Customer Reviews (2)

Bring it back!
As far as I know this book is no longer in print. That is a crime. How can a publisher be convinced to reprint this, either in hard or soft cover? With all of the books in print on playwriting, Gibson's book stands out head and shoulders above the rest. I use this all the time in the theatre where I work with new playwrights and I use it in classes I teach. I recommend it all the time in the hopes that one day renewed interest might get this fine work in print again.

Great Plot-Writing Manual
It's a crime that this book is out of print. This is the best plot-writing book I have discovered. Although the topic is play-writing, the lessons apply to fiction-plotting as well. Gibson dissects parts of 8 or 10 Shakespeare plays, showing in detail how the Bard achieved some of his most striking dramatic effects. I read numerous writing-guides while working on my novel "Direct Action," and this was far and away the best for building a coherent plot. -- Luke Hauser ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great novel
Thank you for the quick shipment!The novel is in great condition and will be a nice edition to my library.

Different cover
The item is ok, but cover is different from the one you can see on item page (old style cover). There is also user provided image, which is real.
I could buy this book in local bookstore, but I chose this one because i thought it has old style cover. It doesn't. ... Read more

Product Description
Expanded to over 1100 photographs, this comprehensivesecond edition contains more than 185 new images, current and accuratemarket values, pictures with the prices on each page, and every printidentified to date.The author, Patricia Gibson, brings you the mostcomplete and informative reference available anywhere.Owning thelargest collection of R. Atkinson Fox in the world, she is widelyconsidered to be the expert in dealings with these artists' works. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

R. Atkinson Fox & William M. Thompson : Identification & Price Guide 2nd Edition
Good book.Was looking for info on a print that was my grandmother's.Found it in this book.

Before you buy this...
You need to know that there are NO color pictures in this guide. This book has small b&w photos of what must be nearly all of R.A. Fox's prints with a price guide. It's great to know all the names of the pictures that I have, and the one's that I've seen that I would like to have. However, this book is better for someone with better eyes than I have. For me, the b&w photos are too small to distinguish much of the detail. ... Read more

Product Description
This illuminating biography introduces an authentic American sports hero and recaptures the mood and style. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Really against the grain with this review
All six reviews for this book are 5 star so I am really against the grain here but I thought this book was kind of a waste of time. It was roughly 200 pages and really I would only say that 50 pages of it were actually devoted to Josh Gibson. The final third of the book was dedicated to other Negro Leaguers. Much of the rest of the book was about society as a whole and the negro leagues.

There wasn't a ton of information about Josh Gibson. That may be because there isn't a lot of info out there on him. Stats are hard to come by and he lived a short life. Maybe there just isn't much of a story to tell. That might explain my disappointment with the book. I probably would feel like I could give it a better review if it would have had a different title or perhaps a subtitle that explained the book's true content.

Not saying the book wasn't well written or well researched... I think it is well written. The author clearly writes at a level that is interesting and moves you through the book quickly and it is a short book with not a lot of detail.

My big beef and this is why I would give it a poor rating. It just didn't focus on Josh Gibson. It focuses more on the negro leagues as a whole. A different title and a better understanding of the book's subject matter with a good intro or a subtitle would clear up the issue in my mind.

A Tragic Figure, A Tragic Story
It's the great chicken/egg debate, was Josh Gibson the black Babe Ruth or was Babe Ruth the white Josh Gibson.Thanks to narrow minded thinking we'll never really know.
Josh Gibson was a man driven by deamons, the tragic death of his wife made him incapable of letting his emotions go. So he gave his children over into the care of other family members and threw himself into baseball, drugs, and alcohol.Records were kept sloppily back then and are scarce today, but it is believed that he hit approximately 800 home runs during his career.In the end his family couldn't afford a grave marker and for years his body was in an unmarked grave until Major League Baseball paid for one.
A sad chapter in our history. We can only guess what might have been.

One of the greatest baseball players of all time
Josh Gibson was a great baseball player in the 30s and 40s in the Negro Leagues.This book chronicles his baseball career, as well as the life in the Negro Leagues and playing in Latin America during the winter months and some summers as well.William Brashler does a fine job writing about Gibson's passion for the game, to the point that I feel like I know him as well as any current major leaguers.In addition, Brashler explains in detail what life was like for Negro League players; the horrible way they were treated in many places in the south; the winter months that they played in places like Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba and other Latin/South American countries.There are also separate short chapters on Cool Papa Bell, Jimmie Crutchfield and Sammy Bankhead, as well as plenty of interesting information on Satchel Paige.I'm glad I had a chance to read about the great Josh Gibson and the Negro Leagues.I believe anyone interested in baseball history would appreciate this book.

The Best Hitter of His Era
Beginning in 1930 with his debut with the Homestead Grays and extending through a career which featured several years with the Pittsburgh Crawfords and stints with various winter league teams in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, Josh Gibson was quite simply the greatest hitter of his era.While he is often referred to as the black Babe Ruth, the black press and fans of the Negro Leagues during the 1930's called Ruth the white Josh Gibson.Though records are sketchy, Gibson is reported to have hit as many as 70 homeruns in a single season and it can safely be assumed that he hit more than 800 round trippers in his career.There are stories indicating that Gibson actually hit a homerun completely out of Yankee Stadium, a feat no major leaguer has accomplished, and although Brashler's research disputes this claim, there are countless other tales of tape-measure blasts.There was a 525-foot homerun that landed in a Puerto Rico prison, a one-handed homerun in Indianapolis, and a doubtful claim of a 700-foot blast out of Chicago's Wrigley Field.Whether or not the stories are believed, the overall perception cannot be ignored.As the most imposing hitter of the 1930's and 40's, Josh Gibson was larger than life.He was posthumously inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame in 1972.

Most baseball fans are familiar with the legend of Josh Gibson, but Brashler brings readers behind the stories of one of the greatest hitters of all-time.Along with the glory accorded a player of such talent, there were disappointments as well.The death of his first wife and the subsequent abandonment of his children haunted Gibson throughout his playing career, and he often felt overshadowed by the showmanship of Satchel Paige.These concerns, combined with the disappointment of not being able to play in the major leagues, likely led him to alcohol when his body began to break down late in his career.When he died in 1947 at the age of thirty-five, months after Jackie Robinson broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Gibson was buried in an unmarked grave.His family couldn't afford a gravestone.

Brashler's biography of Gibson is complete and honest in its approach to Gibson's character and accomplishments.In addition to Gibson, he briefly profiles his peers, men like Satchel Paige, Oscar Peterson, Judy Johnson, Jimmy Crutchfield, Cool Papa Bell, and others.There can be no discussion of the Negro Leagues without comment on the discrimination which made them necessary, but Brashler avoids the trap of becoming overly sentimental, focusing instead on the facts.For a more complete picture of the players and teams mentioned by Brashler, try Only the Ball Was White, Robert Peterson's comprehensive history of the Negro Leagues.

Best book on baseball I've ever read
This is among the very best books I have ever read.Easily the best biography and the best book on baseball (of which I have read a lot).Brashler's account of Gibson's life and the Negro Leagues engrosses you like a great novel.I could not recommend it more highly. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Converging details
Idoru follows the stories of 14 year old Chia, who has been sent to Japan by her chapter of the Lo Rez fan club to investigate a marriage rumor, and of Laney, whose ADD allows him to focus focus and spot patterns that show more probable outcomes and who has been hired to focus focus on the marriage rumor.Their stories converge around the rumor that rock star Rez plans to marry Rei Toei, an idoru or machine generated character.

Chia quickly becomes mixed up in some type of smuggling operation when she carries a bag through customs for someone.She tries hard to find out as little as possible what is being smuggled.As she tries to find out whatever she can about Rez's intention to marry, she realizes that someone is looking for her and is soon much more interested in safely evading the smugglers.

Laney's story contains many flashbacks that show his motivations.Because he can spot patterns in reams of data about a person, he once realized that someone he was analyzing as part of his job was going to commit suicide.His attempts to get into a cleaner type of analysis motivate most of his actions.

A big positive was the way the stories came together.Although Rei Toei is only background most of the time, she appears and when she does she seems to have been doing more along the way.Little details fall into place, maybe something like details falling together for one of Laney's "nodal points."It is also nice that most of the characters are fleshed out.

A negative was that this book dragged and only got going for me near the end.I'm not such a fan of Gibson's writing style, so if you like his style, then this may not be a problem for you. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Really Fast Shipping,Rather Expensive Shipping
Really fast Shipping but rather expensive shipping.The book was in decent condition for being used. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

A wonderful play!
I saw this play produced many years ago, and it still stays with me. It's a sweet story, but with a bittersweet ending. Very funny in a lot of places, it speaks ultimately of the sacrificial love of God in Christ, particularly through the titular angel. Highly recommended! ... Read more

Product Description
American Whiskey Bar is the story of the making of the film of the same name, and includes the entire original screenplay. The book, is an attempt to set the record straight – a story of sex, violence, lies, ambition, power, paradox, dreams, and regret. Consider yourself warned. When first published in 1997, American Whiskey Bar elicited rave reviews for its anti-aesthetic, postmodern ideas of what constitutes a novel.

This new edition features a foreword by William Gibson. ... Read more

Product Description
The Red Badge of Courage And Selected Prose and Poetry ... Read more

Product Description
Stelarc is the most celebrated artist in the world working within technology and the visual arts. He is both an artist and a phenomenon, using his body as medium and exhibition space. Working in the interface between the body and the machine, he employs virtual reality, robotics, medical instruments, prosthetics, the Internet, and biotechnology. Stelarc's art includes physical acts that don't always look survivable—or, as science fiction novelist William Gibson puts it in his foreword, "sometimes seem to include the possibility of terminality."

Although there have been hundreds of articles written about Stelarc since he began performing in the late 1960s, Stelarc: The Monograph is the first comprehensive study of Stelarc's work practice in over thirty years. Gathering a range of writers who approach the work from a variety of perspectives, it includes William Gibson's account of his meetings with Stelarc, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker's emphatic "We Are All Stelarcs Now," and Stelarc himself in conversation with Marquard Smith. Taken together, these writers give us a multiplicity of ways to think about Stelarc. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

glittering vision of a transhumanist future
In the early 80s, I brought Stelarc to speak at Caltech. He showed up with a mechanical third arm and a collection of slides. He proceeded to declaim at length about his previous art performances throughout the world, and his vision of what his performances were meant to convey to a lay audience. Then, I recently ran across this book, with a foreword by William Gibson, no less.

It is a collection of essays by various intellectuals, revolving around analysing Stelarc. His worldview is presented. A different approach from that epitomised in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kapek's RUR, Saberhagen's Berserkers or the Terminator movies. Those echo the fear of a machine, born of man, that turns against humans. Instead, Stelarc's view is much cheerier. He is a performance artist, whose exhibitions are physical metaphors that suggest a peaceful evolution of humans, where we incorporate technological items into or perhaps on or around our bodies. He draws a distinction between Darwinian evolution, where obsolescence can mean extinction. Instead, any differences between us and machines are elided, as we absorb what they can offer, to exhance and extend our capabilities.

To some this is repulsive. To others, it is a glittering vision of a transhumanist future. Where we can someday (soon?) overcome the limitations of frail flesh. The book has echoes of views espoused by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. Though it does not go so far as to posit a technological singularity in the near future.

The photos in the book show Stelarc's remarkable talent. He has exhibited in Tokyo, Copenhagen, London and many other places since the 1980s. In many of the photos, he is naked, but adorned with some strange electromechanical gizmo, that has some type of feedback with his body. (When he spoke at Caltech, he was fully clothed.) Other photos show him dangling by many fish hooks through his skin. In one instance, one storey above a city street.

At least one chapter comments on the irony of his exhibitions. While he speaks of a metaphor of transcending the human form, his very nakedness starkly emphasises that form.

Of course, when he first did his exhibitions, all he could provide were rough metaphors. Limited by the crude mechanical devices of the time. But as microminiturisation proceeds, and as genetic engineering takes on more of an engineering aspect, all coupled with a world wide web, then he looks prescient. ... Read more

Product Description
Based on the short story and screenplay by cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic takes readers into a desperate future where information is all that matters and everything else is cheap. Now a major motion picture starring Keanu Reeves. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

pretty good for a movie book
This movie sort of started a cyberpunk trend
and has become an historical document.
The book expands on the short story like many of Philip K. Dick stories became movies
in the past:Blade Runner.
Hacking and the web have since become household words.
The movie and book are both sort of fantastic plastic in the future...

Bad. Really, really bad.
I'm generally a fan of Terry Bisson's work, especially his short stories ("Bears Discover Fire" is great), but this novel-based-on-a-movie-based-on-a-short-story is just embarrassing. The film was a mostly incoherent rendering of William Gibson's very good story (even though Gibson himself wrote the screenplay); I suspect Bill's stuff just doesn't translate well to the screen. This novelization (why bother?) has all the film's confusion and none of Gibson's trademark style and atmosphere. Worse, Bisson throws in some minor bits and pieces of his own invention. I couldn't get more than one-third into this before quitting in annoyance.

BRILLIANT ADAPTATION
When viewing the film, I always thought that Johnny Mnemonic could have been more. The script laid out a world as amazing and dark as BLADE RUNNER, but the film itself was a cheap piece of trash.

With Terry Bisson'snovelization, we can see the world missing from the film. Wonderfulcharacters. Gritty surroundings. Cyberspace.

Bisson's prose is as rich asthat of cyber-guru William Gibson (who wrote the screenplay). He evenborrows a few frazes and slangs from Gibsons other works.

Don't see themovie, it'll be a waste of your time. But this book just might teach yousomthing. ... Read more

Product Description
The sold out off-Broadway smash has moved to Broadway! The rise of Golda Meir from impoverished Russian schoolgirl to Prime Minister of Israel is one of the most amazing stories of the 20th century. Now her life has been transformed into a one-woman play of overwhelming power and triumph by William Gibson, author of The Miracle Worker. Golda's Balcony earned actress Tovah Feldshuh a 2003 Drama Desk award."Enlightening ... Now, hearing from someone who was there at the birth of the country, who sacrificed to make that happen, helps remind us where the Middle East standoff came from and why it never seems to end."- The New York Times"A valentine to the famously tough prime minister."- New York Post ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

tour de force
This is the script, a written form of performance art. It's a brilliant imagining of a central figure in world politics and it reads powerfully, even without an actress' face and voice to fill it out. It's superb theater with considerable nuance and sensitivity. It may be one side of a very great quarrel, but it is a worthy spokesperson for that side.

Powerful one-person theater, and on the page, it speaks for itself, without staging or an actress to re-interpret it. This kind of a performance has to succeed on the strength of its own words (as with, for instance, the one-man plays about Mark Twain or Harry Truman), and here it does indeed succeed.

Excellent!
I didn't read the book, but I saw the play with Valerie Harper as Golda.Just outstanding!Unbelievable how one person can perform with that kind of range of emotions nonstop for 95 minutes.
And it kills so many myths at the same time:It kills myths how things were in "British Palestine" in the 20's when Golda Meir came from Milwaukee, WI.How the actual signing of the Declaration of Independence happened, the trip she made to King Abdullah of Trans Jordan 2 weeks before the signing to avoid war, the 56 war, the 67 war, the attempt to retire, which she did after the 67 war, and how she was drawn back into politics and of course elected Prime Minister and led Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war.The bulk of the show centers around that war and how frustrating it was for her to have to dealwith the lame ducks Kissinger and Nixon (this was less than 1 year before Nixon resigned because of Watergate), and how they made the war longer than necessary.The way Valerie Harper imitated Kissinger's voice, the slow drawl of Mr. Kissinger and his stupid, stupid remarks.

If you have a chance to see this show, please do!You won't regret it.It is so enriching! ... Read more

Product Description
William Gibson (b 1948), since the publication of his first, award-winning novel, "Neuromancer" (1984), has been celebrated as a breath of fresh air in the realm of science fiction. This anthology of essays is an attempt to analyze Gibsons literary technique, his sustained critique of emerging technologies, and the way in which fiction writing in general is continually categorized and canonized in the Postmodern Age. ... Read more

Product Description
The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.
Medical theory and practice of the 1700s developed rapidly, as is evidenced by the extensive collection, which includes descriptions of diseases, their conditions, and treatments. Books on science and technology, agriculture, military technology, natural philosophy, even cookbooks, are all contained here.
++++
The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification:
++++
British Library

T094737

With index.

London : printed for A. Millar, 1751. [12],464,[12]p. XXXI plates ; 4° ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

accounting history
who made accounting. way he made accounting. wear he made accounting. when he made accounting. how he made accounting. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of William Gibson, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2533 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author