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Archons And Templars (Vampire The Masquerade)

jrduarte — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:50:00 GMT

Archons and Templars provides the philosophies and practices of the Camarilla Archons and Sabbat Templars. This a good book for players who want to create the frontline troops of the sects. The new powers are neat and the background information is good, but this book isn't really necessary for experienced players or storytellers. It is not a bad book, but it doesn't really introduce any new concepts to the game. It is good if you want more information regarding the soldiers of the eternal war and feel that the descriptions in the Guides to the Camarilla, Sabbat, and the main sourcebook are not enough.

Sin City Volume 6: Booze, Broads, & Bullets (Frank Miller)

jrduarte — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 20:48:00 GMT

Can anything be darker than noir? Try Frank Miller's Sin City series. The tasty Hell and Back features Wallace, a brooding artist with a decided talent for hurting people, and Esther, a stunningly beautiful actress accidentally mixed up in a slavery ring that extends far and deep enough to transcend the word conspiracy. The tale twists, turns, and backtracks, teasing the reader with hints of terror to come--until the explosive climax. Miller's art is exactly right for his words; he uses more black than white, and color only when appropriate. The chapter dealing with Wallace's drug hallucinations is beautiful, heartbreaking, and terrifying in turn. Readers interested in the human dark side should find out what fans of Sin City already know: Frank Miller has seen it and wants to share.

Sin City Volume 7: Hell and Back (Frank Miller)

jrduarte — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 20:08:00 GMT

Sin City Volume 5: Family Values (Frank Miller)

jrduarte — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:59:00 GMT

Marking a departure for Miller from an entire career of serialized stories, this 128-page epic spilled out of him all at once... and you can't help but read it the same way! Family Values is a milestone among Miller's work, allowing him enough room to tell this classic story of grit and revenge exactly the way he wanted to. With deadly Miho running on roller-blades, Dwight running on adrenaline, and the Sin City mob on clean-up detail, this yarn from the Town Without Pity is not to be missed.

Sin City Volume 4: The Yellow Bastard (Frank Miller)

jrduarte — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:53:00 GMT

In a Sin City short story, "The Babe Wore Red," Frank Miller deviated from his stark black-and-white artwork by adding tiny bits of color throughout the story. The girl's dress was red, her lips were red--you get the picture. In That Yellow Bastard, the fourth Sin City graphic novel, Miller's experiment with yellow ink is also a tremendous success. The setup is simple. On the last day before he retires, Hartigan, an old cop, gets a call about an 11-year-old girl who has been kidnapped by a lunatic. Hartigan has got just one more thing to do before he retires: save the girl. Saving her is the easy part, because Hartigan has uncovered something really bad that is not going to stop until it catches up with him. That Yellow Bastard is nerve-racking to the very end. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Sin City Volume 3: The Big Fat Kill (Frank Miller)

jrduarte — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:37:00 GMT

With The Big Fat Kill Frank Miller is at it again with another comics packed with guns, lovers, losers, and surprises. In Sin City's Old Town, the prostitutes run the show. "The cops stay out. That leaves the girls free to keep the pimps and the mob out." Sounds like an OK place, right? It is until a pushy, loud-mouthed guy who has had one too many drinks comes into Old Town and gets himself killed by the ladies. When they find out who he is, they realize that "it'll be war. The streets will run red with blood. Women's blood." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Sin City Volume 1: The Hard Goodbye (Frank Miller)

jrduarte — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:29:00 GMT

Sin City launched the long-running, critically acclaimed series of comics novels by Frank Miller. Having worked on some of the most important comic books in the 1980s, including Marvel Comics's Daredevil and the influential Batman graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, Miller was already a heavy-weight cartoonist, but he hit his stride with Sin City. It gave him the freedom that doesn't come when working on someone else's characters. While the art isn't as polished as in later books, it is in many ways the quintessential Sin City story: tough-guy Marv finds the girl of his dreams, an incredible beauty named Goldie. But when Goldie is murdered on their first night together, Marv scours the bars and back alleys of Sin City to find her killer in hopes of avenging her death.

Sin City Volume 2: A Dame to Kill For (Frank Miller)

jrduarte — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:15:00 GMT

Because of a shocking ending to the first Sin City book, many people wondered how successful Frank Miller could be with future tales of his no-holds-barred city noir. Enter Dwight McCarthy, a clean-living photographer who tries to avoid trouble because he knows what he's capable of. His tactics don't do him much good when a girl from his past (who he can't say no to) shows up and professes her love for him. When he finds out she's in way over her head, it looks as though trouble has found him. What's going to happen? You guessed it: people get hurt.

Enki Bilal - The Dormant Beast

jrduarte — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:25:00 GMT

This haunting, open-ended story of a future society reeling from terrorist violence turns the stuff of ugly current events into extraordinary art. Nike Hatzfield was born in Yugoslavia (like Bilal himself), during the siege of Sarajevo. Nike has perfect recall and can remember everything that has happened to him since he was orphaned as a baby. Because of this talent he's become the target of The Obsurantis Order, a kind of pan-fundamentalist (Judaism, Christianity and Islam team up) terrorist group dedicated to eradicating "thought, science, culture and memory."

Enki Bilal - Hunting Party

jrduarte — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:57:00 GMT

A group of old men gathers on an estate in Poland for a hunting party. It's the early 1980s...the Warsaw Pact is still in existence, but cracks are starting to appear. The men in the hunting party are highly influential members of each of the various countries' communist parties. A young French communist acts as translator, and he slowly discovers the story of each of these men, how their idealism eroded, how the Soviet Union loomed over them and their countries...
It's a fantastic story, outstanding writing by Pierre Christin and Enki Bilal's artwork is just extraordinary. Bilal uses color schemes as symbols, it took me awhile to catch on. See if you can figure out what his use of the colors red and yellow symbolizes. But this wonderful, tragic story that ends on a strangely prophetic optimistic note, and get a painless education in how the countries in Eastern Europe after WW2 learned to hate/love
the Soviet Union.

Enki Bilal - The Town that Didn't Exist

jrduarte — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:42:00 GMT

Christin, a French novelist, and Bilal ( Exterminator 17 ) have produced a story of class conflict transformed by a benevolent mistress and visionary technology. The tale is set in a decaying French industrial hamlet called Jadencourt. As the town's corporate patriarch lies dying, the workers in his factories go on strike and the managers and executives from his global conglomerate gather to await his death and claim control of the huge empire. But the mogul's sole heir, an invalid daughter, surprises everyone: she buys out her executive rivals and confronts the town and union leaders with a fantastic scheme to use the corporation's immense wealth to build a new Jadencourt. The reborn city, completely domed in plastic, is designed to provide for every inhabitant. Bilal's drawings, as always, are impressively rendered, his color muted and melancholic. Despite its labored pace and sometimes predictable characterizations, this work documents the provincial working classes while highlighting the disillusion and social vacuity inherent in utopian schemes.

Enki Bilal - The Nikopol Trilogy

jrduarte — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:37:00 GMT

The Nikopol Trilogy brings together three previously published volumes Carnival of Mortals, Woman Trap and Cold Equator all impressive works of imagination meticulously written, drawn and colored by European comics artist Bilal. It's the year 2023 and Alcide Nikopol has been revived from a state of suspended animation after 30 years orbiting Earth. In the meantime, the planet has suffered two nuclear wars, and France is ruled by the ruthless dictator J.F. Choublanc. The immortal gods of Egyptian antiquity have also reawakened to revive their rule over humanity, and they now hover above the crumbling technopolis of Paris in a massive stone pyramid/airship. Horus, the renegade falcon god, takes possession of Nikopol's body, rendering him immortal, and concocts a conspiracy to overthrow the Choublanc regime. When Nikopol cracks under the pressure of Horus's possession, he is reduced to muttering the poetry of Baudelaire while he wanders the halls of a mental hospital. "Woman Trap" picks up two years later in a war-torn London. Blue-haired news correspondent Jill Bioskop dispatches stories 30 years into the past using a device called a scriptwriter, while she takes pills to eradicate the bloody memories of men she has murdered. In "Cold Equator" the story is further complicated as Nikopol's son boards a train bound for Equator City, an African metropolis afflicted with a freezing micro-climate of minus-six degrees, but surrounded by desert and surrealistically populated by sub-Saharan wildlife. Intricate plot twists and stunning color artwork mark this work as both an extraordinary comics literary achievement and a crackling good story.

Ulysses Annotated: Revised and Expanded Edition

jrduarte — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:14:00 GMT

Here substantially revised and expanded, Don Gifford's annotations to James Joyce's great modern classic comprise a specialized encyclopedia that will inform any reading of Ulysses. Annotations in this edition are keyed both to the reading text of the new critical edition of Ulysses published in 1984 and to the standard 1961 Random House edition and the current Modern Library and Vintage texts. Gifford has incorporated over 1,000 additions and corrections to the first edition. The introduction and headnotes to sections provide general geographical, biographical and historical background. The annotations gloss place names, define slang terms, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, trace literary allusions and references to other cultures. The suggestive potential of minor details was enormously fascinating to Joyce, and the precision of his use of detail is a most important aspect of his literary method. The annotations in this volume illuminate details which are not in the public realm for most of us.

James Joyce Works

jrduarte — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:02:00 GMT

James Joyce Selected Works
Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as an Young Man

Leonardo da Vinci - Most Important Paintings

jrduarte — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:50:00 GMT

Leonardo Da Vinci - Most importants paintings
Full Color | Excellent Work | Rapidshare | PDF | 22 MB

Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created.

Companion Encyclopedia of Geography: From the Local to the Global

jrduarte — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:22:00 GMT

This revised edition takes the theme of place as the unifying principle for a full account of the discipline at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The work comprises 64 substantial essays addressing human and physical geography, and exploring their inter-relations. The encyclopedia does full justice to the enormous growth of social and cultural geography in recent years. Leading international academics from ten countries and four continents have contributed, ensuring that differing traditions in geography around the world are represented. In addition to references, the essays also have recommendations for further reading. As with the original work, the new "Companion Encyclopedia of Geography" provides a state-of-the-art survey of the discipline and is an indispensable addition to the reference shelves of libraries supporting research and teaching in geography.

Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (worths US$ 190)

jrduarte — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:11:00 GMT

"The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film" is the first comprehensive volume to explore the main themes, topics, thinkers and issues in philosophy and film. The "Companion" features sixty specially commissioned chapters from international scholars and is divided into four clear parts: issues and concepts; authors and trends; genres; and, film as philosophy.Part one is a comprehensive section examining key concepts, including chapters on acting, censorship, character, depiction, ethics, genre, interpretation, narrative, reception and spectatorship and style. Part two covers authors and scholars of film and significant theories Part three examines genres such as documentary, experimental cinema, horror, comedy and tragedy. Part four includes chapters on key directors such as Tarkovsky, Bergman and Terrence Malick and on particular films including "Memento". Each chapter includes a section of annotated further reading and is cross-referenced to related entries. "The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film" is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy of film, aesthetics and film and cinema studies.

Biblical Hebrew: A Text and Workbook

jrduarte — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:17:00 GMT

A textbook for a two-semester course. Each of 55 lessons is built around a biblical verse or segment that generates the grammatical concepts to be taught.

A History of American Literature - Blackwell History of Literature

jrduarte — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:57:00 GMT

"Richard Gray's real achievement is somehow to have compressed more than 400 years of thrillingly rich literary history between two covers." Literary Review "Highly readable, jargon-free, and engaging." American Literary Scholarship "This book is the first comprehensive, single volume history of American literature since The Columbia Literary History of the United States edited by Elliott Emory and published sixteen years ago. It is a puzzle, given the extraordinary interest in American literature at home and abroad, that so few full histories of American literature have been published. Consider the fact that the Columbia history arrived nearly four decades after R. E. Spiller's Literary History of the United States. What makes Gray's book so extraordinary is that it supercedes the Spiller and Emory texts in nearly every respect, and even challenges the supremacy of the titanic (this pun is intentional), multi-volume, still-evolving Cambridge History of American Literature. How Gray managed to so captivatingly capture the depth and breadth of so complex a literature in under a thousand pages is worth considering. [...] Richard Gray possesses the most balanced scholarship of the entire range of American literature I ever read. [...] This is the first history of American literature fully worthy of the multi-dimensionality of its subject." Norman Weinstein, Boise State University --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet

jrduarte — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:54:00 GMT

Written with a simple, elegant, and com(passionate) prose, Rainer Maria Rilke pens a series of letters to a young aspiring poet, Franz Xaver Kappus that contain a stunningly beautiful argument and plea for living an authentic life, that addresses the silent questions that exist in the deepest chambers of our hearts, the grand themes of literature, and hence life: the meaning of solitude and how to love.

The first letter gives the greatest advice anyone can give to someone aspiring to be anything. You have to ask yourself the following question: "must I?" If you answer in the affirmative, then "build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into it's humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse." That you must only judge Art by the following value, has it arisen out of necessity?

The second letter, he warns against the role of irony running through your life and one must guard against it by searching "into the depths of Things: there irony never descends."