This volume is beautifully presented. Lartigue viewed the world.. not only through the camera lens.. but through the lens of happiness. I feel inspired to pick up my camera more often and have a positive and happy attitude. What a gift to the world Jacques-Henri Lartigue has given in the body of his photographic work!

This book is amazing. This is, by far, my favorite collection of photos. Lartigue's concentration on motion is especially featured here. He has inspired my work more than any other still photographer. Buy it here and save the dough for your own photography.

This photographer mastered photography at such a young age, it made his photographs amazingly unique and absolutely beautiful. a priceless book.

The woman with her back to us might be Grace Kelly. It is an afternoon full of the languor of warmth. Minutes before, luncehon has ended and the air is spiced with aioli, lavender and Chanel. Just out of shot the last of the ice is cracking under the drained Dom Perignon. Thus from the sumptuous cover of this memorable family album we are invited by Jacques-Henri Lartigue into the conspiracy of fantasies that only the French Riviera accommodates. Lartigue's access was privileged. Born into wealth at the end of the nineteenth century, his natural stomping ground comprised the grands salons of the greatest hotels on earth - the Eden Roc at Antibes, the Negresco at Nice, the Gray d'Albion at Cannes. From these gilded terraces he dreamed of being a painter, while the Hispano-Suiza cooled at the kerb. Like Bonnard and Matisse before him it was the light that enmeshed him, and from the age of eight, when he received his first wood-frame camera, he was experimenting with color and form in the manner of the modernists. But Edenic Riviera life offers attractions which, in volume and variety, can become distractions. Perhaps this explains the paucity of international coverage of Lartigue's growth before the middle sixties, and the failure of his measure alongside Blumenfeld and Man Ray. A born adventurer and bon vivant, he courted the Riviera's copious delights - in company of Abel Gance, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, Chagall - with a dionysian abandon that may have undercut his work. But the work is what it boils down to, and the sample presented here, compressed from the 130 albums and 100,000 negatives he presented for conservation to the French government in the late 70s, displays a genius as emblematic of midi magic as Matisse. Unlike Brassai, Lartigue was working till the end of his long life. As he approached his nineties he commenced a dramatic series of light impressions entitled "As Long as I Still Have a Shadow". These (glimpsed here) perhaps best express the intangible beauty of a blue day at Cannes, and the abiding value of Lartigue.

Firemen no longer save lives. Instead they burn books and the people who harbor them. Censorship is the way of life in the science fiction world of Fahrenheit 451. Conforming with government, destroying individuality, and asking no questions are the rules of Guy Montag's world. Set in the twenty-first century, Ray Bradbury's novel tells the tale of the fireman who begins to question the rights and wrongs of his life. In this world books promote thinking and wondering and acting. Compliance is necessary for the government to ignore its people and watch over its "thirty-second" wars. The government wants assimilation and ignorance of differences. So modern technology produces television that is interactive and family rooms are replaced with television parlors - four walls of larger than life TV screens. The firemen hunt out owners of books and burn them, their homes and their books to the ground. "It was a pleasure to burn," is the opening line of the story. In the beginning burning books is a source of joy, an excitement programmed into Montag by his world. Then he meets a girl whose family raised her with an encouragement of challenging what she is told. Montag is amazed, almost scared of the idea of questioning life. She begins to question him too. "'Do you ever read any of the books you burn?' 'Is it true that long ago firemen put out fires instead of going to start them?' and the worst of all, 'Are you happy?'" And there begins Montag's conflict with the government and with himself. When he reads a line of a book he realizes that there is no turning back. He can't be who he was before. And maybe he doesn't want to be. The book is set up as a narrative of one man's experience in trying to rebel against a world that has almost complete control. It is written partly as a typical novel and partly as a sequence of Montag's thoughts. The plot is hard to follow in places and often confusing but the idea behind the story is important enough to make reading the book worthwhile. Bradbury attempts to warn us of what the future may hold that we might prevent the beginning of a world of tyranny. He tells us to remember and cherish the attributes that make us who we are. He teaches us to be an individual and challenge the world around us. Although I did not enjoy the novel, because of the confusion, its message is very important if I want a world where what I think and say is important. A world in where I am a person with rights and opinions that are as valued as any other person's. I do want that world.

Sure the story of a nightmare world in which free speech is forbidden, as a parable for the directions our real-life society is going, has been done a million times - both before and after "Fahrenheit 451." So why is Bradbury's book a classic? The key is his superior writing skills and offbeat social subversion. In Bradbury's world, free speech has not been suppressed through a fascist exercise in social control and forced conformity, as in Huxley's similar "Brave New World." Instead, in this book free speech has been eliminated indirectly through what would now be called rampant political correctness. Every single piece of free speech might be offensive to someone somewhere, so all books and entertainment are eliminated so the masses can waste away in feel-good conformity. Ignorance is bliss in this world. This is a groundbreaking concept for a book written way back in the 50's. Bradbury must have been terrified by the PC hordes that broke out 30 or 40 years later. The one major problem with this book is the characters. The protagonist Montag is ultimately narrow and undefined, even though most of the story concerns his inner struggles. The other main characters - Beatty, Faber, and Granger - exist only as longwinded speechifiers for Bradbury's ideas. But the book is saved by the real sense of creeping dread and social agony lurking in the background, all highlighted by Bradbury's intriguing prose and curveball plot techniques.

Be sure to read an edition of this book published after around 1980. Prior to that, editors had abridged the book without Bradbury's consent, removing some troubling passages for the sake of helpless schoolkids (or more likely, their holier-than-thou educators). This is the ultimate irony - censorship of a book about censorship! Be on the lookout for an edition containing Bradbury's "Coda" (or epilogue) - a blistering indictment of this issue in which Bradbury essentially tells all opponents to kiss his you-know-what, in a quite scathing way.

This novel by Ray Bradbury is a very interesting book. Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books that you just can't put down. It's hard to say why, but you pick it up saying to yourself, "I'll just read a few pages," and you end up reading for an hor or two because of the way it puls you in. The conflict starts imddediately, solving the problem of a slow beginning that some novels have. The very first few paragraphs show Guy Montag's love for fire that eventually becomes his personal struggle as well as the struggle of the world throughout the novel. There is alot of foreshadowing that you don't really recognize until you see what it's lead to, such as how Beatty doesn't run out of the kerosene-filled house as the others, but walks slowly almost delaying when the old lady pulls out a match. In leads into something very strange later on, but I don't want to give it away. This novel plays off the old concept of how you never really know how valuable something is until its taken away, playing on something as important as making books not only rare but illegal in the future. It also shows how destructive the world has and will become, with wars lasting technically 48 hours, and are decided in less time than it takes to blink. All and all it is a very interesting and entertaining book, and I would recommend Fahrenheith 451 to anyone, whehter they are heavy readers or not so heavy readers, such as myself.

If you're looking for dates and places, you can put this book back on the e-shelf. If you want to understand how Western society perceives disability and why, from the gut level, you may want this book. But be warned, this is not light reading. Stiker's book would probably be best used in a university philosophy or sociology classroom; maybe it should even be required reading in settings such as those, since disability issues in general are too often ignored by academia. An important thing to know before buying this book is that it is written originally in French, by a French author; it winds its way from the antiquity shared by all Western civilization directly into specific French history. Readers looking for the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act will not find it here. But all Western countries have shared philosophical concerns even though the history itself differs. Also important to know is that much of Stiker's discourse is founded on the very French phenomenon of understanding a people by its language, in this case, French. He does take somewhat long journeys into the meaning of certain French words. (I am a little less offended by the term "handicapped" as the French understand it, for example, and our term "rehabilitation" now takes on a whole different light.) If you can hold these diversions somewhere in your brain long enough for him to explain his point, what he says does eventually make sense. I did not always agree with his conclusions, but there was enough food for thought that I would say, altogether, the book is worth reading.

positions is a collection of three interviews with derrida, all of which offer a pretty good introduction to his line of thought. this book is a lot better starting point than say, 'of grammatology', its really a lot less intimidating. this is of course because derrida is speaking verbally, 'improvising', and there isnt as much seemingly paradoxical word play. from 'positions' you can get a pretty good idea about what differance, logocentrism, and grammatology are all about. ignore all the criticism of derrida as a reductionist/nihilist who wants to demolish philosophy, he is a brilliant, poetic, innovative man.

A fictionalized account of events surrounding Toussaints revolution.

While the flavor of the times is depicted, the characters are two dimensional, and the prose is ordinary, at best. Read All Souls Rising, by Bell. It is greatly superior to this novel.