Ross King
author of Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Ross King
“With discussions on numerous aspects of cultural and economic history―including religion, education, gender, architecture, food, and popular culture―this comprehensive but accessible book is a welcome corrective to earlier work that tended to focus on institutional, intellectual, and political history of Korea as a 'tributary state' in the sinocentric order.” (from Amazon)
While popular trends, cuisine, and long-standing political tension have made Korea familiar in some ways to a vast English-speaking world, its recorded history of some two millennia remains unfamiliar to most. Korea: A History addresses general readers, providing an up-to-date, accessible overview of Korean history from antiquity to the present. Eugene Y. Park draws on original-language sources and the up-to-date synthesis of East Asian and Western-language scholarship to provide an insightful account. This book expands still-limited English-language discussions on pre-modern Korea, offering rigorous and compelling analyses of Korea's modernization while discussing daily life, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ history, and North Korean history not always included in Korea surveys. Overall, Park is able to break new ground on questions and debates that have been central to the field of Korean studies since its inception.
Recommended by Ross King
“A fascinating new Michelangelo emerges from this account of the last two decades of the artist's long life. William Wallace expertly guides us through Michelangelo's years as an 'old man in a hurry,' proving that his enormous late projects, especially St. Peter's, were every bit as successful, distinctive, and spectacular as anything he achieved in his youth. A remarkable feat of scholarship and storytelling that overturns many myths and misconceptions, and shows the real story to be even more astonishing.” (from Amazon)
by William E. Wallace·You?
by William E. Wallace·You?
The untold story of Michelangelo's final decades―and his transformation into one of the greatest architects of the Italian Renaissance As he entered his seventies, the great Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo despaired that his productive years were past. Anguished by the death of friends and discouraged by the loss of commissions to younger artists, this supreme painter and sculptor began carving his own tomb. It was at this unlikely moment that fate intervened to task Michelangelo with the most ambitious and daunting project of his long creative life. Michelangelo, God's Architect is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other major buildings. When the Pope handed Michelangelo control of the St. Peter’s project in 1546, it was a study in architectural mismanagement, plagued by flawed design and faulty engineering. Assessing the situation with his uncompromising eye and razor-sharp intellect, Michelangelo overcame the furious resistance of Church officials to persuade the Pope that it was time to start over. In this richly illustrated book, leading Michelangelo expert William Wallace sheds new light on this least familiar part of Michelangelo’s biography, revealing a creative genius who was also a skilled engineer and enterprising businessman. The challenge of building St. Peter’s deepened Michelangelo’s faith, Wallace shows. Fighting the intrigues of Church politics and his own declining health, Michelangelo became convinced that he was destined to build the largest and most magnificent church ever conceived. And he was determined to live long enough that no other architect could alter his design.