Powell Books

Dick Powell was an amazingly dynamic performer. He began his career as a singer and learned several instruments for his jazz band career. He was noticed by an executive from Warner Brothers and was signed to a contract which led to the making of films like 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933. His discontent with mediocre roles led him to pursue the leading role in Murder, My Sweet which transformed his image. A workaholic at heart, Dick reinvented himself again as a director and later a television mogul. His early death from cancer at age 58 shocked many, but he lived a full life with a wonderful career.

This book is more of a filmography than a biography. There is a short bio section in the front, but the only outstanding parts of this are the quotes. There is a photo of author Tony Thomas with Powell, and their meeting has provided the inclusion of quotes by Powell. Most noteworthy to collectors are the lists of Powell's television and radio appearances. There is even a listing of all of the records that Powell made during his life, including the rare 20s songs.

The book is not worth the high price for the average film enthusiast. Only Dick Powell fans should consider tracking it down. It suffers from an incomplete portrayal of the man outside of his career and many typographical errors. There are times that simple words are spelled incorrectly or that a line is skipped for no reason. The worst example of this is in the review of The Bad and the Beautiful which seems to be missing some information. Page 141 ends with "...Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), who falls in love with him and believes marriage" and page 143 beings with "under contract to Shields Studio." (Page 142 only has photos.) Thomas goes on to talk about Powell's character as if he has been previously addressed, but he hasn't.

The photos are great. There are many rare scenes from Powell on his yacht, in a nightclub, speaking on the radio, and working on a set. The photos make this book an excellent coffee table book for visitors to flip through.

I was impressed with the amount of information that Mr. Thomas put in the book. It was not only a photo book but had lots of tid-bits of information.

I'm a family law attorney in California. This book really is great. It answers a lot of questions that I get asked everyday. It has great advice on custody, visitation, court procedure, and how to pick (and fire) and attorney. Great for those who are doing it on their own, or for those who have an attorney. A great book to read prior to interviewing a divorce attorney. Good Job!

This is a nice point-by-point reference. Good to have for getting started.

This book is very thin. It's large in size top to bottom and side and may not fit in your totebag or drawing kit. It has lots of good information for a short book, but the drawings are very sketchy. It you want to draw more realistically, then you need to find a different author.

First, I must say I enjoy the physical dimensions of the book. It is tall; it is wide; it is thin. This makes a good sketching instruction book almost from the beginning.

I like to doodle, and I like pencils. I like trees, and I like scenery. What better than a pencil-drawing-book-about-trees-and-scenery? What can I say.

The techniques used in this book are extremely helpful, even for no-skill Joe like myself. I bought it probably three years ago, and it is still helpful. I've even learned to draw things I never thought woudld really make much of an interesting sketch idea--rocks! Rocks on the ground. Boulders, pebbles, hunks of volcano spew.

My favorite section is trees, which I love to pieces. Incredibly tall, majestic trees, been around for ages past since I was a wee munchkin, and standing proud for my appreciative eye. The bark detail, the leaf patters, the height, the large variety.

Draw desert canyons. Sketch drifts of clouds. Compose your own tree of might. Create a majestic oak or a finely detailed rotting log. Swoosh your pencil to form trees in the distance, and vegetation nearby. Perhaps a dainty little cottage or country church nestled in the pine slopes of a towering rock formation. With the instruction that will bless you herein, what limit can there be?

I was born 30 years too late. Otherwise I'd a been a "Stage-door Johnny" for Eleanor Powell. She was -- as Frank Sinatra said in the "That's Entertainment" DVDs -- the greatest, and we are unlikely to ever see such elegant excellence as the best boy-girl tap dance ever done (first the paso-doble to Cole Porter's Begin the Beguine, then the jazz tap version to Artie Shaw's Clarinet.) Alice Levin has captured this in a dandy, easy-reading book laced with pictures of that beautiful hoofer. This is not a dry listing of tidbits, but a glorious feast for those who are young at heart, love musicals. Those were the days just before WWII, but still in the Great Depression, when "The Movies" and its Stars made America Sing! And Dance! And nobody, as is nobody, was better or more athletic a female tap dancer than the delectable,compellingly female and drop-dead gorgeous Eleanor Powell. Alice Levin has chronicled this well.

if your are big eleanor powell fan which i am, this is the book for you. it has a very detalied accounts of her life from her days on the broadway stage to her comeback in early 60's in las vegas. and her first and only marriage to the actor glenn ford.

unlike the the other autobiography of her by margie schultz which also has a HUGE amount of information on miss powell; this one has lots more pictures of her in action. some never seen before.
and the author had a personal contact with our dancing lady and helped name an award after her. it a great collector's item, one which if you are a tap dancer or any dancer would pass on to your child to keep her name alive in print and purchase her videos so you can she she was truly the first lady of dance...she did it all.

This is a great book that spans the spectrum of gay love. There are some incredible things in here and reading a sonnet, I could not contain myself, I was laughing and blushing in the bookstore. Well worth getting as a gift to yourself or anyone who needs to hear in great words the things they feel so well.

This collection of poems of love, longing, sadness,
rejection, and mourning for lost loves (those who have
died, and those who have gone away...) is a very fine,
but uneven, expression of the range of thought and
emotion which can encompass relations between male
and male -- on the erotic and the psychological level.
The editor, Neil Powell, has divided the poems into
six groupings under the titles: Nature Boys -- Street
Life -- Lads' Love -- As It Is -- Borderlines -- In
Memoriam. Within each grouping, the poets and their
poems are presented in chronological order. As the
editor points out, he has included poems going back
as far as eighth century B.C. and has "allowed 'love'
to encompass as wide a range of affectionate relation-
ships as possible." Each grouping is preceded by an
Introductory Note, which contains very interesting
insights or thoughts to ponder. Here is something
from the section titled "Lads' Love" -- "Love poetry --
regardless of sexuality -- has always had a natural
inclination to celebrate the beauty and desirability
of subjects who are significantly younger than their
admiring authors (also regardless of the fact that
the young are ignorant, vain, selfish, unreliable...)."
That's certainly a surprising insight to share with
readers of a collection of love poetry, espcially
for a group, which as a whole, puts such a
premium on youth, looks, and sensuality -- usually
over sense.

The poets include Theocritus, Virgil, Sir Philip
Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare,
Walt Whitman, John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde,
C.P. Cavafy, Wilfred Owen, Solon, Alcaeus, Catullus,
Martial, Strato of Sardis, Michelangelo, Lord Byron,
Homer, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson among the famous --
and a convocation of the lesser known, but no less
feeling and thoughtful trekkers of the quest.
To my own taste, some of the poems seem uneven
in quality -- and the tone of many of them seems
"artificial" -- stagey -- though some of them overcome
that "staged-effect" quality to become quite humane,
telling, and heart-felt.
The poems of the classical authors are often presented
with the translations by famous authors themselves,
such as John Dryden as translator of Virgil's pastorals,
Solon translated by J.A. Symonds. Each of the six
sections may contain poems by previous poets in other
sections, so the representations are fuller in
giving voice to many facets of the same poets.
All in all, this is an excellent collection, especially
for the novice reader or even the more experienced
reader and liver of male-love-related themes.
"Catching up with each other halfway to where we're
going / any day is a likelihood, and an unexpected
extra." -- Peter Daniels. from: "Liverpool St."
-- Robert Kilgore.

I have used portions of this video series with my church high school youth group and they seemed to relate to the video clips. And frankly, teens usually don't have any problems talking about these subjects. If you are looking for a way to reach your teenagers with relavant material relating to Biblical boundaries in dating and the opposite sex, this is a great resource for you!

My only concerns for this series, and the reason I only gave it 4 Stars, are the lack of a DVD version and the lack of a Jr. High version. I had to tone a lot of it down, using only a few portions of the curriculum, when I started teaching Jr. Highers. If you have an innocent group, you might have to pick and choose what subjects you use and which ones you just get ideas from.

I am a religious studies major at a evangelical college. For a school project I surveyed existing Christian sexuality curriculem and evaluated them. This was by far the best I found out there! Use this for your JR High or High School youth group and you will be a blessing to those you teach.

After reading this book I had a greater understanding of life and a whole new feeling about Hiphop. It mirrored my life in so many ways. This book will change your life.

As humbling as it is, I have to raise my hand among those guilty of presuming Hiphop was synonymous with the hardcore gangsta rap that seemingly glamorized violence and utilized every negative expletive it could misspell to demean women. Because of that erroneous presumption, I generally dismissed it. For that more than anything else, I'm grateful to have made the acquaintance of "The Hiphop Driven Life," by Bayo Olorunto and A.K. Powell, two cousins who together are known as the author (and emcee duo) Nightjohn.

At 455 pages, The Hiphop Driven is a labor of passionate devotion that lifts Hiphop out of the media gutter and places it among viable systems of self-empowerment for those in the Hiphop community or those interested in genuinely inspiring exceptional literature. Like the best of such writings, "The Hiphop Driven Life" sidesteps glitzy rhetoric to deliver usable substance in the form of the authors' individual stories of personal transformation combined with strategies for effective change and personal success. That both authors are in their 20s is a bit mind-boggling when looking at a "Table of Common Sense" that includes such subjects as: "Wisdom - Livin' Off Experience"; "Whole Brain Thought - Mental Balance"; "What's Your Divine Purpose"; and "What's Your Highest Intelligence?"

All of this, and quite a bit more, is presented within a framework that erases the more popular (paradoxical though that may be) negative images of rap so often equated with Hiphop as a whole. The book instead replaces that negativity with a revived and revised concept of Hiphop as an individually empowering and community enhancing practical spiritual ideology.

Olorunto and Powell are not inclined in "The Hiphop Driven Life" to pimp themselves as any kind gurus. In fact, they rather boldly request that readers "Please do not focus too much on Nightjohn or even the written pages of our books. We are merely messengers. We write to take you much higher." In the effort to achieve that noble goal, they acknowledge having absorbed a great deal from teachers as diverse as motivation experts like Anthony Robbins and Les Brown; powerhouses of Hiphop culture like Tupac, Queen Latifah and KRS-One; author Grace Llewellyn; and human rights leaders Malcolm X and Gandhi. With its penetrating insights, uninhibited honesty, wealth of information, and searing vision of human possibility, "The Hiphop Driven Life" defies presumption and provides one of most satisfyingly mind-opening dynamic reads around.

by Aberjhani
author of The Wisdom Of W.E.B. Du Bois (Wisdom Library)
and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts on File Library of American History)

It seems the most popular budget classical music label, Naxos, not only makes most of the Western musical output available at very reasonable prices (no top stars who demand absurd fees make this possible), but it has also issued three very nice boxed sets of recordings on cassettes and CDs (I have the latter) that together give you a quick, fairly accurate, and quite enjoyable survey of three major topics. Perry Keenlyside's (NA 314412) is on three tapes or CDs and more or less delivers what the title promises in about 3 hours and 40 minutes. The text is considerately divided into sections--"Mozart, the child prodigy," "January 1762, the first journeys," "Paris and London, 1763-4," and so on--with tracking cues for each section. The narration and quotations from letters and journals of the time are accompanied by the appropriate music drawn from the bottomless Naxos catalogue. Nigel Anthony is the narrator, aided by Paul Rhys (Mozart), Edward de Souza (Leopold Mozart), with David Timson and Anna Patrick in "other parts." I have not seen the original books to see how much of an abridgment this is, if at all, but that is immaterial. The voices are personable, the information digestible, the whole project very worth while, especially at the price. Those last two sentences are true for the other setsas well. Richard Fawke's (NA414012) and (417612) are both on 4 tapes or CDs and read solo by Robert Powell. I am afraid that just a little five hours is not enough to handle the first topic with any satisfying degree of completeness; but it does give a 'Monarch Notes" glance at an enormously wide and complicated topic and is just enough for anyone who wants a head start before plunging into longer works. On the other hand, I greatly enjoyed the Opera set, timed at only 5 minutes more than the other recording. Trying to cover less, it does it better; and it even has room for some amusing incidents such as the one about the famous one-act opera that was entered into a contest (which it won) by the composer's wife who had more faith in it than did the composer. [No, you listen to the recording to learn which opera I mean.] My only objection to the Naxos recordings of books in the low recording level that makes it a bit difficult to hear on a walkman set up on (say) a noisy train. But this should offer no problem to home hearing or even in your car. These sets are really perfect listening for long trips.

From Gregorian Chant to Henryk Gorecki (the first living composer to get into the pop album charts), Richard Fawkes' The History Of Classical Music presents the fascinating and informative story of more than a thousand years of Western classical music and the composers who have sought to express in music the deepest human feelings and emotions. Welsh also explains polyphony, sonata form, serial music, and other musical expressions with a text that is illustrated by performances from some of the most highly praised recordings of recent years. Fawkes' superb text is ably narrated on in this four compact disc collection by Robert Powell (Running Time: 5 hours, 20 minutes). The History Of Classical Music is also available on audio cassette. Also highly recommended is the unabridged Naxos Audiobook edition of Richard Fawkes' The History Of Opera.

All of the "If you see a..." Tiger, Cow, Mouse books are very cute. My two year old likes to "read" them himself. The flaps are easily opened by youngsters. Love them all.

My son (age 1.5) picks this book (and the other three titles in the series) off his book shelf--even when reading is not quite his favorite thing to do. Now, when we go to the zoo and see an animal described in this series, he will make the corresponding noise or do the action. ("If you see a giraffe, LAUGH!"--and he will, from memory, even when we haven't read the book in awhile!)

I found 'The Jesus Debate' during my visit to Cambridge, while seeking refuge in a small store for Theology and History books. I've read just enough to be intrigued ' it was only when I read it back in Israel that I realized I stumbled upon a fine introduction to the scholarship of Jesus.

'The Jesus Debate: Modern Historians Investigate the Life of Christ' focuses on scholars who depict Jesus in the late 20th century. Its style reminds me of 'Explaining Hitler: A Quest to the Root of His Evil' by Ron Rosenbaum. Both demonstrate how an important historical figure can be seen through many different angles, and, significantly, both owe an acknowledged debt to Albert Schweitzer's classic 'The Quest of the Historical Jesus'. Both also discuss exclusively American and to a lesser extent British writers, with an almost complete disregard to Historians from the rest of the world.

The most useful chapters in the book are the early ones, where Powell goes through some of the basics of modern biblical studies. I finally figured out the differences between the synoptic gospels, the apocryphal gospels, and the reconstructed Q Gospel. There is also an interesting historiography of modern Jesus studies, from the late 18th century till the middle of the twentieth, and discussions of various criteria of Authenticity of parts of the NT.

Chapters 4-9 depicts the various attempts to explain Jesus. There is a chapter about the 'Jesus Seminar', an attempt of multiple scholars to vote for the authenticity of sayings and events depicted in the Canonical Gospels and in the Gospel of Thomas. Powell explain well both the value and the weaknesses of the Seminar, and stresses that the Seminar did not really rule out much of the Gospel as unreal. Rather, the Seminar decisively went for a minimal reconstruction of what Jesus said and did. Even a few Black votes (officially a black vote would mean 'I would not include this item in the primary database', or 'There's gotta be some mistake' colloquially) could drag down a passage into the Grey zone ('This information is possible but unreliable' or 'Well, maybe'). Therefore, that the Seminar found almost 20% of Jesus's saying in the Gospels to be authentic does not seem so revolutionary.

The rest of the chapters vary, although they are all interesting. In each one, Powell represents a point of view (i.e. John Dominic Crossan's 'Jesus the Social Revolutionary' or Marcus Borg's 'Jesus the Religious Mystic'), and also includes criticisms and implications of these perspectives.

Basically, the current Jesus debate ranges between two axis ' on the one hand, there are those, like John Crossan, who see Jesus as a Hellenised Jew, highly influenced by the ideas of the gentile environment. On the other hand, Scholars like John P. Meier see Jesus as very much the traditional Jew, working and thinking along classical Jewish lines, although not necessarily without innovations. The second axis is about the content of Jesus's message ' was it primarily secular, focusing on the here-and-now (The Jesus Seminar) or was Jesus Eschatological, a Mystic or some sort of prophet of the apocalypse?

One weakness of the accounts is that Powell tends to overstate the confidence we can have in conclusions about Jesus. 'A Hundred and Fifty Years Ago '[one could] maintain that the person Jesus never existed. Anyone who says that today ' in the academic world at least ' get grouped with the skinheads who say there was no holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat' (p. 180).

Hardly. What is the evidence for the existence of Jesus? A few words of Josephus, which may be later additions, and which anyway were written decades after the fact, and a series of immediately suspect religious texts, which were also written many years after the alleged Crucifixion. Although it is likely that Jesus did in fact exist, to say that we are as sure about it as we of the Earth being round (approximately) is ridiculous.

As a consequence, it seems almost impossible to differentiate between the various contradictory accounts of Jesus. Strangely, I found the most appealing aspects of the narrative to be the contradictory stories of Crossan and Wright ' one an egalitarian philosopher, the other a self proclaimed Messiah (who was right in all of his prophecies). Both figures are fascinating ' but is either of them true?

the author's methodology decides to a large extent which is the true Jesus. Whether Q is much older and more reliable then Mathew and Luke, and whether John and Thomas are relatively recent myth or early, authentic tradition, makes all the difference. Curiously, Powell ignores the question of the authenticity almost entirely. A one page discussion declares Mark the oldest, and Mathew and Luke to be later traditions. The vital questions about the antiquity of Q and Thomas are never addressed.

So who was Jesus? John Dominic Crossan sums it up best in a quote that appears on the back-cover:
'It's impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it historiography'.

Powell's book is unfortunately out of print at the moment but hopefully this will soon be rectified, or a revised and updated issue published.

(Just discovered it has been published by Westminster under the title "Jesus As a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee" - see under that title for my review.)