In this dazzling new vision of the ever-fascinating queen, a dynamic young historian reveals how Marie Antoinette's bold attempts to reshape royal fashion changed the future of France Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of the queen's tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailles's rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt "unqueenly" outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. Weber's queen is sublime, human, and surprising: a sometimes courageous monarch unwilling to allow others to determine her destiny. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion—the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs—was also the means of her undoing. Weber's book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship, but also a moving, revelatory reinterpretation of one of history's most controversial figures.

StepWisdom: Knowledge from the Ages for Successful StepFamilies asks us to shift the way we look at stepfamilies. These vibrant, flexible, and creative families are a boon to our society. Stepfamilies can indeed be challenging and sometimes difficult, but StepWisdom provides the reader with a solid understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of blended families, offering useful guidelines, anecdotes, and expectations to help your family be a success. Eleanor Alden's work encourages stepfamilies to recognize their worth and to function at their best. Combining history, archetypal psychology, and modern family systems theory in a practical and often humorous way, StepWisdom brings hope. Eleanor Spackman Alden, LCSW, BCD, has been working with stepfamilies for over forty years. She has taught Jungian psychology and family therapy at Naropa University's graduate school, and has been in private practice since 1985. She lectures and does workshops on stepfamilies, and presently lives with her husband and two doodles in Colorado. www.StepWisdom.com "This rich and careful work on the holy and unholy aspects of stepfamilies, written by therapist and professor Eleanor Alden, not only draws on observations and understandings from her private practice and education, but also from growing up in a stepfamily herself. This evocative work offers understandings about patterns of both sweet and sour drives and impulses within stepfamilies as found in reality and mythos. This work can help others sow the seeds for a beautiful flowering within those special families called 'step'--as in 'step' to a more fulfilling consciousness." -- Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Diplomate Jungian Psychoanalyst, Author of Women Who Run with the Wolves "Insightful, historically illuminating in a very interesting way, and a must-read for every psychiatrist and mental health professional who works with stepfamilies. And now we know that we all do!" -- Laura J. Klein, MD, Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center "StepWisdom: Knowledge from the Ages for Successful StepFamilies is truly wonderful. There is nothing out there like it. Eleanor Alden speaks to the reader with clarity and moments of humor. She makes the case so well that stepfamilies are the norm and that there is no reason that they can't be gifts. Everyone should be required to read this before they enter a marriage with children. The work is truly captivating." -- Claudia Black, MSW, PhD, Author and Addictions Specialist

The Philosopher's Stone is a collection of case studies in compositional process; not so much about how the music was arrived at through its sketch stages, but more are construction of issues of form as the defining features of a genre, and structure as the individual realization in a particular work. Great musical movements and works are seen as highly creative solutions to problem-solving. The contexts of the works differ considerably. Some were written against the background of a specific precedent or model, as with Mozart's Haydn quartets via Haydn's Op. 33 set. In other cases, as with Beethoven's middle period style, the composer reconsiders a comprehensive range of implications about style and construction, of how, after earlier successes now outworn, to make a new and significant contribution to the genre without duplicating earlier solutions. The essays are grouped into three sections: on Beethoven studies, Mozart in retrospect, and nineteenth-century music. All the movements and works in these chapters pose in their different ways these issues of structural reinterpretation and re-formation, where the reworking of the form leads to a distinctive and higher level transformation

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) was the author of world famous books for children - the tales of fantastical adventures, journeys back in time and travel to magical worlds. Nesbit also wrote for adults, including novels, short stories and four collections of horror stories. Content: The Bastable Trilogy The Story of the Treasure Seekers The Wouldbegoods The New Treasure Seekers The Psammead Trilogy Five Children and It The Phoenix and the Carpet The Story of the Amulet The Mouldiwarp Chronicles The House of Arden Harding's Luck Other Children's Novels The Railway Children The Enchanted Castle The Magic City The Wonderful Garden Wet Magic Other Novels The Red House The Incomplete Amorist Salome and the Head (The House With No Address) Daphne in Fitzroy Street Dormant aka Rose Royal The Incredible Honeymoon The Lark Short Story Collections The Book of Dragons: The Book of Beasts Uncle James, or The Purple Stranger The Deliverers of Their Country The Ice Dragon, or Do as You Are Told The Island of the Nine Whirlpools The Dragon Tamers The Fiery Dragon, or The Heart of Stone and the Heart of Gold Kind Little Edmund, or The Caves and the Cockatrice The Magic World: The Cat-hood of Maurice The Mixed Mine Accidental Magic The Princess and the Hedge-pig Septimus Septimusson The White Cat Belinda and Bellamant Justnowland The Related Muff The Magician's Heart Royal Children of English History Pussy and Doggy Tales Nine Unlikely Tales Oswald Bastable and Others Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare Grim Tales In Homespun The Literary Sense Man and Maid These Little Ones Collected Short Stories Poetry Collections Lays and Legends All Round the Year Landscape and Song Songs of Love and Empire The Rainbow and the Rose Many Voices Other Works ...

This work offers a comparative cross-cultural history of dreams. The authors examine a range of texts concerning dreams, from a variety of religious contexts (including China, the Americas and Greek and Roman antiquity) to explore the ways in which different cultures experience the world of dreams.

Once Upon a Time There Was a Little Girl shares the moving stories of seven women who as young girls experienced the early loss of their mothers through death or physical or emotional abandonment. The women explore their personal traumas through their responses to seven fairy tales in which there was no nurturing maternal presence. Dr. Marcella Shields is a psychologist with over thirty years of experience who reveals the inspiring journeys of these women who eventually triumph over suffering and learn to rely on the bond they have formed with each other to help reclaim their passion for life. By exploring seven timeless fairy tales in which the heroine finds her way through the grief of abandonment, the women offer a deeper understanding of the significance of the mother-daughter bond and the devastating consequences for the daughter if this bond is ruptured early. The poignant life stories and dreams courageously offered by these women show how fairy tales allowed them to understand and refashion themselves, and provide a source of encouragement and hope for other women who have experienced early maternal loss. Fathers raising daughters without a consistent maternal presence will also find the reflections valuable.

For young detective Aggie Morton and her friend Hector, Christmas becomes a lot more exciting when a dead body is found in this second book in the Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen series, inspired by the life of Agatha Christie as a child and her most popular creation, Hercule Poirot. For fans of The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency. Aspiring writer Aggie Morton is looking forward to Christmas. Having just solved a murder and survived her own brush with death inal her small town of Torquay on the coast of England, Aggie can't wait to spend the holidays with her sister Marjorie, the new Lady Greyson of Owl Park, an enormous manor house in the country; Grannie Jane and her fellow sleuth and partner in crime, Hector Perot. Owl Park holds many delights including Aggie's almost cousin Lucy, exciting and glamorous visitors from Ceylon and disguises aplenty in the form of a group of travelling actors, not to mention a secret passageway AND an enormous, cursed emerald. Not even glowering old Lady Greyson (the Senior) can interfere with Aggie's festive cheer. But when Aggie and her friends discover a body instead of presents on Christmas morning, things take a deadly serious turn. With the help of a certain nosy reporter, Aggie and Hector will once again have to put their deductive skills and imaginations to work to find the murderer on the loose. Filled with mystery, adventure, unforgettable characters and several helpings of tea and Christmas pudding, Peril at Owl Park is the second book in a new series for middle-grade readers and Christie and Poirot fans everywhere.