All Entries Tagged With: "books"

How To Find Top Five Books About A Subject

When a subject suddenly catches your fancy, it’s not uncommon to turn to the web for more information.  Problem is, it’s usually tough to figure out where the best resources are.  Five Books is a website that seeks to simplify the process, interviewing one renowned expert on each field about the five best books they will recommend to anyone who wants to catch up.
Every day, a list of recommendations from one eminent personality in a specialized industry gets added to the list, potentially making this one of the most critical “top five lists” when it comes to unearthing dependable source materials.  Current topic listings include a varied range, from the top cooking books of all time (by food columnist Nigel Slater) to virtual living (by broadcaster and journalist Alex Krotoski) to the atom (by theoretical physics professor Jim Al-Khalili ) to British Film (by British cinema academic  Brian MacFarlane).
Five Books’ [...]

The Sneaker Colouring Book Lets You Try Out Custom Looks On Classic Kicks

Some sneakers are just timeless. And we see them show up over and over, getting new colorways and styling but retaining the same design. The Sneaker Colouring Book lets you doll up your favorite pair of kicks from years past and present, so you can try your hand at spitting out a perfect pair.
Featuring models from 1916 to present, the book covers 18 major brands with their most iconic models neatly drawn in clean, black lines. Pick up a box of crayons, color pencils or other preferred medium of choice, and waste an entire day cooped up in bed, remembering just how much you sucked in art class. Boo-hoo.
The Sneaker Colouring Book contains 100 line drawings of popular sneakers from brands such as Adidas, Nike, Vans, Puma, Onitsuka Tiger (Asics) and Converse. Spanning 152 10.6 x 7 inch pages, you’ll have plenty of shoe designs [...]

Two Dudes, One Pan Detail 100 Simple, Flavorful And Guy-Friendly Recipes

The name may be a cheap take on the gross trailer for that even more reprehensible movie, but there’s nothing disgusting about Two Dudes, One Pan. Instead, it’s the title of a cookbook from Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, which details minimalist recipes using just one equipment at a time and a whole host of creative passion.
If you’re not familiar with them, they’re the stars of the Food Network’s 2 Dudes Catering program, a reality show chronicling the duo’s foray into the world of big time Hollywood catering. Designed for the kitchen-challenged gender, the book lists the steps to 100 tasty meals, all inspired from the pair’s early days working with limited money, ingredients and cookware.
Each chapter in Two Dudes, One Pan is named after the cooking vessel used to prepare the dish, such as Frying Pan, Big Bowl and Baking Dish. Recipes range from four types [...]

Popville Is Possibly The Most Awesome Pop-Up Book Ever

Here’s one reason to never get rid of physical books: pop-up inserts. Yep, you can’t exactly make an ebook do paper pop-ups (at least, not until they put 3D holograms on your Kindle). Even then, we doubt they’ll do ones with as much stylish flair as Popville, a gorgeous pop-up book that chronicles a city’s development from an isolated plot of land to a bustling metropolis.
Just like a physical version of SimCity, each spread of the book opens up a scene in the city’s creation. It starts with one single church among the trees and culminates with a heavily crowded city scene, complete with towering buildings, factories and multitudes of streets. Designed to flow like a storybook, the charm lies in the wordless conveyance of a city’s life. Rather than tell you a tale in words, it makes its case in visual 3D, with each new [...]

GOAT: Champ’s Edition Is The Definitive Treatise On Muhammad Ali, Makes For Heavyweight Reading

Boxing may be dying on its knees (with the Pacquaio-Mayweather debacle serving as its latest poison), but the great memories of pugilists past will remain with us forever.   Taschen’s latest opus on Muhammad Ali, GOAT: Champ’s Edition, is the definitive volume on boxing’s greatest practitioner, collecting an insane amount of content relating to the champ over the last 50 years.
GOAT (acronym for Greatest Of All Time) is one huge treatise in eight-color print – 792 pages, consisting of over 600,000 words (collecting the best essays, interviews and writing on Ali) and over 3,000 images (all gloss-varnished).  It’s XXL-sized, measuring 20 x 20 inches and weighing 75 lbs.  It comes with two 80 x 20 inch gatefold sequences and four silver 20 x 20 inch gelatin prints (signed by both Muhammad Ali and photographer Howard L. Bingham).

The book sports a white silk cover with pink lettering, slid inside a silk-clad box [...]

Moonfire: Lunar Rock Edition Comes With Spaceship Case, Genuine Moonrock And An Out-Of-This-World Price

There’s no better way to say “I’m rich, bitch!” than buying a special-edition book for $90,500.  That’s why I’m taking my Lamborghini from my million-dollar mansion, liquidating it on JamesList and grabbing myself a copy of Taschen’s reissue of the Norman Mailer classic, Of a Fire on the Moon.  Which I won’t even read.
Okay.  The above were all lies.  Except for the part where the “Lunar Rock Edition” of Mailer’s epic tale of the Apollo 11 launch – reprinted as Moonfire – costs over ninety grand.   That part is real.
Why the exorbitant price?  The book comes in a single-body aluminum case, sporting a front cover that’s been designed to feature a topographical reproduction of a section of the moon’s surface.  It also gets further Apollo 11 accents, including the struts and feet, making it look like an alien aircraft rather than a coffee-table volume.
The clincher, however, is the piece [...]

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made, Turned Into A Book

Vaporware fans rejoice!  Stanley Kubrick’s unfilmed ouvre on Napoleon Bonaparte, which many consider to be “The Greatest Movie Never Made” (I know how stupid that sounds),  is celebrated on a new collector’s edition book that details all the two years of work the director has spent in preparation for it.
Discussed by Kubrick fans and film buffs for over forty years, Napoleon was supposed to be one big-ass epic.   In fact, the director was said to have amassed an “unparalleled treasure trove of research and pre-production material” during the time that his team worked on the project, including over 15,000 photographs of scouting locations and over 17,000 slides of imagery fit for the era.  From the sound of it, the collection is every bit as epic as the movie Kubrick was hoping to make.

All of those materials, including correspondence about the film from the director himself, costume studies, various drafts and [...]

Emergency: What To Do When It Really Hits The Fan

What do you do when going gets tough and the carefully crafted world you’ve built around you falls to pieces?  Most of us probably don’t even think about those scenarios but New York Times best-selling author Neil Strauss did.  He documents the result of that paranoia and learning to be ready for it in his latest full-length book, “Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life.”

As with his previous works, Strauss delves into his subject and literally lives it.  In the classic and brilliant low-brow tome “The Dirt,” he put himself among the members of Motley Crue during a tour, partaking in their drug-and-alcohol-addled life on the road.  On the 2005 hit “The Game,” he managed to entrench himself into the inner circle of self-proclaimed pick-up artists, reveling in their nightly juvenile pursuits of winning women’s adoration.  For “Emergency,” Strauss throws himself in the midst of survivalists, whose lives revolved around [...]