The pleasures of good photographs : essays

 by Gerry Badger. The Pleasures of Good Photographs is an intellectual and aesthetic excursion led by Gerry Badger, one of the fields eminent critics and popular writers. In this new volume of essays, Badger offers insight into some of his favorite images, artists, and themes, drawing upon nearly three decades of experience writing and thinking about photography. With deep discernment and a readable mixture of scholarly finesse and wit, Badger describes the meanings of work by dozens of photographers, from Dorothea Lange and Eugène Atget to Martin Parr, Luc Delahaye, Susan Lipper, and Paul Graham. Among the broader topics discussed are the photobook, where Badger believes photography sings its loudest and most complex song, and Photoshops role in art-making. An interlude at the heart of the book pairs the authors evocative meditations with nearly a dozen particular images. Alongside some of Badgers classics, The Pleasures of Good Photographs showcases primarily new essays, making it an important addition to the canon of photographic writing. --Summary. (Check Catalog)

George Clinton: Master Builder of the Empire State

By John K. Lee

George Clinton, born in July 1739 on his family's farm in Ulster County, New York, had a life spanning the final days of the British colonial era through the early years of the new republic. He served as witness to and leading actor in the events leading to the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War. In George Clinton: Master Builder of the Empire State, John K. Lee brings new attention to New York State's first governor. He focuses on Clinton's extraordinary military exploits, detailing the victorious Sullivan-Clinton campaign against the Six Nations, which paved the way for the surrender of Cornwallis and ensured eventual American possession of western New York lands. This engaging biography, enriched with an array of illustrations, shines a bright light on an early American politician whose remarkable vision and leadership powerfully shaped the Empire State.

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Concerning E. M. Forster

By Frank Kermode

In the first half of this study, renowned transatlantic critic and teacher Frank Kermode looks back to Forster's Cambridge University lectures, published in 1927 as Aspects of the Novel. Forster's ideas about point of view, flat and round characters, and rhythm in the novel had enormous influence for decades, though Forster's own fiction, Kermode points out, had detractors in his own day. Kermode is at his best in explaining and illustrating how Forster's theory and practice differed from those of his contemporaries, notably Henry James, Arnold Bennett, and Virginia Woolf. The second half of the book offers Kermode's loosely organized observations on Forster's life and works. Especially valuable are the discussions of his place in the Bloomsbury and less-known circles, his other friendships, and his regret that England's repressive culture seemed to preclude his intimacy with men. Forster's love of India, evident in his most famous novel, A Passage to India (1924), receives attention, as do his mystical side and his love of music, which, Kermode demonstrates, Forster expressed in his fiction. The weaving of biographical and thoughtful critical insights makes this an important and attractive work for anyone interested in Forster, his world, and fiction.

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The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower: A Murder That Became a Real-life Mystery. a Mystery That Became an Obsession.

By Robert Graysmith

The bestselling author of an investigation into the Zodiac case tackles the 1988 rape and murder of Marli Renfro, Janet Leigh's nude body double in the Hitchcock classic Psycho, by a serial killer with a fetish for the film.

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George Lucas's Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success

Edited by Alex Ben Block and Lucy A. Wilson

A comprehensive look at 300 of the most financially and/or critically successful motion pictures of all time—many made despite seemingly insurmountable economic, cultural, and political challenges—set against the prevailing production, distribution, exhibition, marketing, and technology trends of each decade in movie business history.

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130 Projects to Get You Into Filmmaking

By Elliot Grove

If the screenplay equation of one page equaling one minute of screen time can be applied, then Grove, a producer and founder of Raindance Film Festival and the British Independent Film Awards, couldn't provide a more tightly packed and potent two-hour narrative: this may be the most engaging and visually demonstrative introduction to filmmaking available in print. Actual filmic examples of diagrammed screenshots, storyboards, script breakdown sheets, business forms, equipment, lighting, makeup, and shot catalogs help to flesh out attractively the author's attainable 130 steps from idea to direction to postproduction to marketing and publicity. With a glossary, site lists, and a web promotion section. VERDICT From students to do-it-yourself upstarts, visually thinking artists embracing a visual medium can finally take part in the conversation. A lively supplement to academic texts, and a pleasing peek for fair-weather enthusiasts.

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