Böcker av Michael J. Strauss

In this unique new book, The Heart of Drawing, 59 artists from 22 countries exhibit their art and talk about their process of creation to inspire readers and help them find inspiration for their own creative efforts. The book is about what happens during the creation of a drawing, NOT just about the final result. Drawing is described as an act of cognition that can help you develop eye-brain-hand coordination, conceptualize and analyze ideas, think creatively, and express yourself and communicate with others. It's about Drawing to Learn, which is the main focus of the book. The words and images you see express a journey, and the artists are exploring their internal and external realities with shape, line and value. The book promotes gestural or expressive drawing, not necessarily a perfect finished work. Because of this, many of the drawings show restated lines, drawn over erasures and other tentative marks and "draw overs" showing the process of creation. They are not all flawless finished pieces. Though from many countries and with various backgrounds, most of the artists say they began drawing at an early age. And most had someone in their lives encouraging them to create. What most have in common is their gestural and exploratory approach to drawing. Some describe entering a meditative state while drawing when nothing matters except putting marks on a surface. Such drawing is sometimes a felt bodily experience more than an intellectual one. For example, one artist notes "I keep a journal of my thoughts, a kind of reservoir for fleeting feelings and impressions where, like a primordial soup, ideas congeal and give birth to strange creatures that crawl onto the shore, discover wings, and take flight." What's best about The Heart of Drawing is the drawings themselves. How these artists create is as diverse as humanity itself and the whole collection will give aspiring artists ideas for their own creative efforts.

Post-2002 events at the U.S. naval facility at Guantanamo Bay have generated a spate of books on its use as a detention center in the U.S. fight against terrorism. Yet the crucial enabling factor-the lease that gave the U.S. control over the territory in Cuba-has till now escaped any but cursory consideration. The Leasing of Guantanamo Bay explains just how Guantanamo Bay came to be a leased territory where the U.S. has no sovereignty and Cuba has no jurisdiction. This is the first definitive account of the details and workings of the unusual and problematic state-to-state leasing arrangement that is the essential but murky foundation for all the ongoing controversies about Guantanamo Bay's role in U.S. anti-terrorism efforts, charges of U.S. human rights violations, and U.S.-Cuban relations.The Leasing of Guantanamo Bay provides an overview of territorial leasing between states and shows how it challenges, compromises, and complicates established notions of sovereignty and jurisdiction. Strauss unfolds the history of the Guantanamo Bay, recounting how the U.S. has deviated widely from the original terms of the lease yet never been legally challenged by Cuba, owing to the strong state-weak state dynamics. The lease is a hodge-podge of three U.S.-Cuba agreements full of discrepancies and uncorrected errors. Cuba's failure to cash the annual rent checks of the U.S. has legal implications not only for the future of Guantanamo Bay but of the Westphalian system of states. Compiled for the first time in one place are the verbatim texts of all the key documents relevant to the Guantanamo Bay lease-including treaties and other agreements, a previously unpublished U.N. legal assessment, and once-classified government correspondence.