Saturday, February 27, 2016

Danganronpa by Spike Chunsoft


Danganronpa: The Animation Volume 1 by Spike Chunsoft, Dave Steward (Illustrations)

Summary
Each year, the elite Hope’s Peak Academy selects only the most gifted and talented students to enroll…plus one ordinary student, chosen by lottery.
Makoto Naegi was that lucky person—or so he thought! When he shows up for class, he finds the elite students are a bizarre cast of oddballs under the ruthless authority of a robot teddy bear principal, Monokuma. 


The bear lays down the school rules: the only way out of Hope’s Peak is to not only murder another student…but get away with it, as every murder is followed by a tribunal where the surviving students cross-examine each other!


Inspired by the Danganronpa videogame series and based on the anime of the same name, the Danganropa manga is a quirky, fun, weird, and dynamic take on the high school Battle Royale genre.


Impressions
Like announced in the summary, it's inspired of a battle Royale with a twisted wicked crazy teddy bear. It remind me of the bear from "Bleach".
Other references, a bit of  "The Hunger Games" as well as "D-Gray Man" in the illustrations.

Personally, I've liked the bloody plot and the sweetness and naive aspect of the hero. This first volume made me curious enough to make me wait the sequel to know who will die next! LOL!

Cool one!


Source
*Arc provided by Edelweiss
I received this book in exchange of a fair and honest review.

Friday, February 26, 2016

Burning Glass by Kathryn Purdie

Summary
Sonya was born with the rare gift to feel what those around her feel—both physically and emotionally—a gift she’s kept hidden from the empire for seventeen long years. After a reckless mistake wipes out all the other girls with similar abilities, Sonya is hauled off to the palace and forced to serve the emperor as his sovereign Auraseer.

Tasked with sensing the intentions of would-be assassins, Sonya is under constant pressure to protect the emperor. One mistake, one small failure, will cost her own life and the lives of the few people left in the world who still trust her.

But Sonya’s power is untamed and reckless, her feelings easily usurped, and she sometimes can’t decipher when other people’s impulses end and her own begin. In a palace full of warring emotions and looming darkness, Sonya fears that the biggest danger to the empire may be herself.

As she struggles to wrangle her abilities, Sonya seeks refuge in her tenuous alliances with the volatile Emperor Valko and his idealistic younger brother, Anton, the crown prince. But when threats of revolution pit the two brothers against each other, Sonya must choose which brother to trust—and which to betray.

BURNING GLASS is debut author Kathryn Purdie’s stunning tale of dangerous magic, heart-rending romance, and the hard-won courage it takes to let go.


Impressions
Dissapointed.

The cover has attracted me as well as the back cover content. If the idea of an Auraseer was interestesting, to be honest I had so difficuties to enter into the story.
Sonya was hard to connect with and to like.
Too bad because I've liked the court schemings and the author writting.

Source
*Arc provided by Edelweiss
I received this book in exchange of a fair and honest review.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Paris Vagabond by Jean-Paul Clebert


Paris Vagabond  by Jean-Paul Clebert, Donald Nicholson-Smith (Translated by), Patrice Molinard (Photographs by), Luc Sante (Introduction by)


Summary
Jean-Paul Clébert was a boy from a respectable middle-class family who ran away from school, joined the French Resistance, and never looked back. Making his way to Paris at the end of World War II, Clébert took to living on the streets, and in Paris Vagabond, a so-called “aleatory novel” assembled out of sketches he jotted down at the time, he tells what it was like.

His “gallery of faces and cityscapes on the road to extinction” is an astonishing depiction of a world apart—a Paris, long since vanished, of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast—and a no less astonishing feat of literary improvisation: Its long looping breathless sentences, streetwise, profane, lyrical, incantatory, are an adventure in their own right. Praised on publication by the great novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars and embraced by the young Situationists as a kind of manual for living off the grid, Paris Vagabond—here published with the starkly striking photographs of Clébert’s friend Patrice Molinard—is a raw and celebratory evocation of the life of a city and the underside of life.

Impressions
Beautiful and touching!

I like reading about my city and it was a great walk into history and into french culture with someone able to make you feel the world he was seeing and living in. He was right about Paris being experimented early in the morning, in the bistrots/cafés or just by losing yourself in the streets.
Still the best way to discover Paris and its diversity not always full of sparkles.

I was pulled into the desription and the hard and realistic way the author was sharing his testimony of an epoque as well as trying to share his views of Paris. Not sure, it's a book for tourists, who usually prefer the glamorous and romantic view of seeing the French capital. But it's wonderfully written, full of poetry even when relating poverty and the ways clochards were living at this time.

It's also very contemporary. If the landscape have changed because of constructions and if some "quartiers" have disapeared, Paris is still full of awesome surprises and days still "inhaled faster than a puff on a cigarette." And poverty with clochards and migrants is still the same. Probably even more sad and dangerous now.

An awesome book, written by someone who was in love with the French city as well as with the real people he had spent time with.
Brillant!


QUOTES

=======================================================



The contributors
Jean-Paul Clébert (1926–2011) ran away from his Jesuit boarding school at the age of seventeen to join the French Re­sistance, serving undercover in a Montmartre brothel to gather intelligence on the patrons who were German soldiers. After the liberation of Paris he wandered through a catalog of odd jobs including boat painter, cook, newspaper seller, funeral director’s mute, and café proprietor. For many months he lived with the city’s down-and-outs, though without losing touch with some of Paris’s literary figures, notably Blaise Cendrars, and gathered the raw material for this book, first published in 1952 as Paris insolite. In 1956 he moved to Provence, where he remained for the rest of his life, writing many books, including a classic firsthand study of Gypsy life, originally published in 1961 and translated by Charles Duff as The Gypsies; and the encyclopedic Dictionnaire du Surréalisme (1996).

Patrice Molinard (1922–2002) began his career taking stills for Georges Franju’s legendary documentary on the Paris slaughterhouse at La Villette, Le sang des bêtes (1949). As a film director, he is best known for Fantasmagorie (1963), Orphée 70 (1968), and Bistrots de Paris (1977).

Donald Nicholson-Smith was born in Manchester, England and is a longtime resident of New York City. He came across Clébert’s Paris insolite as a teenager and has long wished to bring it to an Anglophone audience. Among his many translations are works by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Raoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Jean Laplanche, Guillaume Apollinaire, Guy Debord, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Thierry Jonquet, and (with Alyson Waters) Yasmina Khadra. For NYRB Classics he has translated Manchette’s Fatale and The Mad and the Bad, which won the 28th Annual Translation Prize of the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation for fiction.

Luc Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, and, most recently The Other Paris. He translated Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines and has written introductions to several other NYRB Classics, including Classic Crimes by William Roug­head and Pedigree by Georges Simenon. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, he teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.


Source
*Arc provided by Edelweiss
I received this book in exchange of a fair and honest review.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Book Cover Designs by Matthew Goodman, Nicole Caputo



Summary
Browse more than 500book cover designs and listen to more than 50 of today's top designers discuss their process for creating the perfect book cover. Award-winning creative professionals fromaround the world have applied astonishingly clever cover concepts that playslyly on titles and themes of international bestsellers, both classic andmodern, adding new dimensions to the books and breathing new lifeinto bright ideas.

Literature lovers and graphic illustrators of all types, aswell as book design students and professionals, will relish thisinspiring collection of covers of fiction and nonfiction, history and sciencebooks, novels and short stories, from old favorites to popular 21st-centurytitles.

For future designers looking for inspiration, as well as hopeless coverlovers, Book Cover Designs is a must-have design reference for any collection. Feelfree to judge these books by their covers.

Impressions
As an avid reader, I'm attracted by covers at lot.
If I'm just browsing books at the bookstores or the library without any specific tittle in mind, most of the time, it's the cover that will pick up my curiosity and make me read the summary.
And as a professional, I know the power of a good picture combined with words. That's why I was curious about this book and what the author has to tell us.

It's a very simple and effective book that let a large place to the book designers. And it was cool to spot a book, I have read, and have some informations about the designer and how he/she is working.
Also interesting to see that for some designers, I was drawn into their art, sensibily and world regardless of the book. I would have easily picked all their design and be curious about the story.
So, I've learned also a lot about me as a reader just by learning about cover design.

Interesting book for the lovers of design and books.


The Author
Matthew, a graphic design professional, has worked in book design and covers for more than ten years. He lives with his wife, Christy, and their two sons.
His work can be viewed at www.publishingdesigner.com

Source
*Arc provided by Edelweiss
I received this book in exchange of a fair and honest review.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Lost in Love by Susane Colasanti

Summary
In this second book of the City Love trilogy by bestselling author Susane Colasanti, three girls share a Manhattan apartment the summer before college begins. Lost in Love captures the essence of summer love, self-discovery, and sisterhood, a perfect fit for fans of Sarah Dessen, Jenny Han, and Jennifer E. Smith.

Sadie was convinced that Austin was her soul mate, but after discovering his secret she wonders if she even knows him at all. Darcy was all about fun boy adventures with no strings attached . . . until her ex moves to New York City to win her back. Things are getting serious with Rosanna and her boyfriend, but will she be able to break free of her past and let him in? With no parents, no rules, and an entire city to explore, this is the summer that will change their lives forever.

Told from alternating points of view, Lost in Love weaves a story of first love, first heartbreak, and everything in between.

Impressions
Haven't read the first opus but it was not hard to get into the book or to understand the story. If it's well written and the three girls very different, I'm sorry to confess it hasn't touched me. I've read their love struggles and it's really well told.
It's just that I felt no connexion or emotions pulling me into these heroines.

As the author picture three very lovely women, I hope you will have more chance than me to bond with them as the story is not bad at all.

Source
*Arc provided by Edelweiss
I received this book in exchange of a fair and honest review.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Midnighter by Steve Orlando


VOL 1
Summary

Spinning out of GRAYSON comes a solo series starring the man who can predict your every move… but no one will be able to predict what he’ll do next!

A theft at the God Garden has unleashed a wave of dangerous biotech weapons on the world, and Midnighter intends to put that genie back in the bottle by any means necessary. But something else was stolen from the Garden as well…the secret history of Lucas Trent, the man Midnighter once was!
Impressions
Confused by the story...Too bad because I really like the art and the Batman looks of the Midnighter.

But even if the illustrations are great and colorfull, when you don't get where the story is going and who is the heros, it's a bit dissapointed.
The fight scenes are violent but very well pictured and there is a lot of action.
It's really a deception since there is humor and a really great potential.

I feel frustrated as I like some parts but being confused in a Comics, it's not good to make you want to buy the next volume.

About the author
Steve Orlando is a comic book writer who has worked for both DC Comics and Image Comics. He has created Undertow, an underwater epic for Image and is the writer for the new MIDNIGHTER series.



Source
*Arc provided by Edelweiss
I received this book in exchange of a fair and honest review.

Sunday, February 14, 2016

CONTENT INC by Joe Pulizzi


Summary
How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences
and Create Radically Successful Businesses
By Joe Pulizzi
Founder and CEO, Content Marketing Institute
Author, Epic Content Marketing
The traditional “Shark Tank” model for start-ups is taking an amazing idea, product, or service, funding it, and bringing it to market. One expert in the start-up space declares this is entirely the wrong way to launch a business – and backwards to boot.

If you build an audience first, using content – whether a blog, podcast, website, resource guide, newsletter among examples – you then have the opportunity to monetize to an already loyal following. It’s the smartest, most risk-averse way to go to market, and there are dozens of successful examples, from The HuffingtonPost and Game Theory to Goop and KraftRecipes.com.

In CONTENT, INC., content marketing expert Joe Pulizzi shows you how to position yourself as an informational leader in your niche and develop content that is as beloved as that coming from any traditional media company. Using this model, entrepreneurs with limited resources can build a massive online audience as the engine that drives their entire businesses. Using simple recommendations, any small business owner can use to dominate the market without initially selling anything at all.


Quotes

"A blog post is like a miniskirt...it needs to be long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to keep it interesting."

"To begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of your desired direction and destination, and then continue by flexing your proactive muscles to make things happen."

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle."


Impressions
Interesting. A lot of quotes and examples of people who have succeeded by finding what they were passionated about and have developped a content to attract an audience.

Nice read also to give a boost of confidence to entrepreneurs who want to change their life and take a risk at growing a business.

Like the way Joe Pulizzi has motivated his readers to do what they love and keep going even if the results are not showing immediatly. Common sense? Of course. But when you are stressed by results, expectations and analytics, you forget that loving his job, believing in your products and talking with passion is always the right way to be happy with yourself.

A great read.

About the AuthorJoe Pulizzi is the original content marketing evangelist, and started using the term “content marketing” back in 2001.
He’s the founder of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the leading content marketing educational resource for enterprise brands, recognized as the 468th fastest growing private company by Inc. magazine in 2013. CMI produces the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World, held every September in Cleveland, Ohio, which has been attended by half the Fortune 50.
Find him online at JoePulizzi.com or on Twitter @JoePulizzi.

Source
*Arc provided by Netgalley
I received this book in exchange of a fair and honest review.

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Spellcasting: Beyond the Basics by Michael Furie

Summary
Spellcasting is an exploration of magical theory and practice, natural techniques that utilize spiritual forces.

Join author Michael Furie as he provides lessons on manifestation work, self-awareness and meditation techniques, altered states of consciousness, connecting to the natural world, planetary and stellar information, and information on the Hermetic laws.

Discover practical techniques, spells, and rituals for different magical goals, as well as special spells such as the "Princess and the Pea Ritual" and the "Elements of Self-Esteem."


Impressions
To be honest, it was curiosity that got be to read this book. I was joking about casting spell and was interesting about how to do it. So it was more for fun than really me being interested about wichcraft.
So, at first I was dissapointed because... cough, cough...it was a really serious book. Then, I really start reading it. Not at all what I was expecting.

As I'm into meditation, I was really impressed by the advices given to reach a state of clear mind, as well as astrology and planets.
And after some time, the author leads you into how to build an altar or to draw a circles as well as other stuffs.

So I have to apologize. I was not taking this book seriously when it's a really  interesting one. Well written too!
A great surprise even if i will not try it. :-D

Source
*Arc provided by Netgalley
I received this book in exchange of a fair and honest review.

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Washington and Baltimore Art Deco by Richard Striner, Melissa Blair


Washington and Baltimore Art Deco : A Design History of Neighboring Cities by Richard Striner and Melissa Blair

Summary
The bold lines and decorative details of Art Deco have stood the test of time since one of its first appearances in the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925. Reflecting the confidence of modern mentality—streamlined, chrome, and glossy black—along with simple elegance, sharp lines, and cosmopolitan aspirations, Art Deco carried surprises, juxtaposing designs growing out of speed (racecars and airplanes) with ancient Egyptian and Mexican details, visual references to Russian ballet, and allusions to Asian art.

While most often associated with such masterworks as New York’s Chrysler Building, Art Deco is evident in the architecture of many U.S. cities, including Washington and Baltimore. By updating the findings of two regional studies from the 1980s with new research, Richard Striner and Melissa Blair explore the most significant Art Deco buildings still standing and mourn those that have been lost.

This comparative study illuminates contrasts between the white-collar New Deal capital and the blue-collar industrial port city, while noting such striking commonalities as the regional patterns of Baltimore’s John Jacob Zinc, who designed Art Deco cinemas in both cities.


Uneven preservation efforts have allowed significant losses, but surviving examples of Art Deco architecture include the Bank of America building in Baltimore (now better known as 10 Light Street) and the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington. Although possibly less glamorous or flamboyant than exemplars in New York or Miami, the authors find these structures—along with apartment houses and government buildings—typical of the Deco architecture found throughout the United States and well worth preserving.

Demonstrating how an international design movement found its way into ordinary places, this study will appeal to architectural historians, as well as regional residents interested in developing a greater appreciation of Art Deco architecture in the mid-Atlantic region.

Impressions
Two cities I've never visited even if I was aware of the gorgeous Art Deco work you can see in Miami. So I was curious about this book and the old fashion and decadent vibes this art gives to a city.

I was not dissapointed. The book is detailled with history and stories as well as illustrated with gorgeous pictures.
But it would have been even greater if some color pictures were also proposed. Even if I understand the beauty of Black and White...

It's a great book to know more or discover about a design mouvement. An amazing work done by the two authors.


As I like buildings and history, this book was the perfect mix!


Authors
Richard Striner is a professor of history at Washington College and is the author, co-author, or editor of ten books. Melissa Blair is an architectural historian in Maryland.


Source
*Arc provided by Edelweiss
I received this book in exchange of a fair and honest review.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Monday Storm


Monday Storm

I woke up to the sound of pouring rain
Abundantly washing the ground behind my curtain
I listen to the elements arguing through my windows
Not wanting reality, I bury my face in the pillows
What is this silly humidity rolling out of my eyes?
Am I cleaning my soul out of your memories?
Of empty promises and alluring sentences?
Of cold indifference and supposed acceptance?

The wind hiss fiercely outside not happy 
Of being forgotten in the middle of this insane party 
Like water, his powers can heal or damage
This morning, Aeolus is at war, out for carnage
Inside, my thoughts and feelings keep their swirl
Of what if and why... They roll, they whirl
Never mind asking, answers are locked in silence
I’m tired of your absence or compelled presence

The storm is passionate, loud, angry
As I can be
The nature likes harmony
You had my loyalty, my amity
In a minute, the weather will change
Same for me
White clouds will tell new stories
I will thank you for all our memories 
Before wishing you a sunny journey
New stars to light your wild odyssey

Lucie
02/01/2016

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