4 comments about The Round-Up: A Pictorial History of Western Movie and Television Stars Through the Years.

1. A good book to go back and look for your favorite western stars from long ago. It has nice full page photographs if you can't remember a name and are looking to find someone.



2. My husband and I both have enjoyed this book. Excellent pictures. I would like to have seen more information about the actors; I do understand that to have done that would probably have cut down on the pictures. If you are a western fan, this book is a must. The list in the back of additional books looks very complete.



3. Empire Publishing presents "The Round-up: A Pictorial History of Western Movie and Television Stars Through the Years", reporting in one short paragraph the profile on each page with a photograph, synopsis of their films, career, birth dates and date they left us...compiled and edited by Donald R. Key featuring 300 cowboy stars, sidekicks, heroines, villains and character actors.
   
   Tables of Contents with page numbers:
   A Word From the Publisher - 8
   Acknowledgments - 10
   Foreword by Monte Hale - 12
   Art Acord - 14 (first actor on the roster)
   Tony Young - 312 (last actor on the roster)
   Let's Not Forget - 313
   Afterword By Neil Summers - 316
   
   Many of the stars within this publication gave us hours of entertainment...their careers of excellence and dedication to the craft of acting...the audiences who were so faithful for several decades...all the cast members took their job very seriously and the audience would not settle for anything less than the best...and it showed up there on the big screen.
   
   Would like to close this review with a thought from Monte Hale, it goes something like this:
   Life is Like a Journey,
   Taken on a train
   With a pair of travelers at each window pane,
   I may sit beside you the whole journey through,
   Or I may sit elsewhere, never knowing you,
   But if fate should mark us to sit here side by side,
   Let's be pleasant travelers, because it's such a short ride.
   
   Those are some touching words from Monte Hale, thank you Donald R. Key for printing this verse.
   
   Great reading in the days and weeks to come...I guarantee it!...now appearing on Amazon and Empire Publishing ...many tidbits I never knew...if you're a TV and Movie western fan, this one's for you, don't let it pass you by...so saddle up and let's get started on the drive, move 'em out!
   
   Total Page: 320 pages ~ Empire Publishing 0-944019-12-9 ~ (10/01/1995)



4. I bought this gift for my Dad. He is extremely difficult to buy for and hardly ever gets excited, but he LOVED this book! He couldn't put it down!

No comments about The Playwright as Thinker: A Study of Drama in Modern Times.

5 comments about The Actor's Way: A Journey of Self-Discovery in Letters.

1. I picked up this book simply because I have enjoyed Benjamin Lloyd as an actor. I never expected that he would also be a wonderful writer. In addition, Lloyd provides an insight into the joys and struggles of an actor and will help anyone contemplating a career as an artist. It should also be a must read for the parents, spouse or friend of the "struggling artist". ( And, almost by definition, they all must have their struggles. )
   
   Fortunately, no one need struggle as they read this book. It will capture you from the first through the last page! I loved it.
   
   Duane Malm



2. Acting and teaching acting is revealed in an unusual form: fictional letters between a struggling New York City actor and his Quaker grade-school acting teacher. In adopting the letter format, the pitfalls of an actor's life and the realities of success are more easily captured. It's rare to see such a blending of fiction and fact, but The Actor's Way: A Journey Of Self-Discovery In Letters provides an excellent, realistic survey in a form students can more easily digest.



3. This riveting book using the letters of the 2 main characters wonderfully developes the interplay between acting, openness, fragility and trust. Using the theater metaphor, lloyd details feelings, emotional interplay, and community building as the constant themes of bringing the "spirit"and "life" into our temporal life. His chosen world of acting and directing demonstrate the ephemeral in our concrete denotative world,AND also brings out the eternal through the incorporation of the impact of art on the observer and the participant. Poetry, music, and drama become meaningless exercises without the emotional and spiritual transportation of performer and audience to a new "weltanschaung".
   The specific techniques described are beyond my experience but resonate clearly with similar techniques of relating and isolating specific aspects of relationships in my medical career. I was always amazed by the change in surgeons personalities when they were wearing a mask and when they "out of costume". No question that the mask provided a screen for their persona. The arrogant but friendly and understanding selves disappeared behind the mask replaced by the distant focused martinet.
   Most beautifully handled is the spiritual growth within a community that is open and loving and unavailable in a solo setting. "Alice" "walks the talk" and the handling of her "Spiritual Inventory" as she accepts her death while remaining involved in her community. Community, to me, is where someone lives that I am uncomfortable with. The fictional letters create the "uncomfortable" person as part of each character. The modulation of the uncomfortable actions become facets of each person, preserving the "whole" of the person as loving person with demons not seen by others. The curse of secrecy, hiding the "wounded" parts leading to community and personal diminishment. This love of secrecy is the basis of the innate mistrust of most people to Scorpios. The Scorpio demands loyalty but needs his chamber(cave) private, precluding open communication without advance contemplation and strategic analysis, Iago is a classic example of a Scorpio knowingly headed into destructive course aware that he will be destroyed as well.
   The incorporation of the Quaker blend of high abstract intellect welded to a belief based on an emotional/spiritual experience (The Gathered Meeting) adds the necessary "vertical plot" necessary for living characters facing life each day.
   Many thanks to B. Lloyd for writing such a clear loving book.



4. The charactor of Andy was genuine, and masterfully revealed in his correspondence with Alice. The relationship that was driven by their link to the theater was so much more than just theater discussion (which I have no experience in, but learned quite a bit)- it got to the core of why and how one chooses a direction in ones life. A book that should be on the reading list of every college student - not just those majoring in the arts! Ultimately The Actor's Way is about authenticty in ones pursuits in life. Want to know where Andy is now in his life. Next book due out???



5. I can't stop reading this book! I'm not an actor or a theatre teacher, but I love going to the theatre and try to imagine all the work that goes into creating the characters that we see up on stage. There is so much art and craft to acting and this book helps you to understand it -- and understand the struggles and the growth in each actor, teacher, and director. It's written in a letters between people format which makes it real and lively. This is a book for everyone! Those who haven't read The Actor's Way have a huge treat in store for you!!

5 comments about Honors Disguise (Rocky Mountain Legacy #4).

1. This series gets better and better. As always, Kristen Heitzmann has a lovely way with words. Her characters are deep and lifelike. Things finally seemed ready to settle down and Cole's up and kidnapped by bounty hunters haulin' him in for a murder, of a harlot of all things. Of course, Abbie's gotta hitch up her skirts and tear off after him like heat on a summer day and of course, she finds and frees him. That's where the fun begins. Cole's still determined to walk towards danger for honor's sake.



2. Abbie is fearless, a loving wife, a devoted mother. She's a good daughter and friend. She has many qualities most ladies aspire to.
   
   I love the series, and I cannot wait to see what happens next. I love the narration by Kate Forbes. I can't wait for the 2nd series when Janette gets married, and Eliot finds his true love as well; and even how Marci's daughter turns out.
   
   Kristen keep writing,
   
   Julia



3. Cole has returned to Abbie's ranch as foreman, but Abbie is not about to let down her guard to love again, until -- could it be happening? Just as she begins to wonder, a stranger rides onto the ranch and beats Cole severely immediately before bounty hunters come and violently take Cole away for the murder of an El Paso woman, a lady of the night with whom Cole's brother, Sam was in love.
   
   Consuming a good portion of the whole book is the long journeys most of the main characters are making to El Paso and back, leaving the children, 7 and 4 behind in the care of Abbie's parents. The journey is long and hard, unlikely characters from past books appear and one surprise after another lands Abbie in El Paso, visiting Cole in jail. She has a hard time really knowing if he is innocent or guilty, but someone does know, and Abbie feels she owes it to Cole to find out the truth. After all, he has saved her life on several occasions. Her faithful young stable hand, Will, is by her side, helping in every way he can.
   
   A circuit rider preacher has accompanied Cole part of the way on this trip and Cole has decided he needs to know God. However, Abbie has a hard time believing he really has changed. The author throws in some difficult situations with Cole's past and his family's tragedies and some real surprises in this book which features mainly, the life, the hanging charges and the changes which take place in the lives of Abbie Farrell and Cole Jasper.
   
   I already have the next book ready to start. Thanks Kristen, for this wonderful, historical Christian fiction series!



4. I think this is the best book,but I realy wish monte did not die. I think she should write another book to the series, and have monte not realy be dead,and have it turn out that he realy was just badly injured and before they put him in the dirt a native american came and grabbed him and patched him up but lost his memory.So Abbie falls in love with cole and gets married, and so monte comes home after a few months they've been married, with his memory back,and abbie has to choose between them........you could finish the rest kristen if you decide to use my idea in another rocky mountian legacy. Keep up the good work,and GOD BLESS YOU! P.S Keep me informed please!



5. I think this is the best book,but I realy wish monte did not die. I think she should write another book to the series, and have monte not realy be dead,and have it turn out that he realy was just badly injured and before they put him in the dirt a native american came and grabbed him and patched him up but lost his memory.So Abbie falls in love with cole and gets married, and so monte comes home after a few months they've been married, with his memory back,and abbie has to choose between them........you could finish the rest kristen if you decide to use my idea in another rocky mountian legacy. Keep up the good work,and GOD BLESS YOU! P.S Keep me informed please!

1 comments about Shakespeare's Sonnets & Poems (Folger Shakespeare Library).

1. Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
   To thee I send this written embassage,
   To witness duty, not to show my wit.
   (Sonnet 26.)
   
   How to do justice to the legacy of literary history's greatest mind - moreover in such a limited review? Forget Goethe's "universal genius" and his rebel contemporary Schiller; forget the 19th century masters; forget contemporary literature: with the possible (!) exception of three Greek gentlemen named Aischylos, Sophocles and Euripides, a certain Frenchman called Poquelin (a/k/a Moliere), and that infamous Irishman Oscar Wilde, there's more wit in a single line of Shakespeare's than in an entire page of most other, even great, authors' works. And I'm not saying this in ignorance of, or in order to slight any other writer: it's precisely my admiration of the world's literary giants, past and present, that makes me appreciate Shakespeare even more -- and that although I'm aware that he repeatedly borrowed from pre-existing material and that even the (sole) authorship of the works published under his name isn't established beyond doubt. For ultimately, the only thing that matters to me is the brilliance of those works themselves; and quite honestly, the mysteries continuing to enshroud his person, to me, only enhance his larger-than-life stature.
   
   The precise dating of Shakespeare's sonnets -- like other poets', a response to the 1591 publication of Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" -- is an even greater guessing game than that of his plays: although #138 and #144 (slightly modified) appeared in 1599's "Passionate Pilgrim," most were probably circulated privately, and written years before their first -- unauthorized, though still authoritative - 1609 publication; possibly beginning in 1592-1593.
   
   Format-wise, they adopt the Elizabethan fourteen-line-structure of three quatrains of iambic pentameters expressing a series of increasingly intense ideas, resolved in a closing couplet; with an abab-cdcd-efef-gg rhyme form. (Sole exceptions: #99 -- first quatrain amplified by one line -- #126 -- six couplets & only twelve lines total -- #145 -- written in tetrameter -- and #146 -- omission of the second line's beginning; the subject of a lasting debate.) Their order is thematic rather than chronological, although beyond the fact that the first 126 are addressed to a young man -- maybe the Earl of Pembroke or Southampton, maybe Sir Robert Dudley, the natural son of Queen Elizabeth's "Sweet Robin," the Earl of Leicester -- (the first seventeen, possibly commissioned by the addressee's family, pressing his marriage and production of an heir), and ##127-152 (or 127-133 and 147-152) to an exotic woman of questionable virtues only known as "The Dark Lady," even in that respect much remains unclear; including the nature of Shakespeare's relationship with the two main addressees, regarding which the sonnets' often ambiguous metaphors invoke much speculation. #145 is probably addressed to Shakespeare's wife; the closing couplet plays on her maiden name ("['I hate' from] hate away she threw And saved my life, [saying 'not you']:" "Hathaway -- Anne saved my life"), several others contain puns on the name Will and its double meaning(s) (exactly fourteen in the naughty #135: "Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will;" and seven in the similarly mischievous #136), and the last two draw on the then-popular Cupid theme. Sometimes, placement seems linked to contents, e.g., in #8 (music: an octave has eight notes), #12 and #60 (time: twelve hours to both day and night; sixty minutes to an hour); and in the famous #55, which praises poetry's everlasting power and as whose never-expressly-named subject Shakespeare himself emerges in a comparison with Horace's Ode 3.30 -- in turn written in first person singular and thus, denoting its own author as the builder of its "monument more lasting than bronze" ("Exegi monumentum aere perennius") -- as well as through the number "5"'s optical similarity to the letter "S," making the sonnet's number a shorthand reference for "5hake5peare" or "5hakespeare's 5onnets," echoed by numerous words containing an "S" in the text.
   
   Of indescribable linguistic beauty, elegance and complexity, Shakespeare's sonnets owe their timeless appeal to their supreme compositional values, the universality of their themes, and their keen insights into the human heart and soul; as much as their transcendence of the era's poetic conventions which, following Petrarch, heavily idealized the addressee's qualities: a form new and exciting twohundred years earlier, but encrusted in cliche in the late 1500s. Indeed, Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" Sonnet #130 owes its particular fame to its clever puns on that very style, which went overboard with references to its golden-haired, starry- (beamy-, sparkling, sunny-) eyed, cherry- (strawberry-, vermilion-, coral-) lipped, rosy- (crimson-, purple-, dawn-) cheeked, ivory- (lily-, carnation-, crystal-, silver-, snowy-, swan-white) skinned, pearl-teethed, honey- (nectar-, music-) tongued, goddess-like objects. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;" the Bard countered, proceeded to describe her breasts as "dun," her hair as "black wires," and her breath as "reek[ing]," and denied her any divine or angelic attributes. "And yet," he concluded: "by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare."
   
   Arguably, Shakespeare's very choice of addressees (a young man -- also the subject of the famously romantic #18: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day;" the first of several sonnets promising his immortalization in poetry -- as well as the "Dark Lady," in turn introduced under the notion "black is beautiful" in #127) itself suggests a break with tradition; and compared to his contemporaries' poetry, even the equally-famous #116's on its face rather conventional praise of love's constancy ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments"), echoed in the poet's vow to vanquish time in #123, sounds fairly restrained. But ultimately, Shakespeare's sonnets -- like his entire work -- simply defy categorization. They are, as rival Ben Jonson acknowledged, written "for all time," just as the Bard himself immodestly claimed:
   
   'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity
   Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
   Even in the eyes of all posterity
   That wear this world out to the ending doom.
   (Sonnet 55.)

No comments about High Noon (BFI Film Classics).

3 comments about Fun to Grow on: Engaging Play Activities for Kids With Teachers, Parents and Grandparents.

1. Fun to Grow On is an easy to read, well illustrated book that really supports parental interaction with their children.
   No big expenses or fancy gimmicks, just household goods used in a new way.
   
   This could be an excellent resource for home schoolers to fill up recreational time during the day.



2. This book will help you turn off the TV and be a hero bigger than Barney! With parents scrambling for non-computer related activities, this book provides more than 100 ideas for valuable interaction with your kids. I remembered many of them from growing up in the Midwest, including the peanut-butter birdfeeder, which I'll be sure to create this winter with my own children. The taste test and find-a-smell activities are fun ways to introduce new foods to kids, and are hits at slumber parties as well. I highly recommend this book not only parents but aunts & uncles and grandparents too.



3. This slim book was packed with good ideas for inexpensive spontaneous fun. Although some were a bit simplistic, most were new, easy and inexpensive to try! I'll give a good review to any book's ideas that keep my 4 year old busy and happy on a 4 hour plane ride, which this one did.

1 comments about Hula Dancers & Tiki Gods.

1. There's no way this book should be listed under Home and Garden. Someone tell me why it is. Hula Dancers and Tiki Gods boasts over 500 color images of Hawaiiana collectibles. Pfouts' purpose is clear: It's all about fun. He claims he's not out to teach anyone anything. And then he goes ahead and does it anyway. Hula Dancers offers a great store of information and photos. Pfouts gives a clear picture of how the hula dancer and the tiki god came to symbolize so much to so many. He covers a wide range of Hula collectibles through four sections: flat hula treasures that includes postcards, paintings, pulp art, cocktail napkins, carnival sideshow art, decals, playing cards, tattoos, etc; the three-dimensional section brings the lovely ladies to life as figurines, salt and pepper shakers, plaster sculptures, drinking vessels, killer lamps and more; the vintage crank girls in the third section offer the reader a rare chance to see dainty little ladies who shimmy with a quick twist and the Hollywood section show how movie posters, album covers, photos and sheet music brought the hula into greater public view. The tiki gods portion of the book offers up information and photos on everything tiki, including swizzel sticks, mugs, pendants, bookends and furniture to die for. Combined with his entertaining commentary and assessments on what some of these collectibles are worth today, Hula Dancers and Tiki Gods leaves a lasting impression of the depth and availability of Hawaiiana out there.

1 comments about Acting with Style (3rd Edition).

1. Many people approach "style" in theatre as a play where wigs and tights are necessary. Harrop & Epstein do not attempt to disprove this notion, but rather detail the approach to acting in all dramatic genres i.e. greek, comedy, farce, tragedy, Shakespeare, etc. They also identify the necessity to understand the "style" of the piece being produced from an all areas and suggest exercises to unlock the meaning of the piece. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is afraid of a stylized play and is a necessary read for both actors and directors (especially those directors who have had little or no performance training).

2 comments about The New York Agent Book: How to Get the Agent You Need for the Career You Want (New York Agent Book).

1. K Callan has produced a series of entertaining, common sense, well-researched books on the acting industry and this is definitely one of them. Full of quotes from agents across New York, it contains insights and suggestions into likes and dislikes of agents, tips on how to get an agent to pay attention, what to look for in an agent and much more. If you're starting your agent search or looking for new representation, it's worth a look.



2. ok, i am having trouble getting an agent but this book helped, it specified what an agent does, and what agent you want depending on your career choice. this book seemed to be mostly acting oriented but it had some good info for models too. the one thing i didn't find helpful about this book was that it didn't specify what each particular agency was looking for. it only talked about who started the agency and their background. this book can point people in the right direction for getting into the business but it can't really get you an agent.