Elliott Books

Visually stunning, and with text taken straight from the Bible, this book is an amazing read. However, with that said, The Bible: Eden is not a book for everyone. It relies a bit too heavily on the nudity, sexuality, and "intimacy" between Adam & Eve at times. If you are easily offended by such content, it would be best to steer clear from this collection. On the other hand, these instances are presented in such an honest, innocent, and realistic approach, that the content does not seem pornographic.

We get to see the creation, innocence, seduction, and fall of Adam & Even live and in color in the photo-realistic paintings provided in this collection. I would definately recommend to anyone, just bring an open mind to this interpretation of this classic Bible tale.

Who doesn't have a young teen boy these days that hasn't heard the words "Toa Nuva", "Bionicle", and "Masks" in the same sentence? On our bookshelves, guardian bionicles stand watch over slumbering children, waiting for the dreaded enemies of the Toa Nuva (probably new warriors in some lego language).

The toys are very cool. What was once Johnny West, Batman, or Spiderman is now full poseable, fully changeable, and the dynamics of the body structure are such that these 'toys' could even be our bodies in mechanical form! My eyes don't usually glow, and my hands are digitized, but movement wise, they are magical.

Just like this book, collecting the Lego magazine stories, there is a sense of completeness about the story now. Whenever I read the Lego installments, I always thought that it was time for a collection. Papercutz has a remarkable reputation for quality books printed on quality paper, and is a natural choice for such a property.

The team of Greg Farshtey, Carlos D'Anda, and Randy Elliot have created a world around the characters that is very cool. The setting is other worldly, but the battle for survival is no different than any humans have endured. This is no 'band of brothers', but it is a 'band of others'.

The arrival of Makuta on the Island of Mata Nui signaled the transformation of Nui into a place of evil. The Tohunga wait for salvation, and six arrive who control the forces of nature to help them find it. Collect the masks, and defeat the Makuta no matter what the cost.

The art and color in the books is amazing. D'Anda and Elliot have captured the feel of the characters beautifully. The challenge of illustrating any book with non humanoid features is to make them 'real' and the artists have done that very well. I can imagine their studio. Shelves filled with BIONICLES in various poses, giant boxes of LEGO waiting for construction. How do they ever get any work done?

Read in short installments, these stories made little sense. Now that Papercutz has collected the episodes, the story is clear, and even for adults who have had to learn new words in a new language, the story of the Bionicles has just become more interesting.

www.papercutz.com

Buck Clayton shows himself to be a most articulate musician, covering his life and times from the midwest to California to China. His period with Count Basie was, of course, the most important part of his career, and one wishes that Clayton had written more incisively about that time. But, he writes so well that the book is always entertaining, up to and including his later years when he was forced to play Dixieland music in order to work.

This is a very useful book on labour standards and the way to improve them using international trade and globalization. Written in a simple and easy way, it also offers a comprehensive review of the recent literature on these topics.
In the first part it is discussed the role of the ILO and its tools to spread labour standards: monitoring policy, technical cooperation and enforcement or sanctions.
Furthermore, a broad overview of the ways to link labour standards to international trade and a more pragmatic approach to connect them is discussed. The general view on this issue is that globalization and labour standards are complementary factors and they could work togheter to spread benefits of globalization in a way coherent with labour rights.
I consider this book a very rich source for researchers and policymakers, intuitive and easy to read.

Many books and movies have been written about pirates throughout the oceans of the world---Clipperton: Island of Lost Toys is like a breath of fresh air as it tells about the pirates in the Eastern Pacific Ocean--a topic very seldom discussed---and it shows where buried treasure actually took place--The white sands and blue lagoons are most appealing and makes one desire to plan a vacation to those areas where pirates once left their footprints--without a shovel, you'll never know if you are a few feet from a million dollars, or a million feet from one dollar!

Beneath Contraband's ultra stylish cover lies a tale of high action and drama in a very near future where technology and communications have become inescapable. And just because it's a tech heavy book doesn't mean its light on story. Far from it. Contraband is a difficult and complicated book, but a good one nonetheless and well worth sticking with for the ending.

The story opens in Afghanistan, February. Two mercenaries, Charlotte and Tucker, are in Afghanistan to stir up trouble and make rival factions fight each other rather than the occupying forces. Charlotte ends up captured by some terrorist cell or other and becomes just another hostage video star. But her videos are posted to Contraband, a video-sharing mobile phone app that has begun not only to broadcast news but to dictate it as well.

Then we hit the first of many jump cuts in the book, something Behe does with some mixed results. This is why Contraband will be seen as a difficult book by many unwilling to go with these time shifts and switches in the narrative flow of the story. It all takes work on the reader's part (you have to pay attention to the date on the pages kids).

It's now 4 months later, June. This boy called Toby is running around Belgium trying to track down Charlotte from clues on Charlotte's Contraband video posts. He's desperate to find her, aware that only he can save her life. Another jump and Toby's in London. It's May. A month before he's dashing around the Belgium countryside but three after the Afghanistan abduction. He bumps into Tucker in an Internet cafe and gets himself strongarmed into the search for Charlotte. It transpires she's now working with a fellow called Jarvis who's doing his best to bring the Contraband network down.

Told you it got confusing didn't I?

After this the story keeps switching between the two periods in Toby's life as he runs round trying to find Charlotte in both. Characters come and go, the plot twists and turns until coalescing towards the end as it accelerates to a finish. A very satisfying and exhilarating finish indeed.

Contraband has much to say about the spread of mass media coverage, the concept of citizen journalism, the emptiness of coveting celebrity without merit, the insipid and dangerous effects casual violence has upon a psyche and much more. Behe uses Contraband as a direct reflection of many disparate elements whether it's YouTube violence, soldiers in the Gulf and Afghanistan using their own phones as a better source of information than the official media or these same soldiers then using their phones to post their violent and abusive videos to file sharing sites. At times he pushes his message a little too far and it begins to overwhelm and interfere not just with the story but with the art. There are a few pages where the speech bubbles are everywhere. But these mistakes are few and far between so we'll forgive them easily.

For a début fiction writer, Contraband is certainly an inspired book. It's clear that Behe has written extensively about the facts behind the future tech on display throughout Contraband and his knowledge and passion for the subject shows on every page. Of course, if you hadn't heard of Thomas Behe before, I'd be prepared to wager you may have heard of Phil Elliott; veteran of the Euro-Brit comics scene. And the art is unmistakeably Elliott's with that beautifully clean and clear style he's always drawn in. In a book this dense and text packed it would be too easy to become overwhelmed as an artist. But fortunately for us Elliott is more than up to the task of keeping the script on track. His clean Euro style is perfect as a way of grounding what could easily become a confused mess if dealt with by a lesser artist. The scale of the book, both in size and in scope means that his art often has to do without detailed backgrounds to get a story moving well, but when he is allowed (or allows himself) room the results are typically Elliot. Which is to say that they're extremely good indeed. He's ably assisted here by the grey tones of Cherie Donovan, who sets the each panel perfectly to create a background that emphasises the main characters and action for each panel. A little touch, but something that really adds a lot to the art.

So Contraband is far from an easy book. Anyone looking for a brain-dead bit of high-tech thriller may as well not bother. This is no 5 minute thrill ride. The time jumps and the complex writing makes you work to keep up, but that's no criticism, it's a good thing to be made to think as you read. Behe throws twists and turns into the book and packs a lot of story in between the covers. Phil Elliott's visuals keep everything flowing nicely but it's incredibly text heavy in places as the complexities of the story play out. What seemed at first like a slight, small book becomes something far more involved and satisfying. You'll find yourself reading slowly, refusing to skate over a scene as the complications and intricacies of the plot play out on the page and in your head.

Contraband is a thrilling sci-fi crime thriller with a hell of a lot to say about modern society and current attitudes on violence, technology and the encroachment of both on our everyday lives. Definitely one you should look out for. - RB (FPB)

First, I admit that I am looking at this from the point of view of a hand knitter. Some machine knitting books have some great pattern ideas to adapt for hand-knitting. The Cartwright-Jones books are really good for this.

This book had one pattern that I could adapt, a wrap that would be nice with a weaving technique. Also, I liked the pages on pattern drafting and finishing details. The rest of the patterns are rather English--long sweaters, long skirts worn with dark tights, knitted skirt and sweater sets, etc.--and there really aren't that many of them.

A machine knitter would find this book useful for the techniques. A bonus is that there is a page with knitters' graph paper on it that you can copy for your own charts--hand or machine. The scale is small, so you might want to enlarge it, but that means you can put an entire sweater front chart on one page. Yay! Graph paper is really expensive and hard to find if you need it RIGHT NOW, so this is yet another reason to buy the book.

Too bad this book is out of print. I have a 1971 edition and checked to see if there was an updated version. This book is a good back-up reference if you're stuck on a specific physics theory such as inertia or angular momentum. It's very simple and descriptive. I used it recently to explain, to a co-worker, why sunsets are red in color and how geysers work. I imagine it that it would have been great as a high school physics textbook.

The cover calls this edition the "Brief Edition" I am almost tempted to buy the $50.00 edition

a good book on dylan. there may be a liitle too much material in this book on THE BAND, even though they backed Dylan early on, maybe those images should have been edited down more.