Home Theater Design: Planning and Decorating Media-Savvy Interiors

Book Description

New in Paperback!

Technical tips for how to achieve a "movie theater" experience in your own home.Home Theater Design is the comprehensive guide to planning all types of entertainment spaces in the home. Author Krissy Rushing reveals how to choose and place acoustic and audio/visual systems to the best advantage; how to plan a home theater or music room; and how to display, store, and care for all types of media formats.

This book looks at the aesthetics, too with a "whole interior" approach to home entertaining. The book offers information on a variety of design considerations - furnishings, comfort, setting up entertainment spaces, hosting get-togethers, accommodating guests - while factoring in style, functionality, new technology, acoustic planning, soundproofing, lighting, and environmental and personal health considerations.

Customer Reviews:

Designing a Room not a System.......2007-01-30

The first question you have to ask is 'What is a home theater.'

And the author doesn't have any better definition than you do, so she has written the book in three sections, and with a definite point of view.

One section is on small systems in small rooms. Here you are basically using more or less standard equipment in more or less standard rooms.

The next section is on multi-purpose rooms, such as a den or living room with a major emphasis on media but still useful for other things.

Finally there's the dedicated home theater. Here a room is built to make your own small, but technologically, audiologically, aesthetically and in every other way professional quality. This often includes stadium seating, with high quality chairs and tables for drinks and popcorn between the seats.

All in all the book is more concerned with the interior decoration of the home theater than with the technical aspects. I suppose that's fair, because the rapid change in the technology. Anything you attempted to print in a book would become obsolete at the next Consumer Electronics Show.

Misleading title and little substance.......2006-02-11

I bought this book to help me plan the space for a home theater I am planning to build myself. Big mistake. It contained nothing useful for me.

This is a book written by someone who only knows home theater from the perspective of rich or trendy clients who pay big bucks to have someone else do all the planning. It's also something of a advertising piece to show off very big and expensive (nothing under six figures) home theaters designed by two firms the author repeatedly gives credits to. At the very end she even has a brief interview with the head of one of those firms.

If you're really rolling in the dough and want to see lots of glossy pictures to see how to spend your money, this book is for you. Example: "John and Jane have a wonderful theater space with arched alcoves along the walls. They display their collection of antique vases in each alcove, and use accent lighting to enhance it. They install a crystal chandelier for ambient lighting..."

For everyone else it's a waste of time. It's so limited in text that it didn't take more than a couple hours to read through. Instead of giving you some real planning guides, the author limits herself to glosses of the obvious along with references to the type of professional you'll need to hire (so many - I've never heard of an acoustician before. He came somewhere after the cabinetmaker you'll need to design the housing for the projector).

This is a book that bows to wealth and trendiness. For those of us who want to tap our own creative ability as well as our more typical budget, we'll have to look elsewhere for inspiration and information.

Good book for Interior Design tips, not so good for actually building a room.......2005-08-12

This book has tons of helpful tips about features that you should have in an entertainment room. It helps you learn what accessories to get, but doesn't help much in the way of actually building the room. I was hoping to have some help on how to install a suspended ceiling with the sound-proofing material, or how they recommend to frame an elevated seating platform.

All in all, I'd say this book is an advantage to have, and it definately is worth purchasing, but don't expect it to help you with the nuts and bolts of the operation.

Helped me out a lot!.......2005-08-07

This book is really helpful if you're planning a home theater system or integrating some type of audio and video stuff inside the house. I had a small house and was able to get lots of tips for designing my a/v system in it. Now that I bought my new house (much larger) I am able to reference the later chapters for dealing with the new challenges. Highly recommend!

Way Too Fluffy for My Taste.......2005-05-30

This book should have been called "Beautiful Interior Designs that Happen to Include some Home Theater Gear", or "Home Theater Style". It's little more than a pretty picture book of impressive-looking rooms that integrate HT gear, and often in a laughable way. The text is fluffy, thowaway stuff that is irritating to read.

The photos are very well done, but often include speakers and other gear set up with no unsightly cables. Of course, without the unsightly cables, there'd be no audio or video, either. I guess that's the main thing that got to me -- if you're going to show a setup with nice speakers and other gear that are out in the room, at least be honest about how to treat cables and make them look as good as possible. Don't just leave them out altogether. It's insulting, and is foolish in a book that is supposedly about HT.

Book Description

Ximena Bunster directs her own research center on women in Santiago, Chile. Elsa Chaney teaches and works in the field of comparative politics, centered around women in development concerns in the Caribbean, South America, and Africa.

Sellers and Servants: Working Women in Lima, Peru

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Sellers and Servants: Working Women in Lima, Peru
Zimena; Chaney, Elsa Bunster
Manufacturer: Praeger Publishers Inc.,U.S.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OA7GM6

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Sellers and Servants: Working Women in Lima, Peru
Ximena ; Chaney, Elsa M. Bunster
Manufacturer: Bergin & Garvey Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000KQ4EL0

Book Description

What's left of the new economy? This book examines the remains of this well-hyped concept and finds that despite all the mistaken ideas and sexing-up, the technological changes of the 1990s still have important effects today.

Customer Reviews:

English for nincompoops.......2001-02-12

This book is very, very funny. It's a real rarity, a reference book that you can read from cover to cover in one session.

Leo Rosten, does the subject justice and keeps his timeless style intact covering this fascinating and esoteric world of faith, foklore, tradition, genious and history through a cute study of Yiddish philology...

Hooray for Yiddish.......2000-03-29

Even though Yiddish has not replaced English, it definitely contributed a lot. This book will teach you tips how to use Yiddish expressions. From now on you don't have to worry about your sociall status. A mere mentioning of a yiddish saying makes people laugh. By reading this book you will become a real 'maven'. Good Luck!

Hooray for Yiddish! : A Book about English

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Hooray for Yiddish! : A Book about English
Leo C. Rosten
Manufacturer: Galahad Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OLVPUY

Book Description

The approach of Techniques of Twentieth Century Music is appropriate for composers exploring contemporary idioms, for performers learning to cope with the innovations of modern music, and for teachers developing their understanding and appreciation of the music of our time. All three categories are served by this text. It is designed to provide essential knowledge of the techniques and materials of twentieth-century music and to bridge the gulf between traditional academic training and current practice.

Customer Reviews:

Expanding the Musical Language.......2000-01-13

I consider this book to be valuable for beginning composition students because its examples constitute a useful and varied sampling of early to middle 20th century composers and techniques. Its explanations are readable and focus on musical values.

Dallin offers the student numerous pathways to depart from or expand upon common practice theory while maintaining coherence and expressivity. The important issues of developing ideas and creating cohesive forms are addressed in later chapters.

Along with a steady diet of score study and compositional exercises, this book can be a valuable tool for the student composer.

Helpful book.......1998-07-16

For students that are looking for having a general view on the techniques employed by composers from the beginning of our century this book will represent a good guide. However, its brief explanations and examples about each procedure/technique is just an appetizer for future depth analysis of the mentioned composers/works.

Book Description

Contains personal observations culled from a variety of periodical sources including The New York Times, The L.A.Times, American Theatre Magazine, The Guardian (UK), The Sunday Times (UK), The Observer (UK) and London Times (UK) about some of the most seminal and outstanding performances that took place in the 1990s and the artists that were more prominent during that period.

All Aboard Stage 4 Play: Pixie Dust (All Aboard)

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All Aboard Stage 4 Play: Pixie Dust (All Aboard)
Susan Akass
Manufacturer: Heinemann Educational Books - Primary Division
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0602296188

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Gentle and Endearing Style
Straddling 1947
A success
A taste of India
A Powerful, Beautifully Written Novel Of Two Women & India

Heat and Dust (New Longman Literature)
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Manufacturer: Longman Publishing Group
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0582253985

Book Description

A profound and powerful novel, winner of the Booker Prize

Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an important English civil servant. Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince deeply involved in gang raids and criminal plots. She is intrigued by the Nawab's charm and aggressive courtship, and soon begins to spend most of her days in his company. But then she becomes pregnant, and unsure of the child's paternity, she is faced with a wrenching dilemma. Her reaction to the crisis humiliates her husband and outrages the British community, breeding a scandal that lives in collective memory long after her death.

Customer Reviews:

Gentle and Endearing Style.......2006-09-04

Heat and Dust concerns itself largely with the love affair of Olivia, the wife of a minor English imperial official Douglas Rivers with the local prince, the Nawab, as related by the granddaughter of Rivers and his second wife when she travels to India 50 years later. The granddaughter's experiences are quite similar to Olivia's, in fact one wonders whether she is conscously mimicking Olivia.

India's impact on these English is strong and not necessarily beneficial. The extremes of weather, exotic food, languages, religions, indeed the heat and the dust overwhelm. A particularly interesting character is 'Chidi', a young Englishman temporarily turned Hindu mystic.

Jhabvala is an enormously accomplished author and screenwriter with an intriguing background. Born to Polish parents in Germany, moved with them to ondon to escape Hitler, and married an Indian architect and lived in India from 1951 to 1975 and now resides part-time in NYC. Jhabvala won the Booker Prize (best book by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland in the English language)

Told in a gentle, open and endearing style.

Straddling 1947.......2005-05-31

The British experience in India is a subject that has been given thorough literary treatment during the past century, and most of these books have tried to highlight some aspect of the cultural contrast between east and west. E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India" is perhaps the most comprehensive of these, but Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's "Heat and Dust" makes an admirable effort to contribute to the Forsterian legacy by updating the milieu to a post-independence setting while keeping one foot firmly in the past.

The novel concerns a young English woman, the narrator, who arrives in Bombay intending to make it her home for a while and to reconstruct the story of the doomed marriage of her grandfather, a law officer named Douglas Rivers, and his first wife, Olivia, from a collection of intriguing letters that Olivia had written to her sister Marcia. From the beginning Jhabvala splits the novel into two parallel narratives, alternating between the Riverses in 1923 and the narrator in India fifty years later, who presents her adventures, thoughts, and reflections in the form of a journal.

Olivia Rivers is a bored housewife who has little to do besides playing the piano and chatting with the other British officers' wives until she becomes enamored with the charming Indian prince, called the Nawab, who governs the district Douglas serves. A living emblem of amoral corruption and aristocratic gluttony, the Nawab dwells in an ancestral palace that arrogantly overlooks the wretched slums of the neighboring town and supports an entourage of servants and sycophantic companions including an effeminate Englishman named Harry. Jhabvala employs these elements to shape a dramatic arc that leads from extramarital attraction to adultery and finally to Olivia's disgrace following an ugly scandal for which she could never be forgiven back in England.

The narrator's analogous existence within the pages gives the novel an even broader context; she too falls in love with an Indian man, although a much humbler one, a meek clerk named Inder Lal. She also observes that India is a magnet for Europeans in search of a certain spirituality that they have failed to find in Western religions; in particular she meets a young Englishman who has become a Hindu ascetic, calling himself Chid, but who cannot handle the hardships of a land of such disease and poverty. The novel's title refers to the general climate of the region of which the narrator writes, a scorching exacerbation of the hopeless squalor in which the vast majority of the population lives.

I am aware that Jhabvala has written screenplays based on classic novels, including Forster's, for the Merchant-Ivory film team, and I confess that I somewhat expected "Heat and Dust" to be a pastiche of Forster, but I was pleased to find that Jhabvala, although like Forster a lucid and elegant prose stylist, has a distinctive literary voice, specifically in her shrewd eye for the particularities of Indian culture. From the suttee stones, morbid monuments to Hindu widows who have immolated themselves in their husbands' funeral pyres, to the British cemeteries memorializing the soldiers fallen in the 1857 mutinies, "Heat and Dust" is a valuable tour through 1920s and 1970s India.

A success.......2005-03-10

I've read this book twice, and each time I had the same feeling about it. Very satisfied.
one could feel the heat and dust coming from the story as if he were living with the characters.
Ruth Jhabvala is very talented in describing every little detail and makes you live inside the scene, especially when she comes to describe the state of India and the crowed, disgust, infections, and poverty.
I really felt disgusted reading some lines that I had to stop for a moment thinking of what I've just read.
What I liked the most is having two parallel stories separated by two generations.
The first woman is the narrator who travels to India to discover more about the scandal of Olivia, and unconsciously she follows the same path
claiming that India changes whoever lives there and finally the two characters experience the same end.
The language of the book is simple and fascinating I think everyone would enjoy it .

A taste of India.......2005-03-08

Olivia Rivers, married to Douglas, a civil servant in India, caused a scandal in 1923 in the small town of Satipur when she eloped with and Indian prince. In the 1970s, Olivia's step-granddaughter goes back to the heat and dust of Satipur to solve the mystery of the outrage caused by Olivia's flight.
Mrs Jhabvala's novel sounds like a warning. Both Olivia and the narrator do not seem to withstand India because they are fine and sensitive people who come to love the country very much, too much perhaps. Indeed there are many things to love in India: the landscapes, the history, the music and the physical beauty of men and women which may become a danger to the European. The characters in this novel are immersed by the Indian culture - and in Olivia's case, destroyed by it - they seem to be softened by an excess of feeling for India and finally they are dragged over to the other side. But according to Mrs Jhabvala's description of India - the smells, the sounds, the poverty, the filth, the beggars and cripples - it is difficult to imagine that Europeans can be as totally immersed in that culture as were both Olivia and the narrator. Is it plausible at all that such a foreign culture can be powerful enough to lead one to perdition?

A Powerful, Beautifully Written Novel Of Two Women & India.......2004-04-17

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's powerful and beautifully written novel of an "outrageous" Anglo-Indian romance in 1920s Khatm and Satipur won the Booker Prize in 1983. The author has crafted parallel tales of two young women, distantly related and separated by two generations. Anne, the story's narrator, travels to India to discover more about the mystery surrounding her grandfather's first wife, Olivia.

Douglas Rivers, an upper echelon English civil servant, married and brought his adored wife, Olivia, with him to India in 1923, during the British Raj. She was a beautiful, spoiled and spirited young woman, who found it difficult to adjust to life in the British colonial community of Satipur. Feeling suffocated by the inbred group she was forced to socialize with, Olivia longed for independence, intellectual stimulation and a more passionate life. She hoped that a baby would solve her problems but found it more difficult to become pregnant than she had thought. Shortly after their arrivel in India, Douglas, Olivia and some of the more important members of the community were invited to the palace of the Nawab of Khatm and she was immediately intrigued by the handsome, charismatic prince. He courted her friendship aggressively and then the friendship turned passionate. When faced with a crisis Olivia was forced to make life altering decisions which would have far reaching effects and cause scandal throughout British India and England that would last for generations.

Anne stays in the town where her grandfather and Olivia lived fifty years before. Trying to piece together the puzzle that was Olivia and discover what motivated her to change her life so drastically, Anne visits the places her "step-grandmother" frequented and interviews people who knew her or knew of her. She also reads the letters and journals that Olivia wrote so long ago, and oddly enough, Anne ventures into experiences similar to Olivia's adventures, but more acceptable in our modern time. Anne's spiritual and sensual journey in the 1970s parallels Olivia's as the color, heat, exotic landscapes, and people of India penetrate her western upbringing. Anne writes in her own diary: "Fortunately, during my first few months here, I kept a journal, so I have some record of my early impressions. If I were to try and recollect them now, I might not be able to do so. They are no longer the same because I myself am no longer the same. India always changes people, and I have been no exception."

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PHP Advanced for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickPro Guide consists of approximately fifteen chapters of step-by-step content, aimed at teaching specific topics in direct, focused segments. The scripts featured in this book are based on features and capabilities that current PHP users most frequently inquire about (e.g. sessions, authentication, and object-oriented programming). as well as detailing those technologies that will be more important in the future, such as XML and Wireless Access Protocols.

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