Robert Easton Knihy

For many people, Native American architecture calls to mind the wigwam, tipi, iglu, and pueblo. Yet the richly diverse building traditions of Native Americans encompass much more, including specific structures for sleeping, working, worshipping, meditating, playing, dancing, lounging, giving birth, decision-making, cleansing, storing and preparing food, caring for animals, and honoring the dead. In effect, the architecture covers all facets of Indian life. The collaboration between an architect and an anthropologist, Native American Architecture presents the first book-length, fully illustrated exploration of North American Indian architecture to appear in over a century. Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton together examine the building traditions of the major tribes in nine regional areas of the continent from the huge plank-house villages of the Northwest Coast to the moundbuilder towns and temples of the Southeast, to the Navajo hogans and adobe pueblos of the Southwest. Going beyond a traditional survey of buildings, the book offers a broad, clear view into the Native American world, revealing a new perspective on the interaction between their buildings and culture. Looking at Native American architecture as more than buildings, villages, and camps, Nabokov and Easton also focus on their use of space, their environment, their social mores, and their religious beliefs. Each chapter concludes with an account of traditional Indian building practices undergoing a revival or in danger today. The volume also includes a wealth of historical photographs and drawings (including sixteen pages of color illustrations), architectural renderings, and specially prepared interpretive diagrams which decode the sacred cosmology of the principal house types.

Royal Dates with Destiny is a collection of short vignettes describing the deaths of the world’s aristocracy. It is presented in “calendar form, with at least one entry for each day of the year. Based on a number of scholarly sources per entry, these 400 or so “summaries of mortality” give an idiosyncratic and delightfully bizarre historical overview of the surprising ways in which the world’s most powerful have died. Each month contains at least a couple of famous royal deaths, yet more often than not the royal will be less well known, yet no less fascinating.

Exploring the interplay between fiction and personal memoir, this collection showcases how brief memories or experiences can evolve into compelling narratives through imagination. Each vignette serves as a starting point, requiring a "trigger" to develop into a fuller story, highlighting the transformative power of storytelling. The book invites readers to appreciate the nuances of memory and creativity as they intertwine across its two distinct yet overlapping sections.