Blair Books

I am relatively new to the world of graphic novels but am doing my best to cath up on my reading. I love Sandman, and Hellblazer, am into DMZ and Ex Machina. Astro City was brilliant and there is much more to go... but I have to give extra kudos and appreciation for Hell City and the Indie lable Gigantic Graphic Novels. This is one of the smartest, most interesting and seemingly most underrated titles I've come across and I hope to see a lot more from Macon Blair and Joe Flood in the future. How this hasn't become a feature film I don't know, but Blair seems to write with cinematic undertsanding and flair in mind and Flood translates the accompanying aesthetic seemlessly.

I've since checked out some of the other Gigantic titles and can highly recommend Teenagers From Mars and Dead West as well. As always it seems that the overlooked indie writers are doing some of the darkest, smartest and most compelling work, here's to hoping they get the attention they deserve.

Hellcity is the product of Gigantic Graphic Novels who produced the small press gem Dead West in 2005. Hellcity is a typical, 40's style crime noir detective story with one major twist...it is set in hell. In this case, Hell is a major urban city where demons delight in torturing humans by giving them wedgies, slamming automatic doors on them, and forcing them into all manner of humiliating manual labors. Bill Tankerslee had been a detective in his life which was shattered when his wife was blown away by a shotgun-toting guy dressed like Bela Lugosi in Dracula. Bill took his own life and ended up in hell where he spends his days cooking bacon at the "piggery" and his nights with his annoying demon roommate who drinks Bill's last beer and draws mustaches on the picture of his wife.

Bill is given the opportunity to change his fortunes when a beautiful demon comes to him with an offer he can't refuse. She wants to put his detective skills to use. He can get out of the piggery and get an apartment uptown without a demon roommate, and all he has to do is follow Lucifer himself in order to find out why the Lord of Hell has been acting so strangely as of late. Hell is on the verge of chaos as the demon underlings all want to be in line for Hell's throne.

Hellcity presents a clever twist on the infernal plane. Ironic in that it isn't so different than real life, sans the demons running around and pooping on the sidewalk. I loved writer Macon Blair's modern version of hell even more than the story. The story ends up being a bit of a clichéd detective story but it's the elements surrounding the story that lift it above the ordinary. The art by Joe Flood is solid but not flashy. Straight black & white line work. I loved the expressions on the faces of the demons while they went about their work annoying their human guests in various ways. I was somewhat let down by the fact that the story will be continued in vol. 2 but there's enough good stuff in here to make me want to see the conclusion.

Reviewed by Tim Janson

I like this guide as an introduction to the many scenic mountains of Virginia. The material is well organized and concise with very good directions to reach the described locations. A unique feature of this book is the considerable attention, as well as a considerable portion of the book, devoted to the flora and fauna of various regions. Depending upon your specific interests, this may be enlightening or of passing interest.

The maps are not very detailed and the few photographs are of little value but these are not the focus of the book and can be attained elsewhere.

Overall, a good resource if you plan to spend time in the mountains of Virginia, especially for day hikes.

This book is not only great to use, it's terrific and fun to read. It is so complete and includes great maps that are easy to understand and use. We like having the bota nical names of plants as well as common names presented. The writers know their stuff. We highly recommend this book. It's well worth the price.

Through out the North and the South your neighbor could have been a supporter for the opposite cause. Washington was filled with supports of the South. The author takes her protagonists back in time to this situation in Washington. The secrecy that surrounds Washington finds them in big trouble. How do they escape not knowing whom they can trust? This is a book of intrigue that keeps your attention. By Ruth Thompson author of "Natchez Above The River" and "The Bluegrass Dream"

Writing as a Small BusinessSins of the Fathers: A Brewster County NovelQualifying Laps: A Brewster County NovelTravelersThe Bluegrass Dream: A Wilderness Adventure of Early SettlersNatchez Above The River: A Family's Survival In The Civil War

This book was awsome. I loved it. This book made history alive for me. I thought this was actually going on and I was there with them! I loved it

I've been searching for a book that encapsulated, with succinct and powerful style, just what I needed: to solve my life's challenges by hypnotizing myself. And it proved I could do it in short time!

Loved all the scripts too. Where many books bogged me down with college textbook jargon, this book certainly did not. It spoke to me.

And I recommend it highly!

This book is very interesting and different in its approach to self-hypnosis. The idea is that you can hypnotize yourself while you read hypnotic scripts out loud right from the book. I tried it and it definitely did something. What I liked most about the book is that I didn't have to weed through a lot of filler. The author got to the technique fast within about 30 minutes after I started reading. I wish all self-help books would do that.

Presented by Sheldon Oberman, Island Of The Minotaur: Greek Myths Of Ancient Crete presents classic tales including the story of the deadly Minotaur that roamed the terrible Labyrinth, the winged boy Icarus who flew too close to the sun, Theseus' struggles against the ruthless witch Medea, and much more. A final, true tale of Sir Arthur Evans, a real-life treasure hunter who discovered the buried secrets of the ancient Minoan civilization adds a particularly welcome embellishment to this outstanding compilation of Hellenic mythology. Full-color illustrations by Blair Drawson well serve to highlight this engaging compendium of ancient tales told down the generations from antiquity to the present day.

Sheldon Oberman draws various Greek legends together in a neat package that is suitable for young children (8 and above) to get their first taste of gods, goddesses, heroes and monsters. Adults, too, should enjoy the book, which is a fast read and a refresher on several key stories.

The stories are written clearly and plainly, suitable for young readers without being dumbed down so much to insult them. Illustrations by Blair Drawson are colorful, exaggerated and humorous. Island of the Minotaur is a fun and informative reinterpretation of these ancient myths for a new generation of readers.

Ed Southern has done an exemplary job of collecting many new and non-traditional sources of material for this essay, a welcome antidote to some of the more hagiographic tomes produced for this anniversary. For anyone interested in first class source material, this is a great place to start. I would highly recommend this for both general readers and students.

The 20 collected writings relating to the English colony of Jamestown in Virginia, the first English settlement in America, are arranged chronologically from 1605 to 1614. This covers the time just before the arrival of the first colonists on three ships to the marriage of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. The variety of historical documents collected by the editor, a graduate of Wake Forest U., brings out the many sides of the venture of Jamestown. The struggle of the first colonists and mysteries surrounding the fate of some of them are the usual focus of the Jamestown colony. But besides these familiar subjects, Southern includes in this anthology Spanish documents evidencing concern over the colony; English papers voicing the interests and worries of investors; and references by Shakespeare to Jamestown.

This book contains the following six short stories.

4.5 stars for BLOOD LAW by Dominique Adair.
Excellent story. I chuckled at a couple of good lines. Good writing. The events moved along well. Ilsa is queen of the Shanart people on the planet Verison. They have been threatened by the Mengalors. Zane is the twin brother of Loren. Zane chose to become a vampire, Loren is not a vampire. Zane recently bought Loren's space ship. Ilsa enters the ship, drugs Zane, handcuffs him to a bed, overrides the ship's control system so the ship will only respond to her commands or blow up. When Zane awakes, she has sex with him. She believes he is Loren and he doesn't correct her assumption. She wants to get pregnant with Loren's child and force him to marry her to create a strategic bond between their people and hopefully get his protection for her people against the Mengalors.

Story length: 51 pages. Sexual language: erotic. Number of sex scenes: 3. Length of sex scenes: 3, 3.4 and 5 pages. Setting: unknown time on a space ship and on the planet Verison. Copyright: 2003. Genre: erotic paranormal science fiction romance.

To date, I've read one other story by Dominique Adair. I gave 3 stars to "Holly" Copyright 2005, which appears in the anthology "All She Wants." My 4 star review for the anthology was posted on 4/02/08.


4 stars for BEATING LEVEL NINE by Sahara Kelly.
Fun, erotic vampire story. I liked the characters and events. Stefan and Caroline don't know each other. They play an online game called Nihilism On Line. Stefan's character can never get into the level nine cave to fight the Gryphon Giganticus monster. Caroline's character gets into the cave but dies while attacking the monster. They accidentally meet in real life and discover that they've seen each others' characters on line.

Story length: 42 pages. Sexual language: erotic. Number of sex scenes: 2. Length of sex scenes: 4 and 9 pages. Setting: current day. Copyright: 2004. Genre: erotic paranormal romance.

To date, I've read one other story by Sahara Kelly. I gave 2 stars to "Sizzle" Copyright 2003, which appears in the anthology "Hurts So Good." My 4 star review for the anthology was posted on 5/17/08.


3.5 stars for SURRENDER THE NIGHT by Blair Valentine.
This was an enjoyable story. There were some unexpected events. Toward the end, a couple of events had me surprised and a few of the lines had me chuckling. Lily is raised in the vampire community. On her 21st birthday, she will lose her virginity and become a full-fledged vampire as part of a celebrated vampire tradition. The vampire leader Adrian will be the one to choose a male vampire to take her virginity. Adrian has loved Lily from afar for 5 years. He chooses himself for her. Adrian takes her virginity and immediately asks her to mate with him (the equivalent of marriage). She is reluctant because she had been looking forward to a time of sexual freedom and fun being single. There was a good scene in a bar and another surprise I don't want to give away.

Story length: 38 pages. Sexual language: erotic. Number of sex scenes: 9. Length of sex scenes: average 1.5, shortest 0.3, longest 2.5 pages. Setting: current day London, England. Copyright: 2005. Genre: erotic paranormal romance.


3 stars for MY FAIR PIXIE by Samantha Winston.
I loved the first half but I wasn't as interested in the last half. In the first half, Sebastian, a vampire, fed on a man who had taken Viagra and was drunk. The effect was to make Sebastian very drunk. A friend gave him tickets to be in the audience for a dating game show. The show's producer mistakenly thinks he is one of the three contestants and puts him in a soundproof booth. The girl asking questions is Jessica, a pixie. Sebastian doesn't want to be picked, so he tries to be outrageous, but she loves his answer about spanking her, and she picks him. They go on the winning trip to Las Vegas. There were some funny lines during this part of the story. They get married and then Sebastian takes her to meet his vampire mother, who hates pixies. In the second half, Jessica goes to school to learn academics and etiquette. The vampire mother requires that she be able to pass as a vampire at the next summer's Fairy Court event. Pixies are described as the lowest class in the paranormal world. Their main talent is having fun. They drink beer, throw trash on the ground, and live in trailers. Jessica must learn to act differently to please the mother.

Story length: 68 pages. Sexual language: erotic with rear door activity. Number of sex scenes: 9. Length of sex scenes: 2 short scenes (1 page or less) and 7 long scenes (average 1.8, shortest 1.2, longest 3 pages). Setting: current day U.S. Copyright: 2005. Genre: erotic paranormal romance.

To date, I've read one other story by Samantha Winston. I gave 4 stars to "Darla's Valentine" Copyright 2003, which appears in the anthology "Fever-Hot Dreams." My 4 star review for the anthology was posted on 5/17/08.


3 stars for BLOOD LITE by Dakota Cassidy.
Pretty good. The ending was ok. The best part was the first part where the reader doesn't know what will happen between Leah and Erik. Leah is a little on the snarky side with her comments. Leah is a vampire, 5'4" 185 pounds. She wants to lose weight and finds Erik, a human personal trainer, in the phone book. He comes to her home and begins having her do exercises. Both Leah and Erik are physically drawn to each other from the beginning. Leah assumes he is gay. Erik likes fuller women.

Story length: 42 pages. Sexual language: erotic. Number of sex scenes: 3. Length of sex scenes: 2, 3 and 4 pages. Setting: current day. Copyright: 2004. Genre: erotic paranormal romance.


2 stars for RYALITY BITES by Dawn Madigan.
This was ok, but not as entertaining as the other stories. I wasn't drawn into it enough. I had no major problems with it other than it wasn't interesting enough. Ryal, a female vampire, is over 3,000 years old. She had possession of a magic ruby called the Apple of Eris, which was the property of Eris, the goddess of discord. Bad vampire Rubeus wanted the ruby and killed Ryal's lover Ailig 500 years ago. Ryal hid the ruby and has been running from Rubeus ever since. Hayden is a current day vampire slayer. He is drawn to Ryal and has sex with her instead of slaying her. She believes Hayden is the reincarnation of Ailig. There are some flashbacks to the Ryal and Ailig story from 500 years earlier.

Story length: 54 pages. Sexual language: erotic. Number of sex scenes: 5. Length of sex scenes: average 3.1, shortest 1.5, longest 4.5 pages. Setting: current day Philadelphia and 500 years earlier in Scotland. Copyright: 2006. Genre: erotic paranormal romance.

6 different Vampire love stories. Each one is well written with strong characters. If you love Vampires & Romantica, you will love this book!

As a former resident of Pittsburgh -- the setting for the poems in this collection -- I found Last Heat by Peter Blair to be somewhat of a "you can go home again" collection for me. Blair writes from the honest and provoking point of view of a man who has worked in Pittsburgh's steel mills, seen their decline, and who has been personally affected by the blue-collar towns that died as the mills closed down.

Last Heat was the winner of the 1999 Word Works Washington Prize, an annual poetry book competition that awards $1,500 and publication to a living poet. And it's easy to see why Blair's book was selected for publication.

Blair's poems are sensitive and emotional an engaging contrast to the furnaces and mill-hunks that pepper his poems. For example, Blair captures the all-too-human side of a co-worker, nicknamed Smoke, in these lines from the poem "Smoke":

His words drift down
from somewhere a tap explosion has scattered them
years ago. His chest heaves slowly,
an old furnace, a molten story. How many blacks
do you see on the river, even today?
I was their sport, see? That was the Forties.
All I remember is fighting. When the foreman calls us
for the next cast, the light in his eyes
vanishes, nothing there now but gray smoke.

Many of Blair's poems capture the intricate bonds between foremen and crew, between co-workers, juxtaposed with poems showing bonds between fathers and sons and brothers. These are true "manly-men", putting up brave fronts, hiding any emotion. But while Blair depicts the outer fronts of his co-workers, you hear his own voice telling you what is inside his head, the emotions he feels seem to speak for the men who won't speak the emotions themselves. One fine example of this is "What It Takes":

But tonight in Pittsburgh,
this old man hobbles on the bridge
toward the rusted streetcar cab
nailed to the outside wall of Chiodo's Bar
like a steel mask

The day has forgotten Graz,
old Pittsburgh, and Big Steel,
but night might remember,
so I lean over the bridge rail
above the silent Slab and Palte Division
and ask my brother's face:
Do I have what it takes?

Blair's words are quite close to being love poems to an era that will never return to Pittsburgh the steel era. His fond recollections of the furnaces and coal cars, the smokestacks and rivers, show a melancholy for a time that was rough, but important to not only his own history, but the history of the families of the "thousands of men and women who worked at Homestead Steel" that he acknowledges at the front of his book.

In the poem "What Love Is", Blair gives us a glimpse of his own family's struggle in a blue-collar town:

Across the kitchen table, we fight again.
I shout, It's MY future, leave the steak
my father grilled for me. Stomping up the steps,
I think of the veins bulging on his forehead,
the white collar he so desired tight around his neck.

When you think of steel mills, you think of machinery, heat, boiling metal, foul smells, etc. But Blair's descriptions of the intricate workings of the mill, down to its steaming slag pits (a trivial hell, one of many / up and down the river.) are so moving, so evocative. If you've ever thought a blue-collar worker could not also be a poet, Peter Blair will convince you otherwise.

...

LAST HEAT by Peter Blair is one of the best poetry collections of the year. Blair tells us subtly everything a man needs to know about being a man through an unrelenting yet rapturous gaze into the furnace of the steel mill. We see metaphors made of footlockers, of chipped ham on rye in sandwich machines, and of all the everyday details of blue collar existence.

Not since Carl Sandburg has an American poet managed to ennoble the daily existence of the laborer with the seeming effortlessness of these liquid verses.

For new millenium ArtSpeak, bow to the demons of consumerism with "Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty Pleasures" edited by Phillip Vergne. Walker Art Center Director Kathy Halbreich mentions that artists adroitly adapt corporate techniques to 'create a spectacle of quotidian experience' with various intentions.

Here's some of those, from their biographies:

"investigate the global landscape" | "attempt to discuss and understand" | "sidestep precise categorization" | "appropriate and deconstruct television imagery" | "cool analysis of an aesthetic of everyday America" | "analysis of American celebrity and excess" | "examine issues of present day art production" | "metaphysical reflection on our collective consciousness" | "sculptures that incorporate decaying fish" | "humorous and at times aesthetically subversive interventions" | "commentary on contemporary reliance on tchnological and consumerist promise" | "address issues of colonial hangovers" | "large scale spectacle of the ordinary" | "hold up a mirror to the viewers dysfunction" | "mix conceptual rigor with socio cultural investigation" | "re-imagine themselves as figures of popular culture" | "seemingly banal readymades" | "sound installation of songs popular" | "reflect on the artistic system" | "attempt to bridge the rift between man and nature" | "raise larger questions about the definition of art and authorship" | "collage media reports" | "react against the legacy of Joseph Beuys" | "the hand of the artist is not the important issue" | "use video camera to record own failure, again and again" | "intimations of bodily functions play an important role" | "witty use of diverse clichés" | "artistic nomadism" | "belonging to a humanistic philosophy of proximity" | "invesigate the sense of seduction in society dominated by spectacle" | "fascination with cliché" | "making the commonplace strange" | "blur lines between artifice and nature" | "use sound sculpturally to create aural landscapes" | "use pop culture as a ready made artistic vocabulary" | "cute doodles, friendly words, pointing arrows" | "disruption of games like rugby" | "involve audience in environment" | "purvey the glamorous celebrity lifestyle" | "create a sense of unease by odd juxtapositions"

That's gotta be inspirational! An effort is made to keep the scholarly parts short enough to skip over comfortably, and some interesting points are made convincingly, if somewhat dispiritedly.

This book will help you grapple with the mysteries of modern art practices and is a good overview of the work and motivations of artists who are numbered among the top of the generation born since the 60's.

Painters especially will be pleased that oil on canvas was not represented among this company. Certainly the future beckons ever more brightly!

This book is an excellent companion to the great exhibit, but also good on its own. It is bound well and has glossy pics of the art as well as explanations and commentary by the artists. A wonderful book

This is a wonderful book. The explanation of mental skills for bodybuilding is done in a creative way. The exercises are easy to follow and they are truly helpful. I have become much stronger mentally since reading this book and it has helped me shape my body. I now know that I can have the body that I always wanted. I recommend that every bodybuilder, strength training coach and those interested in fitness buy this book. It is one of a kind. There is simply nothing out there that compares to this book.

Looking for an "edge" in the gym (or in life, because the lessons of Mind and Muscle translate very well outside of the weightroom? This book offers some very helpful practices for involving the mind in your workouts.
Mr. Whitmarsh's book centers on the idea that tremendous gains in size and durability can be made through an active mind-muscle connection. Through the use of various assessment exercises, the program is designed to teach you training strengths and weaknesses, and how to use mental tools to increase your effectiveness in goal setting and strength gains.
If you spend any time in a weight room, its clear that most people go about their lifting as a passive participant, especially from a mental standpoint. While involving mental tools is a slow learning process (as Whitmarsh admits), when incorporated into your program, the benefits are substantial. Using some of his methods, I've increased my bench presses over 20 pounds in the last month. I also have an increased desire to excel.
My trainer is big on the idea that "Intensity + Intelligence = Results". If your program requires a mental boost, or if you fail to recognize the importance of the thought process in your lifting regime, I encourage you to pick up this book.