The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove: The Complete Collection of 78rpm Artwork from the Legendary Record Changer Magazine

Book Description

A visual feast of swingin' cartoons for jazz lovers. On the long road to becoming an Oscar-winning animation director, Gene Deitch became an intense jazz fan. At the age of 21, he discovered The Record Changer, a jazz collector's magazine filled with fanatical, scholarly, and purist essays about jazz as well as listings of hard-to-find jazz albums. Every jazz swinger in the '40s was called a cat (as in "cool cat," derived from the West African word "Katta," a human), so Gene Deitch created a cartoon feature for Record Changer titled "The Cat," which quickly became a fixture at the magazine. He also started drawing the covers, which graced almost every issue from 1945 to 1951 along with "The Cat." Deitch's stylistically virtuoso images exquisitely embodied the essence of jazz and became a visual paean to the joy of collecting and appreciating jazz.

In the 1940s, jazz was a vaguely disreputable musical genre and Deitch's visual embodiments of the music acquired a cult; to this day, his original Cat cartoons are bought and sold on the internet.

Fantagraphics Books is proud to collect all of Deitch's Record Changer covers and "Cat" cartoons in one coffee-table, landscape-format art book, reproducing his covers in the same gorgeous colors in which they first appeared as well as the black-and-white Cat cartoons and a commentary by Deitch—who later went on to become an award-wining animator as the Creative Director of CBS/Terrytoons, where he created Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog for The Captain Kangaroo Show, as well as many other animated features, including a legendary stint on MGM's "Tom and Jerry" series. Fully illustrated throughout; 90 pages color.

Customer Reviews:

The Cat is Back.......2003-06-19

Great 1940s comics that capture the world of the jazz fanatic circa 1945-1950. Deitch's artwork is clever, original, somewhere between Virgil Partch and Harvey Kurtzman -- far above the amateurish efforts one associates with fanzines. Anyone familiar with the loonier aspects of record collecting will find much amusement in these cartoons (The Cat berates one guy searching a huge pile of records with, "That's the 'A' master which is relatively common!"). Deitch also drew some interesting covers, reproduced here in full color. Anyone into vintage comics, records, and/or jazz will dig this.

The packaging is a bit overkill. The width of the book is huge, but there is a lot of white space on the inside pages. A smaller size would not have detracted from the artwork, and would have made this a more affordable book. Also, nobody seems to have proofread the copy, as there are quite a few typos.

Beyond Fantastic.......2003-06-06

This book gets seven stars. At first, I think I thought it had something to do with Mad Magazine, like Spy Vs. Spy. What I found was a goldmine. Rarely do I see books dealing with geeking out on something. Gene Deitch clearly loves Jazz Music. This book documents a dope artist, blossoming into greatness through an interest in an outsider sound. His honest comments on obsesive geekdom, as well as race relations, are appreciated. A super cool gift, as well as a beautiful, beautiful book. the OilCan highly recommends.

Amazon.com

There are lots of books that detail operatic plots, but this is the classic. It offers more than most such guides including historic background and musical examples of major themes. Now revised, this is a good first resource for the operagoer who wants to know exactly what s/he is going to see and hear.

Customer Reviews:

the definitive kobbes opera book.......2000-08-26

As I set this book upon a bed of newspaper and struck a match ...the most wonderful smell filled the air as the flames began to lap against the pages.

beware mortals...I now walk among you

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Definitive Kobbe's Opera Book.
The Earl of Harewood
Manufacturer: Publisher Unknown
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000UY2HUM

Average customer rating:
Definitive Kobbe's Opera Book.

ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000IC4J8O

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Definitive Kobbe's Opera Book.
The Earl of Harewood
Manufacturer: Publisher Unknown
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000UFNZCU

Book Description

This volume is a collection of recent articles written by David Sklansky that have appeared in various publications including Card Player and Poker World magazines. A few have never before appeared in print.

Most of the articles are about poker or gambling. However, David has recently branched out into other areas that lend themselves to his unique style of analysis and some of these essays are contained in this book.

"Poker and gaming" topics include Being a Favorite, Are great Players Born? Talent Versus Discipline, Will Power, The Importance of Position, Never Go Broke, When Time is Not of the Essence, and Is Your Wallet Fat Enough? "Life" topics include What It Is that Makes an Issue Controversial, Coincidences, Some Thoughts on Dying, Legitimate Grievances, and Crime and Punishment.

Though these essays vary greatly in content, you will find them very thought provoking. Thus Two Plus Two Publishing proudly brings you these latest examples of David Sklansky's work.

Customer Reviews:

Splendid.......2006-01-21

This book is good ... and if you're familiar with Sklansky, you know that he is THE authority in poker writing ... hands down. The book is made up of around 50 essays, each a page or two in length; the first 3/4 of the essays cover different poker/gambling tips & points of interest. This section of the book sheds light on different theories and how to logically handle certain senarios ... it's not totally essential to a poker players arsenal, but his ideas presented should intrigue an already experienced and well read player - (examples include : 'Comparing AK to AQ', 'Odds for a backdoor flush', 'last round strategies', 'Why I don't like 7 card stud').

I especially enjoyed the last chunck of the book ("Life")- Sklansky's essays on using logic and rational thinking in our world. Might be a good idea for a few political leaders to ponder a few of his ideas - Examples include 'Crime and Punishment', 'Risking your life', 'Diversity', & 'Will Power'.

While I've learned more poker strategy from Sklansky's other (textbook-like) writings, this one was the most interesting and pleasurable read ... you won't be disappointed.

Precise as Always.......2001-04-10

Among serious amateurs, semi-professional and professional players, David Sklansky is THE author to read.

"Poker, Gaming and Life" is collection of articles that have appeared in "Card Player" and similar specialist magazines during the 1990s. The bulk of them are on poker, and reading them one is reminded that Sklansky almost invented the serious, logical, and carefully reasoned approach to the game based on statistics and probablity. An entire generation of winning players has been the result, changing poker forever.

Sklansky isn't a great writer, and his style suffers from too much passive voice. But every essay is well thought out, and his conclusions hard to dispute. Since the pieces are almost all short, this book is somewhat easier to read than his full length treatments of specific games.

The last section finds the author in a more relaxed mood, as he tries to apply some of the mathematical and statistical principles of poker to more general "life" topics.

One small criticism - some of the articles and examples apply to games that were once common in public cardrooms, but for one reason or another have all but disappeared now. For a younger player unfamiliar with Jacks or better draw poker, or Razz, this can be a little confusing.

Its hard to imagine any David Sklansky book that won't improve your poker - this one, although not essential, should provide some thoughtful and informative reading.

Customer Reviews:

Night/Dawn/Day.......2006-04-11

This was one bound volume of Wiesel's first three books, which concern the Holocaust, survival, and humanity. Night is Wiesel's personal memoir, which relates his personal story before and during World War II, as he and his father are separated from his mother and sister and interned in a series of concentration camps. Dawn is the story of a member of the movement to free Palestine from British occupation and Day concerns how one could move from a past that consumes one's every thought (or even if one should).

Quote: "Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

I read Night in high school, and always think of it as being a particularly long book, which it is not. Wiesel manages to pack more than I would think possible into a little over a hundred pages, which relates the story of himself and his family during the Holocaust. It is a beautifully written work that relates a terrible story. I found the story of Wiesel's loss of faith and the relationship he had with his father particularly memorable. If you somehow missed this in high school, pick it up, if you didn't, find it again. It's worth it. Dawn and Day are not as catching as the first work, but are still interesting in their own way.

The Fire! The Furnace! Look, over there!.......2000-06-01

The cries of a madwoman on an Auschwitz-bound cattle car are just one of many portents shepherding doomed souls on their way to Nazi furnaces. In "Night", the first of three books in this collection, Elie Wiesel recounts his deportation to the death camps where the rest of his family perished. The tragic weight of his witness to this obscene cruelty burdens the reader with the fates of the inmates and his reflections on the meaning of evil. Wiesel questions his god and his faith. He sees sons kill fathers: "Meir. Meir, my boy! Don't you recognize me? I'm your father... you're hurting me... you're killing your father! I've got some bread... for you too... for you too..." (p.106), and becomes intimate with death.

In "Dawn", Wiesel has migrated to Palestine and faces the duty to execute a captured prisoner. His long night of contemplation and uncertainty exposes his preoccupation with killing and killers and again with death: "Death," Kalman, the grizzled master, told me, "is a being without arms or legs or mouth or head; it is all eyes. If ever you meet a creature with eyes everywhere, you can be sure that it is death." (p.140). It is a preoccupation to be squeezed only from one who has not fully lost his faith or his humanity. A beggar explains the face of the night: "Listen," he said, digging his fingers into my arm. "I'm going to teach you the art of distinguishing between day and night. Always look at a window, and failing that look into the eyes of a man. If you see a face, any face, then you can be sure that night has succeeded day. For, believe me, night has a face." (p.126) Fear, night, suffering, and evil are his companions, and he explores them constantly. "Being afraid is nothing. Fear is only a color, a backdrop, a landscape." (p.174).

Until, in "Day", he survives a terrible accident and is faced with his own complacent acceptance of mortality. He struggles with the urge to explain to his talented young doctor the futility of fighting against death, and reaches an epiphany when he understands the tragedy of splashing others with his suffering. "Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul - and worse, the souls of your friends - for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep." (p.247).

These stories are powerful and frightening,. Death is an implacable enemy, but also a partner for life who never goes away and will always win in the end. Wiesel has stared at evil, his stories are wrenching.

The most emotional account of the Holocaust.......2000-04-25

This book should simply be read by everyone interested in Judiasm or the Holocaust. Just read it!

Promise at Dawn: A Memoir (Revived Modern Classic)

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Life as a work of art
My Favorite Book Ever
Best Book I've Ever Read
Incredibly funny, maybe too outrageous
An incredible book

Promise at Dawn: A Memoir (Revived Modern Classic)
Romain Gary
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0811210162

Book Description

Gary, Promise at Dawn. A romantic, thrilling memoir that has become a French classic.

Customer Reviews:

Life as a work of art .......2007-02-09

Life as a Work of Art

This autobiography is a story of self-discovery which is at once charmingly engaging and profoundly deep. This book is one of two of my absolute favorites. I am a native speaker of Russian and I also read a lot in Spanish -- this is not to boast, but to show that I know to what to compare to. And surely there are books which are better written, not to mention more famous. And yet, as other reviews indicate, I am not alone. How come?

Literature and in art general is often intellectualized, taken too seriously and made separate from everyday experiences of life. But experience of reading a book is actually could be just like another experience: observing the beauty of nature, doing Yoga on the mat, staying in a challenges situation in everyday life or having a good conversation with a friend. In all those experiences we discover what we are and what we are capable of. And the book we read, we really read only to the extent that there is something in it which resonates with us and own worldview. The great book is only great for us as it speaks to each us individually while it articulating our own yearnings and dim glimmering. This is one such great book.

Paraphrasing Nietzsche, it is a story about life as a work of art. The author constantly finds itself in impossible situations when he faces multiple conflicting constraints; in fact it is sheer impossibility of these life situations which makes them believable: fantasy rarely stretches as far as exigencies of real life do. Making creativity a way of life, Gari always finds spectacular solutions, sometime more so, sometimes less but always creative and unpredictable. He says he has no choice, he promised his mother (hence 'Promise at Dawn'). Freudian undercurrents aside, the book is one paradox after another, all told with disarming irony and self-irony. A perspective on the world which discerns laugher amid sheer tragedy and which turns everything upside down . Sense of humor, as Gary puts is his ultimate defense against injustices of the world.

This is a perspective not shared by everyone. The book (as well as other Gary's novels) either arouses the passion and gratitude to the author (coming from that sense of recognition -- we see our own story and our perspective on the world) or flat indifference. Most of my friends love it but some don't see anything in it: they don't get it. There is no way to tell in advance which way it will turn out.

I have read the novel in Russian and later in Spanish (Mondadori, Barcelona, 1997) and I also checked English translation. Predictably, both Russian and Spanish versions are more vivid, subtle and evocative. It has nothing to do with the quality of translation but with expressive power of the language itself. Nonetheless, English version is not bad.

Finally, an illustration. Students of serious Yoga (which goes beyond asanas) are familiar with Dharana -- a state of concentration when you merge, become one with the object of concentration. That state comes (and then only to committed few) after many years of practice. Here is quote from the book which shows how Dharana emerges -- in the process of writing of his first novel in 1945 -- precisely because constraints and conditions (of war-time fighting) are inhumanly cruel.

'... The conditions at Hartford Bridge were not ideal for literary work. It was very cold.... Each night I would put on my flying jacket and my fur-lined boots, prop myself up in bed and write in bed with numbed fingers, my breath rising in visible vapor in the freezing air..... Then I got into my Boston bomber and set off, in the gray dawn, on a mission against powerfully protected targets. It was difficult in such conditions to do literature. But this is not what I was doing. Literature and life were always interconnected for me, and flying and writing were part of the same fight, of the same effort to discover the hidden meaning of life..' (I changed the translation a bit because the one in the book was a bit imprecise.)

My Favorite Book Ever.......2004-01-02

"Promise at Dawn" is the first book of what can be considered as Romain Gary's Memoir ( this books ends with the end of WWII but Romain Gary's lived until December 2nd, 1980). Romain Gary was the only writer to be awarded twice the "Prix Goncourt" (the famous French litterary prize) , he was diplomat, movie maker, and a true lover of America. "Promise at Dawn" like most of his books is full of adventures, travels, unexpected meetings, love for life and a communicative optimism. This book made his mother a legend in the French litterature: she epitomizes the love of a mother for her son. "In Promise at Dawn", we live and breathe with Romain Gary during his early years: from his birth in Moscow in 1914 until his return to France after the Liberation.

Best Book I've Ever Read.......2003-11-07

Romain was a facinating character and a tremendous writer. As a lover of literature and a writer myself-I highly recommend this book. I read approximately 300-400 books a year and this is the best I have ever read, in my opinion. My favorite line: "it occured to me that life lies on sunny days." I cried, I laughed and I grew. What more can you ask from a book? Too bad, more are not written by like Promises At Dawn.

Incredibly funny, maybe too outrageous.......2003-08-06

This is called a memoir, but even those who have read other books by Romain Gary might be unprepared for how thoroughly he shows himself to be schooled in ridicule, almost from the moment of his birth. In Chapter 2, at the age of thirteen, he was already in training to be a great writer. The first chapter ended with a paragraph describing his desire to battle the gods, "the god of Stupidity," (p. 5), "the god of Absolute Truth and Total Righteousness," (p. 5), "the god of Mediocrity," (p. 6), "the god of Acceptance and Servility," (p. 6) and "other gods, less easy to unmask, shifty and shrouded in mystery;" (p. 6), for whom "my mother had been one of their favorite toys; they never left her in peace; from the snows of Russia to the shores of France, with her child in her arms, it was in vain that she tried to escape from them." (pp. 6-7). Romain Gary needed to defeat those gods and "tear down the veil of darkness and absurdity concealing the true face of the universe." (p. 7).

Published in 1961, this book has the kind of earth-shaking humor that formed the basis for THE DANCE OF GENGHIS COHN in 1967 (in French) and 1968 (English translation). For all the chapters in PROMISE AT DAWN which are devoted to basking in maternal love, there are chapters in which people fail to show the same attention to him that his mother did. Chapter 11, when he was nearly nine, starts with a description of Valentine, a lovely eight-year-old girl, whose first words to him seem to be, "Janek ate his whole stamp collection for me." (p. 70). Such people must be doing the TV scripts of contest shows, as this kind of behavior seems to inspire some contagious reaction approaching insanity. "I ate for the lady one of my rubber galoshes." (p. 70). Curiously, she asked, "Are you going to eat it raw?" (p. 72). On a literary level, "Twenty years later this puppy love inspired my first novel, A EUROPEAN EDUCATION, and also some passages in THE COMPANY OF MEN." (p. 72). There have been other things that Romain Gary has done in his life, but it is difficult to imagine that he could have done any of them better than writing books.

An incredible book.......2002-06-30

This book needs no review; it is simply a beautifully written, remarkable literary work. I have read it in both the French original and the English translation. Mr. Beach's translation obviously was a painstaking process due to superb quality of the end product. A must read.

The Dawn of Hope : A Memoir of Ravensbruck

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Another View of the Holocaust
Moving

The Dawn of Hope : A Memoir of Ravensbruck
Geniviev De Gaulle Anthonioz
Manufacturer: Arcade Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1559704985

Customer Reviews:

Another View of the Holocaust.......2000-07-28

This thin little book contains some of the memories of Genevieve de Gaulle Anthonioz (niece of Charles de Gaulle), from the time she was imprisoned in Fresnes Prisons during World War II. A young Catholic, she was jailed because of her efforts as a resistance worker.

She watches a co-worker being beaten to death for trying to wash out her underwear. One of her jobs is to sort through huge piles of dirty, bloody prison uniforms from those who are murdered, to find scraps and buttons that can be reused. Her single cell is flooded with smoke from the ovens. She spends much time in solitude, reflecting on how she will handle her own early death which she is sure is imminent.

She is never marked for extinction, and so has a slightly different view of life in the camps than the tellers of most books I've read. Life in one of the worst prisons in France during WWII is not pleasant, although through she can receive mail, smuggled in Christmas presents, and medical care when sick.

In her isolation, she survives by befriending the cockroaches in her cell. She secretly makes a Christmas handkerchief for the Jehovah's Witness who brings meals around. She observes the lives of those destined to die, and is deeply moved.

Realizing that the only way to bear witness is to survive, she does. It took 55 years for her to be able to write her story - she spent those years raising her children and working to improve the lives of the homeless.

Translated from the original French, the tenses used are a little unsettling, without any obvious reason. The text switches from past to present sometimes within the same paragraph. It could have used more editing after the translation.

However, for those interested in the Holocaust, this is a very quick read, and offers a look from the eyes of a young non-Jewish girl. A worthwhile read.

Moving.......2000-07-15

A most moving book. You learn of the terrible sufferings experienced in a concentration camp, and the later fruits they would bear.

Promise at dawn: Romain Gary ; translated from the French La promesse de l'aube by John Markham Beach

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Promise at dawn: Romain Gary ; translated from the French La promesse de l'aube by John Markham Beach
Romain Gary
Manufacturer: Harper & Brothers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
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The Life Before Us (Madame Rosa)

ASIN: B0007H7CQQ

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Dawn French
Alison Bowyer
Manufacturer: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0283070609

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Dawn French: The Biography
Alison Bowyer
Manufacturer: HEADLINE
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Binding: Hardcover

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Night, Dawn, the Accident: Three Tales
Elie Wiesel
Manufacturer: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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To leave before dawn;
Julien Green
Manufacturer: Owen
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: 0720688140

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