Words don't do justice to the work & imagination of Ray & Charles Eames! This is a beautiful book covering the creative minds of two of the best modern furniture designers. Filled with great pictures, & very complete text of their design & the many other things they created besides furniture.The Eames' are my biased favorite, if you love modern 50's furniture,fabric, & art you must have this book.They worked for the infamous Herman Miller company, who has reissued many of the Eames furniture pieces available again today.As creator of the modern molded fiberglass chair, & molded plywood, the Museaum Of Modern Art has Charles' chairs as Art, which they are & comfortable too!More than comparable to their Danish counterparts,this couple brought us sleek,smooth lined furniture that will take us into the space age for at least another fifty years!(check out A.I.-incredible backgrounds of modern furniture!)

This is a wonderful addition to any coffee table! I learned so much about this creative couple that I never knew before. The pictures are A+ & very well done. If you are a fan of Eames furniture, you cannot live without this book!!

The Eamses were innovators in many fields such as Architecture, furniture design, film, etc. But to my mind their gretest acheivement was the definition of a new profession, 'Graphic Design', or as I beleive they called it, a 'Design Office'.

Up till then, there was 'Commercial Art', and 'Art Departments', and whatever styling was applied to an industrial product was done as an afterthought, and usually by an amateur.

After The Eamses, a new recognition that the design of appearances was a craft and a profession, and not just an art, was born.

This book demonstrates in many ways, how Ray and Charles Eames applied this and many other insights to the various fields of endeavor that they entered and changed forever.

As a long-time admirer of both Arthur C. Clarke the man and his fact and fiction, I've been looking for a good biography for quite a long time, and am glad to say I've finally found one. Neil McAleer has done an excellent job, and obviously put a lot of time into research and interviews. This book was compiled from several interviews with Clarke himself as well as with many of his friends, family members, editors, publishers, fellow writers, colleagues, and the like. One is greatful to get such a great glimpse into the lives of science fiction's most famous author, as well as one of the 20th century's most famous visionaries. Truly a remarkable man, Clarke has had an almost unbelievably productive, meaningful, and memorable life. Here we learn about his upbringing and exploits living on a farm in England in his childhood, and through his experiences in school and budding interest in science and science fiction. We then learn of Clarke's going on to join the Civil Service and eventually the Royal Airforce (where he helped with the radar "talk down" system), and through his college years. We are able to see the development of his writing years, and his active and vital role in the British Interplanetary Society. All of Clarke's major novels and several of his short stories are gone into in detail, and oftentimes we learn of his motivation for writing them, and also something of his writing method. One of the most important and revealing aspects of the book for Clarke fans are the long behind-the-scenes look we get at the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. We learn of the working relationship between Clarke and Kubrick, and also get a glimpse into the super hush-hush activities that took place on the set. This book covers his career up to the release of his novel The Ghost From The Grand Banks, and a little beyond. It also touches mightily upon his non-fiction writing, as well as his many other and less celebrated exploits - lecturing, popularizing of communications, diplomatic interests, and the like. We learn a lot about Clarke's vital role in the establishment of communications satellites. This is quite simply an essential book for Clarke fans, with much knowledge held within it to put across and share. The only real drawback to it is that it does only go up to 1992, and thereby misses out on some important events in Clarke's career (the release of further books, including his final novel, 3001, his collected stories and essays, his knighthood, the unfortunate (and falsely alledged) accusations of pedophilia against him, and the actual coming of the year 2001, just to name a few.) Still, this is by far the most comprehensive and thorough book about Arthur C. Clarke available. Obvioiusly, as with any biography, it's not a book you'll want to dive into unless you are already familar with the author and his works. If you are, though, then this is an essential volume to add to your collection.

In this novel, Arthur C. Clarke's entire life story is told. Also, actual interviews with Clarke and his family members are used. A fascinating bit of information is that Clarke co-anchored the moon landing in 1969 with Cronkite. This is a great book for any fan of Arthur C. Clarke.

Arthur C. Clarke had been one of my favorite writers since the early 1970's. The first book of his that I read was 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was hooked on Mr. Clarke and science fiction forever. This biography of Mr. Clarke is a pleasure to read. The most satisfying thing about the book is that Mr. Clarke in real life is very much the man you picture while reading both his fiction and non-fiction. The three most interesting aspects of the book was his early work with the British Interplanetary Society, his life in Sri Lanka, and his work on the movie 2001.

I bought this book to study for a quiz-out test for my Psych major. I read through three chapters the first time I picked it up. I usually have to force myself to complete an assignment, but with this book I just kept reading with no pushing whatsoever! I highly recommend this book to anyone taking a class in this subject, whether or not it is the required text. It would be a great additional information source. It is helpful if you or someone you know may be going through any type of drug or alcohol treatment--from caffeine to heroin. I also enjoyed the online quizzes you are allowed to access once you have the book. It really enforces what you have learned.

I thought this was an excellent source of informaion. I used it for a class and earned an A. Very thorough and easy to understand. Lay terms are frequently used and I found I learned a lot and found it very valuable.

This book is the source for unbiased information on the sociological, psychological, pathological effects of "drugs" - this compendium covers everything from caffeine to antipsychotics to alcohol to psychedelics and everything in between. A review of the history of each drug introduces each chapter. Careful attention is paid to not only the effects of the drugs themselves, but the effect which they have on our laws and the way in which treat addiction.

As a former student of Dr. Ray's I can attest to the thoroughness of this work. It is the one book that doesn't tell you what to think about drugs - it provides you with the data to be informed to make your own decision. In fact the DEA uses this book in training! If you are looking for a comprehensive resource for school, your own interest, or just to be informed to talk to your kids, look no further.

This is THE book about Charles and Ray Eames. Beautifully printed and designed and with more than 3500 photos to explore the work, year by year, of these two famous designers. The range of work is amazing, furniture (domestic and commercial) films, exhibitions, architecture, books even toys. I have a set of his 1952 House of Cards, a deck of fifty-four playing-card size cards that can be interlocked to create three dimensional structures, a very simple idea beautifully conceived.

I think the book easily reflects the joy and stimulation that Charles and Ray Eames got out of the creative process.

An exceptionally comprehensive year-by-year summary of the work of the Eames Office from the early 1940s to the late 1970s. Covers everything equally -- from wartime plywood experiments and herman miller furniture to toys, exhibitions, and, of course, films. A must for anyone interested in Eames design. Full of hard-to-find information and photos of rarely seen items.

This is an excellent survey of the work of the Eames studio. It provides a chronological survey of the furniture, films, exhibits, and other work of the studio. It even provides a listing of the Eames staff at each point and time. Lavishly illustrated, it provides photographs of furniture, exhibits, and stills from the over 100 films produced by the Eames's. Highly recommended as the one book you must have about their work.

In 1988, filmmaker Eames Demetrios made the film, 901: After 45 Years of Working, a family record of the closing of the Eames Office shortly after the death of Ray. It was an objective attempt to capture the essence of the studio and design work created by Charles and Ray Eames and their multi-talented staff. Now more than ten years later, Demetrios has again recorded the studio and work in the book, An Eames Primer. The modest title implies an introduction and starting point to all the work of his grandparents but it is much more informative. What makes this book essential reading is the personal nature of the writing, connections, and the concept of "design addressing itself to the need."

Much of this personal nature is expressed in the chapter on the life of Charles Eames and Ray Kaiser before their meeting at Cranbrook, including extensive writing on each family history. This early period of their lives is illustrated by several drawings and paintings by Charles and Ray with each piece exhibiting a pleasing combination of color and form that would later become the hallmark of their work.

Demetrios devotes two pages on the issue of the Eameses signing with either Knoll or Herman Miller for the plywood group. This analysis, which isn't really dealt with in other books, is a rational and logical explanation of Charles and Ray's principles and their main concern about simply marketing a "good chair". For anyone interested in this crucial choice the author has formulated an essential case for the decision to go with Herman Miller.

One of the many highlights of the book is a wonderful collection of color photographs of different objects hanging from the ceiling of the Eames House that is pure aesthetic delight. Also, the bottom right corner of each page serves as a flipbook tour of the expansive 901 Studio.

What must have been an amazing event in film exhibition is Glimpses of the USA at the American Pavilion in Moscow in 1959. The seven-screen presentation of life in the United States shows a cultural identity of amazing diversity and Demetrios explains the process behind the production of this film. In an unbelievable set of circumstances, the American government had given Charles and Ray complete freedom to produce this film at the height of the Cold War with no "final cut" approval from Washington. Several pages also describe the production of the two versions of Powers of Ten. These films required experiments in film technology and camera work and Demetrios fully describes the process. The many contributions of staff members and outside consultants are thoroughly explained.

Throughout the book, many former Eames Office members and consultants describe their experience of working in the studio on the amazing variety of projects. Issues of design attribution are commented upon and examined for several projects.

Two days after finishing the book I retrieved Eames Design and several other excellent books and realized that everything now seemed much clearer after reading Primer. Perhaps Demetrios is correct in giving his work that modest title. The clean and clear connection has been analyzed and described so that it all seems so perfectly obvious. This is an informative educational book written in a casual but serious style and a worthy addition to a personal library.

Charles and Ray Eames' lives are documented by their grandson in this fascinating collection of anecdotes, photographs, and excerpts. If you know only a little about this creative couple - their chairs, perhaps, or the House of Cards - read this book to hear about their work with IBM, the government of India, and the Nobel Prize Committee. They have touched al of our lives in some way, making design accessible to the masses, and this book tells their story very well.

The Eameses stood as firm as rocks off Venice Beach: they despised fashion and created timeless objects that look as fresh today as when they were first made, up to 60 years ago. Here is a glimpse behind the scenes; an exploration of how Charles, Ray, and their dedicated associates worked painstakingly to get every piece as close to their exacting ideals as it could be. As their grandson tells it, often in the words of their associates, everything was based on identifying needs and figuring out solutions. The office enjoyed extraordinary freedomÑfrom deadlines and commercial pressuresÑyet accepted all kinds of constraints and turned them to advantage. The Eames classics have become so familiar and have been analyzed and applauded so often that one might assume there is nothing of significance left to be said. Demetrios engaging account proves otherwise. (Michael Webb is the book reviewer for LA Architect magazine.)

I bought one of the first copies of this book and it was definitely one of the most unusual books of erotica I've ever seen. I couldn't stop reading it. This month I found that it had been reviewed by Forum and they actually agreed with me! A book "you can pass around to your friends without a flush of embarrassment" and a book "you can't put down!" I can't wait to see more from this pair!

Whispers. Whispers in the dark. Secret longings. Hushed giggles as the hinges on the closet slowly creak open. Beyond the door, in the darkness, carefully hidden, is the passage to a place more magical yet every bit as innocent as Narnia. When lovers pass through its portal what is fantasy becomes reality and what is reality becomes fantasy. It is the place of our hidden desires, a place where lovers' erotic passions are safeguarded and shared in the deepest moments of intimacy, away from prying eyes, and ears.Erotic passions are food for the erotic soul and best served dripping hot to your lover. Some dishes may be too spicy while others a bit bland, but here you will find a smorgasbord to satisfy any appetite. The Wedding is subtle, veiled, and mysterious like many Victorian stories. White Linen is naughty yet with an ironic twist of humour. Rue du 8 Mai 1945 is a romantic tale of fantasy fulfilled. Finally, Black Leather and Silver Chains is so extreme and shocking you may need more than a cold drink to tame the flames. All-in-all, twenty-five stories from two lovers are brought together for you to savour and share.

The High Priest of California is Russell Haxby, a used car salesman, who meets a woman at a dance club. The plot revolves around Russell waiting to get her in the sack. If you've read Willeford, you're familiar with his a-hole characters. Haxby is the king of the a-holes! As usual Willeford takes a tired, well-worn plot and puts his sick and addictive 'english' on it. In place of the juicy tidbits of art history insight you get in other works like Burnt Orange Heresy, Wild Wives and Pick Up, you get Willeford's sentiments on Joyce and Kafka! If you're a fan of Miami Blues then you'll see the roots of "junior" frenger in Haxby as well. High Priest is Willeford 1st, and one of his best!

The best thing about Charles Willeford's stories is that the characters are always horrible people. The kind of people who live all around us (maybe you're even one of them.) High Priest of California was Willeford's first novel, and it sets the tone for his later works: an amoral protagonist is willing to do anything to get what he wants.

I've seen this book for the first time in 1985, when I was kid. It is still my all-time favorite.

Although the book does have lots of textual info pages, the core of the book is a series of 42 full-page pictures which depict the an ordinary picnic photo in different scales.

Starting from an ordinary dude resting on the grass, each page turn shows the scene from 10 times farther away. First we see the park he is picnicing on, then the entire city, and before you know it we are in deep space racing towards the outskirts of the Universe.

On the other side of the journey, each page turn magnifies the last picture tenfold. First by viewing a close-up view of the picnicing guy's hand, you quickly find yourself probing deeper and deeper through the realms of biology and chemistry right into the core of a single atom.

The really cool thing about the whole deal, is that all the images are centered at the same object: a single atom on the picnicing dude's hand.

In short, the idea is absolutely brilliant. The images chosen for the presentation is not perfect, but they are still amazing. Of-course, the film is much more impressive then the book, but you can't take a film with you to a camping trip...

"Powers of Ten" is one of the most influential science books ever printed. It taught me, and tens of thousands of other children, that a "sense of wonder" is something you can get from science, as well as from science fiction. I found it in a bookstore seven or eight years ago, and was immediately transported back to when I first read it, in my school library, at the age of ten. I was swept off my feet at ten years old, and the book can still sweep me off my feet today.

The original film was potent too; more so in the directness with which it expresses the scale of the world. But the book, with its annotations and additional pictures, has its own power. You can flip back and forth, and take as much time as you want absorbing the incredible range of scale in the universe.

The book's first picture is scaled at about a billion light years across--ten to the twenty-fifth metres. On this scale even super-clusters of galaxies are just clots of dust on a black background. The right hand side of each page, as you go through the book, zooms in by a factor of ten, and we dive into galaxy clusters, into our galaxy, our spiral arm, our solar system, through the moon's orbit and into the earth's atmosphere, down into North America, and then Chicago, and a picnicker asleep in a park. After twenty five pages we're at a human scale; the pictured scene is a metre across. But the camera continues to zoom in; to the picnicker's hand, through his skin to a lymphocyte, and on down through the cell nucleus to coils of DNA, to a carbon atom and through its electron cloud, and down to the nucleus and beyond. Sixteen pages from the picnicker have brought us to the quarks.

The left hand side of each page provides companion pictures and comments, some drawn from the history of science. For the nanometre picture there's a copy of John Dalton's two-hundred-year-old models of simple molecules; at the millimetre and tenth-millimetre scale there are pictures of radiolaria, seeds, and other microscopic beauties. All are interesting and informative.

I can't recommend this book too strongly--it's a fundamental work of scientific culture, and should be in every house. However, I particularly recommend that you buy this for any nine-to-fourteen-year-old child in your life; it's the best way I know to introduce a child to a love of science.

This is a great book. Believe it or not, I walk my 5 year old son through the pictures. I am sure it is not meant for youngsters but it can be used like I am am doing.

The idea behind the book is on its smallest scale it is inside a qark inside an atomic nucleus, inside an atom, attached to a DNA molecule, inside a nucleus of a white blood cell, slightly below the skin on a hand of a man asleep at a picnic on some grass in Chicago....all the way to the scale of the universe. My son and I will transverse the middle 1/3 or 1/2 of the journey. He gets to pick his own bedtime books and he chooses this one out of hundreds once or twice a week.

The pictures make a great way to explain the concept of scale and various aspects of science. On the facing page of the main picture underconsideration are objects of the same scale. You can really see that the tail of a dinosaur is 10 times longer than a man.

For the adult, it is an easy introduction to various aspects of science all at different scales. It is not a super serious book - no math - simple explanations. But as a practicing scientist, I view it as vary factual.

Without revealing the plot (!)---The main character is a gritty used-car salesman par excellence, and the storyline deals with him becoming aware of his life's limitations, and his subsequent response to this wake-up call for greater meaning. Ironically, the book is not about a woman chaser, per se...

Willeford uses his main character's view to point out a number of human failings, and the brisk plotline and well-developed supporting cast are more than willing to reveal some of life's bitter ironies. The result is an enjoyable and quick read, filled with tinges of sarcasm and understated dark humor.

Charles Willeford wrote psychopaths better than any sane man should. This book--written, I believe, when he was still in the Air Force--is an examination of a soulless car salesman who wants to create something more permanent. Something lasting. And decides on making a misanthropic movie that will shock and shame the audience. A great, if not THE great, American novel.

I love this book. The ending is so damn brilliant, so startling. Any one who loves noir needs to read this book.

Dave Zeltserman, author of In His Shadow

Charles Willeford has definitely improved with age. His earlier works were a mixed bag. Competent, but no humour. However since the 1980s Willeford has developed a sense of humour which matches his ability to crank out good crime stories, complete with memorable characters. 'Sideswipe' carries on in this tradition.

In 'Sideswipe' with have a violent ex-con, a disfigured ex-stripper, a retiree who just lost his wife, and a talentless artist caught up in some shenanigans. Solving the caper is Hoke Moseley, our quirky cop from the novel 'Miami Blues'. Actually most of 'Sideswipe' concentrates on Hoke and his odd family whereas the crime story itself is a relatively minor element to the book. But overall it works well. The overall effect is funny without being stupid.

Bottom line: competent and fun.

This is it, the classic Florida crime novel. Hoke Moseley's no Travis McGee. In fact Hoke's a LOT like a real person. And poor Stanley, what a great character. This stuff is TRUE Florida, this is precisely what things are like here. Willeford's slow style is just to be enjoyed, he has so much compassion for these incredibly flawed people. One of the top ten ever Florida crime novels.

If you're wondering whether or not it is necessary to've read the first two Hoke Mosley books to appreciate Sideswipe...the answer is a resounding NO. This was my first Hoke book & I absolutely loved it. Willeford had an amazing gift. I never found myself wondering where the story was going. It didn't matter...his storytelling abilities are that good. If the book ever seems slow, it is because Willeford actually takes the time to let you become familiar with the characters. Sideswipe is, on occasion, ugly, but it is more often hilarious. Willeford has a way of making his heroes flawed enough to make them believable. I will read the other Hoke Mosley books, without trepidation, because of what I found in Sideswipe. The quirks of Hoke, Troy, Stanley & the other characters steal the show from the actual mystery. It's almost as if the criminal events were created as a stage to showcase these bizarre characters. The strength of Willeford lies not in the story itself, but more often in the telling of that story. I don't like to give away anything in my reviews, just enjoy a wonderful book.