Bob Thompson (1937-1966) was a figurative expressionist painter active in literary, musical, and artistic circles in New York and Europe from the late 1950s until his death in 1966. In the first book devoted solely to Thompson, the life and work of this pivotal figure in modern American art history and African American culture receive the attention they deserve. Judith Wilson situates Bob Thompson within the context of both contemporary artistic production and cultural trends of the fifties and sixties. She uses interviews, Thompson's diary entries and letters to his family, and his work to give a thoughtful and thorough interpretation of his art and persona. She traces Thompson's development--psychologically, socially, and artistically--effectively portraying his first encounters with art and bohemian culture and his intensely active period in Europe shortly before his death in Rome at the age of 29. Bob Thompson's life intersects several important currents in recent American culture, and his work reveals an unfinished quest for communal identity, says Wilson. His use of postmodern techniques of appropriation and pastiche embraced both the Western tradition and cultural resources specific to the African American experience. The publication of Bob Thompson recognizes the important role of the artist in the vanguard of twentieth-century American art. Bob Thompson (1937-1966) was a figurative expressionist painter active in literary, musical, and artistic circles in New York and Europe from the late 1950s until his death in 1966. In the first book devoted solely to Thompson, the life and work of this pivotal figure in modern American art history and African American culture receive the attention they deserve. Judith Wilson situates Bob Thompson within the context of both contemporary artistic production and cultural trends of the fifties and sixties. She uses interviews, Thompson's diary entries and letters to his family, and his work to give a thoughtful and thorough interpretation of his art and persona. She traces Thompson's development--psychologically, socially, and artistically--effectively portraying his first encounters with art and bohemian culture and his intensely active period in Europe shortly before his death in Rome at the age of 29. Bob Thompson's life intersects several important currents in recent American culture, and his work reveals an unfinished quest for communal identity, says Wilson. His use of postmodern techniques of appropriation and pastiche embraced both the Western tradition and cultural resources specific to the African American experience. The publication of Bob Thompson recognizes the important role of the artist in the vanguard of twentieth-century American art.
In this unique memoir, the adventuresome author combines stories of rural Kentucky and restless travel with tall tales of other worlds and bygone eras. Bob Thompson discovered his passion for storytelling on the front porch of his Granny's country store in McCracken County, Kentucky. Absorbing the tales and traditions he learned there, he kept them close as he went out in search of stories and life experiences of his own. In Hitchhiker, Thompson offers readers homegrown tales that interweave ghosts of the past with real and imagined worlds far beyond his grandmother’s porch. The stories progress from Bob’s Tom Sawyer-esque childhood in Western Kentucky through his restless wanderings as a hitchhiking hippie to his adulthood as an unrepentant adventurer following the footsteps of Hemingway and the Lost Generation across Europe. This collection brings together coming-of-age tales, family stories of bygone eras, and even true accounts of unsolved murders and mysteries. Hitchhiker is Huckleberry Finn meets The Twilight Zone, with just a taste of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Warning!* This book contains the following: Unsafe use of powerful firearms in combination with explosives Cultivation of illegal crops Impressionable minors being exposed to illicit activities Piloting of automobiles under impaired conditions Transporting large sums of cash across national borders *Stunts performed in this book were undertaken by professionals. Do not attempt them at home.
When Bob Thompson asked his granny years ago why she continued to create so many of her beautiful quilts, she said it was the only way she could reach across time, touching and giving her descendants her energy. And just like his granny, Thompson's gift of storytelling provides a reverence and buoyancy all its own. This collection combines personal and family experiences to create a patchwork quilt of gripping stories with the comfort of memory. Thompson draws on his mother's seventy years of diaries, handwritten notes, and recipe cards to reveal that every story, no matter how small, has some wisdom to impart. He describes how, as a child, he would pass his days on the front porch of his granny's country store in western Kentucky and listen to regulars swap stories and spin yarns, which cemented his passion for storytelling. His granny's methods of quilting provide an interesting perspective on life: "She never hurried; her stitches were small and even. Fascinated with numbers, I counted as many as eight hundred per square and did the math, sixteen thousand for a twin-bed-sized quilt! When I mentioned that some of Great-Grandmother Brim's quilts had stitches so large that you could get your big toe caught in them, Granny smiled and said, 'It's not the size of the stitches that count, it's the spaces between them.'" Thompson's poignant narratives of community, friends, and family impart the significance of the quiet moments and meaningful spaces between everyday events. In doing so, they demonstrate that there is something to be gained from every human experience.
In the ride-along tradition of Sarah Vowell, Tony Horwitz and Bill Bryson, this insightful history revisits the pivotal figures and key turning points of the American Revolutionary War. Revolutionary Roads takes readers on a time-traveling adventure through the crucial places American independence was won and might have been lost. You’ll ride shotgun with Bob Thompson as he puts more than 20,000 miles on his car, not to mention his legs; walks history-shaping battlefields from Georgia to Quebec; and hangs out with passionate lovers of revolutionary history whose vivid storytelling and deep knowledge of their subject enrich his own. Braiding these elements together into a wonderfully entertaining whole – and with a reporter’s abiding concern for getting the story straight – he has written an American Revolution book like no other. The Revolutionary War is one of the greatest stories in all history, an eight-year epic filled with self-sacrificing heroes, self-interested villains, and, more interestingly, all the shades of complex humanity in between. It boasts large-scale gambles that sometimes paid off but usually didn’t, as well as countless tiny, fraught tipping points like a misunderstood order in a South Carolina cow pasture that could have altered the course of the war. The drama is magnified when you consider what was at stake: the fate of a social and political experiment that would transform the world. Yet we don’t know this story as well as we should, or how easily the ending could have changed.
(Book). Bernie Williams' ability to play major league baseball at a high level was directly influenced by his musical training and his deep understanding of the similarities between musical artistry and athletic performance. Through a series of conversations, narratives, and sidebars, the authors (Bernie Williams, Dave Gluck, and Bob Thompson) discover and reveal the influence of music and its rhythms on the game of baseball. Readers of Rhythms of the Game will gain an insight into the similarities between musical artistry and athletic performance. The book is written for musicians and athletes looking to improve their level of performance on the stage or on the field, as well as for a general audience interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the underlying influence of music on the game of baseball.
Pioneer. Congressman. Martyr of the Alamo. King of the Wild Frontier. As with all great legends, Davy Crockett's has been retold many times. Over the years, he has been repeatedly reinvented by historians and popular storytellers. In Born on a Mountaintop, Bob Thompson combines the stories of the real hero and his Disney-enhanced afterlife as he delves deep into our love for an American icon. In the road-trip tradition of Sarah Vowell and Tony Horwitz, Thompson follows Crockett's footsteps from his birthplace in east Tennessee to Washington, where he served three terms in Congress, and on to Texas and the gates of the Alamo, seeking out those who know, love, and are still willing to fight over Davy's life and legacy. Born on a Mountaintop is more than just a bold new biography of one of the great American heroes. Thompson's rich mix of scholarship, reportage, humor, and exploration of modern Crockett landscapes bring Davy Crockett's impact on the American imagination vividly to life.
Robert J. Thompson's PANACEA explores the realms of mystery, murder, politics, relationships and humor; ultimately revealing the rewards of growing up selflessly. A lawyer himself, Thompson writes about a young Chicago attorney named Rick Morrissey who hopes to find a more fulfilling personal and professional life while on an extended vacation to the Florida panhandle where he spent his formative years. "Rick, like many single men his age, is a 31 year old man, in a 22 year old's body, with an 18 year old's psyche, holding everything worldly yet personally bankrupt because of his chosen lifestyle," says Thompson. The book follows Rick in his travels down south where he has a chance meeting with Delaney Chase, a young woman who never had a chance to be a child due to her difficult upbringing in the small town of Panacea, Florida. Although Delaney was raised right in the southern way, she is tormented by the mysterious death of her father in 1988's Hurricane Gilbert when she was 10 years old. Further complicating Delaney's childhood was her mother's daily battle with alcoholism and placement in a psychiatric institute due to mental illness and schizophrenia after her husband's death. Delaney's father, Pally Chase, had been a commercial fisherman and was well-known locally before his death. Not only did Pally have a fine reputation as a shrimper, he was also a formidable opponent to political and corporate oil giants as a political activist who fought oil drilling efforts off the Florida panhandle in the Gulf of Mexico, costing the oil industry millions of dollars. Rick learns of the strange circumstances surrounding the death of Delaney's father which happened immediately after Pally had successfully blocked oil drilling by the industry's juggernaut, Copperhead Oil Company. Delaney's entire life has been spent on the Florida panhandle, except for her perfunctory visits to see her mother in an Atlanta mental institute. Her fateful encounter with Rick sets the scene for a modern thriller, romance and, finally, closure over Pally Chase's death. Woven among the chapters are colorful, and often times humorous, characters of the current south who provide interesting twists to the story line, adding insight, discovery and mystery. "PANACEA is as timely as current headlines as politicians battle over the issue of oil drilling in the same Gulf region that provides the setting for this book," says Thompson. "It is laced with factual material discussing the authority for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico along with possible consequences that could result from such activity.
Floyd Collins is perhaps the most famous person you've never heard of, but this young man's tragic death made him celebrated as "the Greatest Cave Explorer Ever Known." Collins was a Kentucky cave explorer in the early part of the 20th century, characterized by his lack of fear when exploring the most difficult cave passages, and few people could match his persistence and endurance. In the winter of 1925, Collins became trapped for more than two weeks in a cave located within the boundaries of what is now Mammoth Cave National Park. The story of Floyd Collins becoming trapped and ultimately dying alone in a cave held a powerful grip on the hearts and minds of people the world over. The resulting media coverage put Mammoth Cave on the map and helped usher the actual designation of Mammoth Cave as a national park. His explorations laid the foundation for others to later discover the truth of Mammoth Cave, the longest cave in the world.
Mammoth Cave National Park and the surrounding area comprise the world's most extensive cave system. The region is characterized by what geologists call "karst" topography, a landscape dotted with sinkholes and caves. One of America's first tourist attractions, the cave was opened to the public in 1816, and was preceded in popularity only by Niagara Falls. The 200 vintage images found in Images of America: Mammoth Cave and the Kentucky Cave Region represent a look back at over 100 years of photography and tourism at Mammoth Cave and other caves that make up the Kentucky Cave Region. Rare images of early transportation, hotels, cave guides, cave tours, as well as important cave discoveries, and cave explorers such as Floyd Collins are shown throughout the book.
In these absorbing interviews with twelve of the greatest money managers in Canada, Bob Thompson explores the mechanics and psychology behind the key characteristics that make these managers great. How do the country's top stock pickers make millions of dollars in the markets? That's the question Thompson answers in interviews with these money-making superstars. This book highlights the common traits of some of the best money managers in the country. It will help average investors increase their skills by having the money managers, in their own words, explain how their strategies, styles, and success have developed over the years. In this entertaining book, investors will see the insights, personalities, foibles, outlooks, and misgivings of some of the brightest minds in the investment world here in Canada. It will help make investors aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. Learn what it takes to be a great investor!
Just try harder. Just work harder. Just do more. But what happens when working harder doesn’t seem to be getting you better results? You’ve got to get unstuck. In Getting Unstuck, Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson show the different kinds of plateaus that can hold you back and how they can be overcome. Using case studies of both success and failure—including Derek Jeter, Blockbuster, and Google—they identify how to avoid pitfalls and to incorporate the peak behaviors that place breakthroughs within anyone’s grasp. If you’ve ever given more and more to a broken relationship, a weight-loss regimen, or a stalled career—only to get less and less in return—Getting Unstuck will change your life.
The Plateau Effect is a powerful law of nature that affects everyone. Learn to identify plateaus and break through any stagnancy in your life— from diet and exercise, to work, to relationships. The Plateau Effect shows how athletes, scientists, therapists, companies, and musicians around the world are learning to break through their plateaus—to turn off the forces that cause people to “get used to” things—and turn on human potential and happiness in ways that seemed impossible. The book identifies three key flattening forces that generate plateaus, two principles to guide readers in engineering a plateau’s destruction, and three actions to take to achieve peak behavior. It helps us to stop wasting time on things that are no longer of value and to focus on the things that leverage our time and energy in spectacular ways. Anything you want to do better—play guitar, make friends, communicate with your children, run a business—you can accomplish faster by understanding the plateau effect.
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