Literature in Art Books

I had to read this for government, it is worth the time. It goes in depth about books banned; art of love, casndide, dubliners, the handmaid's tale, judge the obscure, lolita, madame bovary, and women in love. The sad fact is that there are millions of book lost by the surpression of a few, with it went our first amendment rights!

WOW! There is finally a VERY helpful book for K-2 (many activities can be used for preschool and even above 3rd grade with modifications) teachers that will make learning fun, memorable, and hands-on. The authors do a fabulous job of taking K-2 children's interests (bears, family, Amelia Bedelia, rhyme, and alphabet) and create brain-compatible language arts workshops for children. The book shows teachers how children's literature can richly enhance content area. These workshops will challenge children's minds. The Bioglyph activity can be done with any age student. I love how the workshops are helping students organize information, which in turn, helps them comprehend text. This book will give K-2 students a huge jumpstart in their education. Great job Kathy and Tina!

Just as I recommended the DVD, I definitely recommend getting this book, particularly if you've seen the Wiggles live. It is a great little companion to the DVD, but it also shows photos of them getting ready for a show, what they do to prepare, and being on stage as well. This is a definite keeper in your library, something you'll want to save right along with the DVD. It's very well done, the photos are just great and it just makes my little one smile a bunch and say,"Remember mommy when they did that?"

It's very nice to bring back the memory of the concert (it's the same as the live DVD setup), and something to keep with your child's memories. I'm actually thinking about buying a second - one to keep and one to read since ours has to be read so much! And, if this happened to you like it did to me (I wasn't allowed to take my "professional looking" camera into the concert and thus, lost every memory there), then you most certainly need to get this book. I'm also thinking about buying one so that I can cut out the photos and put them in my little one's scrapbook. Very cute book and very well done. Highly recommend!

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In a market saturated with nonsense that passes as tai chi, it is refreshing that someone has taken the trouble to publish something as potentially useful as this book. Not only does it provide several very old texts on tai chi which were written by acknowledged masters, but it also explores the history of tai chi in a more scholarly manner, rather than passing on half truths about "my teacher once told me that his teacher told him...". Thanks to Douglas Wile for raising the bar on tai chi literature in the US. Hope to see more like this one.

What a delightful book for teaching children (and adults, too) a deeper appreciation of art! Makes a game of observation with some exercises simple enough for children as young as 2 (my friend's 2-year-old, anyway) and some challenging adults with an experienced eye. This lovely book will provide hours of fun for the whole family and help develop art savvy. The first time you take your little one to the Louvre, he/she will be excited to see old familiar faces. Its a wonderful way for children to grow up with the arts.

Funny, complex, smart... Sterritt is far and away the best writer on the beats!! wonderful stuff!!

It is hard to do justice to the imaginative insanity of Salvador Dali, but Angela Wenzel does a pretty good job for this volume in the Adventures in Art series. "The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Salvador Dali" introduces young readers to the Surrealist artist who knew how to put himself in the limelight in ways other than his paintings. One of things that Wenzel does is that she provides some of Dali's own comments about his art, such as the 1937 painting "Sleep," where a heavy face that looks like the film director Luis Bunuel is propped by my crutches and explaining the link between the writings of Sigmund Freud on dreams and Dali's painting "The Burning Giraffe" (1936-37), where drawers are coming out of a tall woman's body. Also included are the famous melting clocks of "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), the fried eggs of "The Sublime Moment" (1938), and the multiple pictures within "The Metamorphosis of Narcissus" (1937).

What I especially like about this volume is how it looks at the origins of some of these paintings. For "The Endless Enigma" (1938) we have the original sketches of the six different paintings that Dali hid in the finished painting, while a postcrd showing an African village became a face turned on its side in "Paranoid Faces" (1931). Then there was the "Portrait of Mrs. Isabel Styler-Tas" (1945), which Dali based on Piero della Francesca's "Battista Sforza and Federico de Montefeltro" (circa 1465) by way of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's "Winter," a marvelous example of how the old becomes new in the hands of a talented artist.

Young readers will also be exposed to some prime examples of Dali's imagination with regards to other types of art beyond paintings, such as his infamous "Lobster Telephone" (1936) and the "Mae West Lips Sofa" (1937), although I miss seeing the harp covered with silverware that he made for his friend Harpo Marx. There are also some choice photographs of "Dali the superstar" engaging in the art of self-promotion. Just showing young readers examples of Dali's artwork is enough to get them interested in the artist, but Wenzel takes pain to explain how Dali created his masterpieces and what he was trying to do with some of these pieces. This is one of the more truly educational books I have seem about a great artist written for young readers.

What a great book! Starts out with anecdotes of friends and acquaintances of Waley's, giving a fascinating picture of a very original person. In his book "The Dharma Bums", Jack Kerouac refers to some of the poems Waley translated (which were also translated by beat poet Gary Snyder) but if you read some of Waley's translations, which appear in the second half of the book, nothing can beat them -- the poems seem as though they were written yesterday, not thousands of years ago. It's a grand culture trip to discover Arthur Waley, a member of the famous Bloomsbury Group who taught himself Chinese and Japanese and translated some of their finest ancient works with the delicacy and sensibility of a true poet. If this book turns you on to the beautiful culture, art and poetry of ancient Japan and China, you'll be on the road to some amazing discoveries, for it'll make you want to read more and learn more, and what you learn will illuminate the strange and crazy times we are living through here and now in the new millennium. I highly recommend this book.

Reading this book to my class will make the difference between birds' and mammals' hot-bloodedness and reptiles', amphibians', and fish's cold-bloodedness much easier for my third graders to understand. It also is on the school's Accelerated Reader list, so they can then reread the book on their own and can take a test on it.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about animals and their characteristics.