Pugin

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Stefan Sharff

One of the most popular thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock's middle years, Rear Window is now also recognized as one of the most brilliant demonstrations of the director's cinematic wizardry. Starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, with Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr in memorable supporting roles, the film centers on a photographer confined to a wheelchair in his apartment who, using binoculars, spies on his courtyard neighbors and witnesses a possible murder. This was not the first time Hitchcock challenged himself to build suspense when plot limited action to a small area, but it was the only time when the director's art in creating through a lens is so dramatically reflected in the very story he tells. The voyeur-hero is there to see for us, and the images he chooses to observe become the language of the movie, which is almost thirty-five percent silent. Stefan Sharff, professor emeritus of Columbia University's film department, shows us how Hitchcock achieved the mounting excitement and fear that mark this film. The author first provides a detailed overview of the director's skill in developing the story from intriguing start to shattering climax. In the second part of the book, he goes on to a shot-by-shot analysis; using the film's continuity as his text, he describes how hitchcock's technique accomplished its magic. Illustrated throughout with stills from the film, The Art of Looking is a unique appreciation of the art of Alfred Hitchcock, made even more valuable by the first publication in any form of the full dialogue of a screen masterpiece.

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Marie-Pierre Perdrizet

Europe, XIIIème et XIVème siècles, les grandes cathédrales gothiques sortent de terre. Reconstitution de cette aventure architecturale et humaine superbement illustrée.

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T.E. Lawrence

The classic text on Crusader castles and their relation to the military architecture of the West, written by T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) while still an undergraduate at Oxford in 1910.

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Caleb Carr

In The Lessons of Terror, novelist and military historian Caleb Carr examines terrorism throughout history and the roots of our present crisis and reaches a provocative set of conclusions: the practice of targeting enemy civilians is as old as warfare itself; it has always failed as a military and political tactic; and despite the dramatic increases in its scope and range of weapons, it will continue to fail in the future.International terrorism--the victimization of unarmed civilians in an attempt to affect their support for the government that leads them--is a phrase with which Americans have become all too familiar recently. Yet while at first glance terrorism seems a relatively modern phenomenon, Carr illustrates that it has been a constant of military history. In ancient times, warring armies raped and slaughtered civilians and gratuitously destroyed property, homes, and cities; in the Middle Ages, evangelical Muslims and Christian crusaders spread their faiths by the sword; and in the early modern era, such celebrated kings as Louis XIV revealed a taste for victimizing noncombatants for political purposes.It was during the Civil War that Americans themselves first engaged in "total war," the most egregious of the many euphemisms for the tactics of terror. Under the leadership of such generals as Stonewall Jackson, the forces of the South tried to systematize this horrifying practice; but it fell to a Union general, William Tecumseh Sherman, to achieve that dubious goal. Carr recounts Sherman's declaration of war on every man, woman, and child in the South--a policy that he himself knew was badly flawed, had nothing to do with his military successes (indeed, it hampered them), and brought long-term unrest to the American South by giving birth to the Ku Klux Klan.Carr's exploration of terror reveals its consistently self-defeating nature. Far from prompting submission, Carr argues, terrorism stiffens enemy resolve: for this reason above all, terrorism has never achieved--nor will it ever achieve--long-term success, however physically destructive and psychologically debilitating it may become. With commanding authority and the storyteller's gift for which he is renowned, Caleb Carr provides a critical historical context for understanding terrorist acts today, arguing that terrorism will be eradicated only when it is perceived as a tactic that brings nothing save defeat to its agents.