Street

This is a wonderful book. It is a great way to teach children how to count with the the characters they love. The book is very colorful and fun to read. I recommend this book to anyone tring to find a fun way to teach their children how to count.

"Guitar Army" is a product of it's time. To some, that would imply that this book is "dated". That's true, and that's what makes it so fascinating. Few people still remember how organized certain factions of the counter-culture were (at least, in theory). The writings of John Sinclair are not those of a naive stoner who's pre-occupied with sex, drugs and Rock 'n' Roll, but of a well informed and carefully thought out intellectual who is preoccupied with the above. If every hippie/radical was as committed as Sinclair was, The Revolution might just have succeded.

This is the story of a family feud in Edgefield Co., SC in the early 40s. Dorn does an outstanding job recreating a time and place where roads were unpaved, electrification just arrived, and acts of vengeance still expected . You can almost see the country store and feel the heat and the dust. There are a series of shootings and a shoot-out with the sheriff. The only weak part is the section in which Dorn substitutes abridged trial transcripts for his own telling of the tale.This book merits attention and readers.

This map is very helpful, and easy to read. Keep this in your vehicle and never get lost again !!

3 More stories from the ghosts... series. although not written by rl stine, these three stories are really good. i couldn't put the book down. a must read !

Henry Bond uses everyday images to make the real world seem otherworldly. This is essentially a book of street photography. Most of the photos in this book have been taken on the streets of London in a candid and non-posed manner. This generalisation however is often broken however as Bond keeps the viewer guessing as to what kind of photo will come next and what is staged and what is not. The relationship between the photographer and the subject is at times unclear. The uncertainties of this book give it a surreal effect.

Bond's photographs are different from the style of street photography popularised by the likes of Winogrand and Meyerowitz. Bond is not always searching for the "decisive moment." Many of his photographs appear so normal that they might be inconsequential; girl walking down street, woman crossing road. The street photographs in this book are hauntingly real. They are so real in fact that they give the reader a slightly curious response. One is left to wonder what the intentions of the photographer are. Why did Henry Bond take these photos in the first place let alone decide to publish them in a book? Pondering over and trying to solve this question is one of the most pleasurable aspects of The Cult of The Street.

The photographs in this book are not all street photographs however. Other stylistic forms that reappear are photos of people taken in nightclubs or bars, "glamour" portraits of women, and photos of people taken inside retail stores. These types of photographs are spread throughout the book and constantly interrupt the flow of the street photographs. This gives the book an interesting progression as the pages are turned. My attention was not lost whilst flipping through

There are also a couple of journalistic, paparrazi almost, photos of celebrities throughout the book. These are off putting in the best possible way. They make the reader sit up and take notice. Why are there all these photos of unknown people going about their lives and then all of a sudden a photo of a celebrity, presented in the same format? One does not expect to see famous faces in amongst the faces of the masses on the street. Neither does one expect to see famous faces in this book, yet you do. I have to wonder if there are not other celebrities in the book that I have missed, mistaking them for glamour or street shots of anonymous citizens. This mystery gives the book a lasting interest.

The Cult of The Street presents both the detail of the street and makes an overall statement about "the street." The details are present in the hairstyles and the clothes of the people on the streets and in the clubs. The overall statement is made by the way the photographs are presented side by side. This book is much more so one piece of work than it is a collection of individual photographs. The photographs work as a whole very well. The book makes a paradoxical artistic statement that makes use of the norms of street photography and glamour/portraiture.

A strong the atmosphere of the various locations is evoked by Bond. While over nine out of ten photographs have people in them, this book says to me as much about the places shown, as it does about the people. This is perhaps due to the fact that for the most part the decisive moment is not present. Therefore it is not only what is happening in the photograph that is important, but also where, who and why.

The body of the book consists of mostly full page photographs, with all landscape format shots and some portrait format shots presented with white space around them. Thankfully, there are no captions or the like throughout the book. This solid flow of just photographs allows the reader to read into the book what they will. Henry Bond does not impose a single meaning for his photographs. Meaning is for the reader to decide.

There are some fantastic and revealing bonuses at the between the front cover and the first photograph. These include a conversation between Bond and a museum curator, an essay by an art historian and a response the photos by a psychoanalyst. The words of all these people make for very interesting reading. One word of advice though, it is best to look through all the photographs before reading the text. This way the reader can look at the photos with a clear mind and allow for the chance to respond to the book on their own terms. Only then should the reader should look for additional and alternative meanings with the assistance of the text.

Overall this is a fabulous book. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in conceptual photography, urban landscape photography, candid portraiture and street photography.

Henry Bond makes us think twice about everyday scenes we normally wouldn't even notice. He shows the artistic possibilities of representing the existing urban and social worlds as photographic images.

No matter the state of the economy, the weakness of the markets, or the dudgeon of the editorial page, there's always one part of The Wall Street Journal that brings a smile -- the center column on the front page known in our household as the "nut box." "Herd on the Street" collects the best of a special genre of nut box stories, the ones about animals.

From dogs and cats to roaches, sturgeons, and Punxsutawney Phil, most every corner of the animal kingdom is represented here. The essays are almost uniformly well written, entertaining, and sometimes even educational. More than a few are laugh-out-loud funny, some are quite memorable, and one at least is unexpectedly poignant -- a contribution by slain WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl.

Animal lovers might well find themselves sitting down and reading this title from end to end. And certainly, people who otherwise have no sympathy with or interest in the Journal will find this worth the read. It would make a fine book to keep by your bed, or in a guest bedroom, for an end-of-the-evening treat before resting up in readiness for what The Street may throw at you in the morning.

New York's Photographer

Helen Levitt, born in Brooklyn in 1913, took up photography when she found she couldn't draw. For seventy years. she took her cameras down the New York streets where tourists seldom wander. She photographed janitors, children, pushcarts, subway riders, and dogs.

Crosstown (Powerhouse Books, 192 pages, $75), a collection of many of her best pictures, became an instant classic when it was published in 2001. Now her publisher has followed up with the less imposing, less expensive, but equally remarkable Here and There (Powerhouse Books,120 pages, $40). It's a selection of 120 black-and-white photographs, also taken mostly in New York City. The book is graced with an especially perceptive foreword by New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik.

Yorkville. Spanish Harlem. The Lower East Side. Levitt's people abide in a landscape without foliage: a desert of sidewalks, store fronts, and empty lots. Their lives slide by unnoticed, unpraised. Yet their faces are maps of emotional nuance. There's half a boy and half a man under that fedora. You would not want to mess with that moving man in the middle of the trio. Note the nearly penitent posture on that big guy in his undershirt getting the word from that tiny little dog.

There is not a single picture here that has much of real interest "going on." Yet everything's going on, all around, all the time, here and there. Levitt possesses that rarest of gifts, an original temperament. The artist who look these pictures knows the world will always be full of dead cats and kids bawling their eyes out. She also knows how gratifying its daily illuminations can be.

Levitt requires neither celebrity nor flamboyance (much less decadence) to give us portraits as emotionally complex as drawings by Durer or Rembrandt. In this sense, she is the quiet opposite of every superstar New York photographer from Avedon to Warhol.

And as anyone who has lived there knows, these are authentic New Yorkers. They may be invisible to the crowds uptown, but what pride there is in that profile, what resignation sulks in those eyes, what mischief electrifies that grin.

It's as though each of Levitt's pictures had its own wire that plugged directly into a tiny but precise aspect of the human condition. Her skill with her Leica is such that we are made to stand in her sensible shoes, to see through her comprehending eyes. And so we are transported to a spot in the sidewalk across from a building that was torn down forty years ago. And it's more real than anything in Vanity Fair.

Levitt's pictures send a message to serious photographers. "You don't have to get outside your own life," they assure us. "All the material you can handle is right down the street."

CAMERA ARTS magazine

Hide-and-Seek Camping Trip is a interactive children's book. The main characters in the story were Ernie and Bert from the well-loved children's show "Sesame Street". They go on their adventure through the woods. The book is fully furnished with peek holes that bring you to the next page. On one page it's a tree and on the next it's the horns of a deer. It's an easy reading story that your children will love and enjoy!

Easiest book to review I ever saw; all pages were completely blank. But the blurb on the back outside cover was certainly intriguing. :)