Essential book to understanding Hughes, his empire, his paranoia and his bizarre final years in isolation. Also a must-read for info on Robert Maheu and Richard Nixon.

Michael Drosnin did an excellent job of deciphering all the memos that Howard Hughes exchanged with Robert Maheu (his chief of Las Vegas operations) and writing a cohesive story. He also interviewed many associates to obtain a true picture of what went on with Howard Hughes during his many years of self-imposed exile. I found it to be the most interesting and revealing book about Hughes that I have ever read. I worked for one of his companies for 30 years and I would highly recommend this book.

Wisely chosen and beautifully illustrated,this book shows how entertaining and exciting poetry can be. It instantly held the attention of my six year old. He wanted to write a thank you note to Lord Byron!

Michael Rosen's collection of poetry refuses to talk down to children. He has selected classic poems from the seventeenth century to modern day, poems (and poets) that children will hear references to for the rest of their lives. From Shakespeare to Shelley to T. S. Eliot and many more, Rosen has gathered a mixture of beautiful, fun, and significant poetry, complete with biographical information about each of the poets, as well as information on individual poems and poetic forms.

It is Paul Howard's lovely, intriging illustrations that will first grab your attention, however. His illustrations capture the mood of each poem and make them come alive for young readers.

A must for children who love poetry and for parents who want to share poetry with their children.

Running across a Howard Hodgkin exhibition forever revolutionized my formerly negative view of modern art. It has opened my soul to new areas of art enjoyment not experienced previously. This book has many plates of his work and provides very interesting reading. Let his beautiful art and colors wash over you... Enjoy!

This well illustrated and multifaceted book is an important addition to any library. If only for Marla Price's catalogue raisonne a very valuble addition not in other publications about this important artist. I found the exchange of letters from Hodgkin to John Elderfield insightfull and full of the sort of detail on techniques hard to find elsewhere.

Michael Auping has written a compassionate opening essay on this sensitive man and the development of his work.

Susan Sontag writes about Hodgkin and art after modernism,with a wry and wonderfull humour.

All of these writings are punctuated with marvellous colour plates.

This book is a must.

Gillian Solomon. END

The exhibit was astounding - this museum is HUGE! The works of art featured are very diverse, both in theme, style and culture. The book really is a nice tribute to this grand exhibition. Any Californian who likes both popular art and "marginal" or underground art would be satisfied with this book.

Finally, an expansive and critical, although bewildering, survey of California's visual culture and its impact on American culture at large! Beautiful in its design and generous in illustrations, the catalog offers insight into the complexities of America's "wild frontier." What makes this catalog/exhibtion most intriguing is its inclusion of ephemera, framed by the organizers as important historical and cultural documents of life in California. Often overlooked, these items are often more telling than the cultural productions of visual artists and offer interesting juxtapositions to the art also presented. In addition to the discourse between hi and low culture, is the discussion of the cultural and racial diversity of California's population and its effect on culture and identity. The writers and curators bring together important documents, visuals, and art that construct diverse racial, gender, and sexual identities and also offer critical insight to these.

I was given this book as well as the second and third in the series (Mystery of the Magician and A Scent of Murder) as a birthday gift when I was eleven or twelve. I loved this series as I was very taken with the romaticism of it. It was very exciting to read about a sixteen year old American girl at the turn of the century, visiting France and solving crimes. I lost my originals long ago, and I recall that the books were not bound very well. Pages started to fall apart while I was reading them.

I work in a bookstore that deals in new books only so was unable to order these as they are (obviously) out of print. Imagine my happiness when I found 1-4 yesterday at a used bookstore, for 60% off of the cover price of $3.95. I came here to see if that was all of the series.

Very glad to have found these and surprised to find out what they're going for here, considering what I paid for them! The cover art is beautiful, and there are very nice pen & ink sketches peppering each book.

Would definitely recommend them for pre-teen girls...all of the elements of good reading for that age group. I'm enjoying re-reading them as well. :)

Scour the used sites/stores...you might get lucky.

I loved this book as a young teen, and I was hoping to let my children read it someday. Ms. Howard's descriptions of Paris were so real that I felt like I was the one solving the mystery with Paris. This book should be released again!

Walter Benjamin has progressed over the years from an obscure lesser member of the Frankfurt School to a widely read leading member of that obscure school. Aided by such as Hannah Arendt, who introduced him to a wider audience in her writings (and also to me), readers have come to appreciate Benjamin for the beauty of his writing as well as his sharp insight.

This volume, along with its companion, is an excellent introduction to the style and thought of this man who, while out of step with his times, possessed the insight to give those times an original critique.

Possessed of a lively style and free from the Marxist bagge that weighs down his Frankfurt School colleagues such as Adorno and Horkheimer (I think Benjamin owes much more to Heidegger than Marx), Benjamin will hook any reader who takes the time to spend an hour or two with this book. From here it's an easy step to purchase other Benjamin writings, a step I can almost guarantee.

While his work is as important as Barthes, Foucault, or Derrida, or any other critic of the 20th Century, Benjamin's work has a mystical quality, a kind of enchantment, that resonates much more than any other critic I have read. It is always human and sensitive, even despite his determinedly impersonal tone.

When I think of Benjamin, I think of Emerson's famous line about Hawthorne - that he was a greater man than any of his works betray. The integrity and character of Walter Benjamin shines through his works, and is an inspiration to anyone who takes literature seriously.

This first volume of Bejamin's complete works is very attractive and welcome. Some of my favorite essays are present, such as his essays on children's literature, and the nature of language. I eagerly await the other two volumes.

Please let me know the title of page 887-888

Michael Howard tells you how to work with candles. Candle have been used by esotericism and religion alike for centuries. They have a practical usage. More than that, however, candles can literally bring about change: they induce magic.

Now I am not writing this for unbelievers. They are too short-sided to appreciate the art of candle burning.

I found this book hard to grade, but easy to read. Stories are the best way for people to learn, and this book has six interesting ones (about Josiah Wedgwood, H.J. Heinz, Marshall Field, Estee Lauder, Howard Schultz, and Michael Dell) describing entrepreneurs pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to create major brands. As a book of engaging business stories, this is a five star book. In terms of the insight you will get from these stories compared to the potential insight you should get, this is a three-star book. I compromised the two to come up with my grading.

If you want to learn about today's brand-building challenges, other books handle that subject much better. If you want to learn about how the Wedgwood, H.J. Heinz, Marshall Field, Estee Lauder, Starbucks, and Dell businesses got started, this is your book. The material is handled much like historical fiction (except the facts are meticulously gathered and documented), and you will find the going easy and pleasant.

If you like Horatio Alger stories, you will find those here as well. I suspect that exhausted entrepreneurs on long plane trips where their computer batteries have run out will find this book helpful in recharging their personal batteries. As Winston Churchill once said, "Never give up." That's the key lesson here. Through trial and error, these entrepreneurs kept trying until they found formulas that worked.

The choice of examples is a little flawed. Five are consumer branding examples and only one is a business example (Dell). Of the consumer branding examples, you will find that most are about selling to the higher income people. That gets a little repetitive.

The explanation of the examples is also incomplete. Considering that this is a business book, there is relatively little financial information other than annual sales and occasional asset turnover ratios. Qualitative example are helpful, but they are more helpful with more pinning down. For example, when you see the profit margins that Wedgwood had, that explains a lot about why the company could afford such lavish promotions. Without similar information on Heinz, you wonder why he was so successful in making sales but went bankrupt. Presumably, he had low margins.

The photographs and maps in the book are a plus, and I enjoyed them very much. The book was printed on such high quality paper (similar to that used for diplomas) that the images are on the same paper as the text. This permits the book to have many more illustrations than similar-sized business books.

The point about earning trust in the book is easily explained. At the time when these entrepreneurs were getting started, their largest competitors usually provided poor quality products, sometimes had inappropriate brand images, often failed to offer decent guarantees, and typically acted in self-serving ways. Earning trust isn't too hard if others are scoundrels or incompetent. Above all, these entrepreneurs stood for decent human values, and got that point across in one-to-one situations. I'm not sure that point comes out clearly enough, even though it is certainly present in each example.

Those who think the Internet age is unique will find the comparisons to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England and the transportation improvements in the United States to be valuable contrasts. But each age brings its unique changes. Entrepreneurs should seek to grasp those changes, but also see what others have missed. I think that the Starbucks concept could have been successfully innovated in the late 1950s. It's just that no one did it then.

After you finish enjoying these stories, I suggest that you think about the values that your organization stands for. Are those values presented and delivered in ways that make your organization more trustworthy than any other? How else do you have to be superior in order to establish a burnished brand image?

Be serious about giving people the best you can possibly provide!

This highly readable business book profiles six successful entrepreneurs from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Each profile (Josiah Wedgwood, Henry Heinz, Marshall Field, Estee Lauder, Howard Schultz, and Michael Dell) details the milieu of the era and offers insight into the environmental business factors that each of these business builders faced.

It is this holistic approach to the subject of each profile that makes the stories so compelling. Using her command of history, Ms. Koehn outlines the period view of each of the products (pickles to perfume) and vividly draws the reader into the strategy of each of these entrepreneurs' approach to the market and building their brand. It is the power of these stories that gives the brand message such import. All of these people had a great number of competitors in their market niche but their focussed approach to the brand associated with their goods or services is what set them apart.

Ms. Koehn uses some excellent demographic and financial information (indexed to today's dollars) that provide the backdrop for the scale of the success each of these entrepreneurs' achieved. This provides just enough quantitative information to provide texture without clouding the real story in statistics.

As an executive in the software business today, I found a great deal of comfort in the fact that the challenges I face in today's competitive marketplace are not new. In fact, with great courage and resolve, they have been solved again and again in differing but similar ways over centuries.

Brand New is a brilliantly written book about entrepreneurs, brands, consumers, business history, and socioeconomic change. The book explores these subjects through the examples of six entrepreneurs-Josiah Wedgwood, H. J. Heinz, Marshall Field, Estée Lauder, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and Michael Dell-and the brands and companies they created during times of economic and social change: Wedgwood during the Industrial Revolution, Heinz and Field during the Transportation and Communication Revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Lauder, Schultz, and Dell in our time.

Koehn is a perceptive historian and biographer as well as an astute analyst of brand creation, entrepreneurship, and organization-building. She explains how the entrepreneurs in her book were able to understand the economic and social change of their times and anticipate and respond to demand-side shifts. This understanding, she argues convincingly, enabled these entrepreneurs to bring to market products that consumers needed and wanted and to create meaningful, lasting connections with consumers through their brands. Koehn also focuses on the importance of these entrepreneurs as organization builders who understood that their success depended on developing organizational capabilities that supported their products and brands. Her book is very well-researched throughout, and uses primary archival documents extensively in the historical chapters on Josiah Wedgwood, H. J. Heinz, and Marshall Field. Koehn also brings her entrepreneurs and the stories of how each built his or her company and brand to life with her talent as a biographer and historian.

The book's emphasis on drawing lessons from both past and present offers many valuable insights for those interested in coming to a better understanding of brand creation, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial management, and organization-building. Koehn's emphasis on the demand side of the economy and on entrepreneurs and companies making connections with consumers through the brand distinguishes her book as an important work of business scholarship on brands and entrepreneurship. A lively, interesting, and engaging read, Brand New is also valuable reading for anyone interested in business, economic, or social history or biography of business leaders. I highly recommend it!

Despite the author's posting of three 5-star reviews of his own work, this is the best overall resource volume for beginning digital photographers that I've seen. Unable to find anything particularly useful about scanners at the library I picked up this book because it had a chapter on Adjusting Resolution on Your Computer that answered all my questions about why it's appropriate to print at much higher resolutions than the resolution of your original image.

I've been using a digital camera for several months and have just acquired a scanner that came with a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements. This is an application with a great deal of depth and I found myself wondering what the documentation was talking about regarding color correction, gamma, resampling, palettes, and many other technical terms. This book, besides giving a great deal of information about cameras, also gave me an understanding of all these things.

I would have given it five stars except for two things.

The illustrations are all black & white, making them meaningless in many cases where the subject was color. Even worse, there would be two B&W photos side-by-side purporting to show differences where the differences were totally invisible. A CD-ROM accompanying the book has color copies of all the illustrations, but this is not a convenient way to read a book.

The book was published in 1999 and the information in it is current only through some time in 1998. As fast as things move in the world of digital cameras this makes most of the specs for cameras way out of date. Today's high-end consumer cameras are far beyond those detailed here. The book could do with an update to the chapters concerned with specific models and their specs as well as features now available that you couldn't get five years ago.

I tried posting an author comment months ago, but for some reason it never appeared...then I tried a review, but I included a URL and they say they don't like that, so here's my last attempt at posting this information

The following is from the introduction to the book:

"This book grew out of my personal interest and enthusiasm for digital cameras. For the past ten years I've been a multimedia developer; making interactive projects of all kinds. Most of these have a tremendous appetite for images and other media, and I'm always in a hurry to get the things assembled as quickly as possible. Being able to take photographs of objects, subjects, materials and scenery and get them in to the computer immediately makes the process that much easier, so using a digital camera just makes a whole lot of sense.
Digital cameras have come a long way in the last ten years. Now, for less than $1,000 you can buy a camera that takes photographs good enough to print at 8 x 10 sizes. Resolution and image quality has improved dramatically, and the functionality of the cameras is improving too. If you've been thinking of buying a digital camera, now is as good a time as any.
This book covers the digital camera world, from how cameras work and how to make a buying decision, through using the camera and downloading images to a computer. Since a digital camera really only makes sense if you have a computer a lot of the book is devoted to dealing with images once you get them into your computer. From explaining resolution and color models, through how to edit images and the myriad of software applications available to manage, edit and massage your images. The chapter on printing covers the many issues involved in turning an image into hard copy form.
Since this is the age of the Internet, the book also covers the basics of Internet imaging; how to create a web page, how to upload images to a web server, and working with some of the popular auction web sites. The chapter on webcams covers setting up web cams and digital conferencing."

That's the end of the quote from the introduction, but here's the chapters:

INTRODUCTION
1 Stumbling Through Digital Imaging
2 How To Buy A Digital Camera
3 How A Digital Camera Works
4 Working With A Digital Camera
5 Connecting To A Computer
6 Adjusting Resolution On Your Computer
7 The Digital Darkroom: Image Editing
8 Color
9 Printing
10 Accessories
11 Other Uses
12 Interviews
13 File Formats
14 Saving and Archiving
15 Immersive Imaging and 360-Degree Panoramas
16 Introduction To Web Graphics And HTML
17 Useful Software Applications
18 WEBCAMS
19 Animation
20 DIGITA Operating Environment
21 Copyright
22 High-End Cameras
23 Troubleshooting
24 Camera Specifications
25 Future

Hope this was of use to you.

I tried posting an author comment months ago, but for some reason it never appeared, so I'm going to try this method of adding an author comment instead... So the following is from the introduction to the book:

"This book grew out of my personal interest and enthusiasm for digital cameras. For the past ten years I've been a multimedia developer; making interactive projects of all kinds. Most of these have a tremendous appetite for images and other media, and I'm always in a hurry to get the things assembled as quickly as possible. Being able to take photographs of objects, subjects, materials and scenery and get them in to the computer immediately makes the process that much easier, so using a digital camera just makes a whole lot of sense.
Digital cameras have come a long way in the last ten years. Now, for less than $1,000 you can buy a camera that takes photographs good enough to print at 8 x 10 sizes. Resolution and image quality has improved dramatically, and the functionality of the cameras is improving too. If you've been thinking of buying a digital camera, now is as good a time as any.
This book covers the digital camera world, from how cameras work and how to make a buying decision, through using the camera and downloading images to a computer. Since a digital camera really only makes sense if you have a computer a lot of the book is devoted to dealing with images once you get them into your computer. From explaining resolution and color models, through how to edit images and the myriad of software applications available to manage, edit and massage your images. The chapter on printing covers the many issues involved in turning an image into hard copy form.
Since this is the age of the Internet, the book also covers the basics of Internet imaging; how to create a web page, how to upload images to a web server, and working with some of the popular auction web sites. The chapter on webcams covers setting up web cams and digital conferencing."

That's the end of the quote from the introduction because I don't want to go over the 1000 word limit for this.