Bali: Heaven and Hell


Phil Jarratt - 2014
    Bali: Heaven and Hellis a tale begging to be told - a story of survival in the face of genocide, natural disaster, terrorism, cultural imperialism and corruption on a grand scale. Go behind the smiling face presented to generations of tourists and expats with Phil Jarratt, the award-winning author of over 20 books including Surfing Australia: A Complete History of Surfboard Riding in Australia and That Summer at Boomerang. Phil has first-hand experience of the glorious island at the morning of the world, having spent the past 40 years falling in and out of love with our favourite holiday destination.Jarratt weaves a page-turning story of treachery, deceit, debauchery and wholesale slaughter, set against the idyllic backdrop of a paradise on Earth, then cleverly segues into a modern-day tale of jaw-dropping surf, karma, sexual abandon, and a fusion of East and West that created the modern tourist hot spot.David Hill, Chairman, National Geographic Channels US

The Silverado Squatters


Robert Louis Stevenson - 1883
    There are, indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a center of interest. It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its near neighbors rising to one-half its altitude. It looks down on much green, intricate country. It feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks. From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography: seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon.The author's experiences at Silverado were recorded in a journal he called "Silverado Sketches," parts of which he incorporated into Silverado Squatters in 1883 while living in Bournemouth, England, with other tales appearing in "Essays of Travel" and "Across the Plains." Many of his notes on the scenery around him later provided much of the descriptive detail for Treasure Island (1883).

Minutes to Midnight


Trent Parke - 2012
    Minutes to Midnight is the ambitious photographic record of that adventure, in which Parke presents a proud but uneasy nation struggling to craft its identity from different cultures and traditions. Minutes to Midnight merges traditional documentary techniques and imagination to create a dark visual narrative portraying Australia with a mix of nostalgia, romanticism and brooding realism. This is not a record of the physical landscape but of an emotional one. It is a story of human anxiety and intensity which, although told from Australia, represents a universal human condition in the world today.

Daido Moriyama: How I Take Photographs


Daido Moriyama - 2019
    In Daido Moriyama: How I Take Photographs , he offers a unique opportunity for fans to learn about his methods, the cameras he uses, and the journeys he takes with a camera.

The Coconut Latitudes: Secrets, Storms, and Survival in the Caribbean


Rita M. Gardner - 2014
    Leaving a successful career in the U.S., a father makes the fateful decision to settle his wife and two young daughters on an isolated beach in the Dominican Republic. He plants ten thousand coconut seedlings and declares they are the luckiest people alive.In reality, the family is in the path of hurricanes and in the grip of a brutal dictator. Against a backdrop of shimmering palms and kaleidoscope sunsets, a crisis causes the already fragile family to implode. "The Coconut Latitudes" is a haunting, lyrical memoir of surviving a reality far from the envisioned Eden, the terrible cost of keeping secrets, and the transformative power of truth and love.

Hollywood Frame by Frame: The Unseen Silver Screen in Contact Sheets, 1951-1997


Karina Longworth - 2014
    You look directly through the photographer s eyes as each photo gets closer to that perfect shot. And yet, it s often the photos not chosen that best capture the true spirit of their subjects and the life they lead after the director yells cut. This was never truer than in the classic Hollywood era, where behind-the-scenes photos were carefully vetted for marketing purposes and unapproved shots were never expected to be seen again. Hollywood Frame by Frame presents hundreds of never-before-published photos from the sets of some of the greatest films of the twentieth century. Hollywood s biggest stars are caught with their guard down behind the scenes of movie classics from Some Like It Hot and Breakfast at Tiffany's to Taxi Driver and The Silence of the Lambs. A treasure trove for any fan of Hollywood s Golden Age, this rare glimpse of the unseen silver screen will intrigue even movie buffs who think they ve seen everything. First book of movie contact sheets, features never-before-seen photos of screen legends at work, including Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Robert De Niro, and Alfred Hitchcock Provides insight into the art of moviemaking, the science of movie marketing, and the nature of stardom Karina Longworth is an author, film critic, and journalist based in Los Angeles and Paris. She has contributed to numerous publications, including the Guardian, LA Weekly, Village Voice, Slate,and many more.

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits


Mihaela Noroc - 2017
    The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs that celebrates women from fifty countries across the globe and shows that beauty is everywhere, regardless of money, race or social status, and comes in many different sizes and colours. Mihaela's portraits feature women in their native environments, from the Amazon rain forest to markets in India, London city streets and parks in Harlem, creating a mirror of our varied cultures and proving that beauty has no rules.'Stunning . . . aims to challenge the ideals of beauty dictated by the women's fashion magazine industry' Independent'A startling and revealing project' Daily Mail'Scrolling through "The Atlas of Beauty", beauty becomes not a universal standard, but a complicated tapestry' Huffington Post

John F. Kennedy’s Women: The Story of a Sexual Obsession


Michael O'Brien - 2011
    Kennedy has been more carefully scrutinized. Michael O’Brien, who knows as much about Kennedy as any historian now writing, here takes a comprehensive look at the feature of Camelot that remained largely under the radar during the White House years: Kennedy’s womanizing. Indeed, O’Brien writes, Kennedy’s approach to women and sex was near pathological, beyond the farthest reaches of the media’s imagination at the time. The record makes for an astonishing piece of presidential history.---Michael O’Brien was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and studied at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received a Ph.D. in history. He is the author of the widely praised John F. Kennedy: A Biography, a full-scale study based on eleven years’ research into letters, diaries, financial papers, medical records, manuscripts, and oral histories; and a concise analytical life of the president, Rethinking Kennedy. He is now emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley, and lives in Door County, Wisconsin.

Reluctant Pioneer: How I Survived Five Years in the Canadian Bush


Thomas Osborne - 1995
    The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Many years later, after returning to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir that has become, in the words of author and journalist Roy MacGregor, "an undiscovered Canadian classic."Reluctant Pioneer provides a brooding sense of adventure and un- sentimental realism to deliver a powerful account of pioneer life where tragedies arrive as naturally as rain and where humour resides in irony.

Brassai: Paris By Night


Brassaï - 1987
    First published in French in 1932, this new edition brings one of Brassa's finest works back into print. The back alleys, metro stations, and bistros he photographed are at turns hauntingly empty or peopled by prostitutes, laborers, thugs, and lovers. "Paris by Night" is a stunning portrait of nighttime in the City of Light, as captured by its most articulate observer. 62 photos.

The Road to Le Tholonet: A French Garden Journey


Montagu Don - 2013
    It is the story of a man travelling round France visiting a few selected French gardens on the way. Owners, intrigues, affairs, marriages, feuds, thwarted ambitions and desires, the largely unnamed ordinary gardeners, wars, plots and natural disasters run through every garden older than a generation or two and fill every corner of the grander historical ones. Families marry. Gardeners are poached. Political allegiances forged and shattered. The human trail crosses from garden to garden. They sit in their surrounding landscape, not as isolated islands but attached umbilically to it, sharing the geology, the weather, food, climate, local folklore, accent and cultural identity. Wines must be drunk and food tasted. Recipes found and compared. The perfect tarte-tartin pursued. None of these things can be ignored or separated from the shape and size of parterre, fountain, herbaceous border or pottager. So this is a book filled with stories and information, some of it about French gardens and gardening, but most of it about what makes France unlike anywhere else. From historical gardens like Versailles,Vaux le Vicomte and Courances to the kitchen gardens of the Michelin chef Alain Passard. There are grand potagers like Villandry and La Prieure D'Orsan and allotments and back gardens spotted on the way. Monty celebrates the obvious French associations of food and wine and finds gardens dedicated to vegetables, herbs and fruit. It is a book that any visitor to France, whether gardeners or not, will want to read both as a guide and an inspiration. It is a portal to get under the French cultural skin and to understand the country, in all its huge variety and disparity, a little better.