Jeffrey Jones Books

This is an incredible book. 160 pages of color plates. As an artist, I really appreciate the detailed close ups of some of the paintings, where you can see every brush stroke. The color quality of the plates is very high. Lots of fantasy female figurative paintings in this book. Jeffrey Jones has a real gift for light and shadow, color, and painting the human form. Many of the color plates are 8" x 11" or 9" x 12". and could actually be cut out and framed.

Dozens and dozens Jeffrey Jones' wonderful paintings are beautifully produced in this fine book. Unfortunately, there is very little in the area of his sketches, and almost nothing of his comic work.

It might be argued that Jones' most original creations were his *Idyll* and *I'm Age* strips for National Lampoon and Heavy Metal. Certainly his work with pen-and-ink is nothing short of extraordinary. (I work with pen-and-ink myself and am in awe of his modeling techniques.) This book gives us only one single page of Idyll and one single page of I'm Age.

Because of these disappointing omissions I am tempted to give this book only two or three stars, but I give four stars in the hope that the Idyll and I'm Age strips will be collected together at a later time. They are brilliant, and from an artistic standpoint they are at least as important as the paintings.

Questions have always circulated about Jeffrey Jones and his place in the history of 20th Century fantasy art: was he a monumental talent or just another Frazetta imitator? I think this book finally provides a definitive answer: he was both. THE ART OF JEFFREY JONES is a beautiful showcase that effectively traces Jones' transition from a Frazetta-wannabe in the 1960s to the truly gifted painter of the 1990s be became.
And I must disagree with Manfred's complaints and comparisons to previous Jones books: not only are Jones' earlier books long out of print, but THE ART OF JEFFREY JONES includes a great deal of work not included in any other collection (along with unpublished art credited as being painted in the '90s). While the text most certainly could have been expanded, I believe the editors have revealed more about Jones as an artist and person than any have previously and I came away with a better appreciation of this eccentric creator. A personal favorite.

This is one terrific book! It was a great trip down memory lane for me: Jeffrey Jones did the fantastic covers for many of the swords-and-sorcery paperbacks I read while growing up. In addition to the artwork for stellar talents like Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, and Karl Edward Wagner, Jones' beautiful paintings also brought class to less distinguished (but still fun)books by authors like Lin Carter and Gardner F. Fox. The wonderful artwork for many, many of these books is included, as well as a ton of great illustrations based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan adventures. The cover illustration is one of the best (and most understated) pieces of vampire artwork I've ever seen. The paintings are enlivened by Jones' personal reflections on his career, and the book concludes with striking samples of Jones' non-commercial art. Jones' smoldering, doe-eyed brunettes are the stuff dreams are made of!

Even I, a REH fan, was wondering how a boxing yarn could be any good. I was expecting just a bunch of in-ring action with the only differences from story to story being the fighters and who won. Far from it. This book starts off with an essay entitled Men of Iron, where Howard asks the question: "What freak of nature makes an iron man?" I personally didn't find the essay all that interesting==but the rest of the book makes up for that. The first story is The Iron Man. In my opinion, it's the best in the book. While I read it, I couldn't help but think of the B and W movie Champion with Kirk Douglas. Iron Man has got one whopper of a storyline. Next up is They Always Come Back. This is the second story in the book, and the second best. There's a few nice twists in this story, though. Finally, there's Fists of the Desert. After reading that story, I really felt like I'd been punched in the stomach. That one is the third best of the bunch. This is a hard book to find--even in paparback--but if you see it, pick it up--you won't be disappointed.

This is a must for all Howard fans,especially the newer ones who may have only read his sword & sorcery stories.Iron Man is about boxing pure and simple;the men who took untold punishment in the ring before usually winning their bouts by knocking out their fatigued opponents.Howard wrote this using some of his personal experiences following the fight game in Texas and has based some of his later and well known characters like Conan and Kull on the fighters in this book.They all share the same characteristics of toughness,incredible vitality and endurance.Iron Man is a good guide to how Howard thought and how he shaped his future characters

Robert E. Howard was great fan of the ring. He loved the action and the shear power of the men who fought between the ropes. This respect for manly strength shows in every story he wrote, from his westerns right up to his most famous creation, Conan. Here in this book he writes about the real thing. These are men here. Real men! Howard was a life time fan of boxing and these stories are based on men he actually watched trading blows in the ring. If you think these men are larger than life, think again. For each fictional character found in this book there was a real man behind the character. Real men lived the lives presented here. While it is true that these are fictitious accounts it is also true that boxing really was once like this. It was brutal. It was bloody. It was all about fighting. The boxers of today, with their polish and their fancy footwork would not have had a chance in the boxing ring of old. Only an iron man could get through a match in those days. An iron man was a man who didn't duck and dodge but, rather, took each blow to come his way and never faltered. An iron man could take any amount of punishment and still win the fight. An iron man was the toughest of the tough. In this book you will find four such men. These are the men who inspired the great barbarian, Conan. Read this book and enjoy, but beware. No matter how tough you think you are you will feel weak and helpless compared to the giants found in these pages. This is Howard at his best. This is Howard writing about that which he loved most. This is The Iron Man!

Professor Jones addresses the current issues of our time and our world. Economics, philosophy and issues of globalization are several ways Jones helps us understand the changing times for life in America. It was personal to me because it helped me articulate some of my own questions regarding my career and obligations to society in a changing world.

THE UNAFFORDABLE NATION: SEARCHING FOR A DECENT LIFE IN AMERICA addresses concerns over the affordability of a decent life in America, and should be a part of any high school to college-level library strong in American social issues. In an era where even two incomes often isn't enough to make ends meet, the country is fast becoming an unaffordable nation by those who struggle in the middle and see their families falling to the poorer end of the economic sale - and THE UNAFFORDABLE NATION addresses these problems, offering plenty of opportunity for debate.

This calendar contains some of the best art work ever done based upon characters of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Jones' paintings have a monumental, mythic style that is very suitable to his themes.

Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture by Jeffrey P. Jones (Communication, Media, and Politics: Rowman & Littlefield) (Hardcover)
examines humorous political talk shows on television-Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and Dennis Miller Live. This book challenges the assumption that these shows have dumbed down politics, as well as the idea that television in general is a primary cause of civic disengagement. By investigating the production, content, and audiences for such programming, Jeffrey P. Jones contends that these shows provide important alternatives to traditional elite political and news sources. He shows how these comedic political commentators have revived political humor as an accessible and potent means of political critique in times of postmodern crisis. Bridging the fields of political communication and cultural studies, Entertaining Politics makes the case for how and why popular culture is an increasingly powerful force in shaping our civic culture-and why this may be a positive thing.
Excerpt: When I first saw the program Politically Incorrect, I wasn't particularly en¬amored of it. I didn't disdain it like some of my colleagues; I was simply in¬trigued. Now here is something different, I thought, something that is overtly violating the implied rules of televised political talk. Although I never partic¬ularly enjoyed watching the Sunday morning talk shows or the shouting matches of the overly conservative hosts on cable television, they did define the standard. Here, though, was a comedian with a mullet discussing politics with the guy who played Batman on television when I was a kid. Say what? I, like other viewers, initially enjoyed seeing this odd mixture of celebrities from various public venues presented in a different light, hearing what they had to say and marveling at their intelligence, articulateness, or outright stu¬pidity.
But, as I watched, what increasingly became clear to me was that this pro-gram was not operating under the same linguistic or epistemological guide-lines that I had come to accept as the normative ideal in discussing politics. Instead, it sounded like political discussions found in most every venue out-side of the institutions of television or the university-shortsighted, ahistori¬cal, laced with the latest media buzz, prone to diverting comments, and gen¬erally dependent on the "truths" offered by personal experiences. It also was refreshingly honest, impassioned, diverse, stimulating, witty, and smartly commonsensical when push came to shove. Indeed, the prevalence of com¬mon sense as the primary means for thinking through and arguing political issues is what hooked me intellectually. I had previously studied Rush Lim¬baugh and his claim to commonsense thinking in the populist early 1990s, but his talk never seemed very commonsensical to me-it was just mean-spirited bigotry driven by fear.
As I began to watch, listen to, and study Politically Incorrect, however, I realized that this program, which had recently moved from cable to network television, was truly something different. Whenever I overheard conversation about the show or mentioned it to people outside the academy, I real¬ized that many of them enjoyed it for the humor, guests, and issues it de-bated. They seemingly didn't entertain the logic used in the dismissals of the show by political elites and cultural critics that this was some unholy mar¬riage of entertainment with politics, primarily because they didn't take it too seriously (which critics always did). At some level, they seemed rhetorically engaged in the conversation it offered as well as generally amused by this televised cocktail party.
This book, then, began as a project to study this program in greater detail, including my perceptions of a disjunction between audience appreciation for the show and academic/elite disdain for it. The project, however, changed considerably from its first appearance as a dissertation to include other programming from the same mold-Dennis Miller Live and The Daily Show. What's more, the world also changed during that process, beginning with a presidential impeachment and continuing through to election deba¬cles, horrific terrorist attacks, and stunning foreign policy initiatives. What became clear during this time is that what I call New Political Television-with its biting humor and satire and its honest and commonsensical talk by people not directly linked to the political establishment-has been a central location on television for the interrogation of political issues from a critical perspective. Here I have found voices on television that consistently ques¬tion and ridicule the patronizing lies, twisted logic, and taken-for-granted as¬sumptions of both government and news media in a time of crisis.
What follows, then, is an in-depth look at new political talk shows and their audiences, the humorous entertainment talk programming that ap¬peared in the 1990s in the programs Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, Dennis Miller Live, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. These shows, I ar¬gue, have challenged normative assumptions about who gets to speak about politics on television, what issues will be covered and in what manner, and how audiences can engage politics on television beyond simply deferring to expert knowledge. Furthermore, they challenge the boundaries between "serious" and "entertaining" programming erected in the network era, which increasingly have come to be seen as artificial. Finally, the shows have be-come a primary location for new public rhetors that consistently challenge the policies advanced by political elites and the sense-making on which those policies are founded.
In this process, the reader will note that I have attempted to bridge the fields of political communication and cultural studies-theoretically, methodologically, and rhetorically. Political communication and political sci¬ence's interest in civic participation and political norms, values, and cultureare linked here with cultural studies' recognition of culture as a complex process of meaning-making. By my reading, cultural studies has retreated from its early beginnings as a means of interrogating the relationship of cul¬tural production directly to the state. Similarly, political science continues to expend energy focusing on the formal political arena with minimal attention to the cultural factors that often precede political action. The traditional bounded nature of politics (culturally and academically) has transformed into a more porous position in media and culture, and our methods, ap¬proaches, and targets of analysis should reflect those changes.
I have attempted to be both expansive and narrow in my analysis, perhaps to the dissatisfaction of readers who are overly committed to one particular approach within these fields of study. Although I discuss Dennis Miller Live and The Daily Show as part of this move toward a hybrid genre of political talk, I have intensified the investigation of Politically Incorrect to examine the specificity of its production decisions, content, and audiences who watched it. And although I examine issues related to civic engagement, the focus is clearly on how this particular slice of television programming is a contributor to our overall political culture. Again, detail and specificity nec¬essarily sacrifice an analysis of a wider range of texts and a wider range of subjects in a book this size.

If you're looking for a book that gives you the most up to date information on relationship commitment, this is the book. Yes, it's a scholarly volume, but everyone, regardless of academic background, will find something useful here. I'm not a professor or a researcher, but I nevertheless found the book to be quite illuminating and interesting in several respects. You just have to read it!

Cram & Casman's Intro to Surface Electromyography explains the foundations of this difficult topic clearly and concisely. It offers a multitude of helpful hints, among the most useful of which is a comprehensive atlas of electrode placement sites for picking up EMG activity from specific muscles. This book covers both clinical and research applications of EMG.

If you loved Jonathan Larson's Tony award winning musical "Rent," you're going to love JP Morgan Saves The Nation. Larson uses the same styles he does in "Rent," and it just goes to show the genius he could be writing now were he still alive. If you're a die hard fan, this will make a nice addition to a Rent collection, or if you're just looking for some damn good theatre :)

I like the unique approach in this parenting book. Rather than giving specific advice, techniques, tricks, and tips to use on your kids, the author approaches good parenting as something that grows out of your own spiritual life. His philosophy is that if you have a strong spiritual life, and if you help your entire family develop spiritually, then good parenting will fall into place.

He has a lot of great activity ideas to help kids and parents bond, and he illustrates how the activities work by telling stories of things he's done with his own kids.

I'm going to recommend that this book be used in our church in our parenting class, because there's a great group study guide included in the book.

Margaret St. Clair is a science-fiction/fantasy writer whose fine body of work is sadly neglected today, and is urgently in need of rediscovery. And this short, subtle, shadow-haunted novel is one of her finest works.

A quarter of a century before Goth culture came into vogue, this compelling urban fantasy took readers on a frightening journey into a very dark & malicious Faerie indeed, one that could be reached merely by going behind the walls of just the right (or wrong) basement, where lank-haired, emaciated elves feed on hallucinogenic fungus & prey upon one another as viciously as they prey upon any hapless humans who fall into their hands. Written & published during the first resurgence of fantasy in the late 1960s, before the genre became glutted with identical mass-market "sagas" & "epics" with no genuine magic to them, this tale has lingered with me like a fading but unforgettable nightmare for decades now.

Fans of Neil Gaiman & Charles DeLint (among others) should do themselves a favor & track down a copy of this disturbing gem, which deserves reprinting today. You won't be disappointed, I assure you. Highly recommended!