Books about Sheeler from Amazon.com

Based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning story, Jim Sheeler’s unprecedented look at the way our country honors its dead; Final Salute Is a stunning tribute to the brave troops who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the families who continue to mourn them

They are the troops that nobody wants to see, carrying a message that no military family ever wants to hear. It begins with a knock at the door. “The curtains pull away. They come to the door. And they know. They always know,” said Major Steve Beck.

Since the start of the war in Iraq, marines like Major Beck found themselves thrown into a different kind of mission: casualty notification. It is a job Major Beck never asked for and one for which he received no training. They are given no set rules, only impersonal guidelines.

Marines are trained to kill, to break down doors, but casualty notification is a mission without weapons. For Beck, the mission meant learning each dead marine’s name and nickname, touching the toys they grew up with and reading the letters they wrote home. He held grieving mothers in long embraces, absorbing their muffled cries into the dark blue shoulder of his uniform. He stitched himself into the fabric of their lives, in the simple hope that his compassion might help alleviate at least the smallest piece of their pain. Sometimes he returned home to his own family unable to keep from crying in the dark.

In Final Salute, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jim Sheeler weaves together the stories of the fallen and of the broken homes they have left behind. It is also the story of Major Steve Beck and his unflagging efforts to help heal the wounds of those left grieving. Above all, it is a moving tribute to our troops, putting faces to the mostly anonymous names of our courageous heroes, and to the brave families who have made the ultimate sacrifice for this country. Final Salute is the achingly beautiful, devastatingly honest story of the true toll of war. After the knock on the door, the story has only begun..
Price: $12.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Like Everything I Really Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten, or Tuesdays with Morrie, Obit is a wise and deeply moving book that illuminates the human condition For ten years, Jim Sheeler has scoured Colorado looking for subjects whose stories he will tell for the last time. Most are unknowns, but that doesn’t mean they’re nobodies. Their obituaries are sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, and chock full of life lessons as taught by the people we all pass on the street every day. And thanks to Sheeler’s brilliant and compassionate prose, it’s not too late to meet them..
Price: $1.74 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the twentieth century. His work is synonymous with precisionism, a crisp, clean, hard-edged style that reconciled cubist abstraction and the machine aesthetic of Marcel Duchamp with American subject matter. Trained in industrial drawing, decorative painting, and applied art at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, Sheeler also attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he learned an impressionistic, painterly style. He later embraced European modernism and taught himself photography. Sheeler fully absorbed the lessons of each discipline and forged his own singular approach.
This beautifully illustrated book, created to accompany a traveling exhibition of Sheeler's work, features detailed analyses of the artist's mediums and working methods. Focusing on the complex, often paradoxical, relationships among photography, film, drawing, printmaking, and painting that were central to Sheeler's art, this pathbreaking book traces critical points in Sheeler's trajectory, beginning with a small selection of Sheeler's seminal photographs, circa 1917, of the interior of an eighteenth-century Quaker fieldstone house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Sections are also devoted to the 1920 film Manhatta, made in collaboration with Paul Strand; a series of commercial photographs of the Ford Motor Company's River Rogue factory (1927); the enigmatic painting The Artist Looks at Nature (1943) and its related works; and finally a group of mill subjects from the 1940s and 1950s that experiments with photomontage.
Copub: National Gallery of Art.
Price: $24.41 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Probably the most enigmatic garden in Europe, the Sacred Wood at Bomarzo in central Italy has been called extravagant, mysterious, unholy, surrealist, fascinating and good fun..
Price: $26.48 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $12.71 [Notify me when price goes down.]

At the dawn of the twentieth century Henry Adams proclaimed that the machine was as central to our modem American culture as the Virgin was to medieval culture. We worshiped in our factories as our ancestors worshiped in cathedrals. In this century we also raised up bridges, grain elevators, and skyscrapers, and many were dazzled by these symbols of the Machine Age—from American presidents such as Calvin Coolidge to European artists such as Marcel Duchamp. Charles Sheeler (1886–1965) was one of the most noted American painters and photographers to embrace the iconography of the machine. But was he high priest or heretic in the religion of mass production and technology that dominated his era?

Karen Lucic considers this intriguing question while telling us Sheeler’s story: his coming of age, his achievement of artistic independence in the teens and twenties, and his later treatments of Machine Age subjects throughout the years of the Depression and World War IL The author shows us how—in paintings, drawings, and photographs depicting New York skyscrapers, Henry Ford’s automobile factories, and machine–dominated interiors—Sheeler produced images of extraordinary aesthetic power that provocatively confirmed America’s technological and industrial prestige in clear, vivid, and exact detail.

Do these compelling works establish Sheeler as a champion of the Machine Age? Most of the artist’s contemporaries thought so. “Sheeter was objective before the rest of us were,” claimed his friend Edward Steichen, and critics either lauded or assailed Sheeler for his seemingly straightforward acceptance of the machine. He is misunderstood today for the same reason. In the post–industrial era, Sheeler has been attacked for objectifying his subjects, for eliminating the human element from the modem landscape, and ultimately for complicity in the mechanization of the world he so accurately portrayed.

By closely investigating Sheeler’s social and aesthetic contexts and through exceptionally clear and convincing visual analysis, Karen Lucic reinterprets the work of this important modernist. She argues that his images do not celebrate the machine but question its predominance during his time. They provoke us to confront the social consequences of modern technology.

Sheeler appears in this book as neither believer nor heretic in the cult of the machine. Lucic asks us to grant Sheeler his ambivalence, for it was his ambivalence that enabled him to portray modernity so splendidly.

.
Price: $25.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $30.19 [Notify me when price goes down.]