Danielou was an amazing forerunner of the modern India traveler, who had the good fortune to hook up with a wealthy lover who helped him travel and live in style in India in first half of 20th century. This bon vivant gay couple were trendsetters in many ways, being among the first Westerners to visit the neglected erotic sculptures of Khajuraho and photograph them in black and white, while living in a palatial silverstream type of camper imported from southern California.

Danielou describes their pleasant lives in a rented Maharaj's estate on the banks of the Ganges where the couple learned languages, music, and entertained tout le monde.

A compelling look at Westerners' first real entree into the literati life of Benares/Varanasi as well as high Indian art and culture. A personal odyssey, that brought Danielou back to Paris with a newfound ambition to bring Indian classical music to the world's attention and to preserve it as well. This was a heroic task which he apparently succeeded in accomplishing.

The book itself is charming and well written. I thoroughly enjoyed from beginning to end. Fun animal stories included, too! (Much better than a sort of Peter Mayles account of Provence).

the three authors have found an excellent way of trying to put into writing an intense experience in professional drama in west-africa, an experience which is way beyond the western concepts. It communicates in a very lifely way their scholarly preoccupations mixed with their human insights.

My 3 yr old daughter just received this book as a Christmas gift! We love it! The illustrations are great! It's a lot of fun for her to guess what is behind each flap!

Great idea for those hard-to-find, inexpensive Christmas gifts for young children.

My 1 year old daughter Alyssa loved lifting the flaps and looking at the fun pictures everytime we went to the local coffee shop where they had it for sale. It was obviously popular with other children because it was quite used looking and all the flaps were worn so I came here to buy her a new copy of her very own. It's a fun book to look at any time of year - not just at Halloween - because of the vivid colors, the simple layout, the question-style text, and of course, the flaps which all young children love to lift up or point to so Mom or Dad can lift them!

I suppose it was only to be expected that filmmaker Wim Wenders would have an eye for composing a good photo. This book of sixty-two, originally published in 1987, is thankfully still in print. They were taken in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas while Wenders was looking for locations for his movie 'Paris, Texas'. Predictably they show a European notion of America so most of them capture what could be considered a rather negative image, abandoned gas stations in the desert, deserted movie theatres and shops, neon signs, everyday commercial activity and more. But they are taken with a sympathetic eye and great feeling.

There are six really great images of street corners, this kind of shot always works, shop-fronts and parked cars stretch into the distance while the immediate foreground provides close-up detail. As with all Wenders photos the color is very controlled and he takes advantage of the very strong dark shadows created by the sunlight in this part of the country. There are four interior photos which I don't think are too successful, very dark and rather lacking in composition.

I don't think this will be a photo book to everybody's taste, because of the subject matter but if you like the grittiness of the American street scene it is well worth owning. A book that captures the same area in great color photos is 'Southwest USA' by another German, Gerd Kittel. More broader in scope than 'Written in the West', it includes many interior and landscape photos as well as the small town street scenes.

Wonderful display of Klein's work and great indepth content. A must buy for a fan of Yves Klein!

Hiroshima, Mon amour is a film that explores the idea of memory: what is to forget, and what is to remember? What is experience and what is reconstruction? Do we have total control over these notions, and do we need to have control over them? With the Hiroshima bombing tragedy as the layout of the film, Resnais and Duras mock the European (and maybe the Japanese themselves through the museum and other memorial things that they built) understanding of what had really happen there. Universally, the story then focus on the conflict of understanding that the Riva character is suffering in when she gets herself involved with the Okada character, thus revealing her past to him as they both struggle into creating their definition of what love is. Is it enough to compare one's suffering to others' when their sufferings are more 'horrific' in nature? Not only that this film tries to answer this question but it also brings out lots of other questions on our common humanity. A complex and very intellectual film, but one should be warned (or should be aware of its implication from Resnais and Duras) of the passive nature of time from the Riva character's subjectivity too when watching the film.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the screenplay for the classic French film directed by Alain Resnais. This is one of the few screenplays I truly enjoy, as Hiroshima is a wonderful story about remembering and forgetting set in the context of post-nuclear war and love.

True to the classic stream-of-consciousness style of Duras, this screenplay is a highly emotional account of a French woman's journey to Hiroshima to film an anti-war movie and the affair with a Japanese man that ensues. Throughout the course of the affair, the woman is struck with the memory of her German lover during WWII and the insanity that his death brought on.

In many ways, this is Duras at her finest. She has an uncanny ability to take specific stories and bring them to a level of universality as far as human emotion and circumstance are concerned. This is a powerful and riveting tale that is not to be missed.

After almost a decade of producing short documentaries, Alain Resnais made his debut as a feature-length filmmaker with the adaptation of Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). And what a debut! Arguably one of the most innovative films in the history of cinema, and a masterpiece of the French Nouvelle Vague, Hiroshima is a love story, not about love, but about memories, time, and the dissolution of memories in time. Duras' s screenplay flows and ebbs with poem-like rhythms. Sasha Vierney's photography is stunning, and paints the reality of the tragic love affair. The music is as hauntingly complex as the film itself. And finally, there are the evocative, convincing performances of Emmanuelle Riva (Elle), in her film debut, and Eiji Okada (Lui).

The story, at first glance, simple: Fourteen years after the dropping of the first atomic bomb, Elle goes to Hiroshima to take part in an anti-war film. On her penultimate night in Hiroshima, Elle meets Lui, a Japanese architect. She returns to her hotel with him. A chance encounter. An ordinary affair.

Or is it?

Resnais's Hiroshima started as a documentary effort, and in fact, much of the original footage of the aftermath of Hiroshima's bombing is used in the opening fifteen minutes of the finished film. It was this same opening sequence that puzzled many reviewers, who listened in confusion to Elle's description of her experience in Hiroshima, as Lui apparently contradicts her every statement. Several tentative interpretations were proposed for this apparent, although improbable, argument. Why should new lovers argue like an old married couple? The song "Je t'aime... moi non plus," by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin comes to mind. We ask ourselves, have the reviewers never experienced deep sexual rapture?

The scene that follows the opening is the key to the rest of the film. Lui is still asleep on his right side, with his right arm outstretched behind him. Elle enters the room. Her glance travels down his arm, to his hand. At that moment, briefly, the arm and the hand are transformed. They belong to someone else -- a dead German soldier. The door to the rest of the story is now ajar.

Later, as Lui asks, "What did Hiroshima mean to you in France?" she connects to her thoughts of her first, tragic love of a German soldier in Nevers. Elle has suffered a crippling emotional wound, buried deep in her subconscious, since that time. Little by little, she reveals her secret love affair with the German, first in bits and pieces. As the film progresses, Elle's memories become more precise, more urgent, more intrusive, until eventually the flood gates of her remembrance burst open (a scene in a bar, the night before her departure from Hiroshima). Lui's transformation is complete -- he is now her German lover ("Tu"), not only in her mind, but also in his. The living memory has fused the past with the present.

As the story unfolds, past and present images of Nevers and Hiroshima mix and merge in a continuum. The powerful music by Giovanni Fusco and George Delarue guides us through this highly emotional, somewhat chaotic journey. A Japanese-type music accompanies the Hiroshima scenes, while a French-type music follows the memories from Nevers. But, here also, some confusion exists, and at the climax of the story in the bar, a simple Japanese jukebox music links Nevers to the present.

As the movie ends, Elle realizes she will again experience the same desperation and loneliness of separation. Lui can only speculate what is in store for him. What both know with a certainty, though, is that only memories will remain.

Resnais and Duras show us that without memory, the present has no foundation, and time cannot truly exist. Without memory, it is impossible to understand time or events, as they have no context or framework. Resnais and Duras force us to consider the awful and depressing thought that with the disappearance of our memories, our very existence and soul will be obliterated.

This book is known mostly, perhaps, for the character of Bazarov, widely considered the vanguard of nihilism in literature, especially in Russia. Bazarov is a significant fact of fiction, a sketch of the young middle class intellegentsia developing in Russia in the second half of the 19th century. Brash, self-confident, iconoclastic, educated young men like Bazarov were popping up all over Russia. Turgenev finds a way to tie this into a rich tapestry of love, familial relationships, and simplicity that Arkady and Bazarov, the young men, succumb to. Even in his determination to change the world by destroying it so it can be rebuilt, Bazarov does not overcome the strong bonds of family. Love and family has the sort of redemptive power found so often in War and Peace, and indeed, Turgenev writes from a similar perspective and on a similar wavelength as Tolstoy. This book, while not big on plot, is to be appreciated for blending its simple prose with a poetic passion in showing how love between fathers and sons is ageless, and love between men and women occurs. I found the last passage very moving.

In Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, as in most of Chekhov, nothing much really happens. People talk a lot and that's about it. Should be dull, right? But it isn't. The talk, and the characters revealed, reflect the profound changes that were being felt in Russian society at the end of the 19th Century; changes that would set the stage for much of what was to happen in the 20th Century. But more important to a modern reader, the ideas and the real life implication of those ideas are as current and relevant as when Turgenev wrote. Bazarov, the young 'nihilist', sounds just like the typical student rebel of the 60's (or of the Seattle WTO protests just recently). He has the arrogance and the innocence of idealistic youth. He is as believeable, and as moving in his ultimate hurt, as any young person today might be confronted with the limitations of idealism and the fickle tyranny of personal passion.

I loved this book when I first read it as a teenager and I enjoyed it even more on subsequent rereadings. It makes the world of 19th century Russia seem strangely familiar and it gives many a current political thread a grounding in meaningful history.

One of the most eloquent works in Russian literature, Fathers and Sons has had a major influence on subsequent Russian writers. Turgenev weaves so much into this short novel. As the title suggests he is dealing principally with generational differences, but ultimately this is a book about finding yourself in the world. In Bazarov, we have the ultimate nihilist, someone who renounces all societal conventions, which his peers utterly fail to understand. As a young doctor he has turned his back on noble society. We see some of his old feelings briefly rise to the surface in a romance which he pursues, but Bazarov chooses to extinguish those feelings, and return to his paternal home, where he ultimately seals his fate.

Turgenev is the bridge between the Russian writers of the early 19th century and the later 19th century. In many ways, Fathers and Sons reminded me of the theme which Lermontov explored in "A Hero of Our Time," and Turgenev appears in Dostoevsky's work, even if deliberately as a caricature.

During the business school application process I read countless books on the topic. Of all the books that I read, this was by far the most helpful. I especially found the example essays from other students helpful in giving me ideas and structure for my own essays. If you are considering applying to one of the schools profiled in this book you will be pleased to see a very detailed overview of the program by a student who has attended the program. I had already taken the GMAT by the time I read this book so I didn't focus on that part of the book, but it seemed to be fairly complete.

My only complaint - and this complain is universal to all business school books that I've found - is that it emphasizes applying to the "top" business schools. There are a number of books that profile the "top" 10-15 business schools and do a good job of it, but very few that provide any detailed information on the other 200+ MBA programs. I was focused on applying to MBA programs that are considered by most ranking systems to be ranked 20-50.. There is very little information available beyond what the school provides on these programs. The vast majority of people will be attending schools that aren't considered "top 10".

If you are hesitating about which schools to apply or if you have decided that you want to get into one MBA in particular (for me, it was Stanford and MIT), this book is a MUST buy. It will save you a lot of time since it will help you to make the right choices and will increase your chances of being admitted. This book has helped me throughout the entire process, from choosing the right school to getting admitted to the school of my choice. The essay section is really helpful since the authors make an in-depth analysis of about 100 essays from successful candidates. You should make sure that you are admitted to the best school possible since your salary upon graduation will be different according to the school. There is about $40,000 difference (salary upon graduation) between the upper-crust schools and schools which are just "good". Go for the best you can!

This book was invaluable to me. Let's put it this way: I wasn't sure that I had what is took to get admitted! I found the whole admissions process real competitive and being accepted to Harvard and Wharton was more like a dream than a possible reality.
A GMAT teacher recommands me to buy this book. "Quite expensive but you won't regret it". good advice since I followed most of the advice especially for the schools I was targeting. For a lot of schools (Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago.....), it displays anything you need to know ...and to say..to get admitted. authors analyse essays of each school...i t demystifies the questions, the traps, some good answers and loads of examples. The book is quite exhaustive: more than 600 pages but it is well organized, so it makes it pretty user-friendly.
Even if you do not feel that you can get in into the best business schools, IT IS NOT AS DIFFICULT as most people think, all you need is FAITH and a GOOD METHOD!

If readers don't want to think about love (or wince from personal recognition), they have no one to blame but themselves. De Botton's title serves as sufficient warning as to what this book is about. Young or old, straight or gay, anyone who has ever submitted to the experience of falling in love is bound to identify with either the narrator (who sounds remarkably like the de Botton of HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE) or his beloved, Chloe.

As I read this book--which includes chapters entitled "The Subtext of Seduction," "Marxism," "The Fear of Happiness," "Romantic Terrorism," and "The Jesus Complex"--I kept puzzling over de Botton's subtitle, "a novel." Was this tack something he chose as a way of preventing friends and family from offering advice and consolation (which are usually self-serving and misplaced), or as a way of preventing ex-girlfriends from seeing themselves in the relatively pleasing portrait he paints of Chloe? Whatever his intention, he has stetched the definition of the novel in an interesting way. The basic love story between the narrator and Chloe travels its predictable path in an uneventful, but quirky, way. Neither comes off as a villain or victim, though both can be quite nauseatingly cute or petty at times. Through it all they remain convincingly human and we are drawn into their foibles, insecurities, squabbles, and desires. In short, they "live" as fictional characters. Even the narrator's hyper-reflective attitude is not bothersome. These analytical reflections read like diary entries; but the reader has evidence that the narrator has the good sense not to let Chloe know how much time he spends THINKING about his feelings for her. And it is these reflections, after all, that make the novel such a fun and thought-provoking experience for the reader.

This book awed me. I marvel at Alain de Botton's attention to detail. He has unraveled the many mysteries of romantic love. And he does it with a great deal of wit and irony. A woman named Chloe on a Paris flight to London smites the nameless narrator, and by the time they reach the baggage claim, he knows he has fallen in love. From then on, Alain charts the different stages of love -- from the blissful beginning to the heart-wrenching ending. I have found some interesting things in this book, like the fact that one's attempt at being charming on a first date consists in not doing or saying a lot of things one would normally say or do. Having experienced this, I utterly agree with the author. In fact, this book helped me understand many things about relationships. I love the philosophies and the theories that were illustrated in his writing. This dissertation/novel is one of the most complex and most intellectually stimulating pieces of literature I have ever read. This is -- without a stretch of doubt -- the human's guide to romantic love. I strongly suggest that you read and reflect on the chapters in this novel. Believe me, you will love it!

This book is the "When Harry Met Sally" of books. It gets to the core of everything related to LOVE -- and keeps a sense of humor about the whole ordeal. You will recognize your own experience time and again throughout the book, and laugh every step of the way. The book tells the story of De Botton's relationship with one woman -- the beginning giddy phase, the settling in lovey dovey phase, and on through the other phases till the end. De Botton's witty writing makes everyone's favorite topic even more fun. This book is such a memorable read that I always recommend it to friends (or buy it for them) -- and all of them have loved it too.