The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints

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Astonishing volume

Love it

Beautiful book

The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints
David Acton
Manufacturer: Hudson Hills Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1555952135

Book Description

This magnificent volume is the first comprehensive study of the influence of Abstract Expressionism on printmaking.

Customer Reviews:

Astonishing volume.......2005-09-10

While now only available in the secondary market, and rather expensive, this book is worth every penny. Lavishly illustrated, this book provides an astonishing window into the little-known world of abstract expressionist graphic works. I cannot recommend it more highly. Whatever the price you pay, I'm certain you won't be disappointed.

Love it.......2002-02-28

This is a fabulous book, very carfully thought out and nicely produced. It contains copious biographical facts on each artist, including many who are relatively unknown. It also includes some rare works, such as the only known print by Mark Rothko. I recommend it highly.

Beautiful book.......2002-02-04

Before this book (and the exhibition it reflects),who knew that the Abstract Expressionist painters worked not only in the big mural or wall-sized scale but also in prints, some very small? This is a brilliant act of scholarship that is a gift to every viewer's eye.

Inside Maverick's: Portrait of a Monster Wave

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The Trifecta for a Mav's Book: Acton/Jenkins/Washburn
An Extraordinary Book
"Are you KIDDING ME??"
Maverick's - A Very Gnarly Place

Inside Maverick's: Portrait of a Monster Wave

Manufacturer: Chronicle Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Maverick's

ASIN: 0811851214

Book Description

Every winter when the ocean buoys start to read 10-, 15-, and 20-feet, the coast of Half Moon Bay, California, is transformed by an enormous wave called Maverick's. Recognized as one of the most dangerous big wave surf breaks in the world, Maverick's is big, cold, and sickeningly powerful. It's the best show in town, but until now you could only see it through a pair of binoculars. Inside Maverick's brings you right onto the sickening ledge of a 75-foot wave with jaw-dropping photographs and gritty insider accounts of what it's really like out there. Sports columnist Bruce Jenkins and Maverick's surfer Grant Washburn have interviewed top big wave surfers Peter Mel, Zach Wourmhoudt, Evan Slater, and others to discuss every aspect of the freakish wave from the paddle out to the terrifying drop to the inevitable and brutal wipeouts. Covering fifteen years of incredible surfing with photos that have never before been published, Inside Maverick's grants unparalleled access to this legendary wave and the elite core of big wave surfers that are obsessed with challenging it.

Customer Reviews:

The Trifecta for a Mav's Book: Acton/Jenkins/Washburn.......2007-01-15

Inside Maverick's is an outstanding mix of excellent photos, writing and story telling. The book captures amazing stories from the unique mix of surfers that ride Maverick's. No extreme sport enthusiast's coffee table or bookshelf is complete without this book.

An Extraordinary Book.......2007-01-01

The stunning photos alone make this book worthwhile, but the surfing commentary is topnotch as well. A great companion to the DVD "Riding Giants", and you will recognize many of the people from the DVD in the book.

If you are in to any adventure sports or just an armchair surfer, this book is for you.

"Are you KIDDING ME??".......2006-12-28

"Are you KIDDING ME???"

Those are usually the first words out of anyone's mouth when they see this book on my coffee table. And then, usually I have to throw in "Riding Giants" and change any conversation we may have been having.

The photography and story telling present by Grant and team in top notch. Grant alone has spent more than a decade chronicling the history of the world's heaviest big wave, and it comes through in an amazing presentation that anyone who could possible comprehend what these guys do will appreciate.

But then again, comprehending just exactly what these guys are doing is pretty much impossible.

Maverick's - A Very Gnarly Place.......2006-09-28

Inside Maverick's is an extraordinary book. It is written & photographed by 3 extraordinary people and, as a team, there is not another 3 people alive who can match their intimacy and knowledge of Mavericks or who have the ability to capture in words and images the wild moods and moments of this world class break. This incredible book answers the question, what's it like and the answer is delivered by more than 50 voices, all of remarkable courage, strength and boldness. If you want to wade in, here are a few excerpts of what Maverick's has to offer up. Washburn describes an unforgettable wipeout: "I was shocked at the ferocity, the gravity, the mercilessness. Where was he? Would he be drowned? Dismembered? It seemed entirely possible that his head could be torn clean off. When the set was finished with him, he popped up, shaken, but alive. We knew he had been lucky" There is a chapter giving us expert weather advice, courtesy of Mark Sponsler: "Hurricane swells pale in comparison to Northern California surf, because all 12-foot waves are not the same. Some will seem to move a lot more water and travel much faster. The period is what makes the difference. The longer the period, the faster and stronger the wave. Pure chop has a period of 4 to 8 seconds, windswell 9 to 11 seconds, weak swell 13 to 15 seconds and strong swell 16 seconds or greater. Though a hurricane can generate waves with periods in the 14 second range, storms headed for Maverick's can generate waves with periods at 25 seconds or greater, the most powerful waves on Earth short of a tidal wave." And here is Evan Slater's description of the take off zone: "Only fifteen or twenty feet wide, swells march in as big, fat lumps, then double in size and fold over themselves as they hit the shelf. Within this zone, each wave has about a three-to-five foot wide ramp or make-able entry point, with a one-to-two-second window of opportunity. The location of the ramp changes with every wave; sometimes it's not there at all. Mistime it by a split second or take off a foot too deep, and you'll be freefalling. Guaranteed. Even after surviving countless beatings and a handful of two-wave hold-downs, I still have no clue why there's a 99.9 percent wipeout survival rate at Maverick's. Every time you go through one, you wonder in midthrashing, 'Is this the end for me?'" And there is a chaper on fear, "I love fear," says Don Curry, "I thrive on it. But there are times at Maverick's when it overwhelms you. There was a day in '97 when I was out there for three hours, just me and Jay and one other guy. None of us even took off--not once--and I'll admit to being psyched out. I felt like I was seeing things that I shouldn't have. Things that were not meant to be seen that close by the human eye. I felt like God and the devil were right there, and it could go either way." And finally, one of many tributes to Jeff Clark, this one written by John Raymond: "We owe everything to Jeff Clark, and nobody should forget that, I'm talking about going left or right with nobody else out there. I don't think people understand what kind of courage that took. It's one thing for the rest of us to come in afterward, but for him to go out, at a place that looks like it just might kill you, that's unbelievable. If it wasn't for Jeff, I'll bet that place would still be cloudbreaking, and nobody would be out there." If you're in search of inspiration, Inside Maverick's is where it's found. I can see this becoming my all-time favorite surfing book.

Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921

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Critical Companion to Russian Revolutions
Excellent but loosely coordinated essays

Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921

Manufacturer: Indiana University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0253333334

Amazon.com

Drawing on the work of dozens of scholars from Russia, Europe, Japan, and the United States, this encyclopedic volume provides a useful overview of the early years of the Soviet Union. Among the topics covered are the collapse of the moderate Kerensky government and the rise of Bolshevik power, the sweeping militarization of Soviet society (the Red Army had 4,400,000 regulars in 1920), and the contribution of members of the Russian intelligentsia to the apparatus of the Soviet state. Students of Soviet history will find this compendium, which weighs in at nearly 800 pages, to be a valuable resource.

Customer Reviews:

Critical Companion to Russian Revolutions.......2003-01-14

This is a solid, definitive, wide-ranging and in-depth look at the Revolutions told from a variety of viewpoints, ideologies and mindsets. Modeled after the Foucoult/Ozuf Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, this is an excellently assembled book, with very current material, well worth having by any scholar of this period.

Excellent but loosely coordinated essays.......1999-12-31

This book is a necessary addition to the library of anyone who already knows a fair amount about the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. It provides for the first time in one volume the advances in understanding that result from availability of Soviet archives and close cooperation between Western and Russian scholars. It also points out numerous topics on which further research would be useful.

However, it has its flaws. Some topics are covered redundantly in various essays, and not always the ones one would expect; other topics get inadequate attention. Makhno's anarchist army in Ukraine, for example, is barely mentioned in Mark von Hagen's essay on Ukraine, given an unsympathetic paragraph in Vladimir Chernaiv's essay on anarchists, and a longer and somewhat more useful paragraph in Orlando Figes' essay on peasant armies. Given that at times Makhno's army was the most effective military force in Eastern Ukraine, and that all other combatants in Ukraine had to worry about what Makhno was going to do next, this is fragmented and incomplete treatment of an important topic. As another example, the description of what happened in Latvia between 1917 and 1920 is seriously incomplete; the bitter division between pro-Bolshevik and Latvian nationalist elements is not brought out clearly, nor is the intensity of the war that took place in Latvia, with many Latvians, German troops (the von der Goltz Iron Division) and some Russians (the Bermondt-Avalov force) on one side, and the Latvian Bolsheviks and the Red Army on the other. One would not guess from this book how disastrous this was for Latvia; by the end of the fighting, about half the population of Latvia had fled the country or died.

Rather than cite other such topics, I'll turn to the observation that most of the bibliographies of these essays consist mainly of secondary rather than primary sources. This is a drawback in a book which implicitly assumes that the reader already has a general familiarity with the subject matter. To be sure, not all primary sources that presumably exist are accessible even now; in particular, one suspects that somewhere in British government archives are documents that would clear up various puzzling issues. But there is a conspicuous lack of references to the extensive German political and military archives related to the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Indeed, the German role is so incompletely treated that one suspects some of the authors are, quite understanably, not familiar with this material. But from 1917 through mid-1919 the Germans deliberately shifted their weight to keep any of the forces contesting for power in Russia from winning a clear victory; the Germans occupied here, distributed weapons there, stirred up trouble over yonder, and generally tried to make sure that revolution and civil war in Russia would not spread to Germany. A careful discussion of German policy and its effects on the course of events in the first half of the Russian Civil War would be extremely helpful; lacking that, a good bibliography of the primary sources in German would be most useful.

Despite these criticisms, the book is a big step forward in understanding what really happened and who did what to whom in the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. I hope that a decade or two from now there will be a second edition clarifying some of the topics not easily understood from this first edition.

Average customer rating:

Easy to read

Informative

Fine introduction

Learning To Look At Paintings
Mar Acton
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Learning to Look at Modern Art

Art: The World's Greatest Paintings Explored and Explained

Great Artists: The Lives of 50 Painters Explored Through Their Work

Understanding Paintings: Themes in Art Explored and Explained

The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern

ASIN: 0415148901

Book Description

A critique of works of art dating from the early fifteenth century through to modern installations, Learning to Look at Paintings is an accessible guide to the study and appraisal of paintings, drawings and prints. Mary Acton shows how one can learn to look at and understand an image by analyzing how it works, what its pictoral elements are and how they relate to each other. She describes the ingredients of composition, space, form, tone and color which make up a painting, and discusses the importance of subject, function and setting in appreciating its visual meanings. Acton also suggests a series of questions to ask when looking at a painting in order to help develop a critical understanding of art.

Acton discusses work by a wide range of Western European and American artists, from the fifteenth century to the present. Learning to Look at Paintings is illustrated with over ninety images by artists ranging from Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Botticelli to Picasso, Matisse and Rothko. Also included is a glossary of critical and technical terms used in art history.

Customer Reviews:

Easy to read.......2007-07-09

This book is written in a plain, clear style---it is a good reference book to look up anything about art. The chapters are short.

Informative.......2001-08-24

I enjoyed this book on the principles and elements of design. I think she selected exemplary pictures to illustrate her point. I especially enjoyed the chapter on "subject matter". The only drawback of this book was having to flip back and forth from the reading to the painting. Also, she talked about some of the paintings color combinations that were printed in black and white. In the paperback version some of the details of the paintings were lost because they were reproduced on a small scale. Overall, though I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about design elements.

Fine introduction.......1997-11-10

Composition, space, form, tone, color, subject-matter, and other pictorial elements of the plastic arts are considered and their interrelationships explained in this handy introduction, with over ninety well-chosen illustrations, some in color.
The author, an experienced art teacher, has also included illuminating essays on drawing and its purposes, looking at prints, a handy glossary of art terms, and references for further reading.
Highly recommended as eminently suitable for an Introduction to Art course, and for anyone else interested in learning to see more in paintings.

Customer Reviews:

Thought-Provoking Essays, Religious and Political..........2002-06-16

Acton is probably most known for his quote: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1804-1902) was born to a wealthy English aristocrat and become a brilliant scholar. He was Victorian England's most renowned historian and political thinker. Acton was a Roman Catholic educated under the Catholic historian Ignaz von Dollinger in Munich. Acton found the idea of Papal Infallibility to be appalling. To Acton, holding the Vatican on a pedestal as the infallible arbiter of religious and moral conscience was detrimental to the cause of liberty. Acton was a classical liberal who seems to possess the prescriptive wisdom and prudence of Edmund Burke when it comes to politics.

Book Description

This is the first volume of a new integrated documentary history of the Soviet Union. The Soviet story looms large in history syllabuses across the world. This book will be a valuable resource for students at all levels, drawing upon the primary material that has come to light since the collapse of Communist rule in 1991. Combining lucid narrative commentary and a rich selection of evocative documents, it provides a lively entrée to current debate over humanity's most momentous and tragic experiment. This volume is organized into three chronologically distinct parts, subdivided thematically and embedding over 200 documents. Key terms and references to individuals, places, events and institutions are explained and guidance provided on significant features of the primary sources.

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An excellent example of late 19th century historiography

The History of Freedom and Other Essays
John E.E. Dalberg Acton
Manufacturer: Cosimo Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1596052244

Book Description

Known as Lord Acton, John E.E. Dalberg Acton was one of the great historians of the Victorian period and one of the greatest classical historians of all time. His life's work was advancing the history of liberty though he was never able to complete his magnum opus. THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM AND OTHER ESSAYS consists of articles reprinted from various journals of his time. Additionally, Acton's works include Lectures on Modern History (1906) and Historical Essays and Studies (1907), which were brought to light after his death. JOHN E.E. DALBERG ACTON (1834-1902), English scholar and historian, was denied entrance into Cambridge University because of his Roman Catholicism; he traveled to Munich, where he studied with Fr. Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger. In 1895, Acton was appointed Professor of Modern History at Cambridge where he was known for his lectures, his writings for periodicals, and his personal contacts with the leading historians of the era. His impressive personal library - consisting of more than 59,000 volumes - was acquired by financier Andrew Carnegie and donated to Cambridge.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent example of late 19th century historiography.......1997-09-18

Perhaps better known for the famous quote of how "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." This work by Lord Acton is an excellent example of Europe's finest late 19th century political/historical intellectual. Acton's assertions are often dated due to the age within which he lived, but his perceptive views are worth investigating. Unfortunately Acton never wrote a single full volume of history. All that we have from Acton are compilations of his lectures, essays, and smaller works. The above such title being an example. The most interesting essay for American readers is Acton's essay on the American Revolution. A well read novice will be able to understand Acton's thesis, though his language can be somewhat difficult at times. The most fascinating aspect of this essay is Acton's assertion that America will degenerate into a "barbarous" nation unless America's black population is segregated to another country. Acton did not live long enough to see America's burgeoning civil rights movements, and was obliged to see America from the standpoint of post-Reconstruction America. The only reason I graded this work short of "10" is due to the language. Besides being fluent in five languages, Acton was an awe inspiring intellectual, and sometimes his prose reflects his intellectualism, thereyby sacrificing some readability. John R. Grac

Selected Writings of Lord Acton: Essays in the Study and Writing of History Volume 2 (Selected Writings of Lord Acton)

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Selected Writings of Lord Acton: Essays in the Study and Writing of History Volume 2 (Selected Writings of Lord Acton)
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
Manufacturer: Liberty Fund
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Reference | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0865970491

Selected Writings of Lord Acton: Essays in the History of Liberty (Selected Writings of Lord Acton)

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Selected Writings of Lord Acton: Essays in the History of Liberty (Selected Writings of Lord Acton)
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
Manufacturer: Liberty Fund
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Historiography | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0865970475

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