Blake Books

My mother used to read this book to me when I was a child and as soon as I was old enough I started reading it for myself. All of the strange wonderful animals are so creatively imagined by the author. I was enchanted by it everytime I read it.

This is a beautiful book. I have to say that it is probably my very best, most favorite cookbook. This book is a real treat. It is full of entertaining stories and beautiful photographs. The photographer, Anthony Blake, has a real gift for capturing the imagination. It's a really nice book. My second most favorite book is the Baking Book by Linda C. It's got the same photographer, Anthony B. The recepies are very reliable.

The is a great starter book for would be landscape artists. The author presents the beginner with all the information he/she will need to get started. Including what to buy, the basics of colour and additives, how to analyze light, shadow, colour, perspective, shapes, planning the picture and painting technique. There are demonstrations of how to paint forms of the land, trees, water, snow and ice, skies, weather, manmade structures and figures in the landscape. Top this all off with step-by-step full colour demonstrations by George Cherepov, a master of the direct oil painting method. Using this book as their guide most everyone will be able to paint their first beautiful landscape.

If you have seen the series from Australia called Underbelly then you will want this book. If you are a true crime buff then you will want this book. If you are a fan of the Sopranos then you will want this book. A fascinating look at the underbelly of underworld crime in Australia over the period of a decade stretching into the new century.

Eleanor Dwight's The Letters of Pauline Palmer: A Great Lady of Chicago's First Family appears at first glance as a series of homey letters from a daughter to her mother who both lived the leisurely upper-class life of Chicago's elite. We follow Pauline Palmer from 1908 until 1926, and are given an intimate portrait of travel, society and home life. To illustrate this life Ms. Dwight has gathered together a remarkable array of photographs to take the reader back to Chicago's Gilded Age and has also included a beautifully illustrated essay on the Palmer art collections.

Dwight has, in addition, made an important addition to cultural history. Pauline's warm humane presence, her concerned and often amusing reflections, her reactions to the events of her time ("At Soissons it was terrible," wrote Pauline in 1920 after World War I, "the Cathedral in frightful ruins, but the people hard at work rebuilding!") (p. 168) create a vibrant window on a way of life and on attitudes that were the very fabric of American life at the time. The cheerful optimism of this correspondence reflects a certain honor and resoluteness that underlies all the detail of fashion, jewelry and parties: this is the American spirit resilient in many women, women who have throughout our history created values and families that are classless and timeless.

I highly recommend this book. A must read!

Quentin Blake has always had an uncanny empathy with all of the natural world, silly humans included. This book sees him flying high-- past the limits of the glorious natural drawer he has always been. If you love the form and material of books, birds, people, and wonderful drawing, you will sigh when you open these pages.

Gilchrist had two things going for him as Blake's first biographer. He remains the only one of them all who actually got to talk to people who knew Blake, who were friends with he and his wife. Secondly, he was alert enough to recognize Blake's genius despite the neglect with which it continued to be treated even as Gilchrist wrote the book. Just as Harold Bloom suggests that Emerson proved his own genius by being the first to recognize Whitman's, the same ought to be said of Gilchrist. Throughout Gilchrist's account, he cites conversations and letters exchanged with various friends of Blake, from Samuel Palmer to Crabb Robinson and others. Palmer serves up a gorgeous and sensitive portrait of Blake in a letter to Gilchrist, while Gilchrist's copious quoting of Robinson's talks with Blake are ceaselessly fascinating.

To read this first of countless Blake biographies before one of the more recent ones is to strap yourself into a time machine and launch from one world to entirely another. Writing in the 1860s, Gilchrist's language reflects just how jaded we've become over time. Full of purple but no less delightful prose, Gilchrist's often adoring book stops at nothing to ensure the sanctity of his subject. One of Blake's early and comparatively minor "Song" poems from the "Poetical Sketches" is described as possessing "shy evanescent tints and aroma as of pressed rose-leaves."

Yet for all the book's haughtiness, it is Gilchrist's fascinating renunciation of criticism that most distinguishes him from we post-moderns: "Criticism is idle. How analyze a violet's perfume, or dissect the bloom on a butterfly's wing?" It would be a long way to Freud, Brooks, Frye, Vendler and Bloom. While Gilchrist often goes to boring lengths in describing Blake's paintings and engravings (as in the tedious "Supplementary" chapter at the end), it is a good thing he did decide to lay off the criticism, as Gilchrist often reveals a complete and astonishing inability to fathom so much of Blake's work. He repeatedly surrenders to the abstractness of Blake's epics, condemning Jerusalem's language as "words empty of meaning to all but him who uttered them" and says of Blake's "Milton" that "few are the readers who will ever penetrate beyond the first page or two."

But it is the book's charm that designates it a literary monument. "Fully to appreciate the poetry as the lad Blake composed in the years 1768-77. let us call to mind the dates at which first peeped above the horizon the cardinal lights which people our modern poetic heavens," Gilchrist carries on at the book's onset. The author often blurs the line between eloquence and coherence early on, but soon, as if the immensity of Gilchrist's project gradually wore him down, the book assumes a far more pedestrian tone and becomes all the more wrenching a read because of it.

The book's most powerful moment comes in a chapter called "Personal Details" which, if you can sift through Gilchrist's romantic elaborations, makes for a singularly moving document of Blake, the man and the artist, including such meticulously vivid observations as to his clothes, the shape of his head and nose, the look in his eyes, the way he carried his five-foot-six frame. "his clothes were threadbare," Gilchrist writes, "and his gray trousers had worn black and shiny in front, like a mechanic's. Out of doors, he was more particular, so that his dress did not, in the streets of London, challenge attention either way." These details along with those offered by many of the Blake acquaintances Gilchrist was able to interview throughout the book make it an indispensable document of a deeply poignant and fascinating life.

I Loved the Book!

Good look at one man's life in LA in the 70's. Easy reading, well paced and some unusual characters. What more do you want?

Freddie Knoller says he kept silent about his experiences for many years, until his grandchildren asked what had happened. When he started to relate his amazing story he could not stop. I am glad he told us. It is not often one can review a book where one knows personally the author of an outstanding work. This book stands out as a record of Jewish suffering and will to survive. It is stranger than fiction. He went back to occupied Belgium to find an abandoned cello, he lived by pimping in Paris. Later he confessed his Jewishness when arrested by the Gestapo rather than betraying the resistance under torture. Thanks to meeting a doctor in the train to concentration camp he was able to work in the infirmary there which helped his survival.
This is though a book which tells you there are two categories of people. Most of us accept what befalls us as God's will, fate, or whatever and learn to accept it rather than to fight. Freddie is one of the small band of fighters whose courage and will to survive remain an inspiration and challenge to us all. I salute him.