Picasso Line Drawings and Prints (Dover Art Library)

Book Description

44 drawings from many periods, styles show master 20th-century draughtsman's incredible line. 1905 circus family, portraits of Diaghilev, Balzac, cubist studies, neo-classical nudes, mythological scenes, many media: lithograph, drypoint, etching, pen-and-ink.

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Utterly disappointing piece of kitsch

Great Adaption of the Grandest Opera

Stunning Conclusion to a Powerful Drama

Excellent Adaption of the Ring cycle

The Ring of the Nibelung Book 2: Siegfried & Gotterdammerung: The Twilight of the Gods
P. Craig Russell
Manufacturer: Dark Horse
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Ring of the Nibelung Volume 1: The Rhinegold & The Valkyrie (Ring of the Nibelung)

Rackham's Color Illustrations for Wagner's "Ring"

The Magic Flute

Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Round

The P. Craig Russell Library of Opera Adaptions: Adaptions of Parsifal, Ariana & Bluebeard, I Pagliacci & Songs By Mahler (Russell, P. Craig. P. Craig Russell Library of Opera Adaptations, 2.)

ASIN: 1569717346

Book Description

The ultimate adaptation of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle concludes with these elaborate and faithful renditions of Siegfried and Gotterdammerung: The Twilight of the Gods. Siegfried is separated from his love, the Valkyrie Brunhilde, and even the All-Father himself cannot make things right. In the stunning conclusion, all of creation hangs in the balance because of gods meddling in the affairs of man — all over the gold of the Rhinemaids. In this massive undertaking, P. Craig Russell has created a living, breathing version of the Ring Cycle that Richard Wagner could only have dreamed of executing in his day.

Customer Reviews:

Utterly disappointing piece of kitsch.......2006-11-08

The text is OK and the way the story is cut up in frames and assembled is competent, but the drawings are the work of a hack, often tacky and always styleless and garishly colored. The costumes and settings are totally lacking in imagination and carry no semantic weight. The attempts to create a visual equivalent for the musical leitmotifs of the operas are too literal and very much in the spirit of a mechanical translation from opera to comic book. An affront to connoisseurs of either opera or comics or both. Only valuable as a kitschy curiosity.

Great Adaption of the Grandest Opera .......2004-09-22

This comic book is superb! Graig Russell treats such a complex opera with great sincerity and skill, the characters and themes fit the music perfectly. Yes, there is no such thing as a perfect performance of ring cycle, but there is certainly a perfect comic book for the work.Do grab it when it is still available! This book is one of a kind, it will stay with you for years to come.

Stunning Conclusion to a Powerful Drama.......2003-05-11

The story of one of Wagner's timeless operas, adapted here into comic form. I do not know the original, but this version makes me wish to find out more. It is comprised of 4 parts collected into two books, corresponding to the original 4 operas, which were independant but held together in a loose confederation to make on complete whole.

This is continued from Vol. 1.

Siegmund's son, Siegfried, is raised by Alberich's ambitious brother, who wants the ring held by Fafnir the giant, now a dragon. Siegfriend reforges his father's sword, and with it he slays first Fafnir and then the dwarf who would kill him for the ring. Alberich, in the meantime, is watching mirthfully. Voton looks for advice from the first goddess, then meets Siegfriend on his way to win Brunhildé He shatters Voton's spear and climbs through the river of fire, and at the top wins love in the former Valkyrie.

The series wraps up in Gotterdammerung, twilight of the gods. Siegfried sails out to find his fortune, and meets a kingdom run by several characters out to ensnare the power of the ring. With a powder they make the hero fall in love with a princess, and pledge to retrieve Brunhilde for the king -- and the ring for his advisor. After a blood-oath he sails away to do this. The valkyrie is visited by one of her fellow maidens-at-arms, demanding Brunhilde throw the ring into the Rhine, but she refuses, claiming it as a symbol of her love. Siegfriend, in guise of the king, finds her and wins her again, this time for another. It is seen that the advisor is Alberich's son, thus his interest in the ring. A marvelous feast is prepared for a double-marriage on the king's return, when Brunhilde finds out she was tricked; she then helps this advisor and the king to devise a way to kill him. Siegfried is warned by mermaids, but refuses to grant them back the ring. He is later tricked into talking with longing of the king's new wife, and the king's advisor promptly slays the warrior; later that night, in a duel, he also kills his brother the king. Brunhilde demands a funeral pyre built, and in the end, everyone dies and everything burns.

Even such a long summation can barely do this dense and powerful opera justice. Rather than the standard practice of rewriting or removing speech in parts, nearly everything is kept, translated directly from the original words of Wagner. The translation itself is very nice, keeping an archaic and formal syntax, while remaining accessible to modern readers. It is similar to Shakespeare or any contemporary, high without pretnetion. While the music cannot be included, the songs remain, to be fleshed out instead by lush art. The parallel goes deeper, in fact; as mentioned in the introduction, where Wagner's music has its lietmotifs, quickly recognizable strains that pull the whole together, so does the art include its own repeated motifs.

The story is classic, and told as well as befits a master. The politics between the gods is as fierce or more than that between men, and between them battles and intrigue rage. No major point is left unexplored, nothing forgotten and left to the wayside. Each character introduced comes back to play at least once, most exiting only through death. So much goes on that it is dizzying to keep up, but the intention is never to leave the reader behind, so it isn't overly difficult to follow. Even the reintroductions that catch the reader up on the events of each previous part are handled deftly. The art is vivid and colorful, very detailed and realistically shaded and textured. At times it seems more like acrylic paint than simple color press. The scenery is well detailed, matched by the people, whose actions and expressions are each striking and individual. While characters are seen from many angles and perspectives, anatomy of each is still proper. The story is very visual and cinematic; some places are very dense and wordy, while sometimes pages go by with no words needed. The fights in particular flow this way, becoming very abstract, yet the action clearly laid out. Russel is very comfortable with his ability to tell a tale however it needs to be told, certainly.

Excellent Adaption of the Ring cycle.......2002-07-27

This is a beautifully illustrated and translated two-book comic adaption of Wagner's Ring cycle. P. Craig Russell's defends his belief that he could translate the opera music into images and create a powerful fantasy saga. The art is fantastic: Russell draws beautiful panels - the covers of these two books are a great example of the art inside. The translation into English is melodramatic (well, it's opera) and powerful. I can't praise these books enough. This is my favorite graphic story since I read, and re-read, Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, and these two volumes will be accompanying me on all my future moves.

Customer Reviews:

A collection of clever limericks.......1998-07-10

What is nice about this book is that it is not embarassed to include bawdy limericks among the others but never for bawdiness's sake alone. Bawdiness is NOT a prerequisite of a good limerick. Cleverness IS - and this book has collected a large number of entertaining and clever 5-liners, all with glorious punch lines. I was also pleased to be introduced by the book to a number of variations of the limerick form, such as the double limerick and the limeraiku, a combination of the limerick and the haiku forms.

Great stuff - highly recommended!

Average customer rating:
The Penguin Book of Limericks

Manufacturer: Viking
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Limericks & Humorous Verse | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0713915579

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THE PENGUIN BOOK OF LIMERICKS
Unknown
Manufacturer: BLOOMSBURY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Limericks & Humorous Verse | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000S838I0

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THE PENGUIN BOOK OF LIMERICKS.
E. O. (Compiled and Edited by). Parrott
Manufacturer: BCA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Limericks & Humorous Verse | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000O8RIF8

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THE PENGUIN BOOK OF LIMERICKS

Manufacturer: Viking Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Limericks & Humorous Verse | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000I17JC8

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Penguin Book of Limericks
E O Parrott
Manufacturer: PENGUIN BOOKS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Limericks & Humorous Verse | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000UDI6RG

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The Penguin Book of Limericks
E. O. Parrott
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Limericks & Humorous Verse | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000OJ78N4

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Movie reviews from an insider, fan and master storyteller

This is how it's done

Harlan Ellison's Watching
Harlan Ellison
Manufacturer: Underwood-Miller
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

History & Criticism | Movies | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
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Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories

ASIN: 0887331475

Customer Reviews:

Movie reviews from an insider, fan and master storyteller.......2001-12-09

You'll learn more from one Harlan Ellison movie review than you did in a week of any college history or media class.

He's done the screenplays for various movies to varying degrees of quality, and he's honest about that, which gives him MAD credibility points with me (self-effacing is the path to free, open blasting of others). He blasts movies on the premise that, if they're bad, they've lied to you and sucked the very life out of your existence and should be punished. He's got lots of backstage insight and, even though a great deal of the films in this book are dated by the nature of the films discussed (ever seen a 10 page essay about how bad "Gremlins" was?) which slows the book down in spots, it's over 400 pages of the most erudite, informed, intellectually stimulating slamming you've ever read. He makes you want to go to the video store and stock up on everything in the 80s to see if its as bad as he says it is. I don't agree with every review (and some reviews aren't even reviews, but diatribes about how jacked up society and art is, and these are often chilling), but I am thoroughly engaged with every review, and what more could you ask for?

A must for movie fans or anyone looking for intelligent writing that dares you to not own a dictionary. The book literally makes you smarter.

This is how it's done.......1999-10-04

The written reviews have much more to give in terms of sheer entertainment value then the moves themselves. If you run across this in a library check it out, it shows how movies reviews should be done

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Harlan Ellison's Watching
Harlan Ellison
Manufacturer: Underwood Books, Incorporated
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0887330665

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WATCHING
Harlan Ellison
Manufacturer: Underwood Miller
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000RWTLVU

Average customer rating:

An interesting set of music biz stories

Moguls and Madmen: The Pursuit of Power in Popular Music
Jory Farr
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0671739468

Book Description

Popular Music/Non Fiction

Customer Reviews:

An interesting set of music biz stories.......2004-11-21

What you get here is eight interviews-stories about people in the music business, from a diverse group of genres. Now 10 years old, it's interesting to read about was going on then, and what has since happened to many of the people mentioned in the book. A relatively easy read but be warned it would get an R rating if it was a movie due to profanity and graphic descriptions.

Customer Reviews:

A Minute to Learn: A Lifetime to Master.......2004-07-08

Hex is a deterministic, zero-sum, abstract board game. If you know what this means, and appreciate such games, then you will find the game irresistible. The rules are so simple that you can "see" far down the strategy tree. Draws are impossible. Hex was invented independently by two eminent mathematicians, Piet Hein and Nobel Prize winner John Nash (the latter of _A Beautiful Mind_ fame). The feel of competition that this game provides is intense; one player compared it to a "knife fight in a phone booth." The game demands your best efforts, and rewards them.
If you are talented mathematically, there are chapters which deal with the game in a way that appeals. If not, you will still love to study how the book progresses from the simplest templates to tactics to overall strategy. Annotated games are given, as well as quizzes and problems. Game of expert play are taken from the internet. Hex programs are dicussed. There is a rich treatment of the variants and offshoots of the basic game, although perhaps basic 11 x 11 hex is probably still the best of the bunch. The author creates a rich vocabulary to describe the different aspects of the game, and while the reader may have to slow his reading occasionally and ponder, he will find everything in its proper order and will find that everything makes sense. I found a useful colection of blank boards of different sizes at the back of the book which I photocopied to make studies of the games I have now in progress on the net, and thereby explore the different possible avenues of play by using pencil-and-paper diagrams. Anyone who enjoys abstract games such as chess and go will be cheating himself by not exploring the richness of this book, and the richness and challenge of this game. There are a few typos here and there, but relatively few, and not very distracting.

The "Hex" Bible.......2002-08-05

Being hex rules so simple, there are only 2 possibilities. Either you never heard about hex or you know how to play it. In the first case there are good odds that you can like this book,especially if you like games such as chess or checkers. But in the second, this book is a must. There is everything about this wondeful game, from strategy to historic notes, from variants to computer-play and algorithms, from sample games to a great reference section.
So this is THE hex book.

Strategies for a simple game with many subtle possibilities.......2000-08-01

While I had heard of the game of Hex, until I read this book, it had been of little interest to me. My interest in games like this extends very little beyond the analysis of strategies. In most cases, I find detailed treatments of tactics to be uninteresting and rarely complete an article much less a book. However, this time I read it completely and not just because I needed to for the review. I am not sure whether it is the game itself or the writers explanation, but my interest never wavered throughout. While many of the questions regarding the best next move had clear solutions, there were times when I did not believe that the given move was the appropriate one. However, once I read the explanation, there was no doubt.
It is this feature that most likely kept my interest. Some of the strategies are obvious and easily seen. The point where my interest was really generated was when the subtlety of play began to become evident. Seemingly foolish moves are suddenly understood to be brilliant ones that force the conclusion. It is easy to prove that every game must have a winner and also that there must be an optimal strategy that will guarantee victory. The problem of course is that the next best move that guarantees victory often appears as one of little consequence.
This is the first book about games that I have read from cover to cover in many years where my interest never wavered. I tackled most of the problems and came away with a deep appreciation for the game and the difficulty of play. It is strongly recommended.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

Book Description

The trading strategies of legends Jesse Livermore, Bernard Baruch, Gerald Loeb, and more provide ways to triumph in the market

Today's bookshelves are so laden with Johnny-come-lately experts, eager to sell their knowledge to any and all, that it's sometimes hard for traders to know which way to turn or whom to trust. Lessons from the Greatest Stock Traders of All Time makes the choice simple, examining the careers of five traders--Jesse Livermore, Bernard Baruch, Gerald Loeb, Nicolas Darvas, and Bill O'Neil--who, more than any others over the past century, demonstrated tremendous success at conquering Wall Street.

This technique-filled book presents numerous ways in which the timeless strategies of these investing icons can be used to tame today's high-speed, unforgiving marketplaces. Comparing and contrasting the successes--and occasional failures--of these five giants of finance, it reveals:

What Jesse Livermore did to correctly call every market break between 1917 and 1940
How Bill O'Neil stuck to basics to create his famously effective CANSLIM system
The strategies Nicolas Darvas used to become a self-made millionaire several times over

Customer Reviews:

Must read for an investor.......2007-08-18

If you are an investor, this is a must read. After all, who better to learn from than the most successful investors of all time. Granted, some of those profiled here aren't investors. In their own words, Livermore and Baruch called themselves speculators. But their goal was to make profits for their money.

It is very interesting to note that the 5 profiled cover investing in the stock market for nearly a century and that all the prinicples apply to this very day. John Boik has made a service by compiling the life stories of these five great traders/investors. It is inspirational for those who want to succeed in the market to read about these indiviudals, their life mission, their strategies, their successes, their failures, the lessons learnt.

I don't want to state what is all in the book. What is great is the opportunity to read about all these five in one place. The last chapter is well written summarizing the strategies of the five. The book itself is an easy read without you having to beat your brains out trying to remember all you read. The lessons are very crystal clear to sink in. The chapter on William O' Neal is a bit longer compared to others.

The book does not explain a combined system of trading, nor does it capture all the trades for every year each of these traded. This is not the point. The point is about the rules/strategies they followed and the lessons learnt. If you are new to trading or even if you in those initial years where you rely on tips and/or using another person to invest for you, you have to know what makes money in the market. For that, this book is a must read and a must addition to your investing library.

Excellent book for beginning traders.......2007-04-26

I really wish I had read this book earlier in my studies on trading stocks. The author does an excellent job bringing together the greatest stock traders of all time in one place. It is hard to argue with the results of these men, making millions in the markets several times over 40-50 years. Jesse Livermore made over $100 million during the crash of 1929 by being short in stocks, Nicholas Darvas made $2 million in 18 months part-time. I had already stumbled upon Jesse Livermore, Nicolas Darvas, and William O'Neal, and read each of their books. They have all taught me a great deal and their teachings have lead me to profits in the market. I love the way the author has shown the similarities in all these great traders and condensed the lessons to be learned from them in the final chapter. All these great traders bought into the strongest stocks, they did not look for bargains. They believed in buying high and selling higher. They believed in buying stocks with great fundamentals and technical strength. They looked for large price increases on strong volume, they captured there profits on the rise at the first sign of weakness. Thanks to this book I will read the books by Gerald Loeb and Bernard Baruch and continue with my growth as a trader. I will also read all the books about these great men recommended at the end of the book. This book would have helped me focus on what books to read when I began learning years ago. Who better to learn from than the best there ever was?

Poorly written and short on substance.......2007-04-26

This is an OK book for beginners and folks interested in the lives of the "greatest" traders. However, I found it to be poorly written, redundant, and very short on details. I have to imagine that becoming a successful trader takes a lot more than the very simplistic view this book portrays. Unfortunately for the reader, the lessons described in this book could be summarized in a few bullet points. I feel like the author was trying to use the traders' backgrounds to add color to the story. In the end, I don't think he was successful in writing interesting biographies or in describing trading techniques.

Learn how the greats did it.......2006-12-30

This book gives you a great introduction to strategies that made 5 of the greatest investors in history a lot of money. I truly find Jesse Livermore, Nicolas Darvas and William O'Neil to be the most interesting but this book covers all of them.

I went on to read How I made 2 Million in the Stock market by Darvas, Reminissences of a Stock Operator and How to Make Money in Stocks by O'Neil, but this book gives you a good overview of the systems these greats used.

It's a pretty quick read and it will get you thinking in a different direction.

Informative.......2006-10-30

This is a must read book for beginners since it gives a little bit of
background and history of the greatest traders.

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