Books about Vreeland from Amazon.com

A vivid exploration of one of the most beloved Renoir paintings in the world, “done with a flourish worthy of Renoir himself” (USA Today)

With her richly textured novels, Susan Vreeland has offered pioneering portraits of artists’ lives. Now, as she did in Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Vreeland once again focuses on a single painting—Auguste Renoir’s instantly recognizable masterpiece, which depicts a gathering of Renoir’s real friends enjoying a summer Sunday on a café terrace along the Seine. Narrated by Renoir and seven of the models, the novel illuminates the gusto, hedonism, and art of the era. With a gorgeous palette of vibrant, captivating characters, Vreeland paints their lives, loves, losses, and triumphs so vividly that “the painting literally comes alive” (The Boston Globe)..
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There are only 35 known Vermeers extant in the world today. In Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland posits the existence of a 36th. The story begins at a private boys' academy in Pennsylvania where, in the wake of a faculty member's unexpected death, math teacher Cornelius Engelbrecht makes a surprising revelation to one of his colleagues. He has, he claims, an authentic Vermeer painting, "a most extraordinary painting in which a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rust-colored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window." His colleague, an art teacher, is skeptical and though the technique and subject matter are persuasively Vermeer-like, Engelbrecht can offer no hard evidence--no appraisal, no papers--to support his claim. He says only that his father, "who always had a quick eye for fine art, picked it up, let us say, at an advantageous moment." Eventually it is revealed that Engelbrecht's father was a Nazi in charge of rounding up Dutch Jews for deportation and that the picture was looted from one doomed family's home:

That's when I saw that painting, behind his head. All blues and yellows and reddish brown, as translucent as lacquer. It had to be a Dutch master. Just then a private found a little kid covered with tablecloths behind some dishes in a sideboard cabinet. We'd almost missed him.

By the end of "Love Enough," this first of eight interrelated stories tracing the history of "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," the painting's fate at the hands of guilt-riddled Engelbrecht fils is in question. Unfortunately, there is no doubt about the probable destiny of the previous owners, the Vredenburg family of Rotterdam, who take center stage in the powerful "A Night Different From All Other Nights." Vreeland handles this tale with subtlety and restraint, setting it at Passover, the year before the looting, and choosing to focus on the adolescent Hannah Vredenburg's difficult passage into adulthood in the face of an uncertain future. In the next story, "Adagia," she moves even further into the past to sketch "how love builds itself unconsciously ... out of the momentous ordinary" in a tender portrait of a longtime marriage. Back and back Vreeland goes, back through other owners, other histories, to the very inception of the painting in the homely, everyday objects of the Vermeer household--a daughter's glass of milk, a son's shirt in need of buttons, a wife's beloved sewing basket--"the unacknowledged acts of women to hallow home." Girl in Hyacinth Blue ends with the painting's subject herself, Vermeer's daughter Magdalena, who first sends the portrait out into the world as payment for a family debt, then sees it again, years later at an auction.

She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.

In this final passage, Susan Vreeland might be describing her own masterpiece as well as Vermeer's. --Alix Wilber.
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Politics in America, written by the well-known political scientist Tom Dye, presents a clear, concise introduction to the American political system. His lively, absorbing narrative examines the struggle for power: “Who gets what, when, and how”. This Basic Version of the popular book includes current coverage of our political system, and covers such topics as: political culture, the constitution, the participants and the party system, institutions such as Congress, the Presidency, and the Courts, and personal liberties and civil rights. For anyone interested in reading about the American political system, including government employees, political workers, and policymakers..
Price: $29.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Introduction to Applied Geophysics covers the fundamental principles and common methods of exploration geophysics, preparing students for field study of the shallow subsurface. Offering a chapter on each of the most common methods of exploration, the text explains in detail how each method is performed and discusses that method's geologic, engineering, and environmental applications. In addition to ample examples, illustrations, and applications throughout, each chapter concludes with a problem set.

The text is also accompanied by the Field Geophysics Software Suite, an innovative CD-ROM that allows students to experiment with refraction and reflection seismology, gravity, magnetics, electrical resistivity, and ground-penetrating radar methods of exploration..
Price: $53.34 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Novelist Susan Vreeland has made a career of fictionalizing the lives of artists and of particular paintings, like Artemisia Gentileschi¹s magnificent Judith in The Passion of Artemisia. In her third novel, The Forest Lover, Vreeland's subject is the courageous Canadian painter Emily Carr, who traveled through native villages and wilderness of British Columbia in the early 1900s, often alone, on a quest to paint totem poles and other artifacts before the indigenous traditions died out and the poles were destroyed or sold. Vreeland's Carr is deeply respectful of the people she meets, and is rewarded with their trust and their stories. She brings the same sensitivity with her to Paris to see the new art, is exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, and returns to Vancouver in 1912 with a style so direct, and colors so expressive, that a conservative local reviewer dubs her a wild beast, literally, a Fauve. Vreeland's strength is in the tacks of emotion during dialogue, and in her nimble, exact prose. As she depicts her, Carr is an endearing and believable balance of sensitivity and determination‹an artist of life as well as a remarkable painter. --Regina Marler.
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In the summer of 1999, the Dalai Lama addressed an audience of over 40,000 in Central Park on how to live a better life. Open Heart is derived from this and other popular lectures given in New York. Here, the Dalai Lama progresses beyond his bestsellers The Art of Happiness and Ethics for the New Millennium by introducing specific practices that can engender happiness. Spiritual practice, according to the Dalai Lama, is a matter of taming unwanted emotions, which means becoming aware of how the mind works. Through the methods of analytical and settled meditation, the Dalai Lama shows how we can cultivate helpful states of mind and eliminate harmful states, leading us to develop compassion for others and happiness for ourselves. But there is no preaching of a single, right method. This revered but humble monk merely invites the reader to understand the causes of one's suffering and consider how best to alleviate it. Open Heart should draw crowds to the bookstores and lead us all to more satisfactory living. --Brian Bruya.
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