Clay Books

The free software or open source movement has, not surprisingly, garnered lots of free publicity. Encouraged by massive hyperventilating by its proponents. In contrast, this book steps back and offers a more dispassionate and nuanced analysis of the zeitgeist, for surely the movement deserves that label.

You get background as to the social motivations and the history of the movement. Which is shown to predate the Web and linux. GNU in the 1980s was all about alternatives to proprietary operating systems and compilers.

The book can help you dial down the hype. Yet, ultimately, it offers a broadly positive affirmation of the movement. There is shown to be no impediment or logical flaw to cause open source to not stop growing. Rather, the book suggests that both proprietary and open source software will always be with us, albeit in a sometimes uneasy coexistence.

I just finished flipping through this book at a bookstore and liked everything I saw. There were several great ideas that you could flat out copy for yourself, or at least draw some good inspiration from. You should be an artist or artist at heart to make this book work for you if you plan to make some designs yourself. I gave it 4 stars out of 5 because I thought they could have gone into a bit more detail for each design idea. This book reminds me of Candice Olsons 'Divine Design' show on HGTV. Again, great ideas.. its just up to you to put it to use!

This is a direct, no nonsense approach to developing study skills. It is quick, yet includes the essential ingredients to becoming an effective learner. It has my recommendation!

Clay Reynolds' characters in these stories inhabit a world just down the road from Larry McMurtry's West Texas town in "The Last Picture Show." Here we find many of the same people with their trials and tribulations, sometimes treated farcically, sometimes not. A Friday afternoon fist fight in a bar is told as a good-ole-boy yarn in "A Better Class of People," and in a similar vein, four friends take off in a pickup to raise hell south of the border in "Mexico." Southern Baptists get a drubbing as a death-bed attempt to save a sinner backfires in "The Baptism."

There's a decided shift to the macabre in "The Prodigal," as a free-spirited young woman is punished by her Bible-thumping father by being held prisoner in her parents' basement. A dead homeless man discovered in the town dump brings out the law and a coroner on a bitter, cold night in "Dogstar." An upwardly mobile woman tries to get her comeuppance with a former lover, leading to results she doesn't anticipate in "Bush League." A young college teacher gets a family of next-door neighbors from hell when she buys an old Victorian house in "Nickleby." A rancher's widow has a life-changing encounter with a young Spanish-speaking couple on a lonely road during a blizzard in "A Train to Catch." And in "Etta's Pond," an old man refuses to surrender his farm as a highway is built through the middle of it.

As a writer, Reynolds is more than a little similar to McMurtry in his estimation of small-town and rural West Texans. He even has some of McMurtry's meandering narrative style, lingering sometimes excessively on the minutiae of situations and exchanges between characters that do not advance the story. Most of the stories, in fact, would benefit from judicious pruning. But taken together, they offer a widely various view of human behavior as played out in an American landscape far from the nearest Starbucks. Sandhill County is worth a visit.

This book is the combination of "Sculpture for Beginners" and "Scuplturing with Wax". The anatomy is dealt with very tastfully, mostly using skelital and muscular charts. One female torso is developed. I enjoyed it for its attention to detail in both the text and pictures. The extensive content spans these 18 chapters:
1) Getting Acquainted with Clay
2) Make Some Simple Sculptures
3) Tools You Will Be Using
4) Make Some Figures
5) Decorating Your Home with the Objects You Make

6) Learning from Plaster Casts
7) Using the Armature for Support
8) Making a Head in Clay
9) Learning More About the Head
10) Learning the Anatomy of the Body
11) Making a Torso
12) Draping the Figure
13) Casting
14) Textures
15) Finishes
16) Some Larger Sculptures
17) Bas-Relief
18) Sculpturing with Wax

A Secret Location on the Lower East side is an excellent overview of independent publishing from 1960 - 1980. It focuses primarily on the mimeograph revolution and is particularly inspiring for those who wish to become independent publishers. However, this book should also be of interest to readers who are interested in the Beat Generation and the poets and writers who were inspired by the Beats.

The book contains an introduction by Jerome Rothenberg, and the majority of the book consists of burbs describing the individual small presses. As a result, the book combines the best aspects of a coffee table book (accessibilty and short pieces) and solid journalism.

Though the price may be a little high, it is a worthwhile investment for writers, publishers, and anyone interested in the literary movements the second half of the 20th century.

Somewhere Up Ahead is a shoot 'em up, cowboy joy. I find it to be a simple, clear and vivid piece of story telling. The characters are real and their conflicts compelling. Hopefully this is only the first in a series of books by this author.

This exploration of the sibling relationships and everyday existence of wild critters living on the edge of human habitations takes us on a tense run through rough territory. Tension builds as a young coyote and her family seek out food sources too close to the planet's most dangerous predator. The book is both educational and entertaining. Anthropomorphic cuteness reigns.

I have many PC books, but I keep going back to this one because it's so much fun. Monica has many great ideas and the projects are simple and appealing, but I've deducted a star because her instructions for making a mold didn't work very well, and because her cane instructions could be better. She instructs you to fill in around the central figure of a cane with lots of little logs of PC. If you do that, you'll wind up with points coming out of your figure where the logs meet. It's better to wrap the figure first with a sheet of the background color, then fill in -- and why all those annoying little logs? Little things like that keep this book from being the best one out there for beginners, but the "fun" factor is definitely here, and I find inspiration just browsing through the pictures.

It was a pretty good book. It was very funny. My favorite character was Buster. I liked him because he thought he was shrinking. The reason I rated it 4 stars was the pictures from the movie in the middle of the book showed the ending. They should have put them at the end. Overall, I liked it.