Lynn Goldsmith's Springsteen Access All Areas is a photodiary of his 1978 Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour. The photos are all in black and white and they perfectly capture the spirit of Bruce Springsteen. Ms. Goldsmith was Mr. Springsteen's girlfriend at the time and she uses that cache to give us glimpses of the man and his band that other photographers may never have been able to get. For those of you old enough to remember or even attend a show at the tour, this book will bring you back to that time and for those of us who were too young to know, it provides us with a look at an artist establishing himself as an icon.

There is no question that Lynn Goldsmith does what professional portrait photographers do: capture on film the essence of the person. A very difficult objective that only a few do well. Her book "Photodiaries" documents her portrait work with popular musical artists from the seventies to the nineties and places her work alongside that of Annie Liebowitz in creating the memorable images of our popular music culture. What wonderful fate that she also happened to be the girlfriend of Bruce Springsteen during the 1978 Darkness on the Edge of Town tour. This was an important time for those who beleive that Springsteen writes and performs music that describes a truth in our individual lives and our communities. In 1978, he had not yet "conquered the world". Unlike the years that followed, the audience was not expecting a phenomenal performance, so the concerts were a shock to most. Bruce and the E Street Band were hungry to prove it all night, every night. "All Areas Access" captures the incredible energy of the stage peformance and the reaction of the lucky audiences. My favorite image is of Clarence, Bruce, Gary and Little Steven all in the air and there is no doubt that they are bringing a rocker home one-tenth of a second later. Then the book goes farther. It captures the quiet moments of an artist creating, looking for inspiration, crafting a song, spending a moment with a friend, and of the artist completed exhausted from a peformance. If the music of Bruce Springsteen speaks to you, then this book will illuminate a special time in the life of the artist, the music, and quite possibly yourself.

This is a beautiful little book which captures perfectly a moment of music history.

Springsteen's 78 tour is widely regarded as one of the seminal moments of his career. Coming of the back of Born to Run, the settled courtcase with his ex-managers and the Darkness album, Springsteen undertook a triumphant tour accross America, playing 1,000 to 5,000 seater concert halls.

This tour was a pure celebration of rock n'roll and Lynn Goldsmith's unrivalled access (she was Bruce's girlfriend at the time) allowed her to record it for posterity.

The concert shots capture the excitement of the shows perfectly, the sweat pouring off the performers, Bruce's mock collapse, the interaction with the audience. I've seen bootleg videos and heard many tapes from the tour but I have to say that Lynn Goldsmith's book captures the excitment of being in the crowd at one of those concerts better than any medium I have seen.

But this is more than a collection of superb concert photos, it also captures the quieter moments backstage both pre and post show (including the infamous Bruce shower shot!) Shots of the band eating breakfast, Bruce writing etc.

This book is pricey but will definately appeal to all Bruce fans and admirers of outstanding photojournalism.

A must have book for any New Kids Fan. This book contains some of the most incredible pictures I have ever seen. Lynn Goldsmith captures the guys in there own way. Their Real Selves!

A+

I am an adult and I am still and always will be an NKOTB fan! This book is great! The pictures are the best one's I have seen! This book is a must for any NKOTB fan new or old! Iam very proud to own this book!

This is one of the most exciting books ever published on the New kids! The pictures really share the most intament experiances the boys went threw! Pictures are the most wonderful part of the book!

This book is ideal for any Mark fan. They tell you more info about Mark than anyone else! Buy this book ASAP!

Celebrity portrait photographer Lynn Goldsmith turns to a new subject, flowers, in this interesting book. As Donald Sultan comments in his introduction, this is "an entirely new and compelling way of experiencing this classic subject." Each image is "shot in natural light with a macro lens from unexpected angles." The purpose: "I don't want to be looking at the flower, I wanted to be in it."

Donald Sultan feels the results are "a tribute to the minimalist and abstract expressionist schools." The work "imparts a sense of digital eroticism to the color which is at once referential and intensely real."

Lynn Goldsmith says, "I desired to create a highly subjective impression [of flower as] . . . the transcendental image . . . ."

Personally, I found the work to be a little too dreamy for my taste. Maybe I'm just used to seeing flowers be very realistically portrayed. As a result, I liked the more realistic images the best. The ones that looked like an early Farber nude didn't appeal to me very much (and neither do the soft Farber nudes).

A number of the images are portrayed over two oversized pages. The crease in the middle often interferes with the center of the composition.

The best part of this book is that the flowers chosen display extremely vibrant colors.

During a creativity class I took with author Dan Wakefield, we did an exercise where we observed a single flower and wrote down everything about it. I was astonished at how much I could see. In these images, I saw something that I missed in that exercise . . . the subtle way that colors shift from one shade to another across the same portion of the flower. That's the unique gift of Lynn Goldsmith's vision here.

My favorites include: Polo Rose; Flax; Anemone (purple); Regal Geranium; Heather; Anemone (red); Amaryllis; Cattleya Orchid; Pansy; Blushing Bride; Pincushion Protea; Delphinium; and Thistle.

You may also find the angles chosen to be interesting. As someone who regularly looks at flowers from a close distance, I did not find them to be very novel. Just imagine that you are a bee, and that's what you will be seeing.

After you finish enjoying this breath of spring (no matter what the season), I suggest that you consider what else would look quite different from very close up (or very far away). Then take the time to vary your viewing distance to capture those perspectives. You might start with something attractive like a geode and work on to more mundane objects.

Learn to really see!

What did you learn?

This book provides us with a unique vision of a commonly presented subject. It costs less than the most exotic bouquet of flowers and certainly lasts alot longer. Lynn Goldsmith has touched upon the spirt of Flowers. She evokes both the natural and supernatural in her images of nature as she does in her portraits of celebrities. I will always want to collect her work.

Child prodigy which defined in this book as God giving specific gift to achieve some specific task, is indeed nonexistence. The only thing I see in this book is six highly intelligent kids who had been guided to develope some specific skill such as music or chess by their parents and/or their master teachers. The author is a researcher who starts with a wrong assumption, bend his research mathod whenever he likes and at the end, has no courage to admit that his research is misguided and his research subject does not even exist.

The only thing that any parent of gift children can learn from this book is: let your children be, support them but don't push them. The worst thing any parent can do is to behieve like Adam's mother in this book.

Anyone who has any interest in the phenomenon of child prodigies will find this book a fascinating read. It traces the early development of 6 children who are prodigies (able to work competitively at the adult level) in some field. Of the 6, the fields the children excel in are as follows: 2 are in chess, 1 is a writer, 1 a musician, 1 in mathematics, 1 is extremely gifted overall (one of the highest IQs recorded). The author explains why prodigies are more often found in some fields, such as music or chess, than others (such as writing- the writing prodigy was the only 1 of the 6 children studied who was not working at an adult professional level). The author delves into the "coincidences" of time, place, technology and parenting that allow these prodigies to develop. He draws on other examples of prodigies outside of his own 6 subjects. Among these is a severely handicapped youth who, through the dedication of his adoptive parents, was eventually discovered to have savant ability in music. Some may argue that one or the other child in the study may not be a true prodigy, but they are all interesting children to read about, and the author certainly makes some excellent observations on the development of human potential. I found this book hard to put down.

While "it remains true that the prodigy cries out for explanation," Feldman displays an array of insights which demonstrate that (as he approvingly quotes Richard Feynman): "The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting, the part that doesn't go according to what you expected." By drawing together the interplay, the reciprocal threadings, of physical, psychological, and cultural cultural levels in the development of prodigies, Feldman contends that the "end game" of our evolutionary process is to create conditions which maximally deploy the rich potential expressed in human history. Such an end game thus has survival value to our species by increasing the range of human skills and capacities in meaningfully specific ways. As Feldman states, "Prodigies are masterpieces of timing, individuals who manage to find a fully resonant domain very early in their individual life games." This book sensitively portrays, in a nested cluster of apt metaphors, how such a matching of individual and domain occurs. Any given society provides a fecund bed for very specific types of prodigies to flower. Certain times favor particular forms of talent, yet our prodigies often defy predictability and retain "an element of mystery and uncanniness." And, ironically, for all the efflorescence of talent, the development of a prodigy is intrinsically a fragile event. Feldman's penetrating look at such precocity provides a deeper understanding of its preconditions, structure, and outcomes. And all this is presented in the context of human evolution as psychophysiological-cultural reality. A wonderful, provocative book. Pour a cup of java or tea, and prepare to ponder.