Pret : 35 Lei

The Complete Owner’s Manual

· Details on how to unlock every secret car
· The best racing lines for all tracks
· Expert racing lessons to help you dust your competition
· Customization hints and tips to get the most out of your vehicles
· Complete driving basics to bring you from beginner to expert

Pret : 23 Lei

In Fandomania, photographer Elena Dorfman examines the pop culture phenomenon of “cosplay,” in which participants dress up in costumesâand live part of their livesâas characters from video games, animated films, and Japanese graphic novels. This exploding subculture flourishes at convention centers, college dorms, private clubs, and in homes across the country. Dorfman puts herself quietly behind the scenes of these fan-based events to create a remarkable collective portrait. As she describes it, “The theater of cosplay has no boundaries, is unpredictable, open-ended. It includes both the fantastic and the mundane, the sexually aberrant and innocent, female characters who become samurai warriors and brainy scientists, and male characters who magically change their sex.” Explorations of identity through portraiture are at the forefront of Dorfman’s work, with the blurred lines between fantasy and reality a continuing theme. She allows each individual a spotlight in which to enact their fantasy. The effect is pointedly evocative of this new world of role playing and narrative, one in which scenery is secondary and persona is everything.

French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand and his devoted team have spent five years putting together this voluminous gallery, selecting 195 images from 100,000 photographs taken from helicopters in the skies over 75 countries. It is a staggering achievement and precisely shows how vaguely we know our world. Statistics play a secondary, but vital, role; the text that accompanies the shots (a paragraph each, with a short essay adorning every chapter), highlights the degree to which we have abused our Eden, providing a sobering adjunct to what can at times be mistaken for a planetary holiday brochure. Of primary concern, however, are the pictures. Almost every plate is double page, reproduced in sumptuous vibrant color, with helpful fold-out notes for each shot. The standard is a visual treat but, damn it, books should be luxurious sometimes. Huge African cotton bales become cauliflowers, logs floating down the Amazon are nothing more than matchsticks, the extraordinary contours of Turkey’s Cappadocia are more like lunar scapes and South African sea-lions gathered to mate eerily echo an earlier crowd of curious humans in Côte D’Ivoire. In contrast, a solitary human figure frequently gives perspective to a shot, though occasionally superfluously, for the obliquity of perception can add resonant depth, reducing mighty river courses to glistening snail trails. Much on show is conventional, exceptional landscape photography, but Arthus-Bertrand also trains his lens on our fingerprints smudging the idyll, such as the depressingly overcrowded shanty towns favelas of Rio de Janeiro or the sprawling communal rubbish heap of Mexico City. However, the hovering eye, like a benevolent celestial deity, cannot help but impose a fragile beauty even on these blights, reclaiming the scarring chaos from its despoilers and harnessing the sense of mortal finitism necessary for a solution of ecological sustained development to be convincingly reached. Arthus-Bertrand’s desire to take his art “beyond the anecdotal”, to give his subject the space in which to impose its own beauty, allows a gleefully conspiratorial voyeurism, at once empowering and humbling, that at its best captures something quasi-religious in its intense calm. As Louis Armstrong once growled, what a wonderful world. –David Vincent

About authors
Alan Livingston has been Principal of Falmouth College of Arts, Cornwall, since 1987. A Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers, he is a former Chairman of the Council for National Academic Awards’ Committee for Art & Design. Isabella Livingston lectures in Design History at the Falmouth College of Arts.

Pret : 50 Lei

It’s time to throw away the scissors and paste. We’ll show you how to make innovative and colourful scrapbooks; make fun - even interactive - calendars; capture holidays, weddings, and parties online, on CD, via email…or just in print. We’ll even show you how to make slideshows, interactive family trees, and print your photos onto a variety of things, including T-shirts and mugs!
About author
The author Steve Anzovin is the CEO of Anzovin Studio, a CG character animation services company he co-founded in 2000 with his son, Raf Anzovin. Steve also founded and manages Anzovin Studio’s publishing arm, which develops commercial software tools and CD-ROM-based training materials for animators. Raf Anzovin is the co-founder and creative director of Anzovin Studio.

Pret : 25 Lei

The African diaspora—a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism—generated a wide array of artistic achievements in the past century, from blues to reggae, from the paintings of Henry Ossawa Tanner to the video installations of Keith Piper. Richard Powell’s study concentrates on the works of art themselves and on how these works, created during a time of major social upheaval and transformation, use black culture as both subject and context.

From musings on the “the souls of black folk” in early twentieth-century painting, sculpture, and photography to questions of racial and cultural identities in performance, media, and computer-assisted arts in the 1990s, the book draws on the works of hundreds of artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, Wifredo Lam, Jacob Lawrence, Spike Lee, Archibald Motley, Jr., Faith Ringgold, and Gerard Sekoto.

This revised edition includes expanded coverage of video art and a new chapter that discusses work by a number of artists who have risen to prominence in the past five years, such as Chris Ofili, Kara Walker, and Renée Cox. Biographies of more than 170 key artists provide a unique art-historical reference.

Placing its emphasis on black cultural themes rather than on black racial identity, this groundbreaking book is an important exploration of the visual representations of black culture throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Professor Hammacher, who knew Barbara Hepworth for many years, has added new material to his acclaimed study to bring the story up to the time of her death, and has included several new illustrations.

Bruce Arnold traces the complex evolution of Irish art through three millennia, showing how it has drawn on Celtic, AngloSaxon, Norman, Mediterranean and other diverse sources.

As the story unfolds, Arnold repatriates Irish artists who are frequently regarded as ‘English’ – including William Mulready, Daniel Maclise and James Barry – and shows how Irish painting and sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, metalwork and architecture together form a rich and distinctive cultural heritage.

Pret : 25 Lei

The Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic Movements, Art Nouveau, the Modern Movement, its rivals Art Deco and the Moderne, American Streamlining and Modern, Pop, Op, Surrealism, Hi-Tech, Post-Modernism, Deconstructivism, and many other styles of interior design are charted in this wide-ranging survey. Some movements, like the Modern, were inspired by leading architects such as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, or by groups and schools such as the Bauhaus. Others like Art Deco were the work of decorators such as Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann—glamorous haut-décor, which was then popularized throughout the world by the mass media. Still others, like the ethnic styles, were virtually anonymous, or were consumer-led. Anne Massey introduces all the styles, signposts the changes of direction, and fully documents the emergence of professional “interior decoration” and its evolution into interior design. This revised edition is brought up to date with discussions of green design and the effect of new technology on the home and workplace.
190 illustrations, 39 in color.