Nicholson Books

Abel's first at bat is a well plotted cop novel with complex character interaction. His writing is subtle (there comes a point in the book when you begin to understand where all the pieces he's laid before you are falling, and it's like WOW), but there's enough violence to keep things visceral. Check out his next, "The Blue Wall." It's even better than "Bait."

When reading the summary on the book jacket for this book I was expecting a real action oriented novel. Boy was I disappointed. There is absolutely nothing going on in this book. You get to hear a lot about Jack Walsh and his goofy brother. He meets some other goofy characters that help him along the way. Then you get to the big ending. Anyone who has ever read a suspense novel can figure out the ending in this book. Overall, not a very good book (but that's just my opinion). :-(

This is amazing! The story centers around Walch, good cop goes bad, simple story, right? With Abel's knack for twists, Bait ropes you in. Read it. Put down Ulysses. Read it. This is the new Noir! All hail Abel!

Britain was the first country on Earth to witness the Industrial Revolution -- and my, oh, my was it ugly! Millions of economically displaced families moved from the countryside and Ireland to work in the burgeoning cotton, metal and coal industries during the early 19th century. Cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds were completely overwhelmed by the human influx, becoming breeding places for mass poverty and the disease that followed. The living conditions were nothing less than murderous -- as bad as anything in the Third World today.

In this college-level book, Tristram Hunt chronicles how British society responded to the crisis. "Building Jerusalem" is an intellectual history of the ideas that transformed squalor-bound urban areas into a new organizational model based on civic pride and public works. We learn how the Romantic vision of medieval chivalry (as retold in popular novels like "Ivanhoe") influenced the ground-level urban activists -- along with powerful forms of Christian compassion and nationalism.

The Victorian urban reform movement succeeded in many areas, but fell short in others. Ultimately, the coming of the 20th century undermined many of the core ideas that sustained the movement and led to a new focus on suburban development instead.

Hunt's writing is lively, particularly in the first 200 pages, and his research is impeccable. Unfortunately, the second half of the book drags a bit as he delves too deeply into the biographies of certain key characters, like John Ruskin. I would have split this book into two different volumes, the first from 1770 to about 1880, the second volume from 1880 to 2000. The photos are valuable, but we need more maps, illustrations and graphics to understand the true nature of this earth-shaking transformation. Bottom line: Worth reading, but could be better organized.

Historians must take an ideological stance or they become but poor reporters of facts. Hunt's research and approach is brilliant. Whether you agree with him on his interpretation of the facts is your business. Great history is written with great passion. This book is a very fine example of the rare art of the historian.

Hunt, a university lecturer and government adviser, has written a considerable work, based on years of research, but flawed by its pro-Labour, anti-working class perspective. He quotes John Prescott, "We are all middle class" - true enough of Labour Ministers and their cronies.

But the world's first industries and the world's first industrial cities were built by the world's first working class. In this book, trade unions are almost invisible - a walk-on part when Manchester Town Hall opened in 1878, a demand for better conditions for Glasgow's tramworkers, but Hunt cannot see the working class's role in creating industry, only `restrictive labour practices'.

He approves the Victorian economist James Mill's arrogant and idealist claim that the capitalist class contains `the heads that invent, and the hands that execute' and `the men who in fact think for the rest of the world'. The reactionary diatribes of Carlyle, Pugin and Ruskin, and the bourgeois triumphalism of a Macaulay, were equally idealist.

Too often, Victorian capitalists had prestige projects built, at the cost of urban development, putting palaces before people. Self-styled merchant princes, seeing themselves as the new Medici, romanced `Saxon self-government' and smugly rejected planning for public health.

The Victorian ruling class saw London as the imperial city, with its irredeemable natives. Hunt sees people's moves to the suburbs and to garden cities as wilful failures to solve London's problems, and joins Betjeman, Orwell, Williams-Ellis and Priestley in snobbish hatred of the suburbs, despite acknowledging that many people do want to live there.

Hunt calls for a restoration of local democracy, noting that in the 1890s, Londoners elected 12,000 of their fellow-citizens to run hospitals, schools and transport; now 36,000 quangocrats decide for us. Successive governments' rate capping, surcharging and cash limits have weakened the `innovative local government and civic pride' that Hunt celebrates, yet he ignores completely the biggest current threat to local (and national) democracy - Labour's EU-driven regionalisation policy.

He applauds the knowledge economy - though isn't all productive work knowledge-based? But we also need steel, ships, vehicles and clothes, which we should be producing ourselves, instead of relying on imported goods.

JoAnna Nicholson is brillant! She goes over complete head to toe looks for dressing smart and elegant in any situation. Starting with color which is essential in looking great, to shoes, belts, purses, hairstyles .... everything for the finished, polished look. She also makes you very aware of all the myths and bad advice we have received throughout the years. The color pictures in the book are very helpful. I highly recommend this book to everyone.

The author gives some good tips on color, basic items to buy and styles but the photos are terrible. They are extremely outdated - who wears denim jeans with animal print and belts printed on them? Or jeans splattered with paint that look like a bad spinart project. The few photos that are in the book are very outdated. The author also trys to pair a scarf with everything. Maybe I'm too young for this book but I was trying to find something that would show me how to put together a professional look. I'm still looking.

This book is worth over $5600. That's how much I paid for my Color 1 Associate training from Joanna Nicholson in 1990.

This book contains all that I learned and more. I have saved myself and others thousands of dollars of fashion mistakes by using her approach to color and style.

Buy the book if you are interested in easy to understand, accurate information about how to look great everyday using your best colors and styles.

Joanna's color system is not seasonal and she believes everyone can wear every color as long as the shade,and clarity are flattering.

There is so much great information in this book that you might feel a little overwhelmed. In that case it might be worthwhile to slowly read the book and highlight parts that pertain to you.

If you have diffulty determining your color type you may want to contact your nearest Color 1 Associate who can quickly shorten your learning curve about your best colors and styles. Then you can use this book as a reference.

This is one of my favorite (non-fiction) books of all time. It is not your garden variety decorating book, and doesn't pretend to be. In subject matter it is a bit more about architecture rather than interior decoration, with an emphasis on traditional. I think the text is excellent: witty, charming, down-to-earth, very informative and not long-winded or padded out. The photography is superb, giving excellent and well-lit views. Most of these rooms are decorated with some antiques, and the captions give you some information on these. If you love traditional cottage architecture, and English country decorating on the somewhat modest side -- no fancy houses here, these are cottages -- you might love this book as much as I. Highly recommended.

I bought this book last year and have looked through it many times. It is a true pictorial look at the REAL English cottages.

I was expecting a book with pictures of english decorating style. This is certainly NOT THAT. It is on the small side, so if you're looking for nice photos, forget it. It just wasn't what the title led one to expect it would be. Dissappointing!

From back cover:

"A personal, and sometimes controversial selection by 3 distinguished jazz critics of the 'best' 250 modern jazz records and CDs, each record and/or CD is placed in its musical context and reviewed in depth. In addition, for each disc and/or CD, full details of personnel, recording dates and locations are given. This authoritative work includes full indexes of album titles, track titles and musicians."

Contents:
* The Swing to Bop * Alternatives to Bop * Consolidations and Developments * Other Currents * Out into the Open * Alternatives to Freedom * On the Frontiers * Fracturing into Postmodernism * Bibliography * Indexes

I also reviewed Volume One of the Essential Jazz Recordings for Amazon. The first volume impressed me for the breadth and fair-mindedness apparent in the 250 selections listed, but what really excited me was the passion and insightfulness of the individual reviews.

The authors faced an altogether more daunting task in selecting and reviewing the 250 discs included in volume two. The modernist and "postmodernist" (I don't really think there's a difference, but . . .) movements in jazz spawned a plethora of stylistic innovations, many of which demand some sort of representation here. And there are just many, many more jazz recording from the latter half of the century than there were in the first half.

So, where the selections and review essays in the first volume generally reflect the passion the authors felt for the music on the discs, the selections and reviews for the second volume generally seem to reflect a set of arbitrary standards the authors established to deal with the enormous amount of material potentially under consideration.

So, a lot of the inclusions seem to be here not because anyone thinks they are truly exciting recordings, but because they are though to best represent a particular stylist or stylistic movement or structural change in how jazz could be approached.

The thing I like most about the reviews in the first volume is the way it sent me back to the recordings it treats and gave me fresh ears to listen to them with. The thing I remember about the reviews in the second volume is Simon Nicholson's seeming obsession with song structure (A,B,B',A',C,A,A).

I am put in mind of William Youngren's review of Gunther Schuller's fine book Early Jazz. At the end of the day these sorts of books always come down to the subjective response of the author or authors to the experience of the music. Technicalia or any other stage props of purported fairness and objectivity tend to start getting in the way of that response pretty quickly if not used with care.

Schuller's work generally is a model for balancing the musical technicalia fine writing and good ears. While the second volume of The Essential Jazz Recordings is a quite useful book, it falls far short of the pleasures of the first volume, mostly because it fails to strike a good balance between these elements.

It has been 16 years since the publication of vol.1, 'Ratime to Swing' in 1984. At long last we can read the vol.2 . I obtained a copy in the Ginza, Tokyo. It cost me ..........! This was the case in Japan before the ............' in Japan.

During these 16 years the co-writer Charles fox regrettably deceased,to whom this volume is dedicated. The writing by three writers (the leader is Max Harrison) is as highbrow as in the previous one and they frequently mention classical music, which sometimes made me bored. However, rarely have I ever come across such high-grade criticism. The works equal to this brilliance of the two volumes are, arguably, Humphrey Lyttleton's 'The Best of Jazz' 2 vols.(the volume of modern jazz is unpublished), Gunther Schuller's 2 vols (the same as the former), Martin William's 'The Jazz Tradition', and the Japanese critic Masaaki Awamura's 'The History of Modern Jazz'(only in the Japanese language.

In the vol. 1, 250 records were analyzed and criticized, this time also 250 from Charlie Christian's Minton House Session to Peter Apfelbaum and the Hieroglyphic Ensemble's 'Sign of Life.' We can listen to our own records/CDs afresh from various new points of view and reexperience the process of jazz trend, if not development, from modern to postmodern age. I am sure the meaning/significance of our record collection will become manifold.

Architects these days just build things, and they don't even get to be very famous. There used to be architect-gurus back in the twentieth century, who said things that got quoted a lot - people like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Kelly Howell is the daughter of one of these architect-philosophers, who was famous for not having built anything until he got crushed by one of his creations (a concrete hand).. She is conflicted about her feelings for her parents, makes a living driving a cab, and keeps trying to avoid giving interviews to biographers. A persistent American admirer of her father inveigles his way into her life.
It's mostly set in rural Norfolk, England. It is brilliantly satirical but also very cleverly plotted, especially in the last few chapters (set in California) that twist and turn and set the story on its head.

I am so addicted to Mr. Nicholson! I own pretty much everything he's written, except for a few out of print pieces I'm still searching for. This new piece has his signature style of taking something common and twisting your perspective so that you see things in ways you never could in everyday life and you become just as intertwined with the subject as the characters are...

This book deals with the world of architecture (not the typical art history terminology and styles I memorized in college) and what it says about our human condition, especially about the coincidence and sometimes wimsy of it all.

I found myself completely thrust into the world of the characters and even though things seemed a bit predictable, the way things are revealed through Mr. Nicholson's twisted and descriptive language kept me completely inthralled and waiting to see what happens next.

If you liked his other books, this is a definite must-read. If you've never read anything before, try the Food Chain, Hunters & Gatherers or Bleeding London first and then go for this one.

Geoff Nicholson's latest book is a fun read that doesn't amount to too much. And while the protaganist is likable and nicely drawn, there is little movement or development in her character.

In general Nicholson is a cultural critic, a sort of poor man's Roland Barthes. And his observations about architecture in "Female Ruins," are funny and astute. One gets the feeling, after reading a lot of Nicholson, that this is the reason he writes novels. He wants to talk about some subject that is obsessing him. Whether it be the electric guitar, VW bugs, foot fetishism, or the city of London, it's always some external subject that drives the story. Sometimes this is successful (Hunters and Gatherers, Bleeding London, Everything and More) and sometimes this drive to explain and expose the facts gets in the way (Flesh Guitar).

Here we have a story that carries the reader through, but doesn't ultimately satisfy. Female Ruins won't bore you, it's a nice ride, but when you close the book you'll be finished with it.

Female Ruins is a forgettable book.

This is the king of Jerusalem, Saladin has just crossed the Jordan River with 20,000 men because Reynold de Chattion has been raiding his caravans and tormenting Saracens for years. The plot of this book is that the Christians from Europe who are currently holding Jerusalem are about to go to war with the Saracens, who are led and governed by Saladin. The king has tried to keep peace with Saladin and believes that Christians and Muslims should live in peace together.
The genre of this book is historical non-fiction. This book is neither a sequel nor a part of a series. I loved this book with all its action, mystery, and historical accuracy. I learned a lot from this book and it reviewed what I already know. This book shows and expresses the point that Christians and Muslims can live together in peace. I think this novel is more for an adult crowd unless the reader is a child and is very mature for his age or if the child loves history.
John S. Basset who is a professor at a college gave the information to the author to write this book. The more I read this book the more I got sucked in to it; I recommend this book to any and every one because it teaches you about history and also is a compelling and interesting story.

-Forrest Robinette

This work describes the horrific battles leading up to the Muslim
capture of Jerusalem in 1187. Saladin destroyed the Christian armies; whereupon, Richard I commenced the 3rd Crusade. Saladin was considered the greatest man in the 12th century Middle Ages. Various pieces of artwork depict the struggles of the period;namely,
- a 12th and 13th century stucco of Persia depicts horsemen
fighting with spears.

- a 13th century lustre plate of Persia shows a tall soldier with
fighting shield.

- In 1139, the Pope banned crossbows in the Laterin Council
except for infidels.

- The famous Battle of Hattin is depicted in 1187.

- A solider with a 1220s turbin is depicted in a manuscript

Clearly, the art of the period mirrored the tremendous military
conflicts engaged by Christians and Arabs alike. This work would be perfect for historians, theologians, arts/crafts enthusiasts
and a wide constituency of people inside and outside formal academe.

Overall a worthwhile book, written in a somewhat military fashion. The illustrations are either accurate modern ones or good, mostly color, contemporary ones. It puts forth the facts as the author knows them in a fairly straight forward manner. It is nicely bound and presented with quality. It has more information on the muslims than many other books of its kind.
On the bad side, the author has a minor, out of context bias against the crusaders (as can be seen in the annoying conclusion, for example), and their sources for the crusaders are somewhat lacking. Given that, they fill in the blanks with often erroneous and cliched tid bits. Though, to their credit, they do mention "...so presumably..." on occasion.
All together there are some minor, all too common, frustrating bits the historian of europe or its martial traditions may find, but nothing new in books on the crusades, and hardly enough to be taken into account, comparitively, and the book has far more good than bad, and I'd recommend it.

At 150 pages, this book is not very long, yet it provides the reader with awesome up to date tips on dressing for success. I'm a beauty consultant and work in a highly recognized health and beauty store. I'm a male and I deal with many women, men and teens. I am now recommending this great book to all my customers. The beauty tips are magnificent. The author, Joanna Nicholson does a great job in explaining how to coordinate your clothes with eye make-up, lipstick, hair styles, nail polish, even foundation. She is clearly a professional in this area and has written other great books for success. Alot of my women customers that have read this book, have nothing but great things to say about it. This book shows women how to dress sexy, yet look classy, professional and beautiful not trampy. The clothes, pants, skirts, jacket coordination are all right on. And she explains how to make yourself look slimer, taller and how to accent the beauty in a womens shape. I found this book to be worth reading and the price is low. I have to mention, I was surprised to see some of the low reviews this book got, all I can think is those readers didn't get past the table of contents.

I disagree with the other readers. I think this is a great informative book, that provides hundreds of useful fashion tips. How many times, haven't we seen someone dressed completely wrong for the occasion. I especially think it offers good advise for teens, who are always pushing their limits with what they wear. This book is well written, it provides easy instruction and can definately be used as a reminder of how we don't want to look in public.

i bought this book for my wife, but it seemed the main goal was to sell you products. there were little tid bits of information, nothing solid. mostly the point was beauty was in the eyes of the beholder. a quick read only.

I haven't finished this book, so I can't really give you complete details. To learn Adobe/Macromedia read the blue book published by Adobe.

This books covers it. Whatever you are looking for, all of the applications are discussed in detail, their similarities and differences. The Projects are very useful and cover the full range of software.
The only negetive is the fact that you have to download all of the data files. There is no included CD. But that said, this book starts at the basics of all of the applications and moves though their functionality. Then moves to the projects that are carried through from beginning to end.
The language used is not Techie, but lighthearted for lack of a better phrase.
Easy to read and very informative.
Well setup, very easy to use as a reference.

I got this book a few days ago because I wanted to use Studio 8 to design a site. The book has been helpful but no lifesaver. The example you build throughout the book is very simple and much of the book focuses on building the example, but does a poor job of explaining other design options to users. I think the biggest problem is that it tries to do too much in one book. I guess I can't blame the authors, because Studio 8 is quite big. What the book does manage to explain is well done and easy to understand. I don't think you will find a Studio 8 book with everything you need. I recommend you look into buying a different book for each of the applications within Studio 8 (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc)