"The Warrior's Camera" is not a casual book for fans of "Yojimbo" and "The Seven Samurai." It is a dense, scholarly tome designed for film majors to study. The book takes for granted that you are familiar with the films of Eisenstein, the books of Dostoyevsky and the plays of Bertold Brecht, as well as the personal philosophies of each of these Kurosawa influences.

This is also not a biography, and none of Kurosawa's personal life is put on display. Films are dissected shot by shot in tight detail.

However, if you are prepared, "The Warrior's Camera" lends tremendous insight into a fascinating director. Each chapter focuses on philosophical themes central to Kurosawa's work, and dives into the films that most represent these personal philosophies. The strength of the individual, and the ability for personal choice, is outlined by "Drunken Angels," "No Regrets for Our Youth" and "Stray Dog." Strength of will is shown in "Ikiru" and "Red Beard." As this is a scholarly work, each chapter presents an argument and then presents evidence to support the argument.

I have come away from this book with a much deeper understanding of Kurosawa and what he was trying to accomplish with his films. Highly recommended, but be prepared to work for your knowledge.

The Warrior's Camera is a really intelligently written book with very important information about the groundbreaking director. The book is worth buying just for the Legacy section of the book, which is a wonderfully written section about Kurosawa's legacy. This section also has some great quotes from other film directors, such as Steven Spieldberg and George Lucas, and prominent film critics. The book also has some great info on his style and the way to view a Kurosawa film. If you are writing a report on Kurosawa or if you are just a big fan, make sure that you pick up this book along with his biography.

I have the pleasure to have Dr. Prince as a teacher at Virginia Tech, but his book is one of the best books on Akira Kurosawa. I have been a fan of Kurosawa since I found my intrest in film at the ripe young age of 15. I have read his audiobiography, and next to that this is the only book that actually said something. It has many details not even in the biography, and insighful information on all his important works.

As he states in the beginning of this small, almost tiny, work, The Prince is not a very florid or complex piece, nor are its contents very innovative.

The brilliance of this text lies in its mundane and matter-of-fact nature. Machiavelli excels in taking common sense tidbits of practical government and synthesizing them into an easily read and masterful textbook for leaders of all organizations, and a must-read for any aspiring leader or student of history.

There are very few holes in his arguments, and he usually has a contingency for all of them. The biggest ideological flaw of The Prince is that Machiavelli seems torn over the nature of mankind: whether it is inherently good or evil; generous or self-interested. He doesn't (seem to) consider the possibility of a middle ground.

Contrary to his characterization (rather character assassination) by moralists, Machiavelli does not advocate abject cruelty or evil machinations. He sees them as tools to be implemented rarely, infrequently, and only when necessary. These tools, as vile as he admits them to be, are to be used only for the most noble of purposes: the preservation, stability and prosperity of the state and the people.

Furthermore, he seems to have a genuine belief in the mercy, love and power of God. A good deal more than many of the clergymen of his day!

Additionally, he seems to have a great amount of fear/respect for the common people, alluding to his more republican tendencies. In fact, one can almost hear him exalt the masses as the source of all real power (especially when he discusses the Swiss).

He does not moralize the audience, he merely provides them with his own experiences and those of history to lend him credibility and allows them to make decisions. (On a personal note: He'd have made an excellent economist!)

I commend Everyman for including the supplemental readings, as they shine light upon many of Machiavelli's references. I do however think that the translation was a too stiff (more fit for an audience contemporary to Machiavelli!) and suffers from the occasional confusing passage and grammatical error, but it has a good style and good use of devices. There is an abundance of footnotes (although a few less in some place and more in others would have been better). I was shocked that no reference was made about Machiavelli's allusion to The Aeneid at the beginning of Chapter 7.

In any event, this is a supreme work and should sit on everyone's bookshelf. Whether you hate Machiavelli and what he espouses, you will find yourself more appreciative of politics, and of democracy, after having read this testament to realism.

From the father of the theory of power, the reknowned statesman Niccolo Machiavelli, this book teaches strategies for getting power and control. If you think that now, 400 yrs. later it will be outdated, think again! Machiavelli's ideas are VERY valid in today's world. Don't skip over the examples he gives just because that is a thing of the past; think how those situations compare to the modern world.

Moralists, beware! you may be exposed to see the side of the world you'd rather suppress.

Read this classic, and also get "What would Machiavelli do?" by Stanley Bing, and "The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers.

I bought this book for my granddaughter because of the lovely drawings and easy readability of the text. I know children of all ages will enjoy the book.

I found this to be a beautiful picture book with a lovely text and paintings -- the lyrics by Stephen Schwartz are wonderful.

I bought this book since the blurb promised it would be as good as Captain Corelli - Wrong! I found the characters very distant and I could not get involved in their stories. On the other hand, this book is beautifully written and the depiction of ancient battles, and the way the author relates them to the modern day story of Captain Carlo, is very good indeed. The scene at the beginning of the book as Carlo relates a battle tale to Count Ciano (Mussolini's foreign minister) and to his future wife is truly ace. This is a book for an intelligent reader and I am sure there are many Amazon readers who consider themselves to be that!

Prince of the Clouds follows the life of Colonel Carlo Terzo, a brilliant military strategist who has never seen action. His life is utterly changed by the arrival of Emma, a Russian aristocratic, who may not be all that she appears, but who gives his humdrum life passion, meaning, purpose...and, inevitably, tragedy.

This beautifully told and written (or translated?) story by Gianni Riotta had me spell-bound from the first to last page. It is populated by colourful and well-delineated characters who linger in the brain long after you have put the book down. I never thought that a novel which spends so much time describing battle strategies could be so engrossing, but Riotta manages to pull it off because he makes it concise and to-the-point, (there are no longueurs in the book) and makes it a key element to both the character of Colonel Carlo Terzo and to the plot. This is a superb book. Read it and enjoy. I can't wait for Riotta's second novel.

I bought this book between flights because the jacket promised that "like Louis de Bernieres's Corelli's Mandolin, Gianni Riotta's charming and provocative romance explores large and small matters of love and war, shifting between the turbulence of post-war Sicily and the great battles of ancient and modern history." Corelli's Mandolin is one of my favorites as is Italy so I bought in and I'm not sorry I did.

Like Corelli's Mandolin, this book has significant flaws made tolerable by vivid and loveable characters. Riotta takes a little too long to get things going, but once he does it's well worth it. The book's military strategy theme works well and is extremely interesting. Riotta makes strategy fun and enjoyable, reminding me of Ayn Rand's vocational architecture backdrop in the Fountainhead.

My favorite Italian novel is Lampedusa's The Leopard. Prince of the Clouds provides another interesting view of the decline of Sicilian nobility and I think readers will appreciate either one more having read the other. Appropriately, Riotta acknowledges his debt to Lampedusa by having him make a brief appearance in the book.

While staying respectfully close to the traditional story outlines, Mitchell has embroidered within that tale a marvelous meditation on difference, desire, trust, and transformation. The section on what it means to "promise" alone is worth the price of the book. By changing perspectives, the author allows us to examine the many facets of the Frog Prince in a way that satisfies our modern interest in multi-perspective tellings while calling us back to our most profound needs and desires. A beautiful achievement.

Seems that there has not been enough romance in our busy lives lately... so Mr. Mitchell decided to give you something to fall in love with. This story is a pure delight from the first page to the last. I'm sure you'd enjoy playful historical insights and delicate language (the story takes place in France - the motherland of true romance). But this is all the shell - the pearl is the love story itself. We all know the actual tale, Stephen Mitchell, however, makes it unfold along with two strong and complex characters. Both lonely and proud princess and ugly frog have to overcome their fears to finally fall in love with each other. It's not easy for a frog to become human, it's never easy for a princess to find her prince. Stephen Mitchell describes the romance not as the love is born, but as it makes its way through to change them both. - No matter where you are in your relationship with somebody, this book is sure to make you kinder to that somebody.

To my mind this is one of Stephen Mitchell's best works. It's an excellent example of the sort of thing he does best: he "listens" his way into a traditional text or story, and then says what it "wants" to say in lucid, liquid English prose-poetry.

In this case his story is the traditional "Condensed Version" of the story of the princess and the frog prince. Mitchell has remarked somewhere that the characters in this old Grimm's fairy tale were crying out to be deepened -- and so his retelling of the story deepens them into, respectively, a self-possessed Tao-Te-Ching-quoting princess and a meditative but seriously lovestruck frog.

The tale itself is transformed into a parable of love and spiritual transformation -- or were Mitchell's insights already present in the original tale just waiting for someone to bring them out? (Does it even make sense to suggest that these meanings were "in" the story _rather than_ "in" Mitchell's elaboration of it?)

Be that as it may, Mitchell's interpretive rendering is as lovely and captivating as anything he's ever written. I won't spoil anything, but Mitchell reminds the reader very early on about a point we often forget about the original tale: the frog doesn't turn into a prince when the princess kisses him, but only when she hurls him into a wall.

(The lesson here is not, of course, that if you don't like your lover as he is, you should throw him really hard against a load-bearing structural member and hope he changes into something you like better! It's that real love requires an unwillingness to settle for less than each other's best, together with a complemetary willingness to undergo difficult-but-necessary transformations oneself. But you'd probably figured that out already.)

The tale is notable as much for its style as for its substance (if these two aspects of Mitchell's work can be clearly differentiated at all). The narrative is filled with little frame-breaking devices, excursions into spiritual insight (and sometimes into just plain fun), and small touches that add texture to the physical and "historical" background of the story. As the events in question take place in Renaissance-period France, Mitchell works in not only some fine detail about e.g. the exquisite trappings of the royal palace but also some gentle twitting of French culture.

The insights themselves are, as is usual with Mitchell, the narrative center of gravity. I won't spoil these either, but they come from sources as diverse (or are they?) as the _Tao Te Ching_ and Spinoza, Japanese haiku and Rainer Maria Rilke. The sources will be no surprise to any readers familiar with the rest of Mitchell's ever-growing oeuvre, but they're worked into the story remarkably well.

Oh, and if you like this, see whether you can find a used copy of Mitchell's 1990 book _Parabales and Portraits_. It's currently out of print, but it's excellent in general and in particular it contains a one-page prose poem entitled "The Frog Prince" with which the present work is thematically unified.

I would recommend this book to all music lovers who had a grade 3 and above.Fantastic,I love the tunes and some of it were soothing.Keeps you relaxed too!

As a singer and pianist, this music book was very exciting as well as helpful! I would recommend it to any piano player, as well as piano teacher!

This book tells in great detail the relationship of violence in Sam Peckinpaugh's films and it's predecessors today. While I would recommend it to Peckingpaugh fans, critically-minded and socially-aware Hollywood types, and for academic purposes, this book is a little lengthy and tedious for those seeking a quick and easy read. Thought-provoking and meticulous.

Prince doesn't get the fifth star only because the book is a little underwritten in parts (like the conclusion), and because I feel his analysis of "Straw Dogs", while well-intentioned and mostly solid, seems a little unbalanced with regard to David Sumner (Hoffman). Nevertheless, this is a a MUST-HAVE for students of Peckinpah and/or cinematic violence. Particularly fascinating is Prince's unique view of "Peckinpah's great trilogy on the toxic nature of violence" (re: "Straw Dogs", "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid", and "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia"), which represents a significant breakthrough in the literature. The freshness and clarity of 90 percent of this book make it worthwhile, and the other 10 percent is still readable. Don't expect Vonnegut, after all this is a critical volume. Highly recommended to students and cinephiles.

Prince's book is a rich, deep study of Peckinpah's own serious and humanitarian concerns with violence, and how his films were a personal crusade against Man's inhumanity to Man. The author convincingly argues the director grew away from the catharsis philosophy and developed a more uncompromising style. A masterpiece, and a must!

This was one of the volumes in the History of the American Cinema series that I was most looking forward to, and while a good book it fails to measure up to the best in the series. Prince never seems to be able to offer the insight of Cook (in vol. 9) or the mastery of Koszarski (in vol. 3). I had hoped for more about an era that looms as large in the public imagination as that decade does, yet Prince is unable to meet the challenge.

Stephen Prince's A New Pot Of Gold details the crisis of the 1980s in American film when Hollywood faced challenges from rising costs and stagnant ticket sales. Both are excellent histories of different eras in American filmmaking.

This book is a collection of essays on "The Wild Bunch" written in the late 90s. (When I bought the book, I had thought that the book would include some original reviews and show how attitudes toward "The Wild Bunch" had changed over time.)

Most of the essays are very good. The first, on how the script of the movie took shape, is worth the price of the book itself. Apparently, one can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, or at least we movie lovers were extremely lucky.

The only essay that is a dud is the last one, in which the author argues that "The Wild Bunch" is not a great film, that it is too romantic, and that "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" is Peckinpah's real masterpiece. Now, I think PG&BK is a very good movie, but it doesn't hold up as well as "The Wild Bunch" (and I have seen the restored PG&BK.) The idea of including an essay attacking the greatness of a movie that is the inspiration for the book strikes me as odd.

However, this book is recommended for those with an interest in Westerns and Sam Peckinpah.

I recently found this book - in hardback - as I was going through some boxes of royal junk and miscellany. Upon re-reading it I had not realised how inconsequential it was - but I suppose Mr. Barry had to cash in on his job experiences in order to maintain the lifestyle to which he was not born and in which he got very comfortable, indeed.

He needed a really good editor and/or proofreader because there are some real howlers in his text: "Duke of Argyle" for "Duke of Argyll", "Castle of May" for "Castle of Mey" (the late Queen Mother's northern Scottish residence), "the Earl of Spencer" for "the Earl Spencer", "Lord and Lady Spencer" for "the Earl and Countess of Spencer", "Lord Snowden" for "Lord Snowdon", and he keeps referring to some entity called the "Gold Coast" - I believe he means the "Ivory Coast (Cote d'Ivoire) in Africa. This is not the complete list of his inadequacies as a royal diarist and passable writer.

That being said, there is one telling photograph that is unattributed showing The Queen and her family on the Royal Yacht Britannia. In it, Her Majesty is wearing SLACKS! There was a recent controversy that when The Queen exited the hospital after surgery on her leg that said that this was only the second time she had been photographed in such garb. Apparently, all the pompous pundits forgot about THIS photograph. It made for good cocktail chatter for about two weeks and friends were amazed that I could dredge up proof of the factual errors of ALL of the newspapers and scandal rags.

I feel the reviews by the two other readers were gushing and over-the-top - the book is only a tarted-up diary with some very occasional and all too infrequent insights. But the photos are interesting and of some archival use. Mr. Barry later succumbed to AIDS.

Timothy Wingate, Canada

There is an old saying that goes 'No man is a hero to his valet'. That may
or may not be the case, however Stephen Barry's innocuous memoir was written
to reveal as little of the un-heroic side of the Prince of Wales as possible.
The book suffers for the discretion of the author and In light of the
revelations to come after this book was written, it does so needlessly.

Serving Charles as his valet from 1970 to 1982, Barry was in a unique
position to observe Royalty close-up. He makes the most of the opportunity
and is willing to let a few (and only a few) tid-bits out of the bag. Did
you know that the Prince is obsessed with making sure that his favorite brand
of honey accompanies him wherever he travels? Or that the Prince prefers a
sweater to central heating (A trait he shares with Queen Victoria)? These
and many other startling revelations await the reader of "Royal Service: My
Twelve Years as Valet to Prince Charles" Not surprisingly, one topic that

permeates the book is Charles' desire for privacy. This was a desire that was
often unheeded by the many people around him. Knowing this, one wonders why
the book was written at all.

Both the author and the Prince were born in 1948, thus after a few years
training, as a footman Barry is the right man of the right age in the right
place to become the valet to Charles. This relationship persists until
shortly after his wedding to Diana. That proved to be a period during which
many of the long-term servants of the household go on to new duties.
Strongly and repeatedly denying any sort of a fight between himself and the
Princess, Barry writes "Understandably she would not wish to have around
herself and her husband those who had known him at earlier times when there
were other girl friends".

Primarily, the book is organized along topical lines. Travel with the
Prince, Holidays with the Prince, the Prince and the other members of the
family, The many girl friends of the Prince, and so on. There is also some
material organized in a chronological fashion about the duties that Barry
held in the palace prior to his work for Charles.

Barry is the first to point out the dichotomy of the situation that he was
in. He often saw more of his royal master that Charles' family or friends.
And yet it was always from the perspective of the master/servant
relationship. After all, "However kind and friendly they are, in the end
they are Royal".

Barry is quick to play up this relationship (going so far to point out that
at least one portrait of the Prince is Charles' head and Barry's body wearing
garter robes). However he often gives short shrift to the many other members
of the team who worked with the Prince. While the Policemen who serve
Charles often are mentioned in anecdotes it is only on occasion that we hear
about the junior valet who also works with Barry to tend to the Prince. In
fact the assistant is never mentioned by name!

While the book hints at many things in the intimate female relationships the
Prince has had Barry is quick to mention that Charles always handled his love
interests with such discretion that Barry never found the Prince in bed with
anyone! This comes after he repeatedly states how it was his duty to awaken
Charles each morning at 7:50. This may or may not be so but in any event it
belies the closeness that Barry seems to have felt.

Time has not been good to this book. It abounds with many unintended
ironies. Barry himself did not live to see all of them come to public light
but here is a sample of some from the book:
"People always seemed to die when we were at Balmoral. This complicated
things for me, getting the Prince's wardrobe together"
On Camilla --
"For many years before he married, the gossip was that the Prince of Wales
was strongly influenced in his choice of girl friends by two married women -
Lady Tryon .... And Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowels, the wife of a cavalry officer.
....
The Prince is simply not the type of man to dally with married women."
"Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowles, is a hunting friend....and the friendship ... seems
to have survived the marriage"
On Diana -
"she was a friendly and open young woman. The crew of the Britannia fell in
love with her to a man"
"She liked giggling and she loved eating sweets. She always got into the car
with her Yorkie bars or bags of toffees. 'Have one Stephen,' she'd say. 'Go
on.'
'You'll get fat,' I used to warn her. But she undoubtedly burned up all those
calories contending wit the pressures that were building up. "
"The camera flashing in her face, the constant pestering finally got through.
She burst into tears. ......
The prince came back as soon as he could and comforted her, but it was easy
to see that he was worried. Was she going to fail to cope with all that being
Royal demands, right at the last minute, five days before the wedding? ... But
the young lady is very resilient and she soon perked up again"

. . .by the former valet of the Prince of Wales. This is not a tattle-tale tell-all -- instead it is, especially for Americans, an intimate and heartwarming look into the mystique of the British Royal Family. Barry is discreet and complimentary throughout, while relating amusing anecdotes about the Royals as he moves through their lives as one of the principal servants to Prince Charles.

An enjoyable read.