Customer Reviews (1)

Good Text, Poor Quality Pictures
This one's a nice book, with a good overview of Cole's life and work, but the quality of the pictures and of the printing is very poor. ... Read more

Book Description
During his peak popularity in the 1820s -1840s, artists flocked to New York's Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley to confront the wilderness and emulate Cole's vision, and America's first indiginous art movement was born--the Hudson River School of landscape painting. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Truly superb
A truly superb, intimate portrait of Thomas Cole by his minister, friend and confidante, Louis Noble. No student of Cole and his work can do without this volume. -- Edward J. Renehan, Jr. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Pen as Complement to the Brush
"Ye mountains, woods, rocks, and impetuous streams
Ye mantling heav'ns -- Speak -- speak for me!"

Arguably, one of America's most important artists, and the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, Thomas Cole also had a literary side.Largely unknown, his compositions with the pen encompass more than 100 poems and a healthy smattering of prose. A few were published, but most were left behind in a rough assemblage of his journals and notebooks.In 1972, as part of a doctoral dissertation,Marshall Tymn compiled and edited these to produce this tidy volume of 105 poems.

As with his prolific paintings, Cole's poems reflect an awe of nature.A romantic through and through, Cole waxes lyrically about the rugged beauty of mountains, lakes and valleys of a newly found rural America.Tymn points out Thomas Cole's love for mountains; they fill his large ornate canvases dwarfing any small human figures that may appear.A devotee of the Catskill and Adirondack regions of upstate New York, Cole embraced the outdoors with religious ferver -- he praises it unabashedly:

"The Hudson lies below, a mirror'd Heaven" and
"No!Tis Niagara shouts from the abyss" and
"Before thee lies the Holy Lake outspread"[Lake George] and
"Hail Monarch of a thousand giant hills!"[Mt. Washington]

Tymn, in his introduction, points out that Cole's poetry is not the burnished work of Wordsworth or other romantic poets.Cole never intended as much, and many of the pieces do read more like inspired entries in a diary than "higher style" verse. And where Cole left his works unpolished in journal form, Tymn has resurrected the rough stuff, footnoted with explanatory notes, and excellent documentation. The poems are presented in chronological order: towards the end more verses are penned as letters to friends or to mark the occasion of a death.The collection also includes four black and white photographs of Cole's work, among them "Landscape Scene for the The Last of the Mohicans" and "The Clove, Catskills" both painted in 1827 at the height of Cole's fascination with the romantic landscape.

Cole's allegorical lines about the bold American landscape are an interesting complement to his paintings.Anyone with an interest in the Hudson River School will appreciate this volume. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Guide to Strengthen the Lives of Priests
This book is a very insightful read in which Father Basil both outlines the unique identity of the priesthood and also looks at how the struggles with different vices apply to it. He draws heavily from the Catechism as well as papal documents in fleshing out his understanding of the priesthood and he draws also heavily on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas in looking at the different vices. Many Thomistic themes, such as the need for contemplation are prevalent throughout the work and what emerges is a very pastoral guide for understanding human nature and stocking up the spiritual arsenal for those times when one faces various temptations. ... Read more

Product Description
Exhibition catalog from 1969 Exhibit at Rochester, Albany, etc. 75 plates. ... Read more

Book Description
Now in Paperback

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) is widely considered the founder of the popular Hudson River School of painting. Cole, who emigrated to the United States from England in 1819, awakened a passion for landscape that would characterize American painting throughout the 19th century and change the way Americans, and the world, viewed the young nation.

In a series of breathtaking canvases, painted principally in the Catskill Mountains, Cole portrayed vast spaces, awesome horizons, and vibrant color. Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, traces Cole's development and explores the Romantic theories that guided his thinking and informed his vision. Superb color reproductions bring Cole's paintings to life, revealing the America that once was.

EARL A. POWELL III, director of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., has written articles and exhibition catalogues on American artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, and has curated exhibitions devoted to the art of those periods.

111 illustrations, 67 in full color, 91/2 x 11" ... Read more

Book Description
Provides a new look at the founder of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting. ... Read more

Book Description
Most of us today can expect to live into our seventies in reasonably good health. (In fact, the fastest growing segment of the population is the group eighty-five and older.) Yet our culture offers few convincing ways to help us find purpose in our later years. The ancient and medieval vision of aging as a mysterious part of the eternal order of things has given way to the secular, scientific, and individualistic outlook of modernity. No longer seen as a way station along life's spiritual journey, old age has been redefined as a problem to be solved by science and medicine. Older people have been moved to society's margins, and, as a result, we have become uncertain about what it means to age.To help us make sense of our journey through life, The Oxford Book of Aging offers some two hundred and fifty pieces that illuminate the pleasures, pains, dreams, and triumphs of people as they strive to live out their days in a meaningful way. Fiction, poetry, memoirs, essays, children's stories, reflections by philosophers, historians, and psychologists, African and Japanese legends, excerpts from the Koran and the Bible, scientific and medical tracts--the variety of writings is remarkable. The excerpts shed light on the many aspects of later life, including creativity, love, memory, spiritual growth, and the value of work. The perspectives range from Schopenhauer's dark "Disillusion is the chief characteristic of old age" when we come "by degrees to see that our existence is all empty and void," to Robert Browning's uplifting "Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be" (a vision so idealistic that Ogden Nash was moved to write "Such a statement, certes, / Could emanate only from a youngster is his thirties"). We read Mozart's letter to his dying father, Alice Walker's endearing "To Hell With Dying" (about the vital ties between children and the old), Annie Dillard's meditation on her mother's hands, and Mark Twain's tongue-in-cheek formula for reaching age seventy ("It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake"). There's a marvelous vein of poetry woven through the volume, ranging from Shakespeare's seventy-third sonnet ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold"), to Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," to the Bible's Psalm Twenty-three, to Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium." And there is a great diversity of voices, from Huang Ti (a Chinese physician who lived some 4700 years ago), to Black Elk (an Oglala Sioux holy man), to Alifa Rifaat (a contemporary Egyptian writer), to an Appalachian woman's oral history. Through these carefully chosen writings, Thomas R. Cole and Mary G. Winkler demonstrate that the joys, fears, sufferings, and mysteries of aging can be successfully explored, with humility and self-knowledge, with love and compassion, with a sense of the sacred, and with acceptance of physical decline and mortality. "We who are old know that age is more than a disability," Florida Scott-Maxwell wrote while in her early eighties. "It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high." In The Oxford Book of Aging, we find this "intense and varied experience" captured before our eyes. ... Read more

Book Description
No Color Is My Kind is an uncommon chronicle of identity, fate, and compassion as two men--one Jewish and one African American--set out to rediscover a life lost to manic depression and alcoholism.In 1984, Thomas Cole discovered Eldrewey Stearns in a Galveston psychiatric hospital. Stearns, a fifty-two-year-old black man, complained that although he felt very important, no one understood him.Over the course of the next decade, Cole and Stearns, in a tumultuous and often painful collaboration, recovered Stearns' life before his slide into madness--as a young boy in Galveston and San Augustine and as a civil rights leader and lawyer who sparked Houston's desegregation movement between 1959 and 1963.While other southern cities rocked with violence, Houston integrated its public accommodations peacefully. In these pages appear figures such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Leon Jaworski, and Dan Rather, all of whom--along with Stearns--maneuvered and conspired to integrate the city quickly and calmly.Weaving the tragic story of a charismatic and deeply troubled leader into the record of a major historic event, Cole also explores his emotionally charged collaboration with Stearns. Their poignant relationship sheds powerful and healing light on contemporary race relations in America, and especially on issues of power, authority, and mental illness. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

More than just History
In a sense this is two books. While it starts with a discussion of how the author, a medical ethicist, was drawn to write this book about Eldrewey Stearns, the first 100 pages primarily tells the story of integration in Houston, Texas in the late 50s and 60s.It's a compelling and interesting story, but it is more compellingly told by the video that was made simultaneously with this book.That video, The Strange Demise of Jim Crow: How Houston Desegregated Its Public Accomodations, 1959-1963 is available from University of Texas Press (I can't find it on Amazon).The video includes interviews with many of the prominent actors in this drama and is always a favorite when I use it in my Introduction to US and Texas Politics class.
The second 100 pages of the book is about Eldrewey Stearns' life before and after the movement. Stearns was one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Houston, but he is also someone who has struggled with mental illness all his life.This book provides a fascinating insight into the struggles the author goes through in trying to help Eldrewey and to understand this complex, flawed, yet sometimes heroic man.He also comes to considerable insight about himself through the process of trying to chronicle Eldrewey's story.
An excellent read, whether you are interested in the history of the movement or in getting an understanding of how it is to deal with mental illness.

Fascinating book about Houston, integration, and two men
In the 1990s I spent two years traveling in Europe. One day in a Hungarian history museum I hit the wall: Here I was reading all about the Magyars, but I knew little about my own hometown--Houston, Texas--except whatever I'd been forced to memorize eons ago in grade school. Unfortunately, once I got back to Texas I found many of the local history books unbearable: "In 1832, Lamar So-and-So reined in his trusty steed at the banks of Buffalo Bayou."I gave up my getting-to-know-Houston project until recently, when I stumbled upon No Color is My Kind: The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston. This is easily the best book I've ever read about Houston history. Thomas Cole personalizes the story, makes himself visible as a person confronting his own ideals, frustrations, and personal myths. His subject, Eldrewey Stearns, is obviously no easy man to pin down. Stearns has troubles, and I'm afraid he suffers more than most people. However, the fact that the writer refused--or was unable--to paint Stearns as a perfectly noble (and flat) hero is, in my opinion, exactly why Stearns is such a moving figure and why this work is so much richer than the Daughters of the American Revolution (or worse, Daughters of the Confederacy) tributes that so many other books about Houston and Houstonians seem to be. Stearns is real, and Cole's depiction of him and his part in Houston's integration movement deepened my appreciation for African-Americans' struggles and their courageous stands. ... Read more

Book Description
Along the Juniata focuses on the dissemination of American landscape imagery in the early to mid-19th century. Through a variety of media including drawings, paintings, engravings, and decorative arts, images of the American landscape were translated and reproduced in large numbers to provide an eager audience with examples of patriotic views and scenes of natural wonders. This book investigates the art of Thomas Cole as representative of this process and examines the means by which an 1827 drawing by the artist of a scene in the Allegheny Mountains was transformed into a painting, engraved copies, and adorned imported Staffordshire ceramics designed to appeal specifically to an American audience. The widespread use of this popular image by Cole demonstrates the cultural demand for images of the American landscape as it was fueled by a period of increased nationalism during the first half of the 19th century.

Additionally, a selection of Hudson River School paintings and engravings illustrates the popularity of American landscape imagery as it appeared in painted and printed formats. Artists include Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, Albert Bierstadt, John Frederick Kensett, John William Casilear, Jervis McEntee, Edmund Darch Lewis, Norton Bush, David Johnson, and Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait. These paintings are all recent discoveries and are illustrated for the first time. AUTHOR BIO: Nancy Siegel is director of the Juniata College Museum of Art and assistant professor of art history. She is the author of The Morans: The Artistry of a Nineteenth-Century Family of Painter-Etchers and Uncommon Visions of Juniataís Past. ... Read more