Studios Books

A welcome contrast to the overly studied and glamourized coffee-table porn books of late, this book contains images from the notorious seventies underground erotic quaterly.
edited from a unique series of magazines that featured the Mythic sex appeal of seemingly ordinary black men. Produced during the height of the black exploitation period, these images may be hard to look at during our current P.C. times. However, as a historical artifact of seventies pop culture and sexual liberation, it's an interesting item. The complete lack of sophisticated art direction is precisely it's strength. The garish interiors and un-polished men are period perfect. This work did not share mr. mapplethorpe's ultra refined visual taste and obsessive eye for artistic details. Museums and galleries were not the intended targets......it was all about arousal. Direct and immediate....for anyone who had a particular fondness for a specific type of ebony brother.

Images are arranged by color rendition, instead of by model: Black & white (b&w) to page 64, then color through the end at page 128. Ron, also known as (aka) "Outlaw," for example, is on pp. (pages) 12-13 in b&w and in color on pp. 65-67 & 100-101. There is no text after the Introduction and no captions identifying the models. In case you are wondering if any of your favorite models are included, I also recognized Angelo, Barry, Clayton or "Clay," Francoise, Mack, Mario Albert, Mark, Mickey (cover), 'Rone, "Sputnik," "Taurus," Ty aka Jack, Vic and Warren. A lot of others are shown, but I do not know their names. Many of the photo's have been circulating for years on the Internet, which is where I associated their names/aliases, but the 'net pictures have usually been degraded as cropped, thumbnailed, low resolution, etc. I was glad to see the picture of Clay(ton) in the book, although in black & white, because the color image that has circulated on the 'net is stretched sideways and the book's image is the first time that I have seen the picture without distortion. On the other hand, some of the photo's I have never seen before; to me, I think the book would still be worthwhile even if I had seen all the photo's before. Overall, the photo's are usually not cropped, often showing too much background, but better too much than not enough. The emphasis is on full, frontal nudity. Some rear views are shown, but are usually given lesser importance as one of two or more photo's on a page, instead of a full page. Likewise, there are only a few portraits without full nudity, front or rear; I did not add any portraits as Customer Images (being suitable without nudity) because they are not as representative of the book's content as much as the cover. The publisher's website already shows "sold out" for this title, so do not wait any longer if you want a new copy, as stock at the U.S. distributor in New Jersey may be all that remains. The South Africa (.za) Janssen website also shows a "2006 Preview" thumbnail of a sequel, "Mr. Long," with Francoise on the cover, calling it "...the final continuation," but ISBN "to follow."

This book is not going to get dusty on the shelf. It is a real resource--for art teachers, social studies teachers, home schoolers and anyone else who wants to use art to teach world culture (or conversely world culture to teach art). The lessons makes sense. The art projects are doable. This book had been well thought out. It's also been tested with real students. It is ideal for teachers who want to do multi-cultural education and not just talk about it.

Susan Hogan's book is a fascinating exploration of several different cultures through their art, their customs, geography and history. Her insight into the nature of the different societies brings a deep understanding of how art has been interwoven with the needs and rituals of that society. It also points out the need for us to use our hands, our minds and emotions - expecially in this electronic age. It brings us back to ourselves, to make these things with our hands. I have worked with children of different ages for more than a decade. I find the students really enjoy the easy to do projects that help them produce beautiful articles they can actually use. What a wonderful way of teaching. Bravo!

My 14 month old loves this book. Young children are starting to learn their body parts and clothing and this helps makes SHOES fun instead of a chore!

The Mom's Choice Awards® honors excellence in family-friendly media, products and services. An esteemed panel of judges includes education, media and other experts as well as parents, children, librarians, performing artists, producers, medical and business professionals, authors, scientists and others. A sampling of the panel members includes: Dr. Twila C. Liggett, Ten-time Emmy-winner, professor and founder of Reading Rainbow; Julie Aigner-Clark, Creator of Baby Einstein and The Safe Side Project; Jodee Blanco, New York Times Best-Selling Author; LeAnn Thieman, Motivational speaker and coauthor of seven Chicken Soup For The Soul books; Florrie Binford-Kichler, Founder of Patria Press, Inc.- an award-winning independent publisher and Member of The Children's Book Council; Tara Paterson, Certified Parent Coach, and founder of The Just For Mom Foundation(tm) and the Mom's Choice Awards®. Parents and educators look for the Mom's Choice Awards® seal in selecting quality materials and products for children and families. This book has been honored by this distinguished award.

This book is a fantastic reference of plants and their narcotic properties. The scope is very broad and you would be hard pressed to find any plant missing, domestic and foreign. Filled with photos, history, geography, uses and customs, and active ingredients and their effects on the body.

I found this book quite by accident. It is informative and has some interesting history. There were plants that even I had never heard of. I recomend this book who is interested in all aspects of Botany and even some history. I also recomend that anyone who has this book to use the information wisely. There is far too much value in books such as these for the information to be wasted

Charles Potts is an experienced poet with more several published works to his credit. Nature Lovers is the latest of his collections and continues to document him as having a unique style and gift for language, images, and speaking to the mind and heart of his reader. The Code Of The Olde West: Get a load of Charlie Coyote,/Hauled before the magistrate by the grammar police/For hunting verbs without a license.//The judge demands to know:/How did you learn the vernacular?/There are correct ways to say the same thing,//Cheap talk from fatigued Sierra Clubbers/Cannot change my mind, your honor./I'm outside the purview of Standard American Englishizers.//Like the taxidermist he will be/If he ever catches anything Stoic,/Sniff this poem and make it snappy naturally./Fill it with linguistic drift.

I met Charles Potts in 1970. I was living in Minneapolis and was starting a writing workshop, so I took the unusual tack of tacking postcard notices around in the West Bank neighborhood. No one locally ever contacted me about the postcards. But a visitor to Minneapolis, in the visage of a bona fide bearded beat poet from the west, who was passing through Minnesota in his microbus on a poetry tour of America, found himself, as poets do, standing and copying a stranger's phone number from a telephone pole. Charles Potts called and asked to visit me. We huddled as equals, drank iced tea, sized up one another's poetics, and agreed to stay in touch.

We have been friends ever since. Good friends. I sometimes feel Charlie knows what is in my heart better, and respects it more, than I myself do.

Charles was vastly more advanced than I was. He, even in his twenties, knew who he was, knew how the world worked, and knew what he wanted to do. I'm still working on all three. Talking to him, and corresponding later, I felt I was communing directly with the wild prophetic side of American poetry.

Most poetry I read in the early 70s was elliptical as all get-out, dreamy, posey, and mainly about the self's deep interest in itself. Charlie was doing something nearly the opposite. You could feel the gravel under his poems -- they were roughcut, fearless, and unfailingly straight about what they wanted to say. You didn't wonder what psychic level Charlie was writing from (8? 13? lingerie and notions?) any more than you'd wonder what level a gun pointed at your darkest suspicions and prejudices was on. Even when his poems were funny they were dead-on serious, like Lenny Bruce on a good night. I had to be reminded he was a youngest, not an oldest child, because of that quality of gravitas.

Anyway, on to the poems in Nature Lovers. Charlie wrote these poems in 1989, under the influence of his study in the field of Neuro Linguistic Programming, and readings in the microstructure of cognition. The title is a tip-off to Charlie's ragged irony -- because it is impossible for humans to truly love nature, because we are helplessly separated from it by language and consciousness -- the makings of poetry itself. "I go way back with writers who identify themselves with nature," he writes in an afterword. "Wordsworth, for the mystifying and mystical unity to be fond there; Menzu (Mencius) for his insistence that the entire state has to operate in obeisance to natural law; and Lucretius, who said poets should never lose the power to irritate."

Each poem is a meditation, or an editorial cartoon, about some aspect of nature. Listen to the fussy cadence and the caustic syllogistics, and tell me you don't hear the unmistakable ring of Menzu in the following:

Natural Causes

"He died of natural causes."

How many times have you relaxed while reading

That sanguine phrase and paused to wonder:

What causes would not be natural?

Car wrecks, overdoses, the fall of Flight DC 10?

Mechanical, pharmaceutical, aeronautical?

If everything is by definition natural,

What's left to experiment on?

Pig out on Haagen Dazs ice cream diet?

Fall down my one-time publisher's nomenclature,

The Empty Elevator Shaft?

Will you pass on a drug bust or a cardiac arrest?

You ask too many questions.

See death of a naturalist,
Watch Hermes put Argus to sleep

With an interminable story.

Bored him to death, naturally.

Maybe that is not a "great" poem, but it is great discourse, and poor, loathed poetry desperately needs this sense of engagement, this sense of mental acuity.

But Charlie Potts's poetry is. His oeuvre is immense and intelligent and so keen. Besides some twenty books of poems, he has written harrowing memoirs about going crazy in the 60s, plus a terrific polemic about U.S. politics, How the South Finally Won the Civil War. Plus, he is a noted publisher and editor. His own presses: Litmus, Inc. in the 60s and 70s, and Tsunami, publisher of the great multilingual magazine published on rag paper, The Temple¸ and Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry, one of the most remarkable anthologies of recent decades.

This little book is one of his most striking collections. In it he achieves what every political poet should ache to do, yet so few try -- graft the confusion of the heart to the evidence of our senses. This is no-nonsense poetry from a visionary who long ago stripped the gears off common sense. His best work swirls the spirits of Ginsberg and Ken Kesey and Phil Ochs at their best, and more anciently, the poets Walt Whitman and William Blake, the pamphleteer Tom Paine, and the mountain man Jim Bridger.

Here's a poem which achieves the same kind of connection, with a more gripping lyricism:

The Stream of Consciousness

The stream of consciousness flows

Effortlessly forward like an unfed brain,
Given nothing new to think about,
Merely rotates in space, the same sounds,
Pictures, and sensations in predictable order.

Who will muddy up this stream,
Then purge and purify the cluttered tableau
Of the extraneous features preventing you
From actualizing your ideal self,
The way you always wanted to look and sound?

The quicksand of the collective unconsciousness
Will tempt you many times
With its lurid renditions of quackery images
Stories in the millennia of Christian denial,
Hallucinated forward at the speed of pain.

Down a lazy river to the polluted sea
The flotsam jettisons thoughtlessly along,
Contributory to a natural disaster.
Throw yourself onto the banks to stimulate
Your freeflowing sense of contrary motion.

Let it work on you. Here is a poem about nothing less than the significance and substance of thought -- everything that means meaning to us. He simultaneously reveres the gift and potential of consciousness, while despairing of our ability to leverage it into truth. Like eschatological Emmett Kellys, the best most of us manage is to sweep the spotlight of our own desire into the ashcan as we depart. The language is unflinchingly ambitious, but never pompous or "poetic." In fact, it's fun -- "flotsam jettisons," indeed. Here's a living, thinking head, giving you its best peek at the dynamic that makes us what we are. Hey, poetry isn't supposed to be important.

We think we love nature, says Charles Potts, but nature doesn't love us back. In fact, you'd be smart to keep a close eye on it, because one of these days, nature's going to get you.

When a friend recommended this book, I had no idea that the studio workshop approach would overshadow the memoir in its pedagogical attractiveness. The two authors detail how they studied visual artists in their studios and how they came to apply that practice to the teaching of reading and writing memoir. The studio approach that they present in this book is far richer than the usual writing workshop. Because of their years of experience and their extensive field testing of this model, the authors anticipate every pitfall. The book includes a complete package of reading and writing memoir activities, enough rubrics and worksheets to get started, an excellent booklist that spans the lower grades through college level and suggestions on how to develop one's own memoir booklist. In the school where I consult I plan to use this book with high school freshmen in English class and then to recommend that English and some content area teachers return to this model in a shorter form when the same students are juniors and seniors, so that they can benefit even more from the reflective elements of the model. Because of the nature of contemporary memoir, I can see the model as presented in this book as being effective at age levels from primary through higher education, and as being relevant to any area of the US.

I am a former student of Dr. Kirby's and I am now an Elementary School teacher. I had her for writing at Kennesaw State University where she incorporated the methods described in this book in her class. I was very scared and intimidated by writing when the course started, but by the end of the semester, I LOVED memoir and writing in general. The techniques she uses are very engaging, fun, and meaningful. I especially liked the "Snapshot" pieces of writing which allowed me to really explore my creativity and writing skills. Everyone likes to talk about themselves and memoir allows you to do this. This is an excellent book which has the potential of making mediocre writers good and good writers great!

The moment I recieved 'The Older Brother Returns' I had a very hard time putting it down. I laughed. I cried. It is very thought provoking. I want to send a copy to every one I know. This is the type book you just don't let out of sight. It is extremely inspiring, as I have said. I absolutely reccommend this to anyone down on themselves, down on life, down on the upcoming year, with all the hoopla you hear coming from the media. This book will turn your life around. It did mine.

What a timely gift for all who seek to express God's loving heart in our day! Author Neal Lozano has served as an instrument of the Great Physician in providing a healthy dose of medicine for the soul and spirit. It is a very fitting book to read as we prepare for the new millennium. As Pope John Paul II urged recently, "Let no one behave like the elder brother in the Gospel parable who refuses to enter the house to celebrate (cf. Lk. 15:25-30). May the joy of forgiveness be stronger and greater than any resentment." THE OLDER BROTHER RETURNS is an excellent means to apply that timely message -- and the classic story about the prodigal son and the older brother (in all of us!).

Sharon MacCabe and Matthew Payton fight an incendiary attraction as they work to stop a serial arsonist in Charleston, WV. I enjoyed watching their love and trust grow, and the arson suspense story was different and compelling. Sharon is a heroine you can root for, and Matthew is a yummy hero. I bought this book after thoroughly enjoying Sargeant's first romantic suspense, You Belong To Me. Her books have a place on my keeper shelf!

This is the first book I've read by this author and it is a page turner. She is very detailed in her writing. She makes you feel like you are on the scene, and she makes the characters come alive.

The book starts out slow, but all the details will help tremendously throughout the book. A news reporter and fire investigator try to work together (despite the fire burning between the two of them) to solve the mystery behind a string of arsons; while outside forces attempt to prevent the mystery from being solved. This story is full of deception, trust, murder, mystery, and surprises.

I bought this book in the hopes that it would give me a few more items, spells and feats for my players to enjoy, and instead found a book capable of adding great flavour and verve to any campaign.

The rewrite of the bard is the highlight of this book for me. From a new and unique method of spellcasting, to a new set of skills and special abilities, the bard in this book goes from being a sort of utility spellcaster to being a completely new and unique class, a thing apart. The idea of casting spells as songs is not a new one, but the way that it's done here is nothing short of brilliant, encouraging bards to use their spells while not sacrificing any of the other abilities of the class.

The feats focus mainly on bardic activity, as do the prestige classes, making the addition of the soul magic section seem, at first, like a last-minute add-on. It's not. Soul magic is, as another reviewer's said, the use of intelligent spells, and saying more than that would be spoiling things. They really will add depth to my games in the future.

As if that weren't enough good stuff (for less than half the price of a standard hard-bound WoTC title), there are also a smattering of new and useful spells, perfect for making surprise scrolls and adding detail to a campaign.

I recommend this book to anyone looking to spice up the bard class, and anyone interested in some new and unusual spells and abilities.

One thing I like about the 3E core rulebooks is it seems like WotC play tested the hell out of them. Nearly everything is fairly well balanced. Many aspects have been simplified from the 2nd addition in a good way (though sometimes too much.) Overall, I really like 3E and consider it worth buying.

Enter supplemental materials like the Book of Eldritch Might II, by Monte Cook. Let's take a look:

VALUE: Under 15 bucks for the printed version, or 5 bucks for the PDF file (available from his website). After shelling out at least 20 for each of the class books, I find this very refreshing.

DESIGN: The art in the printed version is some of the finest yet in a Malhavok product. Monte continues to enlist better and better artists for each product. (I went with the PDF and had Kinko's print it out and spiral bind it.)

CONTENT: This is where all of Monte's D&D 3E material shines. The man is brilliant when it comes to fantasy game design. Like BoEM I, The BoEM II contains new feats, spells (primary for Wizard's and Sorcs), new prestige classes, and new magic items. However, these aren't just more of the same things we've seen. Each has a unique flavor and purpose. However, first lets go over what's totally new: Variant versions of the bard and sorcerer.

BARD: Since 3rd Edition came out, I've seen a million variant rangers, and half a million variant bards. Monte comes through in spades with his variant bard. No longer the sub-par sorcerer rogue fighter, the new bard uses spellsongs to power his unique magical talents. Big thumbs up.

SORCERER: Unlike Monte's variant ranger & bard, his sorcerer is not an attempt to fix a class that was considered 'broken' by so many. Indeed, many consider the sorcerer to kick butt. But, he can get a little boring, casting the same spells all day. This sorcerer really captures the feel of innate, raw magical power. I use Monte's bard, ranger, and sorcerer in my game, and have never looked back.

SOUL MAGIC: A brand new concept for intelligent... spells. A really cool idea that I don't want to spoil. Check it out...

OTHER: Then we have pages of fantastic feats (the lace spell feats rock), spells, prestige classes, and magical items. Like BoEM I, these are all innovative, stylish, and rather deadly. In my campaign I've made the Book of Eldritch Might I & II spells a bit more rare. They are considered powerful secrets to learn of. Once you see some of these spells, you'll see what I mean by powerful...

OVERALL: 5 Stars. One of the few accessories that I've opened up in its entirety to my game. Visit Monte Cook's website for errata to this book, and all his other Malhavok Press products...

That this book is back in print is a gift to the world. It's a completely thorough and wonderful trip through various 2d and 3d geometries and patterns. The drawings can be appreciated just on an aesthetic level, or can be delved into deeply. A rare book.

This was one of the books that first showed many people the interrelationships between the Platonic and Archimedian solids. Critchlow studied under Buckminster Fuller and many of Bucky's perceptions find their way in to these pages. Not without a few small errors here and there but overall a groundbreaking book of its day and still an essential volume on the shelf of anyone who works structurally in 3-d. Highly recommended.