Bøker av Richard Read

Everything changes when you're thirteen! When they were in sixth grade, Calista Snipe and her best friends, Skyler McCray and Tabitha Tyler, narrowly escaped being kidnapped by Flash and Joint, two subordinates of crime boss, Wee Willie Sturgis. That horrific event is behind the children as they now prepare to enter Parkington Junior High. They soon find that the junior high school presents its own set of challenges and hurdles. Four elementary schools send students to Park Junior. The kaleidoscope of new faces, seventh and eighth grade students, is at first overwhelming. In addition to the familiar but always stress producing tasks encountered with academic assignments, Cali, Sky, and Tab must now make new friends, must take on new activities, and deal with the tantalizing and embarrassing excitement of their budding sexuality. The three friends are soon involved with eighth grader Talia Murphy, who helps a classmate expand her junior high drug trade; with Bill Baxter, who has an exceptional athletic talent and a keen interest in romance with almost every girl he meets; with Melanie Kent, a girl blessed both with physical precociousness and extremely affluent parents; with Leantos and Lee Ann Mosley, eighth grade twins who also happen to become Cali's, Tab's, and Sky's first African-American friends; and with Pablo Cruz, who is using amphetamines to enhance his athletic skills and is involved with older youths who often attempt to manipulate younger students into providing sexual benefits. In the meantime, the children's past nemeses, senior high student, Carl Huff, and Wee Willie Sturgis continue to practice their illegal dealings. Is it possible that the criminal behavior of Huff and Sturgis will once more impact the lives of Calista, Tabitha, and Skyler?

Although interest in the painter, poet, and art writer Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) has been growing in recent years, Art and Its Discontents is the first biographical study of this pivotal figure in British modernism. Focused on Stokes's formative years, the book offers important new insights into his intellectual development, his growing commitment to the arts, and his eventual turn to the art criticism that would win him international renown. Even as Richard Read follows Stokes from his London childhood to his travels in Italy and his psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein, he weaves Stokes's experiences and writings into the great social and cultural issues of his era. Stokes's friendship with Ezra Pound is given its due, but Read balances his exploration of Stokes's modernist ideas with detailed discussion of his profound debt to the teachings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Seen in this broad perspective, Stokes emerges as a thinker who bridged Victorian and modernist cultures and renewed the British tradition of aesthetic criticism.

In Illicit Liaisons, Volume 3, The Studio, Megan Morgan works on four basic issues. She struggles to put her relationship with her uncle in proper perspective and to relate to Uncle Jack in an appropriate fashion. She faces the complexities of dating two very different boys, Paul Ugalini and Joe Edwards, and with her own confusion of how she wishes to behave when she is on a date with any boy. To complicate her dating experiences, she discovers she has a third issue to tackle. As a consequence of being kidnapped and raped, she has developed a post traumatic reaction that emerges when her dating encounters turn sexual. Finally, her friendship with Paul's sister, Francesca, leads Megan to take on the responsibilty of assisting Francesca's friend, Emmanuelle, with drug related difficulties. This last issue begins to dictate much of Megan's experiences and behavior over the course of her tenth grade summer. Both Megan and Nadia Cortez, the free lance photographer that Megan met at Paul's unchaperoned party, build a closer bond as they try to gain insight into the child pornography ring operating somewhere around the greater Pittsburgh area, and with which Emmanuelle has become involved in order to earn money to pay for her growing drug addiction. Emmanuelle's low self esteem has made her vulnerable and she becomes entangled in the devious web cast by the adults who profit from her beauty. Even the combined efforts of the three young women, Megan, Francesca, and Nadia may not be enough to save Emmanuelle.

Wiiliam Molyneux's question to John Locke about whether a blind man restored to sight could name the difference between a cube and a sphere without touching them shaped fundamental conflicts in philosophy, theology and science between empirical and idealist answers that are radically alien to current ways of seeing and feeling, but were born of colonizing ambitions whose devastating genocidal and ecocidal consequences intensify today. This Element demonstrates how landscape paintings of unfamiliar terrains required historical and geological subject matter to supply tactile associations for empirical recognition of space, whereas idealism conferred unmediated but no less coercive sensory access. Close visual and verbal analysis using photographs of pictorial sites trace vividly different responses to the Question from William Hazlitt and John Ruskin in Britain to nineteenth-century authors and artists in the United States and Australia, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Cole, William Haseltine, Fitz Henry Lane and Eugene von Guerard.