Book Description
They defy the rules of space, but captivate the mind. Most of these visions can't exist in the real world--only here, where artists play with perspective in the most remarkable ways. "An Impossible Staircase" goes up and down endlessly, with no highest or lowest step. How is that possible? And take a look at a very unique elephant: would it have trouble walking on its unusually-constructed legs? From the strangely three twisted rings in "Cosmic Wheels" to a meandering Celtic knit that you can try to untie, all the images are mind-boggling.
Average customer rating:
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Artist's Guide to Mixing Colours
Jenny Rodwell
Manufacturer: David & Charles
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 General
| Instructional & How-To
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
Watercolor
| Painting
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0715304216 |
Book Description
Cats are famous for being aloof, but "cat-titude" reaches new heights in Get Fuzzy, the bitingly funny comic strip from cartoonist Darby Conley. Wry and witty, Get Fuzzy is a hilarious portrait of single life with pets.Rob Wilco is the human who heads the household, but it's really Bucky the cat who's in charge. Satchel is a gentle pooch with a sensitive soul who tries to remain neutral, but frequently ends up on the receiving end of Bucky's mischief. Together, this trio makes it through the trials and tribulations of daily life as an unlikely team.Darby Conley's first book was a runaway hit; this second, Fuzzy Logic, will likely hit the same funny bone of everyone who enjoys their pets with an attitude.
Customer Reviews:
Funny!.......2007-09-27
these books just crack me up, my only complaint is they are too short! I never want to put them down, and read the whole thing in one sitting.
A Get Fuzzy Reading Guide.......2007-08-11
I won't go into how fantastic this comic strip is, but it is easily my favorite comic strip of all time. :)
For the uninitiated, there are 6 collections so far and three treasuries. The seventh collection is not yet released.
Please keep in mind that each treasury is two collections put together, so as far as I know the treasuries are the same as two of the collections, except I believe the treasuries have the Sunday comics in color while the collections have them in black and white.
In chronological order, the collections are:
1. The Dog is Not a Toy: House Rule #4
2. Fuzzy Logic: Get Fuzzy 2
3. The Get Fuzzy Experience
4. Blueprint for Disaster
5. Say Cheesy: A Get Fuzzy Collection 5
6. Scrum Bums
7. I'm Ready for My Movie Contract: A Get Fuzzy Collection (not yet released)
The treasuries are:
1. Groovitude (encompassing collections 1 and 2).
2. Bucky Katt's Big Book of Fun (encompassing collections 3 and 4).
3. Loserpalooza (encompassing collections 5 and 6).
These comics are beyond hilarious, and I would highly recommend them to pet lovers/haters of all ages. :)
Fuzzy Logic, wonderful as always.......2007-01-04
What is so amazing to me is that Get Fuzzy has from the very beginning been extremely funny and the characters fully conceived. The level of excellence and humor is always in place. One can't go wrong getting a Fuzzy book. A great present for the entire household and important for those who collect Get Fuzzy and want to be able to return to Fuzzy world just by opening a book.
I love Bucky.......2005-08-03
What can I say, I'm a sucker for Bucky and Sachel. This book is a compilation of past strips that are wonderfully hilarious.
Best comic.......2005-02-18
I think think this is one of the greatest comics ever! I read them all day. So you should read them too!
Edward a sixth grader
Customer Reviews:
Bad Baxter.......2007-05-12
Very disappointing CD--Dry, repetitive, and hard to believe, boring.
There is much better Baxter available on his self produced live CD's.
Buy them and by all means, see him in person.
Audio replaces Paper.......2007-01-19
My husband, a long-time Baxter Black fan, spends more time in his truck listening to the radio than sitting in a chair reading. The CD version of Black's book was the perfect gift. He giggles while he tries to relate a tale he has just heard, then gives up and puts the CD in a player in the house so I can listen. Hearing the stories in Baxter's familiar, ironic drawl is as delightful as listening to the weaving of the tale.
YOU DONT HAVE TO BE A COWBOY.......2007-01-11
...to love Baxter Black. His commentaries make horsesense to city folk too. Seriously, if you love good story tellers, then you need to include the wisdom of Mr. Black in your circle of tellers! He will make you think, laugh and wish you had been the one to "say that"!
Cowboy crossover . . ........2006-03-07
Baxter Black is kind of the Garrison Keillor of Western humor, a man in a cowboy hat whose country sensibility crosses over to the mainstream - if urban listeners to NPR count as part of the mainstream. Western humor is often self-deprecating and relishes irones, but under it there is a heartfelt love of the cowboy way and the vanishing values that the cowboy represents - self-reliance, respect for the land, hard work, honesty, fearlessness, the whole code of the West. Black's devotion to those values seems often a winking one. While his wit and cleverness are unparalleled, and his knowledge of his subject matter as a "large animal veterinarian" is unimpeachable, the resonance for me is too often with the funny bone and not the heart.
While I'll be the first to champion Black's "Hey, Cowboy, Wanna Get Lucky" as a great comic novel, the material on this double CD seems of a different kind. The humor is often more like clowning, and the lapses into pure sentiment, such as the long story poem "He Sang, 'Little Joe the Wrangler'" go for broke, but will seem too far over the top for some listeners. While Black is certainly among the best for cowboy humor and cowboy poetry, this recording lacks the depth of a Wally McRae or Paul Zarzyski, whose work seems more loyal to Elko than NPR.
Delightful fun!.......2005-03-07
I received this CD set for my birthday after being a fan of Baxter Black for years on NPR. I have enjoyed the CD's greatly. The tracks range from hilarious to exuberant to deeply touching. Some tracks, of course, are a little better than others. but I have gotten so much enjoyment from these discs. I heartily recommend them to anyone who has enjoyed listening to Baxter Black on the radio or to anyone who enjoys humor and stories about real people with a western flavor.
Book Description
"It's an easy enough job if one has something to say," Paul Bowles remarked in a letter to his mother about his first foray into music criticism. And Paul Bowles, indeed, had plenty to say about music. Though known chiefly as a writer of novels and stories, Paul Bowles (1910-99) thought of himself first and foremost as a composer. Drawing together the work he did at the intersection of his two passions and professions, writing and music, this volume collects the music criticism Bowles published between 1935 and 1946 as well as an interview conducted by Irene Herrmann shortly before his death.
An intimate of Aaron Copland and protégé of Virgil Thomson, Bowles was a musical sophisticate acquainted with an enormous range of music. His criticism collected here brilliantly illuminates not only the whole range of modernist composition but also film music, jazz, Mexican and Moroccan music, and many other genres. As a reviewer he reports on established artists and young hopefuls, symphonic concerts indoors and out, and important premieres of works by Copland, Thomson, Cage, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky, among others. Written with the austere grace of his better-known literary works, Bowles's criticism enhances our picture of an important era in American music history as well as our sense of his accomplishments and extraordinary contribution to twentieth-century culture.
Customer Reviews:
Music and Writing in Different Rooms.......2005-10-02
It would be possible to know of Paul Bowles (1910-1999) as a writer exclusively. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949), established him as one of the greatest English language novelists of the post-war generation. However, Bowles was a gifted and prolific composer as well. While he was modest about his accomplishments as a composer, Bowles' managed to compose three operas, five ballets, incidental music for over twenty stage productions, as well as many chamber works, film scores and songs. Of the two pursuits (writing and music composition), Bowles described them as being "different rooms". His creative mind could only manage one at a time and to him they were distinct. It is with interest then to learn in Paul Bowles on Music (edited by Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann) that Mr. Bowles was writing articles and reviews about music long before the publication of his novels and stories. In all, he managed to write over four hundred articles and reviews for Modern Music and the New York Herald Tribune where he was ultimately employed as a music critic and writer between 1942-1945. The book provides an important introduction which describes how Bowles was courted by the composer and music critic Virgil Thomson for the Herald Tribune job and how he doubted he could write under strict deadlines.
Except for a non-revealing interview (his last) at the end of the book, the rest contains his articles and criticisms arranged in chronological order. The idea is an appealing one since this `non-fiction' of his has never been compiled in one book until now. With Bowles' music reaching a wider audience of late one might be interested in what he had to say about the subject. Unfortunately, there is not much interest in reading the reviews. Bowles' intelligence, wit and musical knowledge are evident but many of the reviews reveal him as opinionated and petty: "...most of the music reminds me of the Indian stuff in old Westerns, only it's not quite so good.". Remarks like this appear without explanation. We never learn in his reviews why something is "good" or "awful" just that, from his perspective, they are. The letters and articles hold more interest and import as they reveal Bowles' passion for and careful research of topics ranging from folk music to jazz. One may want to keep the layered metaphors and psychological perception of his novels and the rhythmic precision and harmonic spaciousness of his music in different rooms as he intended.
For Bowles' scholars, this book is essential because it fills a void. Everyone else may want to start with Paul Bowles' novels and compositions before reading his criticisms. It seems, in the final analysis, that his fear of writing well on deadline was rational and the writing included here, simply does not do him justice.
Paul Bowles Reviews Music.......2005-08-24
I wanted to read this book of Paul Bowles's (1910 - 1999) music reviews for several reasons. I am an admirer of Bowles's fiction, including the novel "The Sheltering Sky," which he wrote as an expatriate American in Tangiers beginning in 1947. Furthermore, before he began his career as a novelist, Bowles was a rising and prolific composer. A self-taught protege of Aaron Copland, Bowles wrote ballets, suites, art songs, film scores, and scores for the theater, including plays by Tennessee Williams. Music and literature are two of my passions.
This leads me to the third reason for wanting to read this book. Bowles spent several years reviewing music of all sorts, chiefly for the "New York Hearald Tribune" and for the periodical "Modern Music". He wrote this work as a journalist, for little pay, and with tight deadlines. Yet he managed to write well and to find something important to say. It is this work-a-day world of writing that reminds me of my efforts, and those of my fellow reviewers, writing on this site It is a challenge to write short pieces with regularity on subjects one loves and to try to produce something others will find valuable. In short, Bowles's reviews, and his progress from composer to critic to novelist somehow became emblematic and inspirational to me of the Amazon reviewing process.
In this book, Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann have gathered together Paul Bowles's music reviews written primarily from 1940--1946. Bowles writes in a spare, understated, succinct style that will be familiar to readers of "The Sheltering Sky". His reviews cover a broad spectrum and include reviews of scores for films, record releases, and concerts. They cover too a wide range of music, including the then-recent works of Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein, John Cage, and other contemporary classical composers, to folk music of Mexico, North Africa, South America, and Cuba, through American jazz and blues. I was intrigued by his references to the blues singer Memphis Minnie (p. 230), the blues pianist Champion Jack Dupree (sings "with a fine primitive self-accompaniment on the piano", p.205), and Arthur Crudup (p.230) who would become the most direct and immediate influence on young Elvis Presley.
Bowles's reviews give a lively picture of concert life in New York City during the war years as he describes for us the venues for music, and the performers and performances that he witnessed. Many young composers and performers he reviewed were just starting out and would subsequently become famous, such as the 25 year old Leonard Bernstein (Bowles reviewed the premier of his "Jerimiah" symphony) and the young 18 year old pianist Eugene Istomin. But he also reviewed concerts by composers and performers then considered to be of promise who have subsequently been forgotten. It is good to remember these composers and flegling performers and their efforts. The book allows the reader to see the manner in which musical tastes have changed from the 1940s to the present.
Bowles was a composer and writes about music from a composer's viewpoint. He writes eloquently about structures, harmonies, music periods, textures, interpretations and performance practices. One can learn a good deal about listening intelligently to music from these reviews, even though the performances, and in some cases the music he describes, has long been forgotten.
I noticed that Bowles had a predeliction for early music and, in particular for the music of the harpsichord. In a review praising a 1942 concert by harpsichordist Ralph Kilpatrick, Bowles wrote: "it is difficult not to be enthusiastic over such a concert, if only because it involves the harpsichord itself, that antidote to the poison sounds of our era's daily life. It is the instrument which allows every note of every voice of a piece of contrapuntal writing to be heard with complete clarity; remote and recessed as a voice may sound, it is never hidden." (p.58) In a 1991 interview included in this book, Bowles offered similar observations in discussing his reactions to the performances of Wanda Landowska (pp 267-269). Bowles's criticism of "the poison sounds of our era's daily life," echoed in many reviews in this collection, perhaps help explain his decision to leave New York City in favor of the life of an expatriate in Tangiers.
Bowles decried what he viewed as a growing commercialization and uniformity in all types of music, from folk, to jazz to classical and cherished music as a way of life rather than as a casual entertainment. It is fitting to quote the end of his final review, written in 1946, in which Bowles decried the increasingly sterile character of traditional folk music. He wrote:
"In Latin America as elsewhere, the radio and cinema are systematically exterminating folk music before its creators and consumers are in a position to participate in the creation or enjoymnent of art music. What fills the gap? Commercial music. But there are still thousands of small villages in that part of our hemisphere where radios and projectors have yet to arrive, and where the people still make their own music just as they have for centuries, not for entertainment, but because it is an absolute essential to their living." (p.257)
It is this ideal of music as "essential to living" that I found most lasting in these reviews by Paul Bowles.
Robin Friedman
Book Description
Sudoku, or wordless crossword puzzles, have found millions of fans worldwide. Not only are they fun to solve, but their unique blend of logic is perfect for keeping your brain sharp all day long. And the special step-by-step solving guides found only in this volume allow you to quickly master all the different kinds of logic! So why not grab a pencil and see if you sudoku?Features: 100 of the "wordless crossword puzzles" that are taking the world by storm! Top-quality sudoku from easy to hard, edited by legendary puzzlemaster Will Shortz Features sixteen pages of special step-by-step solving guides, plus an introduction from Will Shortz
Customer Reviews:
Terrific Sudoku Book.......2007-06-03
*****
This book is a steal at the bargain price, but worth even the retail price. There are 100 sudoku puzzles organized into "Light and Easy", "Moderate", "Demanding", and "Beware! Very Challenging!". They are large grids with only one puzzle per page, easy to work.
If you are a beginner, this probably isn't the best book for you, because it's light on technique. There is a cursory explanation about sudoku, but you really should be familiar with basic sudoku and basic techniques before you tackle this book.
A nice feature of the book is that there are eight complete puzzle walk-throughs, where explanations for each step of solving the puzzle are written out. I used this book as my second Sudoku book, and as such, it was perfect!
Definitely recommended.
*****
Book Description
A proven program for turning effective listening into a powerful business tool Managers and other employees spend more than 40 percent of their time listening to other people but often do it so poorly that the result is misunderstood instructions, misdirected projects, and erroneous actions—millions of dollars' worth of mistakes just because most people don't know how to listen. In this new edition of her classic guide to the art of effective listening, Madelyn Burley-Allen shows you how to acquire active, productive listening skills and put them to work for you—professionally, socially, and personally. With her time-tested techniques, you'll learn how to:
- Eliminate distractions and improve your concentration on what is being said
- Locate key words, phrases, and ideas while listening
- Cut through your own listening biases
- Interpret body language clues
- Ask constructive, nonthreatening questions that elicit real information
- Get others to listen to you
- Master a whole range of listening skills that you can use on the job and in your personal life
Listening: The Forgotten Skill uses an interactive learning approach with work-sheets, charts, graphs, and self-tests that help you pace and monitor your own progress.
Customer Reviews:
Mumble mumble through the audio.......2007-09-25
This review is for the audiobook - although the content is good, the author should have gotten a professional speaker to do the narration. It is so ironic to be unable to LISTEN to a book about listening because the author munches her words, chokes off a few, stops and starts here and there, and flips her pages over so loudly that it is distracting.
I find myself focusing on her bad delivery as opposed to her good content. If you're going to get this book, make it a printed one!
Good Content but horrible voice and quality!.......2007-09-13
The book that this audio adaptation is based on is very popular however this CD package is garbage. All the posts are about the book but not the 6 CD set. First off some people are NOT meant to be recorded and Madelyn Allen is one of them. They should have gotten a professional speaker to read her book. Sometimes you can't make out her words and also you can hear her moving or shuffling papers as she reviews her notes as she goes along. Very unprofessional and low quality. I ended up giving this to my mother to listen too!
Good Teaching Tool.......2007-01-11
I used this book as the basis for an in-service training for nurses and social workers. It presents useful information in a convincing manner.
listening behavior.......2006-08-11
Classic guide to understand and improve your listening behavior.
My highest recomemndation.
No-nonsense guide to listening for business.......2006-05-25
No academic cloudy language. Madelyn writes with perfect clarity, organizes her material usefully, and knows what she is talking about. The exercises are excellent. I use this book in my seminars and workshops on listening for business and government people. I give it my highest recommendation, and have no ties whatsoever to the author or publisher. Enjoy!
Books:
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- The Art Studio/Loft Manual: For Ambitious Artists and Creators
- The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso
- The Chesley Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy Art: A Retrospective
- The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome
- The Dodo And Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters
- The Duchamp Effect (October Books)
- The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (Communications and Culture)
- The Essential: Hieronymus Bosch (Essentials)
- The Haunted Inkwell: Art and Our Future
Books Index
Books Home
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SuperVisions: Ambiguous Optical Illusions (Super Visions)
SuperVisions: Geometric Optical Illusions (Supervisions)
The Ultimate Book of Optical Illusions
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