Paris 360 Review

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(More customer reviews)Even if you've never been to Paris, you'll still appreciate the photography in this book. If you have been there you'll also find that the book paints a beautiful portrait of the city. I bought a copy for my wife's birthday and she keeps it in the livingroom near our photo albums. We'll look at our own photos when we want to see how Paris was during the brief time that we were there, and we'll look at this book when we want to think of Paris at its dreamlike romantic best.

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Paris 360 is the fourth in a series of large-scale photographic records of the great cities of the world, following New York, Venice, and Rome.Each of these cities has unique appeal, Paris personifying sophisticated glamour in an unspoiledand manageable city space.The wide boulevards, well-tended gardens, and landmark buildings are not crowded by skyscrapers, and a continuing commitment to public works and interesting architectural projects creates an ever-changing civic personality.The large format and pull-out panoramas of Paris 360 allowed the photographer Attilio Boccazzi-Varotto a series of broad canvases on which to capture the essence of this wonderful city.Using his rotating camera, Boccazzi-Varotto took panoramic pictures of Paris's neighborhoods, great buildings, squares, and streets.A list of the photographs' subjects reads like a must-see tour of Paris:the Louvre, the palace Vendome, Le Marais, the Opera, the Hotel de Ville, Les Halles, the Pompidou Center, the place des Vosges, and more.Some of the photographs have been taken from an unusual perspective to provide a fresh view of a familiar scene, like a street in Montmartre or the Eiffel Tower.The time of the pictures is varied: The sparkling freshness of I.M. Pei's pyramids at the Louvre and the basilica of Sacre Coeur are shown by night, the Seine by the Ile de la Cite at twilight.Each photograph is accompanied by an explanatory caption that identifies the landmarks pictured and gives some of their historical and artistic context.Paris remains one of the most popular European destinations for American visitors, and this volume, an extravagant treasure, is a perfect memento to remember it by.

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Free From Restraint: From Whence We Came... Review

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(More customer reviews)I read the book and visualized it in my head as if watching a movie. If you liked the DaVinci Code, you'll like "Free From Restraint" From Whence We Came.
Many lives taken at sea,rowers dripping with sweat, tales told at low breath from one to another.....Blood, Sweat & Tears.
A book worth reading!

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Now in print... A prequel to The Da Vinci Code...A story told at low breath from mouth to ear for seven hundred years.

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Writing Degree Zero Review

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(More customer reviews)*Writing Degree Zero* is one of those 100-page books you need a 500-page book to really understand. You know you're in trouble when, like me, you find yourself having a problem fully comprehending even the `explanatory' preface. In which, by the way, Susan Sontag warns of the difficulty of the text and states that *Writing Degree Zero* serves as a kind of précis of Barthes' early views that presupposes the reader's familiarity with the literary argument of the time, specifically as it was presented in Sartre's book on the subject *What is Literature?*
That all said, there was still much that I found of interest in this slim volume. The main thrust of the argument seems to be the `impossible' dilemma inherent in the act of writing. And, by `writing,' we mean here the act at its highest level of intent. How, for instance, can the writer compose an authentic text when the very tools he's forced to use--the conventions of language and Literature--are those that belong to a tradition he had no part in choosing, let alone creating? How can he write a text socially and historically engaged in the present when this tradition is handed to him from the past? How can he avoid slipping into cliché, commercialism, and sloganistic propaganda, all pitfalls of the present, and yet still make himself understood and relevant to his time?
Barthes makes much of the distinction between speaking and writing, the former more genuine than the latter in his view, inasmuch as speech is less bound by `Order,' which is, by its very nature, always closed and authoritarian. Yet all attempts to convert the idiosyncratic, free-form rhythms and authenticity of speech into text ((as in the works of Celine)) remains, in the final analysis, when written, artifice.
What's a writer to do? Barthes advances the notion of `modes of writing,' a conscious attempt on the part of the writer to approach the act of writing by first choosing from among various strategies of presentation. He also speaks of a `neutral' manner of writing, `degree zero,' but he's quick to point out that this can also degenerate into a mere mannerism and, in its turn, become just another literary convention to escape. It seems to me that Barthes is saying that a writer is trapped, like a rat in a box, condemned to chasing its own tail. Perhaps the only possible escape is for a writer to constantly switch `modes of writing,' to invent new ones for every utterance? Well, that's my own solution, but if Barthes thought it were as simple as that, you'd think he would have said so, right?
Besides, what do I know? I think I was practically making up my own theories as I went along in trying to understand what I was reading.
Abbreviated, dense, and elusive as it might be, as intellectually handicapped as I might be, *Writing Degree Zero* is so full of intriguing insights and lines of thought that even understanding maybe one-third of it, I felt it was time well spent. It has certainly inspired me to read further into the ideas of this paradoxical theoretician.


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In his first book, French critic Roland Barthes defines the complex nature of writing, as well as the social, historical, political, and personal forces responsible for the formal changes in writing from the classical period to recent times.

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