Documentary on psychedelic potash mines, expansive concrete seawalls, mammoth industrial machines, and other examples of humanity’s massive, destructive reengineering of the planet.

Botero is a poetic documentary profile of Colombian artist Fernando Botero. The film is a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the life and art of this painter and sculptor -- the world's most recognized living artist.

During the 1980s, a failed stand-up comedian is driven insane and turns to a life of crime and chaos in Gotham City while becoming an infamous psychopathic crime figure.

Spanning almost thirty years and settings that range from big cities to small towns and farmsteads of rural Canada, this magnificent collection brings together twenty-eight stories by a writer of unparalleled wit, generosity, and emotional power. In her Selected Stories, Alice Munro makes lives that seem small unfold until they are revealed to be as spacious as prairies and locates the moments of love and betrayal, desire and forgiveness, that change those lives forever. To read these stories--about a traveling salesman and his children on an impromptu journey; an abandoned woman choosing between seduction and solitude--is to succumb to the spell of a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.

This critical edition features an appendix that makes available for the first time the core of the research project that spawned the book and individual chapter notes are supported by a glossary of terms, indices of subjects, names, and works cited. There is also a complete bibliography of McLuhan's published works.

Reading, Manguel tells us, is almost as essential to our existence as breathing. How did this come to be, and how has reading shaped our minds and our cultures? These are big, complex questions, but Manguel, who has devoted his life to books, is able, by virtue of assiduous research and creative analysis, to answer them, delighting his enraptured readers in the process. Much of the charm of this highly original history lies in the autobiographical sketches Manguel, who has lived all over the world, includes, from his own childhood epiphany when he realized he could read, to an account of his experiences reading aloud to the blind writer Jorge Luis Borges. Manguel spices his discussion of such rich topics as "metaphors of reading," books and religious traditions, book design, and the voluptuousness of reading with profiles of the likes of Petrarch, Proust, Kafka, Colette, and Whitman. Then, because one can't talk about books without talking about libraries, he offers a lively portrait of Callimachus, the clever fellow who organized the legendary lost library of Alexandria. Unique, enlightening, and as captivating as a celebration of reading should be. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Childrens' show based on the classic works of author and illustrator Richard Scarry centers on six characters solving the mysteries of everyday life in an imaginary place called Busytown.

In a culture where beauty is currency, women’s bodies are often perceived as measures of value and worth. The search for visibility and self-acceptance can be daunting, especially for those on the cultural margins of “beauty.”
Becoming Women offers a thoughtful examination of the search for identity in an image-oriented world. That search is told through the experiences of a group of women who came of age in the wake of second and third wave feminism, featuring voices from marginalized and misrepresented groups.
Carla Rice pairs popular imagery with personal narratives to expose the “culture of contradiction” where increases in individual body acceptance have been matched by even more restrictive feminine image ideals and norms. With insider insights from the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, Rice exposes the beauty industry’s colonization of women’s bodies, and examines why “the beauty myth” has yet to be resolved.

The incomparable Alice Munro’s bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about–women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children–become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.

The Booker Prize-winning novel, now a critically acclaimed major motion picture, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe and Kristin Scott Thomas. With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces theintersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far from the Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship crosses the Indian Ocean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as well: they are first exposed to the magical worlds of jazz, women, and literature by their eccentric fellow travelers, and together they spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever. By turns poignant and electrifying, The Cat’s Table is a spellbinding story about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood, and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage.

In the thirteen stories in her remarkable second collection, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that led no less a critic than John Updike to compare her to Chekhov. The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future.