AlokeKumar

ORIANA FALLACI

(1929 - 2006)

An Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer. A former partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career.

Fallaci was born in Florence, Italy. During World War II, she joined the resistance despite her youth, in the democratic armed group "Giustizia e Libertà". Her father Edoardo Fallaci, was a political activist struggling to put an end to the dictatorship of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. It was during this period that Fallaci was first exposed to the atrocities of war.

Fallaci began her journalistic career in her teens, becoming a special corres pondent for the Italian paper Il mattino dell'Italia centrale in 1950. Since 1967 she worked as a war correspondent. For many years, Fallaci was a special correspondent for the political magazine L'Europeo and wrote for a number of leading newspapers. magazine. During the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre prior to the 1968 Summer Olympics, Fallaci was shot three times, dragged down stairs by her hair, and left for dead by Mexican forces. According to The New Yorker, her former support of the student activists "devolved into a dislike of Mexicans".

In the late 1970s, she had an affair with the subject of one of her interviews, Alexandros Panagoulis, who had been a solitary figure in the Greek resistance against the 1967 dictatorship. Fallaci maintained that Panagoulis was assassinated by remnants of the Greek military junta and her book Un Uomo (A Man) was inspired by his life.

During her 1972 interview with Henry Kissinger, Kissinger agreed that the Vietnam War was a "useless war" and compared himself to "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse". Kissinger later wrote that it was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press."

Fallaci has twice received the St. Vincent Prize for journalism, as well as the Bancarella Prize (1971) for Nothing, and So Be It; Viareggio Prize (1979), for Un uomo: Romanzo; and Prix Antibes, 1993, for Inshallah. She received a D.Litt. from Columbia College (Chicago). She has lectured at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Harvard University, and Columbia University. Fallaci's writings have been translated into 21 languages.

She has interviewed many internationally known leaders and celebrities such as the Dalai Lama, Henry Kissinger, the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Walter Cronkite, Omar Khadafi, Federico Fellini, Nguyen Cao Ky, Yasir Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Archbishop Makarios III, Golda Meir, Nguyen Van Thieu and Haile Selassie.

Oriana Fallaci, died of cancer aged 77. At the time of her death she was facing charges of vilifying Islam under Italian law following the publication of her book, `The Strength of Reason', published since the September 11 attacks.

. This spot is for Baylajo from New York,USA who likes the writings of Oriana Fallaci .For more on her visit : baylajo.stumbleupon.com [baylajo.stumbleupon.com]

KEVIN CARTER

(1961-1994)


South Africa Pulitzer Prize winner, Kevin Carter, took his own life months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for a haunting Sudan famine picture.

A free-lance photographer for Reuter and Sygma Photo NY and former PixEditor of the Mail&Gaurdian, Kevin dedicated his carrer to covering the ongoing conflict in his native South Africa. He was highly honoured by the prestigious Ilford Photo Press Awards on several occasions including News Picture of the Year 1993.

Kevin Carter was born in 1960, the year Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was outlawed. Descended from English immigrants, Carter was not part of the Afrikaner mainstream that ruled the country. Indeed, its ideology appalled him. Yet he was caught up in its historic misadventure.

His devoutly Roman Catholic parents, Jimmy and Roma, lived in Parkmore, a tree-lined Johannesburg suburb -- and they accepted apartheid. Kevin, however, like many of his generation, soon began to question it openly. "The police used to go around arresting black people for not carrying their passes," his mother recalls. "They used to treat them very badly, and we felt unable to do anything about it. But Kevin got very angry about it. He used to have arguments with his father.

Though Carter insisted he loved his parents, he told his closest friends his childhood was unhappy. Carter studied pharmacy before dropping out with bad grades a year later. Without a student deferment, he was conscripted into the South African Defense Force, where he found upholding the apartheid regime loathsome In 1980 Carter went absent without leave, rode to Durban and, changing his name, became a disk jockey. When riots began sweeping the black townships in 1984, Carter moved to the Johannesburg Star and aligned himself with the white photojournalists who wanted to expose the brutality of apartheid .

In 1993 Carter headed north of the border to photo- graph the rebel movement in famine-stricken Sudan. Immediately after their plane touched down in the village of Ayod, Carter began snapping photos of famine victims. Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. After he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried.

The New York Times, which was looking for pictures of Sudan, bought his photograph and ran it on March 26, 1993. The picture immediately became an icon of Africa's anguish. The photograph won him the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and a few weeks latter he committed suicide.

This spot is for Olga from Riga, Latvia who is committed to social photography. For more on her visit : olga-dragonfly.stumbleupon.com [olga-dragonfly.stumbleupon.com]

EMILE M CIORAN

(1911-1995)

Emil Cioran is a Romanian philosopher and essayist.

Throughout his works - written some in Romanian, mostly in French - the predominant feelings expressed by the author are pessimism, human alienation, absurdity, futility and decay.

Emil Cioran was born in 1911 in a small, idyllic town called Rasinari. He had a happy childhood, as his family was one of the wealthiest and most respected, as his father was an Orthodox priest. His childhood ended abruptly, when, at the age of ten, he was sent to live with a German family in Sibiu, a thing that left the boy traumatized for life.

The turning point came when he entered the University in Bucharest, as a Philosophy student. Here, he met his lifelong friends, Mircea Eliade - who later became one of the most influential personalities of the 20th century - and Eugen Ionesco, the founder of the Theater of the Absurd.

In 1933, he obtained a scholarship to the University of Berlin. Here he was influenced and he became passionate about Totalita rianism. Some of his declarations dated from that period are positive to Fascism and Nazism. This and his support of the extremist Romanian party Iron Guard attracted a lot of criticism, despite the fact that Cioran repeatedly repented for the lapse into extremism.


His first book, published in 1934 - 'On the Heights of Despair' - was very well received by the Romanian critics, and it was awarded the 'Commission's Prize' and the 'Young Writers' Prize. Other books - highly acclaimed by the critics - were published in the following years - 'The Book of Delusions' (1935), 'The Transfiguration of Romania' (1936), and 'Tears and Saints' (1937), before leaving for Paris on a scholarship.

After he moved to France, all of his books were written in French, as he wanted to emphasize his detachment from the past, particularly from Romania. In order to support himself, he worked there as a translator for a few publishing houses. However, the need to write was strong and he wrote his next book completely in French, even though he worked hard to learn the language. The result was 'A Short History of Decay', which brought him the Rivarol prize, in 1950, the only award he accepted in his entire life.

He led a solitary existence in the latin quarter of Paris, surrounded by famous friends- Samuel Beckett, Mircea Eliade, Eugen Ionesco .... In the last years of his life he gave up writing, because Alzheimer had deteriorated his mind.He died in 1995.



This spot is for Roxana from Romania who likes the writings of Emil Cioran .For more on her visit : bluedream4you.stumbleupon.com [bluedream4you.stumbleupon.com]

GIAMBATTISTA BODONI

(1740 - 1813)

Bodoni was an Italian engraver, publisher, printer and typographer of high repute remembered for designing a typeface which is now called Bodoni.

Bodoni was born into a family of typographers and at the age of 18 moved to Rome, where he was introduced to Cardinal Spinelli. In 1766 Bodoni set out for England, but illness forced him to return home. He started printing and received some local commissions; then, through the offices of Cardinal Spinelli's librarian, Paolo Maria Paciaudi (1755-1829), he was employed as head of the Stamperia Reale of the dukes of Parma.

His early books show the influence of the types used by Pierre-Simon Fournier. He developed a dramatic, bold style, exemplified by the Epithalamia (1775), which celebrates the wedding of the sister of the French king Louis XVI. His mature style achieved a stark brilliance and Neo-classical purity, and from the 1780s he worked with his brother Giuseppe Bodoni (d 1825) to produce his own types.

Bodoni made three main innovations in type design: he gave a vertical alignment to the sloped swellings in the bowls of the letters that derive from the down strokes in handwriting; he made all the horizontal serifs on the upper and lower parts of the letters very thin and uniform; and he increased the contrast between stems and serifs.
Giambattista Bodoni achieved an unprecedented level of technical refinement, allowing him to faithfully reproduce letterforms with very thin "hairlines", standing in sharp contrast to the thicker lines constituting the main stems of the characters.

His printing reflected an aesthetic of plain, unadorned style, combined with purity of materials. This style attracted many admirers and imitators, surpassing the popularity of French typographers such as Philippe Grandjean and Pierre Simon Fournier.

His most celebrated books include. Horatii flacci opera (Rome, 1791) and the two-volume. Virgilii maronis opera (Rome, 1793), whose giant-folio format complemented his typography. Bodoni cut a total of c. 300 fonts of type. In 1806 he exhibited 14 of his books at the Exhibition of National Industry in Paris, where he was awarded gold medals. In 1810 he was granted a pension by Napoleon and awarded the Order of the Union. Notable late works include La Gerusalemme liberata (2 vols, Parma, 1794), the Iliad (3 vols, Parma, 1808) .

The rules of his art were written by Bodoni himself and are demonstrated in the "Manuale tipografico", pubblished after his death by his widow Margherita Dall'Aglio in 1818. A complete collection of his editions are preserved in the Museo Bodoniano, next to the Bibilioteca Palatina of Parma.


This spot is for my friend Marie from Kansas, USA who likes Graphics. For more on her visit : starry-nights.stumbleupon.com [starry-nights.stumbleupon.com]

XUAN ZANG

(602-664 AD)

Xuan Zang or Hsüan Tsang was the most famous Chinese Buddhist pilgrim and traveler in India and a translator of Buddhist texts.

Xuan Zang, also spelled Hsüan Tsang, is the Buddhist designation of the Chinese holy monk whose family name was Ch'en and personal name, Chen. He was born in Honan midway in the brief Sui dynasty (589-617), which represented the first successful attempt at reunifying the Chinese Empire since the end of the Han dynasty (220). Xuan Zang followed the example of an elder brother and joined the Buddhist monastic order in Loyang at the age of 12. The boy monk traveled extensively in China in pursuit of Buddhist learning, particularly the Vijnanavadin school.

A burning desire for knowledge prompted Xuan Zang to leave for India in 627. Surviving the rigors of forbidding deserts and mountains, he passed through the central Asiatic regions of Turfan, Karashahr, Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bactria. He kept a journal of his unique experiences and observations during his nineteen-year sojourn, which later became known as the Hsi-yü Chi. This stands today as the single written record of conditions at that time in India and central Asia. He finally entered India in 631 by crossing the Hindu Kush into Kapisa.

After a two-year study period in northwest India, Xuan Zang sailed down the Ganges to visit the holy land of Buddhism. His itinerary included Kapilavastu, the birthplace of Buddha; Benares; Sarnath, where Buddha delivered his first sermon; and Bodhgaya, where Buddha attained his nirvana under the bodhi tree. The trip terminated at Nalanda, the leading center of Buddhist learning in India, where Xuan Zang took up the study of Vijnanavada in earnest.

After a study period of fifteen months at Nalanda, Xuan Zang resumed his travel, going south along the east coast. Through the introduction of the king of Kamarupa (Assam), Xuan Zang was received with full honors by Harsha, the emperor of India. Xuan Zang now decided to return to China. Emperor Harsha provided him with escorts and gifts. and he arrived back in Ch'ang-an in 645. He was received with royal honors by Emperor T'ai Tsung and Xuan Zang presented him valuable Buddhist manuscripts.


Xuan Zang settled down to the monastic routine and devoted himself to the translation of the texts which he had brought back. When Xuan Zang died at the age of 62, the Emperor canceled his audiences for three days, and just about every resident of Ch'ang-an marched in the funeral procession.


This spot is for Beth from Washington, USA who is a contemporary wanderer and traveler at heart. She organizes tours to India. For more on her visit : wanderluster.stumbleupon.com [wanderluster.stumbleupon.com] and blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/travel [blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/travel]

LOUIS ISADORE KAHN

(1901-1974)

Louis Kahn was one of the most significant and influential American architects. His work represents a profound search for the very meaning of architecture.

When Louis Kahn's corpse was found by the New York Police on the evening of 17 March 1974 in the public lavatory at Penn Station in New York, it took several days for the police to identify him as one of the world's most admired architects. Kahn had died swiftly of a heart attack. On the evening of his death, Kahn had flown back to the US from India where he was building the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. He had gone to Penn Station to board a train home to Philadelphia.

Louis Kahn was born February 20, 1901, in Estonia on the island of Saaremaa. His face was severely burned as a child, resulting in lifelong scars. His Jewish family immigrated to America in 1905 and settled in Philadelphia, where Louis was raised in poverty. A precocious artist and musician in high school, Kahn was inspired to become an architect during an architectural history course he took his senior year. He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (1920-1924), where the Classical tradition in architecture was taught by Paul Philippe Cret, a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Kahn's rise to promi nence began in 1948 -1957 when he was a professor at Yale University. In 1957 he returned to the University of Penn sylvania and taught there until his death. Kahn was a highly respected and influential teacher. His exploratory, questioning attitudes probed in a poetic manner the inner meaning of architecture. For Kahn, the designing of buildings went well beyond just fulfilling utilitarian needs. He searched for "beginnings" and wanted to discover what a particular building "wants to be."

Kahn worked on numerous housing projects including Carver Court (1944), in Coatesville, Pa. He also planned the Yale Univ. Art Gallery (1953) and the American Federation of Labor Medical Building, Philadelphia. Kahn was widely acclaimed for his design of the Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the Univ. of Pennsylvania (1958-60). In this building he arrived at a new and dynamic integration of formal and functional elements, ingeniously relating mechanical services to the total architecture. Kahn eschewed the seemingly weightless International Style glass boxes of his time and created bold, dignified, and sometimes brooding or harsh structures of massed stone and concrete. His notable later designs include the Salk Institute (1965) in La Jolla, Calif., the Olivetti-Underwood Corp. factory (1969) at Harrisburg, Pa., the Kimbell Art Museum (1972), Fort Worth, Tex., and the monumental posthumously completed government complex (1983) in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

His work marked a significant move away from International Modernism towards new directions in architecture.

This spot is for my friend 0leander from Canada, who likes Architecture. For more on her visit : 0leander.stumbleupon [0leander.stumbleupon] .

JAMES JOYCE

(1882-1941)

The writing of the Irish author James Joyce is characterized by experiments with language, symbolism, and use of the narrative techniques of interior monologue and stream of consciousness.

The modern symbolic novel owes much of its complexity to James Joyce. His intellectualism and his grasp of a wide range of philosophy, theology, and foreign languages enabled him to stretch the English language to its limits .

James Joyce was born on Feb. 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin. His father, John, an amateur actor and popular tenor, was employed first in a Dublin distillery, then as tax collector for the city of Dublin .Joyce was educated entirely in Jesuit schools in Ireland, where he excelled in philosophy and languages. After his graduation in 1902, he left Ireland in a self-imposed exile that lasted for the rest of his life. He returned briefly in 1903 for his mother's last illness but left for Paris in 1904 after her death, taking with him Nora Barnacle, his future wife. Until 1915 he taught English in Trieste, then moved to Zurich with his wife and two children. In 1920 they settled in Paris.

Although his fame rests upon his fiction, Joyce's first published work was a volume of 36 lyric poems, Chamber Music (1907). His Collected appeared in 1938. Dubliners (1914) is a collection of 15 short stories completed in 1904. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is a semi-autobiographical novel of adolescence, or Bildungsroman (development novel). A sensitive and artistic young man, Stephen Dedalus is shaped by his environment but at the same time rebels against it. For Joyce and others after him, Dedalus became a symbol for the artist, and the hero, Stephen, appears again in Ulysses (1922).

Ulysses (1922), generally considered Joyce's most mature work, is patterned on Homer's Odyssey. The action takes place in a single day, June 16, 1904, on which the Irish Jew, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses), walks or rides through the streets of Dublin after leaving his wife, Molly (Penelope), at home in bed.Through the stream-of-consciousness technique, Joyce permits the reader to enter the consciousness of Bloom and perceive the chaos of fragmentary conversations, physical sensations, and memories which register there.

Finnegans Wake (1939) is the most difficult of all Joyce's works. The novel has no evident narrative or plot and relies upon sound, rhythm of language, and verbal puns to present a surface beneath which meanings lurk. Not unexpectedly, Finnegans Wake was not well received by the reading public, and Joyce was forced to seek financial help from friends after its publication. With the outbreak of World War II, he and his family fled, on borrowed money, from France to Switzerland, leaving a daughter in a sanatorium in occupied France.

Joyce died in Zurich on Jan. 13, 1941.


This spot is for my friend Simone from California, USA who loves literature. For more on her visit : sagsq.stumbleupon.com [sagsq.stumbleupon.com]

THE BEATLES

(1960-1968 )

In the 1960s a new band known as the Beatles burst on the pop music scene and changed it forever.

Band members included George Harrison (1943-), John Lennon (1940-1980), Paul McCartney (1942-), and Ringo Starr (1940-). With the release of three anthologies in the mid-1990s, the group remained one of the best-selling of all time.

Founded in Liverpool during the late '50s by guitarists John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, with drummer Pete Best and Stu Sutcliffe on bass, the Beatles were initially a skiffle band, playing a British variation of American folk music. The band -- which went under several names before arriving at the Beatles -- incorporated numerous American rock & roll, rhythm & blues, and pop music influences in their playing and songwriting, most notably the sounds of Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Arthur Alexander.

They developed significant popularity in Hamburg, Germany, by the early '60s, where dozens of Liverpool bands were booked into local clubs, and this soon translated into success in their hometown. Sutcliffe left the band in 1961 and McCartney took over on bass. After finding their manager Brian Epstein -- who got them an audition with George Martin, the head of EMI Records' tiny Parlophone label -- the band was signed to a recording contract in 1962. Ringo Starr replaced Best on drums soon thereafter, and the group's lineup was set.

The.spring of 1963, saw the Beatles' singles and albums breaking sales records in England, and they were officially introduced to America in February 1964 with an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show followed by a whirlwind tour. The group had been signed the year before to do a movie, and, through a stroke of good luck, they were turned over to director Richard Lester and together created A Hard Day's Night, probably the best rock & roll movie ever made.

The band's follow-up movie, Help! was made on a much bigger budget and in color, but it failed to repeat A Hard Day's Night's success. The group was generally as unhappy with the results as everyone else, although it has some entertaining moments. The Beatles tried directing and producing their own television film, 1967's Magical Mystery Tour, but the result were amateurish.

In 1968, they provided the songs for the psychedelic animated feature Yellow Submarine, and made a brief onscreen appearance at the movie's conclusion. The divisions that would eventually lead to the group's break-up were chronicled in the 1969 documentary Let It Be, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, with impressive results.


The Beatles soundtrack album 'Let It Be', stands as a cheapskate epitaph, a cardboard tombstone, a sad and tatty end to a musical fusion which wiped clean and drew again the face of pop music.

This spot is for Sunny from Arizona, USA. who likes the music of The Beatles. For more on her visit : sunnyschlenger.stumbleupon.com [sunnyschlenger.stumbleupon.com]