"Smartly designed and easy to understand, Abel and Madden’s text is an edifying course in creating comics. Comprised of 15 comprehensive lessons, readers are taught the basic elements necessary to conceptualize and produce their own comics. Assuming an audience range from individuals to a group, this pedagogical survey is written to serve a wide array of learners . . . Extensive backmatter, including helpful appendices on such topics as homework critiques, and a considerable bibliography round out the volume. This erudite study should leave its readers with a greater understanding and appreciation of the command one must possess to create graphic media. A valuable resource for all interested in the field."—Kirkus Reviews

"This is a great book—flawed, impossible, infuriating, and moving . . . but he has accomplished in this extraordinary book something finer than mere polemic. En route to his last painful discovery, Barthes takes the reader on an exquisitely rendered, lyrical journey into the heart of his own life and the medium he came to love, a medium that flirts constantly with the 'intractable reality' of the human condition."—Douglas Davis, Newsweek

"[Dutton’s] discussion of the arts and of our responses to them is uniformly insightful and penetrating . . . he touches on all the major issues of aesthetics in this fairly short book and invariably illuminates them . . . Dutton’s eloquent account sheds light on the role art plays in our lives, whatever its ultimate origins"—Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

"A brief review can't do justice to Watching the World Change, a lucid, thoughtful, and wide-ranging book. In truth, Friend's excellent writing conveys more of the truth of the day than photographs can."—Garrison Keillor, The New York Times

"Howard argues convincingly that Kimball and Jefferson were the Boswell and Johnson of American architecture. Their conversation managed to leap over two centuries of separation and establish, for the first time, the origins of an indigenous American architectural style. And speaking of style, this book truly has it."—Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of Founding Brothers, American Sphinx and His Excellency

"This important new anthology features more than 100 short essays spanning the career of noted and influential architecture critic Huxtable . . . What makes this volume important is Huxtable's retrospective organization. The theme that runs throughout is the 'transformation of modernism.' Opening chapters on each decade from the 1960s to the 1990s reflect the architectural Zeitgeist of the times. In the second half, Huxtable assembles essays examining iconic buildings and the works of the masters of modernism-Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn, Walter Gropius, and Frank Lloyd Wright. She devotes a whole section to essays about the World Trade Center, and her 1966 piece is all the more prescient given our historical perspective. Although the essays span a career lasting more than 35 years, none of them seems dated. If your library does not own any of Huxtable's work, this is the one to add to your collection. Highly recommended."—Herbert E. Shapiro, Library Journal

"The volume compiles writings not previously available in English alongside fresh translations of his better-known works. This is all very nice, but if you're like me, the first thing you want to know when perusing any Marinetti edition is, 'Is the essay about sculpted meat included?' Happily it is."—Philadelphia Weekly

"Provides the best overview of political and other aspects of the art world that I have ever come across . . . It is a bible that every artist should have."—Shannon Wilkinson, president, Cultural Communications, New York

"A personal meditation on Hopper's most famous painting, Staying Up Much Too Late should introduce Gordon Theisen as exactly what he is: one of the true originals in American letters. In Staying Up Much Too Late Gordon Theisen dismantles the American Dream like a savvy child patiently unscrewing an Erector set Shangri-la. He begins by skewering American optimism, ends with a hymn of praise to un-American pessimism, and in between demonstrates convincingly that Edward Hopper's great painting Nighthawks is imbued with the underhistory of America. We live in the loneliest country on Earth, Theisen tells us, and his darkly vivid language, like Hopper's brushwork, renders it with deadpan accuracy. What a lovely book."—John Vernon, author of A Book of Reasons

"In Lives of the Artists, a collection of Calvin Tomkins's brilliantly illuminating profiles for The New Yorker, this latter-day Vasari puts his dry wit and keen eye to work in fashioning enduring portraits of ten contemporary-art stars, tracing the fruits of creative genius back to their strange roots."—Vogue

“Sharon Waxman’s Loot is the most instructive as well as the most intelligent (and the most entertaining) guide through the labyrinth of antiquity and the ways in which the claims of the departed intersect with the rights of the living.”—Christopher Hitchens author of God Is Not Great and The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece?

"No wonder . . . this book is the hottest topic in Manhattan's architectural salons."—The New York Times Book Review