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Book reviews for "Rosillo-Calle,_Francisco" sorted by average review score:

San Francisco Firehouse Favorites
Published in Hardcover by Crown Pub (1988)
Authors: Tony Calvello and Outlet
Amazon base price: $18.25
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At Last.
This is a super cookbook and one that I have known about for more than 30 years. I just located a replacement copy after looking everywhere (but the web.) As a native San Franciscan I have seen my share of wonderful food, often in the most unusual places. This delightful book gives new meaning to the words home cooking.

San Francisco firemen are world famous. If you are lucky enough to locate a copy of this cookbook, you'll see why more local policemen try out for the Fire Exam each year. I wish I could.

great cook book
As a firefighter, this is a terrific traditional old style firehouse recipe cookbook. My father is even shown in the pictorial section of the book doing an exterior attack in 1965. I recommend it heartily, but prefer the cooks at the Presidio Firehouse


San Francisco For Dummies(r), 2nd Edition
Published in Paperback by For Dummies (15 October, 2002)
Author: Paula Tevis
Amazon base price: $11.89
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Won't live home without it.
For the first time in a long time I have found a travel book that tells me exactly what I need to enjoy my vacation.

Paula Tevis deliverys the goods. No more flipping through page after page to search for information I need. Tevis has put together a book for the true road warrior. With clarity and brevity she brings San Fransico alive. Its obvious that Tevis knows this town inside and out.

great book
I bought this book back in February for a trip to San Francisco with my husband. I've been to San Francisco before around 13 years ago, but it was my husband's first trip to San Francisco. We carried the book with us all the time and the tips that it gave us were excellent, everything worked out great. For example, we did not rented a car and we made it all the way to the Golden gate bridge outside the city, following the book's tips to use the public bus. Another great tip, was to buy a three-day ticket to the MUNI (and it worked for bus, cable cars and electric cars). The restaurant suggestions for Chinatown and The Mission District were great. Good tips on how to avoid tourists traps. Great tips on planning itineraries and we felt like we saw all the most important attractions/sights in San Francisco. We hit a rainy afternoon and all we had to do was turn our book on the page on what to do if it's raining, great! I will defenetily buy books from these series again.

Have fun in your trip!


San Francisco Modern: Interiors, Architecture & Design
Published in Hardcover by Chronicle Books (1998)
Authors: Zahid Sardar, J. D. Peterson, and Mario Botta
Amazon base price: $28.00
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Real modern design
What a great book packed with pictures. The design is very modern and unconventional (read expensive). This is a very fun book to review. If you can't afford the architecture costs there are many ideas you can incorporate into a more typical home design.

Beautiful pix w lots of design ideas. Great Sonoma compound!
Coffee table book showing all the nicest spots in the Bay Area. The spread on the family compound in Sonoma is worth the price alone!


San Francisco: A Certain Style
Published in Hardcover by Chronicle Books (1989)
Authors: Diane Dorrans Saeks, John Vaughan, and Nion McEvoy
Amazon base price: $24.50
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One of my favorite design books.
Often I'll enjoy a design book the first time I read through it, but I won't find myself interested in a second perusal. This book , however, is one I find myself drawn to time after time. Not only are the rooms beautifully photographed and fascinating to look at, but the glimpse at lives of the people who live in them is compelling. There are also enough different and unique styles covered by the book that each one doesn't begin to blur with the previous one as sometimes happens in design books that restrict themselves to a particular style. Highly recommended.

Great photographs
This book has beautiful and stylish photos that really capture the essence of San Francisco. It is a great gift for anyone who lives in San Francisco or has visited the area. It's a good coffee table book.


Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet: Francisco De Quevedo, Sor Juana Ines De LA Cruz, Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Migue
Published in Hardcover by Southern Illinois Univ Pr (Trd) (1993)
Author: Willis Barnstone
Amazon base price: $29.00
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Masterful Translations of Spanish Sonnets
The sonnet form was introduced to Spain from Sicily in the fifteenth century through the writing of El Marqués de Santillana (1398-1458), a poet who wrote Petrarchan sonnets in Spanish. During the Renaissance, the Italian sonnet made its way to most of the countries of Western Europe. In England, Edmund Spenser changed the Petrarchan rhyming form of 'abba abba cdecde' to 'abab bcbc cdcd ee,' and William Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets with the form 'abab cdcd efef gg.' As Willis Barnstone says in the introduction to his book, 'Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet,' 'the Spanish sonnet, a literary vagabond in courtly dress, began in the court of the Sicilian Frederic II, went up to England, and finally, seven centuries after its Italian birth, with its picaresque wits and form intact, dropped down just above the Antarctic Circle to appear in the poems of the Argentine Anglophile [his maternal grandmother was English] Borges.' Professor Barnstone goes on to present a thorough history of the evolution of the Spanish sonnet and a colorful biography of six Spanish language poets who used the form. His writing is informed by his long friendship with Jorge Luis Borges. Barnstone offers here a sampling of 112 Spanish sonnets by these six masters, placed side by side along with his own magnificent translations.

Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645) is described as a 'monstruo de la naturaleza' [monster of nature] because of his prodigious outpouring of writing. 'Like Swift, Dostoyevski, and Kafka, he is one of the most tormented spirits and visionaries of world literature ['El Buscón' (The Swindler), 1626, is his masterpiece] and also one of the funniest writers ever to pick up a sharp, merciless pen.' Though Quevedo's sonnets are at times scatological and darkly satirical, they are also humorous and hopeful.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51-1695) was a Mexican discalced Carmelite nun who is considered by some religious scholars to be the first female theologian of the Americas. Although I was familiar with her love poems and her articulate defense of a woman's right to write in 'Response to Sor Filotea,' I had not read her sonnets in translation before. As he does with all six sonneteers, Barnstone faithfully maintains Sor Juana's rhyming, meter, and cadence in his translations of her sonnets. His analysis encompasses her writing and her life, including some critique of Octavio Paz's definitive biography, 'Sor Juana, or The Traps of Faith.'

Antonio Machada (1875-1939) recalls the landscape of his native Sevilla in his sonnets. In, 'El amor y la sierra' (Love and the Sierra), he writes, 'Calabaga por agria serranía / una tarde, entre roca cenicienta. (He was galloping over harsh sierra ground, / one afternoon, amid the ashen rock).' Barnstone calls Machado 'the Wang Wei of Spain' because 'he uses the condition of external nature to express his passion.' As Petrarch had his Laura, Machado had his Guiomar (Pilar de Valderrama). In 'Dream Below the Sun,' he writes, 'Your poet / thinks of you. Distance / is of lemon and violet, / the fields still green. / Come with me, Guiomar. / The sierra will absorb us. / The day is wearing out / from oak to oak.'

Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet and playwright who was affected by Luis de Góngorra and gongorismo. His 'Gypsy Ballads' was 'the most popular book of poetry in the Spanish language in his time.' Barnstone states that 'his closest attachment, his passion, was the painter Salvador Dalí,' with whom he carried on a six year love affair. Luis Buñuel castigated him for his Andalusianism; indeed, Lorca felt that Buñuel's satiric and surrealist film 'Un chien andalu' mocked him. After traveling to New York and Havana, Lorca became 'the playwright of Spain' with his brilliant 'Bodas de Sangre' (Blood Wedding). His 'Sonnets of Dark Love,' unpublished during his lifetime, were probably written to Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, an engineering student. Barnstone believes that 'dark love' is an allusion to San Juan de la Cruz's 'dark night of the soul.'

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) of Argentina considered himself a poet, though he was a master at prose. According to Barnstone, because of the blindness that afflicted Borges in midlife, 'he could compose and polish a sonnet while waiting for a bus or walking down the street' and then later dictate it from memory. 'Borges's speech authenticated his writing, his writing authenticated his speech. To have heard him was to read him. To have read him was to have heard him.' In 'Un ciego' (A Blindman), he says, 'No sé cuál es la cara que me mira / Cuando miro la cara del espejo; / No sé qué anciano acecha en su reflejo / Con silenciosa y ya cansada ira. (I do not know what face looks back at me / When I look at the mirrored face, nor know / What aged man conspires in the glow / Of the glass, silent and with tired fury.)'

Miguel Hernández (1910-1942), a poor goatherd and pastor from the province of Alicante in Spain, wrote his best poetry while imprisoned during the Spanish Civil War. 'In the prisons, Hernández became,' in Barnstone's opinion, 'the consummate poet of light, darkness, soul, time, and death.' One of his poems, 'Llegó con tres heridas' (He came with three wounds), is a popular song, recorded by Joan Baez on her 'Gracias a La Vida' album.

'Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet' is recommended to all who love this poetic form and want to know more about the lives of these remarkable poets. A good index and list of references are included for further study.

A Delightfull Collection of Written Art
For those who already know the various authors of this book individually, words will be in excess to describe the treasures contained therein. The five Spanish already classical authors and Jorge Luis Borges closing the group with honors are a guarantee of high quality and deep touching entertainment. Tasting the fluent and sincere social verb of Quevedo, or absorbing in silence the sweet and perfect mysticism of Juana Inés would be sufficient to recommend this book. But we find much more, Machado, García Lorca and Miguel Hernández, marked by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, found in their sensibility, the way to transform hate and blood into the purest and most powerful poetry. About Borges, well, what can one say about a man of his talents, his well known depth is something you will find easily linked to his enormous sensibility and human solidarity. Definitively, this multiple anthology is a treasure to keep forever.


Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation
Published in Paperback by Chronicle Books (1992)
Authors: Francisco X. Alarcon and Ion McEvoy
Amazon base price: $11.95
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Educational, provocative ...
This book is an interplay with a collection of Aztec incantations collected in the early 17th century. It includes translations, a glossary and an extensive bibliography in addition to the poetry by Alarcon. The book is primarily for lovers of poetry but is useful to anyone with an interest in MesoAmerican culture and religion.

Alarcon's poetry is typical of his style - extremely spare depending heavily on its images and the connotations (as opposed to the denotations) of words. In this particular book where the number of poems in each section is determined by Aztec associations, a few of the poems are a handful of words - a snippet of a phrase. Some of these work in much the same way haiku works - but a few fail as poetry. The longer poems are consistently successful - either as new incantations or as comtemporary poetry.

Powerful. Rare. Wise. Rich in spirit.
A rare and unique book indeed! Mr. Alarcon takes us on a spiritual path to the past with poems that are vibrant, full of wisdom, and rich in the voices of ancestors.


Someday Soon (Wheeler Large Print Book Series (Paper))
Published in Paperback by Wheeler Pub (2000)
Author: Debbie MacOmber
Amazon base price: $25.95
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Good book
The book was moving. I actually cried (I hardly cry). However, I felt that the other characters like Bailey and Stan should get their own stories.

Action, love, and danger
Debbie Macomber's SOMEDAY SOON, which is the prequel to SOONER OR LATER is a wonderful contemporary about a young widow, Linette Collins, who becomes involved with the head of a mercenary group, Cain McClellan. She's reluctant to love and lose again, and Cain, well he's never even CONSIDERED having a "permanent" woman. But, his days of reckless abandon are numbered when he falls in love with Linette--much to the chagrin of his mercenary buddies--and almost loses her to international terorists. buddies.


Stephen De Staebler: The Figure
Published in Paperback by Chronicle Books (1988)
Authors: Stephen Destaebler, Donald Kuspit, Lynn Gamwell, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Amazon base price: $19.95
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A Quiet Genius
Stephen De Staebler is an artist's artist. Few higher compliments can be assigned. Not that his work doesn't speak to all of mankind for it most assuredly does. It is just that being the presence of his figures, pulled from clay like the biblical creation of man then cast into bronze, there is a beauteous purity of vision that somehow connects us all. Donald Kuspit writes eloquently and reverently of De Staebler's techniques, gifts and spiritual vision. This book is beautifully illustrated with a vast assortment of the artist's output. Thiis is a well made monograph...but it is so much more. If you are meeting De Satebler for the first time, welcome to all that is meaningful in our time on earth. If he is a familiar friend, the share your admiration - page after page.

Excellent illustrations, and a thoughtful essay.
For a De Staebler fan this is an extrodinary book. The photography is first rate and covers some of his early throne and alter work, the ceramic figures, and his bronzes into the mid 80's. Smaller heads are also included, as well as an extensive bibliography, and source list. Donald Kuspit's essay is interestingly reasoned and indepth. This book is from the Laguna Museum show which traveled in the late 80's. It's supurb image quality and exaustive bibliography are it's strenghts.


Straight to the Heart: Political Cantos
Published in Hardcover by Russian Hill Pr (1998)
Author: Angela Alioto
Amazon base price: $22.95
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Classic!
Provides, in human terms, the modality & methodology vital to bring the city (and the country) to a nexus of understanding as to how & why government can transform our collective way of life!

perfect for the political junkie, tells it like it is
Very few political books have the honesty and the integrity that this book has...it is full of real life events in San Francisco politics and it is full of San Francisco tradition....you really feel like you are living the adventure and that you can make a difference whether its with the homeless problem or the lack of competitive bidding in city contracts...facinating reading!


Stuart Davis: American Painter
Published in Hardcover by Metropolitan Museum of Art (1992)
Authors: Lowery Stokes Sims, William C. Agee, and San Francisco Museum Of Art
Amazon base price: $60.00
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A simply masterful presentation of Seurat's work
This beautiful catalog from an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992 is an excellent anthology of Seurat's work, juxtaposing finished works with sketches, and includes a large selection of sketches as a student. The size allows the works to be displayed in all their glory. If you like Seurat, buy this!

Fantastic
I felt that this book is the best overall catalog of the work of Stuart Davis. It includes an enormous amount of color and black and white pictures of his paintings and of himself. It also includes a good synopsis of his life and extrordinary career. If you need a book on Stuart Davis than this is the best.


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