Black and White Books

Dr. Irons is a professor of history at Elon University in North Carolina, and as a student, I was lucky enough to have him. While my major is sports medicine, I essentially had to take a history class as part of the liberal arts curriculum. I thought that the course would be a breeze--memorize names and dates and regurgitate them on paper as I did in high school--but Irons challenged us to dig up the underlying themes in American history and explore and even question their very meaning. I am sure that his new book will be a wonder, and I will be one of the first to purchase it later this month.

This Ozzie and Harriet 10 Episode Marathon goes for about 250 minutes! Great transfer and sound for some really rare TV! The episodes selected are truly wonderful, especially the 2 Christmas episodes!

Reading this book gives pause to the direction many are going in the times in which we live. To evaluate our position as Christians we sometimes need to read and see through the thoughts of others and their actions to examine ourselves. This is a must read in a time of confusion. Crystal Clear

Very little information about the practice of painting (as opposed to tinting; there is a difference) photography has been available. This book covers incredible ground, pulling together material from advertisements, photography texts, archives and collections in order to present an overview of the climate, practice, and production of painted photography. Most other material extant focuses on individual artists who happened to overpaint their photographs, or of particular artworks which are photographs that have been painted on. Henisch shows the existence of a trend in early photography which seems to have been relegated to the sidelines as an analomy or as an isolated practice.
This is an incredible work, well - written, and evocative of Henisch's broad scope of scholarship.

I'm surprised someone hasn't reviewed this book yet. It's quite a treasure.

Some months ago, during an excursion to the Met in NYC, I was feeling a little homesick for Paris, so my eye was immediately drawn to this book. I'm really quite glad that I found it, for it's easily one of my favorite photography books. It actually reads like a book of essays, but in a photographical format. There is an introduction at the front (in French, English, and German) giving a brief background in the history of French photography, but one can easily enjoy the book without bothering with this intro. The pictures pretty much speak for themselves, from mid-19th century Parisian alleyways to the joy on people's faces during the city's liberation in 1944.

First things first: the book is slightly taller than most books, so it may be a little tricky to store on a shelf. I made do, particularly since I use those metal cube shelves you get from Target, which are substantially taller than typical bookshelves. All of the photographs are in black and white, which forms some really nice contrasts and creates an overall sense of timelessness. We're dealing, after all, with Paris from the advent of photography to recent fashion (I believe the latest picture in the book is from the 1980s).

As stated earlier in this review, things like the Liberation are covered, as well as lots of other historical events (the Occupation, the student riots of the 1960s, ect). But these great moments in history are the anomalies. For the most part, the book chooses to focus on everyday events in Parisian life, past and present, like little children skipping rope in the 1920s, or well-to-do ladies watching a horse race at the turn of the last century, or two college students trading a kiss in a bistro in the 1970s.

It's the little touches like this that really bring the city to life. Coming from someone who has lived in Paris twice and considers it another home, this is a very nice compliment, and I think it would make a particularly nice addition to one's coffee table. I only wish it were a little bigger, but it's already over 200 pages, so I guess I'm just trying to prolong a good thing.

...why don't they make them like this anymore? Simple, direct, and to the point. Clues and maps...not a bunch of useless junk that you'd never use in a game. I miss the late 1980's thru early 1990's era of computer games. It was a very fun time. This guide got me thru one of that era's best computer RPG's. If you can get your hands on it, it is still the best of the whole Ultima series. This book was invaluable!

Photoshop is often thought of as a tool for editing color images. Black and white gets overlooked. This excellent step-by-step, show-and-tell text is brief, concise, and to the point about what it takes to produce excellent B&W images.

It is regrettable that the authors have not updated the book ... . The book was published in 1995 and covers Photoshop versions 2.5 and 3. While the fundamentals remain correct, Photoshop has evolved into 5.5 and a lot has changed in terms of the tools. An update is way overdue. That having been said, this is still the definitive short course on coping in B&W.

This is Film Studies of the first order. Williams takes the idea of melodrama as a mode and intersects it with issues of race and its representation. According to her, in conjuction with the popularity or in the legitimization of a particular medium in American society, the representations of the black male and female bodies take on center stage and gain new significations. The book starts out with Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and shows how it stays and strays away from the conventions of the Victorian novel. It then focuses on the Stowe's characterization of the black bodies and how they elicited the sympathy of the readers. Next, it shows how Dixon, with his novel "The Clansmen,' either changes or reverses Stowe's characterizations and themes to elicit another kind of response. However, it is D.W. Griffith's adaptation of the novel, "Birth of the Nation" that had a powerful influence in the society's imagination. Not only did the film legitimize the medium as an art form, it also gave the public a new way of understanding race relations in America. The book covers both the novel and the movie adaptation of "Gone With the Wind" and other cultural texts and ends with the televised trial of O.J. Simpson while keeping on the other eye issues of representation. Linda Williams' project is both multi-disciplinary and multi-media and she weaves them together in a rich study of melodrama as a cultural mode and the ever evolving nature of race relations and representations in our society. She wittily uses Henry James' imagery of the 'leaping fish' to show how melodrama dynamically moves from one medium to the next. Each time it makes an appearance in a big way, it also entails a recasting of black and white or racial representations. Williams achievement lies in her ability to pull together a variety of texts and approaches to engage upon the central issue of race. And she does this in clear, well-written prose. Although this is more like a work of cultural criticism, the book also opens up the possibilities of film studies as a powerful lens or a way of approaching cinema-related queries and dealing with socio-historical matters.

The recommended audience age for this book is 9-12 years old. I'm 44 years old and thereby disqualified from offering an informed perspective. But then I averaged the recommended audience age and divided my age by that number and came up with 4.2. So, now I'm qualified and this review is actually equivalent to five reviews: Four reviews are by ten and a half year olds and one review is by a two-year old. This seems not only fair but reasonable since children don't routinely review books intended for adults - which is a good thing for us children since adult literature seems to favor the drama of self absorption over having fun. Or maybe that is adult fun. Anyway, back to Kate Miller's Poems in Black and White. We liked it. It got us thinking and looking at the world around us in a new way again - which is a real gift, particularly to us ten and a half year olds. It was fun to see who could discover the most things which are just black and white, like panda bears and white-walled tires and Oreo cookies!. We liked the pictures a lot too and we drew our own favorite black and white things - like shiny black shoes with white laces and zebras and magpies. We also wrote our own poems to go along with our pictures - which are now on our refrigerators at home. It was hard but it was fun to try to see everyday things in a new way - to discover that simple things can be complicated and complicated things can be simple. Maybe this will help us when we get really, really old - like forty-four.

The two-year old says: "foot, rattle, star, bug, cat, doggy, popcorn, grandpa, cow, hair, raccoon, moon, snow, ball, bird, doggy, bedtime.", and that's a very favorable review.

Anyone who enjoyed Wisconsin's 150th birthday will be delighted with this book. A wonderful collection of photos to reflect on as the millenium approaches!