Overview

On August 19, 1418, a competition concerning Florence's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore was announced: Whoever desires to make any model or design for the vaulting of the main Dome . . . shall do so before the end of the month of September. The proposed dome was regarded far and wide as all but impossible to build. The dome would literally need to be erected over thin air. Of the many plans submitted, one stood out. It was offered not by a master mason or carpenter, but by a goldsmith and clockmaker named Filippo Brunelleschi, who would dedicate the next twenty-eight years to solving the puzzles of the dome's construction. In the process, he did nothing less than reinvent the field of architecture. Brunelleschi's Dome is the story of how a Renaissance genius bent men, materials, and the very forces of nature to build an architectural wonder we continue to marvel at today. Denounced at first as a madman, Brunelleschi was celebrated at the end as a genius. He engineered the perfect placement of brick and stone, built ingenious hoists and cranes to carry an estimated 70 million pounds hundreds of feet into the air, and designed the workers' platforms and routines so carefully that only one man died during the decades of construction.

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Ross King is the highly praised author of, among other books, Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, as well as The Judgment of Paris and Leonardo and the Last Supper, both of which won the Governor General's Award for Nonfiction. He lives just outside Oxford, in England. James Cameron Stewart trained at Hull University and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Some theater highlights of his thirty-six-year career include Frank-n-Furter (The Rocky Horror Show), Thenadier (Les Miserables), the poet Philip Larkin in Larkin with Women (Best Actor nominee, MEN Awards 2005), and originating the part of Hamish in Sir Alan Ayckbourn's Things We Do for Love. In 2008 he published his grandfather's World War I memoirs and toured his one-man show based on them from 2008 to 2011. His television/film credits include Outlander, Jericho, Flying Blind, Golden Years, Emmerdale, London's Burning, Eastenders, Coronation Street, Holby City, and Taggart. He often appears on Radio 4, and is a regular presenter on the weekly The Economist podcast. James loves recording audiobooks and is delighted to have had the opportunity to narrate such a variety of magnificent authors, from Seneca through Max Hastings and Antony Beevor, to superlative fiction by J. M. Coetzee, Michael Dibdin, Stuart MacBride, and more. James's upbringing alternated between the Home Counties and the Isle of Skye. In addition to being an actor, he is a nutritional therapist, a keen sailor, and is at his happiest when flying his hot-air balloon.

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