As a student of Sub-Saharan Africa I found this history of British Empire propaganda efforts through cinema showings in Rhodesia fascinating reading. This is the stuff of great drama -- the British investment in moving picture development and censorship efforts directed at forging a "tool of Empire" in order to pacify Africans and assimilate them into the new colonial order. Most of othe propaganda tools later employed by the Nazis in Germany and the Soviets in Russia were originally in play in the prolonged and heavily subsidized business of developing a cinema oriented to promoting the white rule administrations. The book is a fast paced, engrossing read -- if there is one criticism to be levied it seems that perhaps in the interest of brevity the author passed over quickly some of the engrossing tales of how certain motion pictures were required to be bowdlerized in order to negotiate them into a colonial atmosphere. For example, a full chapter might have been devoted to the reaction of the Rhodesian natives to cowboy movies, a campaign that stretched over decades, changing in scope and intent to accommodate the growing sophistication of the native audiences. Has anyone made an attempt to produce a motion picture not centered in the Hollywood concept of African colonialism? Perhaps the author has this in mind for a future project -- I would look forward to watching a drama concerned with Rhodesian cinema development in a style of "Out of Africa" presentation, demonstrating the power of film to shape credulous audiences, and how that same influence backfired in fomenting political unrest and revolution.

Paul Gauguin was at the heart of the Post-Impressionist movement with his lush, colorful artworks revolutionizing modern painting a the turn of the 19th Century. Largely self-taught in a diversity of media including oil painting, printmaking, and ceramics, Gauguin came to his career as a Parisian artist relatively late in life, and went on to paint subjects drawn from where he would live ranging from Brittany and Martinique, to Tahiti, and the Marquesas islands. In Gauguin, art expert Britt Salvesen drew from research developed by Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, enhanced with 79 superbly presented illustrations of which 52 are in color and 27 are duotone. Gauguin is a very highly recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library art history reading lists and reference collections in general, as well as being strongly commended to students of the life and work of Paul Gauguin in particular.

This awsome book tells a great white shark's life span from baby to adult. This book was really cool because it had many intresting facts. I learned a lot from this book. This book even has it's own glossary! If you can find this book, you should buy it!

An incredible book about an incredible flight.It is difficult to know which is the more interesting -- the historical part of the book about the original Smith brothers flight, or Peter McMillan's account of his modern day recreation of the same flight.As an aviation buff I loved the detail of how the airplane was built (using the original plans) and tested and then the day-by-day chronicle of the flight. The chapter about the crash in Indonesia (by uncanny coincidence in virtually the same place as the Smith brothers 75 years before) is a great read. Highly recommended.

This book is the best of its kind -- sharply adept in finding some of the funniest quotes by Ronald Reagan. Reagan's quick wit and gentle charm are brought before the reader's eyes in a way which reminds us of his inspiring leadership qualities as America's 40th President. Humorist, P.J. O'Rourke, writes a solid introduction which explains America's facination with Reagan as a leader, and Reagan's personality. If you're looking for a laugh, this book delivers

I have always loved the novels of Henry James, particularly Portrait of a Lady and my real favourite, The Turn of the Screw. When I saw this book I thought it would be very hard going, but I soon realised that Flannery's book was clearly written but also sophisticated and at times surprising. Its a pity there isn't more coverage in it of the Turn of the Screw but Flannery's discussion of The Portrait of a Lady and stories by James like The Aspern Papers and The Figure in the Carpet more than make up for this. This book is written with real grace and sometimes wit, e.g. the chapter on the Tragic Muse and the books discussion of sexuality and aesthetics in the last chapter on The Golden Bowl. Flannery looks with cool and sympathetic eyes at other critics on James. You feel that he really loves James and is not just using him as an opportunity to demonstrate his own powers as critic and egotist, as I find with many literary critics. This book is informative whilst being non-judgemental. Anyone interested in James would, I am sure, find this book extremely helpful as insight and discovery. I also feel that it is driven by a sense of the complexities of James and the complexities of the real world.
I look forward to discovering more works by this author. A great read!

Authors James Hanock and James Kushlan, along with illustrators Robert Gillmor and Peter Hayman have put together a simply gorgeous guide to all the world's species of herons, egrets, and bitterns. A guide to herons on every continent except Antarctica, all 60 species as recognized by the book, it is a thorough treatment of each one. Each species has a breathtaking color illustration, many times an additional black and white illustration, the common name, genus and species name, alternate common names, when and who first described it as species, maps illustrating range (including directions of migration and areas of casual occurrences), several paragraphs describing in detail their physical appearance, notes on their distribution and population, migration, habitat, behavior flying, feeding, and breeding, descriptions of nests, eggs, and young, and a note or two on taxonomy. Subspecies are noted as well; for instance a two page color range map depicts the 30 subspecies of the green-backed heron, found throught the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, and several Pacific and Indian Ocean island groups.

In addition to being a thorough field guide and collection of natural history notes on the world's herons, egrets, and bitterns the first section of the book contains useful articles on heron classification, courtship, feeding, and tips on identifying herons and egrets, including several color plates that aid in identifying the many white herons and egrets that live around the world. An extensive bibliography closes out this work.

Whether you want to read more about the great blue heron or the black-crowned night heron that lives around the local river or swamp, or something more exotic, like the black heron of Africa or the zigzag heron of South America, then this is the book for you. The book will also be of interest to conservationists, as several species such as the slaty egret have very restricted ranges (in this case known to breed only in the Okavango swamp in northwest Botswana) or very small populations such as Malagasy heron.

Coming out of RazorBlade Press, Hideous Progeny is one monstrously beautiful anthology that explores the world as it would have been if Dr. Victor Frankenstein's gruesome experiments had not gone awry. Writers such as Tim Lebbon, Peter Crowther, Steven Volk, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Rhys Hughes (to name just a few) each donate a small literary organ to the mix, and everything is skilfully stitched together into a marvellous book by first-time editor Brian Willis.

Cosmetically, the book is a two-face: while cover design by Chris Nurse is nothing short of outstanding, the internal layout is not without blemish. For example, outside margins are too wide, story titles are not always at the same height in the page, and the author's name is italicised in some but not all of the instances. Another gripe I have is that page numbers on the right-hand pages are left-aligned; plus, headers have no indication about the stories presented below them: these will give you a bad time if you want to riffle through the book to look up a specific something. There are a few extra typesetting warts and moles as well, as I noticed some characters showing up in a different size than the rest of the text, uneven spacing between words, typos derived from bad OCR, and so on. I sincerely encourage RazorBlade Press to pay more attention to internal design in the future, and run a few spell checks as well. Still, don't let appearances fool you, because the writing on these pages is top-notch.

In the whole, I was not in the least disappointed by Hideous Progeny while expecting quality work. Many short stories surprised me by their original angles, and all are very well written. The subjects are quite varied too, although some do overlap a little - it seems inevitable given the limitations inherent to their collective premise. I have my favourites, of course: Peter Crowther's piece is shocking yet touching at the same time, and the idea behind "Mad Jack" is a simple but nevertheless brilliant one. "The Banker of Ingolstadt" is perhaps the funniest in the book, and I found Steven Volk's "Blitzenstein" to rank among the best.

Whatever shortcomings the book has, they're quickly overwhelmed by the superb fiction it it, not to mention a downright gorgeous cover. For £6.99, it's well worth getting Hideous Progeny: not only will you be adding a fine specimen of a book to your library, you'll also be helping small press business to thrive. Because I want to see more from RazorBlade Press. Oh yeah.

Really hard to read, this book is not for the laymen.

The editors cover all the bases in this chronological history of pre-Lewis and Clark western exploration. Beginning with Cabeza de Vaca's perilous journey across the southern U.S. in 1528 and culminating with the horrific massacre narrative of John Jewitt's shipmates and his eventual capture by the Nootka Indians off Vancouver Island in 1803, this book is teeming with adventure and excitement of early day exploration. The reader is lured into narrative excerpts from the de Soto and Coronado expeditions, personal accounts of Sir Francis Drake, Pierre Radisson, Father Louis Hennepin, the La Verendryes, Jonathan Carver, David Thompson, Alexander Mackenzie and many more. These men sacrificed countless nerve-racking and frightening hours of survival in the unknown wilderness from Indian hostilities, weather, shortages of food, water, etc. The book not only opens new territories in real life exploration, it also opens endless new worlds of reading possibilities for armchair exploration enthusiasts.