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Biography and Memoir April 2018 The titles featured here are available during the library renovations! Click on the book cover to place a hold in the online library catalog. Staff will contact you when your item is ready for pick-up.
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Renoir's Dancer : The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon
by Catherine Hewitt
In the 1880s, Suzanne Valadon was considered the Impressionists’ most beautiful model. But behind her captivating façade lay a closely-guarded secret.
Suzanne was born into poverty in rural France, before her mother fled the provinces, taking her to Montmartre. There, as a teenager Suzanne began posing for―and having affairs with―some of the age’s most renowned painters. Then Renoir caught her indulging in a passion she had been trying to conceal: the model was herself a talented artist.
Some found her vibrant still lifes and frank portraits as shocking as her bohemian lifestyle. At eighteen, she gave birth to an illegitimate child, future painter Maurice Utrillo. But her friends Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas could see her skill. Rebellious and opinionated, she refused to be confined by tradition or gender, and in 1894, her work was accepted to the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, an extraordinary achievement for a working-class woman with no formal art training.
Renoir’s Dancer tells the remarkable tale of an ambitious, headstrong woman fighting to find a professional voice in a male-dominated world.
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A prairie girl's faith : the spiritual legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder
by Stephen W Hines
An in-depth discussion of the Christian faith of pioneer and author Laura Ingalls Wilder examines how her faith helped her endure the harshness of frontier life and how the hardships she survived, from sudden crop losses and life-threatening weather to illness and isolation, helped her forge a stronger relationship with God. By the best-selling author of Little House in the Ozarks.
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The Black Prince : England's Greatest Medieval Warrior
by Michael K. Jones
COMING SOON! The remarkable and inspiring story of one of the greatest warrior-princes of the Middle Ages―and an unforgettably vivid portrait of warfare and chivalry in the fourteen century.
As a child he was given his own suit of armor; at the age of sixteen, he helped defeat the French at Crécy. At Poitiers, in 1356, his victory over King John II of France forced the French into a humiliating surrender that marked the zenith of England’s dominance in the Hundred Years War. As lord of Aquitaine, he ruled a vast swathe of territory across the west and southwest of France, holding a magnificent court at Bordeaux that mesmerized the brave but unruly Gascon nobility and drew them like moths to the flame of his cause. His military achievements captured the imagination of Europe: heralds and chroniclers called him “the flower of all chivalry” and “the embodiment of all valor.”
But what was the true nature of the man behind the chivalric myth, and of the violent but pious world in which he lived? This exemplary new history uses contemporary chronicles plus a wide range of documentary material―including the Prince's own letters and those of his closest followers―to tell the tale of an authentic English hero and to paint a memorable portrait of society in the tumultuous fourteenth century.
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Artists and their cats
by Alison Nastasi
A behind-the-scenes look at fifty famous artists and their pet cats pairs photographs with stories about such luminaries as John Lennon, Andy Warhol, and Georgia O'Keeffe.
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Renaissance woman : the life of Vittoria Colonna
by Ramie Targoff
COMING SOON! Ramie Targoff’s Renaissance Woman tells of the most remarkable woman of the Italian Renaissance: Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara. Vittoria has long been celebrated by scholars of Michelangelo as the artist’s best friend―the two of them exchanged beautiful letters, poems, and works of art that bear witness to their intimacy―but she also had close ties to Charles V, Pope Clement VII and Pope Paul III, Queen Marguerite de Navarre, among others. Vittoria was the scion of an immensely powerful family in Rome during that city’s most explosively creative era. Art and literature flourished, but political and religious life were under terrific strain. Personally involved with nearly every major development of this period―through both her marriage and her own talents―Vittoria was not only a critical political actor and negotiator but also the first woman to publish a book of poems in Italy, an event that launched a revolution for Italian women’s writing.
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