Book picks similar to
Young Companions by Benno Thoma


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male-photography
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Never the Sinner


John Logan - 1999
    and Richard Loeb -- abducted and killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, horrifying a nation. Never the Sinner is John Logan's brilliant documentary play about the infamous Leopold and Loeb case, known in its time as the "crime of the century" and still one of the most notorious.Leopold and Loeb were richer than most, and smarter. They knew every hot topic of the day, from Freud to Nietzsche; they were also lovers. Considering themselves Nietzsche's "supermen, " they decided to commit the "perfect murder, " just for the thrill of it. But they proved to be considerably less than supermen, and within a matter of hours police questioners cracked their alibis. In the ensuing sensational trial, they were defended by the legendary Clarence Darrow, who got them life sentences rather than the expected execution.

Work: The World in Photographs


Ferdinand Protzman - 2006
    We see cowboys and clowns, dancers and dog groomers, miners and models. On one page, drill sergeants bark orders to U.S. Navy recruits; on another, young Tibetan monks study Buddhist scriptures; and on another, Kenyan women spread coffee beans to dry. Work is a subject that is both worldwide and personal. It is a shared endeavor at the very core of our identity. From the glamour of a Parisian fashion show to the grit of an African diamond mine, there are countless ways to make a living. The book illuminates scores of them many in never-before-published photographs offering revealing glimpses into various eras and cultures and engaging the reader with entertaining text and informative captions. With a wonderful mix of the utterly unexpected and the instantly familiar, this vivid panorama takes an essential human activity and shows us myriad ways in which work is at once universal and delightfully, unforgettably unique."

Exposure Mastery: Aperture, Shutter Speed & ISO. The Key to Creative Digital Photography


Brian Black - 2015
    I’ve Spent Years Discovering All There Is To Know About the Possibilities of Photography. Now I’m Here to Help YOU! Hi, I'm Brian. I’m a professional photographer with a long career that was made possible by one single tool: my camera. I’ve explored the boundaries of photography for many years and watched it evolve into a high-tech profession that still follows the same, basic rules.I’m here to share these insights with you, to help you turn that basic know-how that’s got you this far into a full-fledged understanding of the physics and rules of photography. Give Me 48 Hours and I'll Teach You the Art of Exposure Give me a week and I’ll train your eye to see all the possibilities as you angle a shot. By the time you’ve put the advice in this guide into practice, you’ll understand everything from light metering, depth of field and exposure to contrast and special effects.In this book, we’ll cover: All you need to know about creative digital photography The physics of photography, including aperture speed, motion capture and light meters The dynamics of light – and what they mean to a photographer The secrets of portrait, close-up, panoramic and landscape photography The special effects that are possible with nothing more than your shutter speed And much, much more. My Secret Ingredient… Sure, there are expensive course out there that cover some of the information included in this book, but the secret ingredient is that I know how to turn mechanical understanding into artistic brilliance – and it’ll cost you less than the price of a memory stick to find out what that ingredient is.All it takes is a few key pieces of knowledge and you’ll be on your way to turning a deep and profound understanding of your camera into a hobby, or even a career. Start Taking More Professional Photos In Less Than a Week... or Your Money Back! If you follow the steps in this guide and don’t see a single difference in the quality of your images, simply click one button within 7 days and Amazon will return 100% of your money. That’s how confident I am that I have the answer to your problem – I really can help you find become a professional-standard photographer.Just scroll up now and click the BUY NOW button to start taking BRILLIANT photographs, TODAY!

Original Sin


Shannon West - 2022
    He’s trying to get answers about a person he’s desperately searching for—an old love who had been attacked and turned while Jonah was imprisoned. But instead, he finds himself alone with her in a dark alley with her. fangs in his neck. Seconds later, she’s dying on the ground at his feet, poisoned by his toxic blood, and her followers are chasing him all over the city. The vampire's venom burns much of his memory away, though they're tantalizingly close. His mind is a blank as far as most of his personal history is concerned, so questions like, what are you, have to remain unanswered. Jonah's stripped naked and brought before a handsome, powerful vampire lord whose blood instantly calls to him, while deliciously erotic images of the two of them flash through his mind. This is the man he’s been seeking, which is unfortunate on many levels, since he only wants Jonah dead.What do you do when the love of your life demands answers—and you don’t have any? Do you meekly accept your fate, or do you fight like hell to cleanse the bitter taste of life without him from your soul? A complicated web of lies threatens both Jonah’s and his vampire lover’s lives, and they must fight their way to happiness through a confusing maze of intrigue and deception. Can Jonah’s vampire lord put aside his bitterness so they can save themselves? Or do they both go down fighting?

Notes on a Shared Landscape: Making Sense of the American West


David Bayles - 2005
    Bayles now turns that same attention to his native West.When European Americans “discovered” the American West, they fell in love with the resplendent landscape. The love affair and its congenital flaws persists to this day.Bayles writes: “. . . the question is why my people bungled our occupation of the West so badly when no one really wanted to, when there was every chance to get it right, when voices of caution were constantly raised, when what needed to be done was frequently obvious, and when, occasionally, we did get it right (think: National Parks).”Notes on a Shared Landscape engages the issues that make the West the West—widely ranging over the autobiographical and the cultural, the ecological and the epistemological, the cow and the potato. This is an intensely personal book, and though the Western library is huge, there is not another book like it. Much of the text unfolds in Yellowstone, where Bayles writes:In the Lamar valley of the Yellowstone, beaver gnaw the trunks of cottonwoods, elk browse their leaves. The shadows are long, even in summer. Even so, it is just another place. In it, just as elsewhere, we see the marks of our own hands faintly because we don’t have to know very much about the land we live in, because we are equally a part of and apart from nature, and because there is hardly any moment when humans are more delusional than when self recognition is required.

The Best Time


Sienna Waters - 2021
    All that's left of her fiancée is the half-finished coffee shop in the corner of the store. And then Riley Winters reappears.Riley is convinced that she's dying. So she's come back to Amberly, the home that she's been avoiding for fifteen years. And when she walks into Lil's store it's like turning back the hands of time. Except it's a clock that neither one of them really wanted to mess with.There's no way that they're about to recapture their history together. If only because Kayden, Lil's best friend and Riley's big brother, would never forgive them. Anyway, Lil's happy alone and Riley's busy dying.Until Riley's diagnosis isn't quite as fatal as she thought, and it turns out she came home for all the wrong reasons. But can she be persuaded to stay for all the right ones?Big brothers, best friends, recaptured youth, false pregnancies, non-lethal illnesses, regrets and true love all come together to create the perfect happy ending. Because sometimes you can turn back the clock, and sometimes all it takes is a reminder of what's truly important to turn your life upside down...The Best Time is a new stand-alone lesbian romance from Sienna Waters, the bestselling author of The Wrong Date and A Perfect Mess.

Here Is What You Do


Chris Dennis - 2019
    A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions with their religious neighbors quickly escalate. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband. Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope, each one drilling toward its characters’ darkest emotional centers. In muscularly robust prose, with an unfailing eye for human drives and frailties, Chris Dennis captures the raw need, desire, cruelty, and promise that animate our lives.

This Blue: Poems


Maureen N. McLane - 2014
    McLane’s stunning third poetry collection, This Blue. Here are songs for and of a new century, poems both archaic and wholly now. In the middle of life, stationed in our common “Terran Life,” the poet conjures urban pigeons, Adirondack mountains, Genoa, Andalucía, Belfast, Parma; here is a world sounded out, broken, possibly shareable, newly named: “Take it up Old Adam— / everyday the world exists / to be named.” This Blue is a searching and a singing—intricate, sexy, smart.

Memories of the Heart


Felice Stevens - 2015
    All words used to describe Dr. Micah Steinberg by the hospital staff for their next head of surgery. When a letter arrives from his grandmother’s friend at the assisted living facility, his orderly world tilts dangerously out of control. Josh Rosen had everything until it was revealed much of his world was a lie. Forced to re-evaluate his life, Josh gives up his career and returns home to New York City to care for his beloved grandmother. What Josh didn’t figure on was an attraction to a man who on the surface, appears to be exactly like the life Josh chose to leave behind.As Micah struggles with the reality of his grandmother’s illness, the bond these two share deepens, as Josh helps Micah heal, then open his heart. Micah discovers there is more to life than work, control and success. Josh is in deep but has yet to tell Micah who he really is.When the fight for the hospital’s head of surgery turns ugly, Josh’s past and present collide. Micah must let go of the past and accept who he is, if his life is going to move forward.Life is full of surprises, and as both Micah and Josh learn, love can happen whether you plan for it or not.

The Opera House


Hans M. Hirschi - 2013
    After the death of his son, his life shattered, Raphael regrets that he didn’t lie about some perfect paradise, and he pushes away everything that once mattered to him—his lover, his job, his reputation as a top architect. Then he meets Brian, a homeless, maybe hopeless kid. A Second Chance Brian’s a street kid. When he disappears, Raphael realizes that he cannot fail another person, and he launches a full-out search. What he finds both breaks his heart and begins to heal it. A Little Magic The price of saving Brian is high, maybe too high. But Raphael is no stranger to sacrifice, and he’ll risk everything to save Brian and reunite with the man Raphael now loves. The question is—How? Like the architecture of the opera house Raphael designs, the steps to regaining his life will depend not just on careful planning, but faith, hope, and maybe just the magic of love.“The Opera House, is a moving and emotional story about about gay men and their children, all struggling with big issues — from leukemia to abandonment, devastating loss to unbridled joy — in a way that’s remarkably touching, sometimes funny, and often unexpected. Remarkable, must-read novel from an emerging master storyteller.” Diane Anderson-Minshall, editor at large, Advocate magazine

Read Between the Lines


Rachel Lacey - 2021
    And ever since she took over her mother’s beloved Manhattan bookstore, they’ve become her home too. The only thing missing is her own real-life romance like the ones she loves to read about, and Rosie has an idea of who she might like to sweep her off her feet. She’s struck up a flirty online friendship with lesbian romance author Brie, and what could be more romantic than falling in love with her favorite author?Jane Breslin works hard to keep her professional and personal lives neatly separated. By day, she works for the family property development business. By night, she puts her steamier side on paper under her pen name: Brie. Jane hasn’t had much luck with her own love life, but her online connection with a loyal reader makes Jane wonder if she could be the one.When Rosie learns that her bookstore’s lease has been terminated by Jane’s family’s business, romance moves to the back burner. Even though they’re at odds, there’s no denying the sparks that fly every time they’re together. When their online identities are revealed, will Jane be able to write her way to a happy ending, or is Rosie’s heart a closed book?

This Much is True


Miriam Margolyes - 2021
    Find out how being conceived in an air-raid gave her curly hair; what pranks led to her being known as the naughtiest girl Oxford High School ever had; how she ended up posing nude for Augustus John as a teenager; why Bob Monkhouse was the best (male) kiss she's ever had; and what happened next after Warren Beatty asked 'Do you fuck?'From declaring her love to Vanessa Redgrave to being told to be quiet by the Queen, this book is packed with hilarious stories. With a cast list stretching from Scorsese to Streisand, a cross-dressing Leonardo di Caprio to Isaiah Berlin, This Much Is True is as full of life and surprises, as its inimitable author.

Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography


Lewis Carroll - 2001
    But before achieving fame as an author, Carroll was a prolific and sophisticated photographer, acutely engaged in the art world of Victorian England. This illustrated volume examines Carroll's photographs not as the sideline of a celebrated writer, but as the creations of a serious photographic artist, and demonstrates their importance to the history of photography. Douglas Nickel traces the evolution in thought about Carroll's photography in the period since his death, demonstrating the ways it has been viewed largely through the filter of his literary reputation. Key to this have been certain preconceptions built up around Carroll's attitudes toward children, especially Alice Liddell, the inspiration for his first book and the subject of a number of his photographs. Nickel demonstrates how, by overturning the modern myths that have attached themselves to Carroll's photography, the works themselves can be seen again as they were by their original Victorian viewers. This analysis is designed to reveal not only Carroll's signal achievement in the medium, but also a new understanding of Victorian art photography in general.

Henri Cartier-Bresson in India


Henri Cartier-Bresson - 1987
    Its images are shaped by an eye and a mind legendary for their empathy and for going to the heart of the matter. Cartier-Bresson's talent, his famous mantle of invisibility and his good connections with such figures as Nehru allowed him to capture the quintessence of India - a land renowned for its contradictions and variety. His pictures of Hindus in refugee camps after the Partition or beggars in Calcutta speak with the same passion and authority as those of the Maharaja of Baroda's sumptuous birthday celebrations or of the Mountbattens on the steps of Government House. Considerable space is given to his famous reportages, such as the astonishing sequence on the death and cremation of Gandhi.

Under the Rainbow


Celia Laskey - 2020
    But when a national nonprofit labels Big Burr "the most homophobic town in the US" and sends in a task force of queer volunteers as an experiment-they'll live and work in the community for two years in an attempt to broaden hearts and minds-no one is truly prepared for what will ensue. Furious at being uprooted from her life in Los Angeles and desperate to fit in at her new high school, Avery fears that it's only a matter of time before her "gay crusader" mom outs her. Still grieving the death of her son, Linda welcomes the arrivals, who know mercifully little about her past. And for Christine, the newcomers are not only a threat to the comforting rhythms of Big Burr life, but a call to action. As tensions roil the town, cratering relationships and forcing closely guarded secrets into the light, everyone must consider what it really means to belong. Told with warmth and wit, Under the Rainbow is a poignant, hopeful articulation of our complicated humanity that reminds us we are more alike than we'd like to admit.