicker than reading the Russian!).
Even the famous translator Garnett simply rewrote little things she didn’t understand, like the scene renaming little Lida as Lenia (i.e., as Helena, who helped convert the Roman Empire to Christianity, bringing the True Cross to Constantinople).
The novel is deeply Christian in presentation but psychologically universal. If, as I have, one doggedly chases the meanings and religious references of all the names—Raskolnikov (divided), Razumikin (reason), Sonia (from Sophia, divine wisdom), etc., the story becomes perhaps the most remarkable ever written, and its seemingly understated ending will move you to tears. I cry just talking about it…
Hailed by Washington Post Book World as “the best [translation] currently available" when it was first published, this second edition has been updated in honor of the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth.
With the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of The Brothers Karamazov the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of Dostoevsky's astounding pyschological thriller, newly revised for his bicentenniel.
When Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, commits an act of murder and theft, he sets into motion a story that is…
European communal dance developed around beliefs about fertility when farming spread to Europe from the Near East 8,000 years ago. The male aspect of agricultural fertility was taken care of by sowing the seed. Still, the far more mysterious female portion, the gestation of the seeds underground, came to be associated with dancing.
The heavily illustrated book explores the European dance traditions with their related rituals, customs, and beliefs still surviving in the remoter parts of Eastern Europe, especially among Slavs and Greeks.
One key costume detail demonstrably harks back 20,000 years. As part of the data, the author (who reads several languages) has translated many lively folktales to introduce these fascinating beliefs and customs to Western readers and dancers.
