Brandon Books

Masters of Horror debuted on Showtime TV last year to much fanfare. This horror anthology show featured some of the most notable horror film directors and writers in the business such as Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, Joe Dante, John Landis, and John Carpenter. IDW Comics, perhaps the leading publisher of horror comics today, has adapted the shows into comic format and this graphic novel contains the first two episodes, "Incident on and Off a Mountain Road" and "Dreams in the Witch House."

"Incident" finds a woman involved in an accident along a deserted stretch of road and soon being pursued by a pasty-faced giant named Moonface. Through a series of flashbacks we learn of her relationship with a zealous survivalist who teaches her the skills she'll need to overcome this maniac serial killer. I wasn't too crazy about this episode when I saw it on Showtime. Too many recent films have covered the backwoods hick lunatic plotline and it just seems warmed over. The adaptation is solid but the source material just isn't very fresh.

"Dreams in the Witch House" is an adaptation of one of H.P. Lovecraft's more famous tales set in the haunted city of Arkham, Massachusetts. Walter Gilman is a student at Misktonic University who takes a room at a run down, 17th century home. He's soon plagued by strange dreams and sees a rat with a human face who want him to kidnap the infant of the woman who lives in the room next door. While the adaptation deviates a bit from Lovecraft's story, it does maintain that palpable feeling of ancient, New England creepiness that was staple of Lovecraft's work. The story is greatly aided by the moody and atmospheric art of Dennis Calero.

In fact, far from being a 'maverick' view of broadcasting (that presentation can only have been a misjudged marketing ploy) this book is the result of the author's ( a renowned Irish film maker) forty years experience as an insider and outsider in Irish film making and broadcasting circles. It articulates clearly and with insider knowledge the crisis of broadcasting brought on by the phenomenon of 'the market'.
An indication of its powerful insight into public broadcasting in Ireland is the fact that discussion on it has been effectively censored by the best-known personalities in the incestuous world of Irish Public television and radio. The reason? Many of them are shown in this book as having a vested interest in the trivialisation of broadcasting.
The author's insights ( based on a four- year tenure on RTE's governing body) into the political and economic attitudes of such as Garret Fitzgerald, ex- premier of Ireland, Des Geraghty, head of the most powerful Union in Ireland, two Director-Generals of RTE are quite unique. The self-serving culture of Irish public broadcasting and its total subservience to the pressures of commercial and political expedience, have rarely been so clearly and worryingly dissected.
This book could only have been written by an artist who is a maverick only in the sense that he has not yet submitted to 'branding'

This book was great. Highly recommended. Me 1 Arthritis 0: A Young Man's Real Life Journey to Beating the Disease

A highly readable and thorough examination of Lt. Colonel John Fremont's disastrous fourth expedition through the central Rockies.

The intent of the expedition was to locate a future railroad passage through the central Rockies during the winter months to see if a rail system would be feasible at that time of year. All signs pointed to a severe and brutal winter when Fremont and thirty-five others (many of them seasoned veterans of the frontier) undertook this impossible assault on the mountains. The outcome was ten dead.

The author explores every scrap of evidence from governmental documents, personal letters and newspaper articles to rationalize Fremont's failure. From the misguidance of "Old" Bill Williams, to the personal vendettas amongst the men, to the geographical disorientations at hand, we gain a better understanding as to what went on in the breakdown of this expedition.
A captivating and engaging read.

This is a lovely story of a big, strong and apparently simple (but in reality, an intelligent and honest) navvy in England around the time of the First World War. Moleskin Joe saves the life of a young girl by pulling her to safety after a dam on a construction site bursts, after which she kissed him and told him he's 'the best'. This encounter leaves an indelible imprint on Moleskin's mind but the girl soon leaves the area with her father and disappears from Moleskin's life. But he never forgets her. The book traces his life through the war in France and back to navvydom in England and Scotland after his return. We meet the other navvies and we see the lawlessness, the illegal distilling, the heavy drinking and fighting that was the life of so many men (and some women) at the time. All through it, Moleskin Joe hopes he will see the girl again.

MacGill is a gifted writer and a beautiful wordsmith. The book sees through the rough and bohemian life of the navvy to the pure and gentle morality of Moleskin Joe. It is a simple story of real love.

In the introduction of this book, Taylor makes a very important point: to examine the context in which art was conceived within the Third Reich is not to empower the ideological framework at hand. Quite to contrary, as the book reveals, it is a poignant indictment of the cultural administration which controlled the production and consumption of art under Nazi control. Artists are not precluded from this complicity either. Arno Breker, in particular, is appropriately interrogated and berated for his prolific production of sculptures specifically designed to uphold the values of national socialism. This book is a significant contribution to the discourse on cultural production as a maintenance of the ideological status quo. As such, it reifies the complicity of those (dare I say?) people ('monsters' is more appropriate), with real names and real faces, who were responsible for maintaining the dominant cultural context which frames the holocaust. I highly recommend this book.

"I've been riding on a ghost train where the cars, they scream and slam; and I don't know where I'll be tonight, but I'd always tell you where I am." - Mark Knopfler, "Tunnel of Love."

It's a dull, dumbing and exhaustive routine, that night shift at the run-down metal factory, and it's only society's losers who are working there; those who no longer have the hope of a better life and of a future to speak of, and who now live from night to night only, trying to beat the graveyard shift one bleak weeknight at a time: Duckarse, the chargehand, never introduced by any other name than that of the nickname which the men have given him, and which seems to sum up his entire existence. Dan, the lonesome old man who has spent his life running away from and simultaneously following from a distance the pitiful fate of the woman he met in post-World War II London, and whose image now haunts his sleepless days because he abandoned her, and because his guilt-ridden conscience has convinced him that he is responsible for her fate; but who has long since lost the ability to do anything about it - or about anything else, for that matter. And Frankie, who spends his weekends in pubs and bars, unsuccessfully trying to build a career as a rock band promoter, and for whom paradise consists of one idea only: to delve head-first into the limitless stashes of Amsterdam's drug market, and never to re-emerge.

And then there is Donal, who does not seem to fit in with this group. Donal, who married his girlfriend Elizabeth after high school because he truly loves her - not just because they found out that she was pregnant and marrying her was the honorable thing to do. Donal, who now lives with his delicate, beautiful and very pregnant young wife in a trailer in the backyard of her parents' house. Donal, who actually has the hope of escaping the dull routine of his nightly work, and of all the days not spent awake with his wife because he is catching up on the sleep he did not get at night. Donal, who only took this job (which his childhood friend Frankie found for him) because he quickly needed a source of income after they had found out that Elizabeth was pregnant. And Donal, who is caught between his loyalty to Frankie and the life that he represents on the one hand and his love for Elizabeth and their shared, fragile hope for a better future on the other hand; desperately trying to hold on to their one chance at luck and happiness and to defend it against the bleakness threatening to encroach their life from all sides simultaneously in the post-industrial streets and neighborhoods of blue collar Dublin.

In less than 150 pages and in gritty, direct terms, Dermot Bolger tells the story of Donal and Elizabeth and of the other men of the night shift at the factory; chronicling their seemingly eventless life and the tenuous normality to which all of them are clinging by the thin threads of their existence. Yet, his narrative is of an almost cineastic quality: As in a motion picture, the story begins to unfold in the middle of a scene in the factory; and even if you've never lived through an industrial night shift, Bolger's prose places you right there, to the point that you literally see the artificial light emanating from the tubes below the ceiling beams, hear the thumping, thudding, clicking and whining of the machines, smell the ever-present dust and chemicals and feel the headache they invariably produce. As in a motion picture, you observe Donal and Elizabeth in the narrow world of their trailor, slowly losing the ability to communicate with each other and unable to make up for it with their love and with their hopes for the future alone; two pebbles in an avalanche "jolted apart and ... trying to scramble back to each other." And as in a motion picture, you watch Donal float alone through the streets of nightly Dublin, past the city's other losers, past its fast food joints, video arcades and late night movie theaters, and past the crumbling facades of its quays.

"No Irish writer since McGahern has been so obsessed with the poetics of love sex, and death; [none] so brilliantly captured the suburban underbelly of the city, the crazy unofficial lives," Colm Toibin wrote in Magill about 1985's "Night Shift" which was, hard to believe, Dermot Bolger's literary debut, and instantly established him as a major force in contemporary Irish literature. Seven novels, nine plays, a slew of literary awards, poetry collections, literary contributions, and several screen plays and literature collections edited by Bolger later, it is well-neigh impossible to overstate the impact of the author who, together with Roddy Doyle, almost single-handedly redefined the literary image of Ireland and, in particular, the working class neighborhoods of its capital Dublin. But whether you begin with the "fury of despair" (Penguin) of Bolger's entrance into the world of modern literature in "Night Shift" or with his somewhat more mainstream contribution to the more recent and wildly successful "Finbar's Hotel" venture, which he also devised and edited, and then work you way backwards: Don't be deterred by the fact that not all of his fiction is easily available in print everywhere and at all times. You'd be missing out on a uniquely important experience if you did.

Also recommended:
Finbar's Hotel: A Novel
The Blackwater Lightship: A Novel
The Barrytown Trilogy
The Speckled People
Irish Journal (Marlboro Travel)

As a music industry consultant and educator, I often tell my clients and students that there is no substitute for experience. This book is all about experience: the experiences of the biggest stars in the music industry and their key pivotal moments, tough business lessons, and the determining factors that helped them to achieve their success - all written in their own words. No matter what area of the music industry you are venturing into, there is someone's story in this book that will provide you with insight, solutions, and even inspiration.

This Book is still one of a kind. Since it was published in 1970, it is still the only reliable Book which gives the complete Text of three Wayang Kulit (Javanese Shadow Puppet) Lakon (Plays). "The Reincanation of Rama" from the Ramayana and "Irawan's Wedding" and "The Death of Karna" from the Mahabharata. The Book begins with a fine introduction to Wayang, the Plays, Performance and Translation. The translation from Javanese was rendered by Pandam Guritno, one of the froemost Javanese Wayang Scholars of all time, whom I knew personally. Next follow the texts of the three Plays, which include 143 illustrations. James Brandon has also included descriptions of the action that takes place and the musical pieces that are played. The reader can thus review three performances through reading. At the end of the Book are useful Appendices, Notes on Sources, a good Glossary and a now outdated Bibliography. This Book is useful for those who are interested in Wayang, Javanese Culture, Theater Arts, Sanskrit Literature and many other subjects. That is what makes Wayang so wonderful. It is many things in one.

This is an excellent book that will touch your heart and reassure you your loved ones live on.

This is the first book I read on the subject and I really liked it. Dr. Carla lists tens of Death Bed Visions which are indeed convincing and beautiful. They make you realize that death is not that horrible and frightening at all. The dying person sees deceased relatives, angels, and loved ones and actually wants to go to them. They see the wonderful light that awaits for them on the other side and they see that [over there] there is nothing to be afraid of. After you read this book you will understand how unfair it is that society does not accept the DBVs and the death subject in general. How our own religion rejects them, and wonder why, since they preach that death is not the end! Let alone the scientists (and stay away from most of them) who always find a...scientific answer for every question. But as beautifully stated in the book already, if those visions are only by-products of the dying brain, how come the dying person sees only deceased ones, and never loved ones who are still alive?

I only wish I had this book when my beloved grandmother died and was so much frightened of death. I would be able to explain her a few things I learned from this wonderful book, and provide her some comfort.

It is amazing. It proved that we don't die alone at all, but a beloved deceased person or persons are there, waiting to help us make it to the other side and we are happy to reunite with them!

This was an excellent book. Very easy to follow and very interesting. I wish she would write another. A must read regarding Death Bed Visions.

This book provides far more than just research. There are some very intriguing parallels to all the documented cases.

This book is written in a way that it maintains the interest of the existing "Believer" and captures the interest of the curious and perhaps skeptic. Every reader can relate to some witnessed event in this book. Perhaps not aware of what may have taking place at the time....now enlightened.

I found this refreshingly real and hard to put down Especially in comparison to other popular books about the afterlife that had a commercial edge and were almost trying to "sell" a belief.

Dr. Carla has an impressive fan club of people like myself that respect her for her Spiritual insight and general wisdom of well being. I actually reccommend all of her books. She's pretty multi-tasked!

I have to agree with another reviewer regarding the substance of this book, or lack thereof; this is a fascinating topic and although the author included some interesting case studies her overuse of irrelevant filler and 'homey' writing style was a real turn-off. If you're looking for a credible, objective analysis of the DBV phenomenon and original research,look elsewhere.You're much better off reading "What They Saw at the Hour of Death", which is where this author got most of her information.Disappointing...