Arts & Literature Books - Page 11

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

David Lynch

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 69 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Charming, if scattered 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book is a strange mix of super-short essays on life, art, film and transcendental meditation. It doesn't deliver tons of depth on any of those topics, and if you're a big Lynch fan, you've probably read many of the anecdotes before, but Lynch's quirkiness and folksy charm is always welcome. He pushes the transcendental meditation pretty hard, but it's obviously a big part of his life and very important to his creative proces. I'm a big David Lynch fan, so I enjoyed this book, though I'm not sure I got much out of it. If you're not a Lynch fan, this book may leave you just scratching your head.

Don't buy this book to learn TM 2 out of 5 stars.
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Don't buy this book if you are trying to learn TM.

This book is about how David Lynch came up with the ideas for his movies and TV shows. In the book, he also explains how he got into the movie business in the first place. This part was very interesting to me as he explains that his first career choice was that of an artist/painter.

Regarding TM, he says that he became interested in TM because his sister was doing it. So to learn TM, he went to a school and took lessons. From the time of his lessons forward, Lynch says he has practiced TM every day. He credits TM for increasing his level of creativity and allowing him to maintain a positive outlook about life.

Editorial Review:

In this rare work of public disclosure, filmmaker David Lynch describes his personal methods of capturing and working with ideas, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

Leading Couples (Turner Classic Movies)

Chronicle Books

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Leading Couples: A brief glance backward at the great movie teams from Hollywood's golden era 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Leading Couples is the third volume in the series dealing with luminaries of Hollywood's glitzy past. The first two volumes Leading Men and Leading Women were well received. The books are written by Fred Miller working in conjunction with film historians from Turner Classic Movies. TCM is the cable channel which runs uncut films from all eras of film history from silents to recent films.
The Introduction to the book is by TCM host Robert Osborne. He is a famed film critic and has written a huge book on the Oscars.
And now let the show begin...Leading Couples examines in a few pages devoted to each couple such famous pairs as: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; Bogie and Bacall; Fay Wrang and King Kong; Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn; John Gilbert and Greta Garbo; Marie Dressler and Wallace Berry; Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney; Clark Gable and Jean Harlow and also Gable and Vivein Leigh; Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler and several more. Note that these are all male and female couples. Famous all male comedy teams such as Laurel and Hardy are not covered.
Each couple is covered in this book by:
a. A short essay on each couple and why they are important in film history and popular culture.
b. Behind the Scenes-short anecdotes and factoids on the couple.
c. Essential Team-Ups-The most important movies made together by the couple during their careers are listed and briefly reviewed.
d. Basic Facts on each of the partners: Date of Birth, Height, Place of Birth, Star Sign and Marriage Partners.
e. Key Quotes from their films.
f. Several glossy black and white photos are included on each couple.
The book also includes a listing of each person profiled posting every movie in which they appeared. John Wayne made more movies than anyone else in the book!
One complaint is the print is too small! Many of the people who will want to read this book are elderly and such small print could be a problem. This is a light and fun read. Nothing profound but informative!

Editorial Review:

William Powell and Myrna Loy. Bogart and Bacall. Tracy and Hepburn. These on-screen (and sometimes off-screen) couples defined romantic chemistry and the art of falling in love. From Turner Classic Movies Leading Couples features the most unforgettable screen pairings of the studio era including actors and actresses with many film courtships and those who made their indelible mark in a single memorable movie. Engaging and thoroughly researched each profile includes trivia behind-the-scenes stories biographical overviews and memorable quotes illustrated by rare stills and poster art.

Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry

Donald Hall

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Donald Hall's remarkable life in poetry — a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 — comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir.

Hall's invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where he first realized poetry was "secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious," and ends with what he calls "the planet of antiquity," a time of life dramatically punctuated by his appointment as poet laureate of the United States.

Hall writes eloquently of the poetry and books that moved and formed him as a child and young man, and of adolescent efforts at poetry writing — an endeavor he wryly describes as more hormonal than artistic. His painful formative days at Exeter, where he was sent like a naive lamb to a high WASP academic slaughter, are followed by a poetic self-liberation of sorts at Harvard. Here he rubs elbows with Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Edward Gorey, and begins lifelong friendships with Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, and George Plimpton. After Harvard, Hall is off to Oxford, where the high spirits and rampant poetry careerism of the postwar university scene are brilliantly captured.

At eighty, Hall is as painstakingly honest about his failures and low points as a poet, writer, lover, and father as he is about his successes, making Unpacking the Boxes — his first book since being named poet laureate — both revelatory and tremendously poignant.

Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

Anne Lamott

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Should be titled "I Hate Bush and Other Thoughts" 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

For someone who seems to be very perceptive on human relations and seems to have a very close relationship with Jesus, this woman has a disproportionate and illogical hatred of Bush. Perhaps this comes from only having friends that think as she does. When she is writing about her son and her relatives, she is very good but the passages and one-liners about her Bush hatred are hard to get through. I suppose this sort of writing isi a hoot to her Salon readers but it will date the book quickly. When she writes about abortion she is doctrinaire and pedestrian.

Not what the description made it out to be.... 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I bought this in the airport on a long layover and threw it away 4 chapters in. What I thought would be a nice book about how everyone finds their own faith and grace, was sort of about faith, but I couldn't get past her political hatred.....who cares, this was supposed to be about finding grace, not how she hates George Bush. I found it too distracting, definitely not what I thought it would be.

Editorial Review:

"Lamott has chronicled her wacky and (sometimes) wild adventures in faith in...the wonderful Grace (Eventually)." (Chicago Sun- Times)

In Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, the author of the bestsellers Traveling Mercies and Plan B delivers a poignant, funny, and bittersweet primer of faith, as we come to discover what it means to be fully alive.

Life Among the Dead

Lisa Williams

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Total reviews: 61 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The highly anticipated memoir from the star of the hit series Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead

When Lisa Williams was four years old, she told her parents about the spirits in her bedroom. Since those first sightings, Lisa has seen and communicated with thousands of people who have passed over, listening to their stories and delivering messages of comfort to the loved ones they left behind.

In Life Among the Dead, Lisa invitesreaders into her extraordinary life, from her childhood in Birmingham, England, where her grandmother -- also a renowned psychic -- encouraged her to respect and nurture her talent, to her decision to move to Los Angeles, where her smash-hit Lifetime television show quickly made her one of the world's most beloved mediums. Lisa shares memories of her earliest psychic experiences and her gradual acceptance of her gift, and recalls many of the amazingly accurate communications she has shared with believersand skeptics alike. In her compassionate, down-to-earth style, she reveals exactly what it's like to live surrounded by spirits every day, and she recounts the joy she feels in bringing solace to those who have lost someone dear and the insights she has gleaned about spiritual phenomena,hauntings, psychic healing, and the afterlife.

Warm, witty, and surprising, Life Among the Dead is a wonderfully intimate account of Lisa's life as a medium, healer, wife, mom, and TV star who has already won the hearts of millions,a woman with an astonishing gift for seeing beyond the ordinary and into a mysterious and fascinating realm.

Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life

Wynton Marsalis, Geoffrey Ward

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Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> Musical Genres -> Jazz

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

“In this book I hope to reach a new audience with the positive message of America’s greatest music, to show how great musicians demonstrate on the bandstand a mutual respect and trust that can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life–from individual creativity and personal relationships to conducting business and understanding what it means to be American in the most modern sense.”
–Wynton Marsalis

In this beautiful book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musician and composer Wynton Marsalis explores jazz and how an understanding of it can lead to deeper, more original ways of being, living, and relating–for individuals, communities, and nations. Marsalis shows us how to listen to jazz, and through stories about his life and the lessons he has learned from other music greats, he reveals how the central ideas in jazz can influence the way people think and even how they behave with others, changing self, family, and community for the better. At the heart of jazz is the expression of personality and individuality, coupled with an ability to listen to and improvise with others. Jazz as an art–and as a way to move people and nations to higher ground–is at the core of this unique, illuminating, and inspiring book, a master class on jazz and life by a brilliant American artist.

Advance praise for Moving to Higher Ground

“An absolute joy to read. Intimate, knowledgeable, supremely worthy of its subject. In addition to demolishing mediocre, uniformed critics, Moving to Higher Ground is a meaningful contribution to music scholarship.”
–Toni Morrison

“I think it should be in every bookstore, music store, and school in the country.”
–Tony Bennett

“Jazz, for Wynton Marsalis, is nothing less than a search for wisdom. He thinks as forcefully, and as elegantly, as he swings. When he reflects on improvisation, his subject is freedom. When he reflects on harmony, his subject is diversity and conflict and peace. When he reflects on the blues, his subject is sorrow and the mastery of it–how to be happy without being blind. There is philosophy in Marsalis’s trumpet, and in this book. Here is the lucid and probing voice of an uncommonly soulful man.”
–Leon Wieseltier, literary editor, The New Republic

“Wynton Marsalis is absolutely the person who should write this book. Here he is, as young as morning, as fresh as dew, and already called one of the jazz greats. He is not only a seer and an exemplary musician, but a poet as well. He informs us that jazz was created, among other things, to expose the hypocrisy and absurdity of racism and other ignorances in our country. Poetry was given to human beings for the same reason. This book could be called “How Love Can Change Your Life,” for there could be no jazz without love. By love, of course, I do not mean mush, or sentimentality. Love can only exist with courage, and this book could not be written without Wynton Marsalis’s courage. He has the courage to make powerful music and to love the music so, that he willingly shares its riches with the entire human family. We are indebted to him.”
–Maya Angelou


From the Hardcover edition.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (P.S.)

Simon Winchester

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 413 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Psychological thriller that can't be put down 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Absent the anti-Christian bias of his geological disaster books, Winchester writes a very good tale about a fascinating sidebar of history during the compilation of the OED. The madman was an American military surgeon (son of missionaries to Sri Lanka!) who served in the Union army during the Civil War, whose slow spiral to insanity culminated in the shooting of an innocent man in London 15 years later. The professor was the editor of the OED who corresponded with the madman for 20 years at the asylum outside London where he made a full-time career of volunteering word lists and quotes to the OED editorial team.

How their histories shadowed and paths crossed, and how the OED came to be, make for a great story. The book was lavishly praised and worthily so, reading like a psychological thriller that can't be put down. I literally read through this in less than 24 hours in just a few sittings.

Editorial Review:

The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED began in 1857, it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

Tom Farley, Tanner Colby

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Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A biography of the Saturday Night Live star as told by his friends and family

No one dominated a stage the way Chris Farley did. For him, comedy was not a routine; it was a way of life. He could not enter a room unnoticed or let a conversation go without making someone laugh. Fans knew Chris as Saturday Night Live’s sweaty, swaggering, motivational speaker; as the irresistible Chippendales stripper; and as Tommy Callahan, the underdog hero of Tommy Boy. His family knew him as sensitive and passionate, deeply religious, and devoted to bringing laughter into others’ lives.

But Chris did not know moderation, either in his boundless generosity toward friends or in the reckless abandon of his drug and alcohol abuse. For ten years, Chris cycled in and out of rehabilitation centers, constantly fighting his insecurities and his fears. Despite three hard-fought years of sobriety, addiction would ultimately take his life at the tragically young age of thirty-three. Fame on SNL and three straight number-one box office hits gave way to a string of embarrassing public appearances, followed by a fatal overdose in December 1997.

Here is Chris Farley as remembered by his family, friends, and colleagues—the true story of a man who lived to make us laugh and died as a result. The Chris Farley Show is an evocative and harrowing portrait of a family trapped by addiction, a father forced to bury a son, and a gifted and kindhearted man ultimately torn apart by the demons inside him.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

Bill Bryson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 210 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From one of the most beloved and bestselling authors in the English language, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s

Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century—1951—in the middle of the United States—Des Moines, Iowa—in the middle of the largest generation in American history—the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)—in his head—as "The Thunderbolt Kid."

Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality—a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and OF his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson’s earlier classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends.

Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young.

Chronicles: Volume One (Chronicles)

Bob Dylan

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Total reviews: 273 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"I'd come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else."

Bob Dylan's Chronicle: Volume One explores the critical junctions in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities -- smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

Revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.