Here are 99 books that Cockatoos fans have personally recommended if you like
Cockatoos.
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I’m an artist with an analytical mind. I love art and stories but I also love systems and processes. Ever since taking a class at art school about making pop-ups, I’ve been in love with paper engineering. It’s been the perfect synthesis of all my loves. There’s something fascinating about transforming an everyday object (paper) into something unexpected. Combined that with a great story and you have a magical experience! I like focusing my work on books for young readers (board books - picture books) because it gives adults and kids an opportunity to interact with each other and build memories.
Without using any physically interactive mechanisms, this book still engages!
It breaks the fourth wall and the narrator asks you directly to do certain tasks—tap the dot, tilt the book to the left, shake the book, etc. When reading this book with my kids, I’ve never heard so many giggles. It is also a great way to help teach my kids colors, actions, and directions. Reading this book becomes a form of play!
PRESS HERE, MIX IT UP!, LET'S PLAY!, and SAY ZOOP! Collect all four interactive books from Herve Tullet!
Press the yellow dot on the cover of this interactive children's book, follow the instructions within, and embark upon a magical journey! Each page of this surprising touch book instructs the reader to push the button, shake it up, tilt the book, and who knows what will happen next! Children and adults alike will giggle with delight as the dots multiply, change direction, and grow in size! Especially remarkable because the adventure occurs on the flat surface of the simple, printed page,…
I’ve been fascinated by color since childhood. I am not a very talkative person by nature and have always found that I communicate well through my illustrations. I have worked both as an illustrator and graphic designer. Through combining illustration with design, I learnt that I have the knack for distilling a complex idea into a simple image, or series of images. My illustrations combine visual trickery with simplicity, designed to make you think and smile. When my children were young, I decided to create picture books like this. The books in this list do the same. I hope you enjoy them!
This is a funny book that teaches opposites. Each page has an elephant on it - ‘wide’ elephant, ‘narrow’ elephant for example. I like its simplicity and humor and the illustrative style. Its design is quite minimalistic but the pictures speak for themselves and it provides a different take on the usual books of opposites. Kids love humor and learn well from it, I think.
Pittau and Gervais have managed to create a book which is stunning in design, visually humorous, but with a simplicity and naivety which will appeal to both children and adults alike. Each double page spread features a pair of elephants exhibiting contrasting features. The child-like style of the art is coupled with a sophisticated humour as the artists capture the essence of the opposites being described. This is the ideal gift book.
I’ve been fascinated by color since childhood. I am not a very talkative person by nature and have always found that I communicate well through my illustrations. I have worked both as an illustrator and graphic designer. Through combining illustration with design, I learnt that I have the knack for distilling a complex idea into a simple image, or series of images. My illustrations combine visual trickery with simplicity, designed to make you think and smile. When my children were young, I decided to create picture books like this. The books in this list do the same. I hope you enjoy them!
I love all books by Eric Carle. I read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to my children when they were young, as well as The Very Quiet Cricket, which is a firm favourite. This book is very funny and plays with paper, design, and type. It is brightly coloured and his inimitable illustrative style is fantastic. Using different paper sizes, flaps, die-cuts, etc. has always interested me and makes story time fun for kids too.
The bad-tempered ladybird picks fights with every animal he meets, but soon learns the importance of friends and turns into a far nicer, happier bug. The beautifully illustrated pages of this entertaining book demonstrate the sizes of the different animals and the sun's path across the sky as time passes.
I’ve been fascinated by color since childhood. I am not a very talkative person by nature and have always found that I communicate well through my illustrations. I have worked both as an illustrator and graphic designer. Through combining illustration with design, I learnt that I have the knack for distilling a complex idea into a simple image, or series of images. My illustrations combine visual trickery with simplicity, designed to make you think and smile. When my children were young, I decided to create picture books like this. The books in this list do the same. I hope you enjoy them!
This picture book has no words in it. It is all about the picture. Of all the books on my list, it is perhaps most like my style because the illustrations are very simple, using blocks of colour and few lines. The walrus on each page often looks like something else, making the reader look twice to make sure they’ve seen it correctly. The visual trickery is so well-done and provides a great source of amusement and admiration for the reader.
Bored with life at the zoo, an adventurous walrus escapes to the outside world. With the zookeeper in hot pursuit, Walrus cleverly tries on all sorts of hats to disguise himself. Will a yellow hardhat point to a new life as a construction worker? Or will a red swimming cap reveal his true talents? Follow the happy-go-lucky runaway as he hides amongst firefighters, businessmen, and even high-stepping dancers in this delightful wordless picture book.
I have been fascinated by women who are artists and activists, such as Ivy Bottini, Käthe Kollwitz and Peggy Guggenheim. (All subjects of plays I wrote). They are convicted, unique, champions of justice, diversity and inclusion.
An insightful examination of art collector Peggy Guggenheim, a fascinating character, Ms. Guggenheim was friends with a vast assortment of American and European writers and artists. The reader gets to see the contradictory sides of this brilliant and unconventional woman. As a result of reading this book, I wrote a play about her entitled The Collection.
"Mrs. Guggenheim, how many husbands have you had?" she was once asked. "D'you mean my own, or other people's?"
Peggy Guggenheim's tempestuous life (1898-1979) spanned the most exciting and volatile years of the twentieth century, and she lived it to the full. How she became one of the century's foremost collectors of modern art-and one of its most formidable lovers-is the subject of this lively and authoritative biography.
Her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, went down with the Titanic en route home from installing the elevator machinery in the Eiffel Tower, and it was in Paris in the 1930s that the young…
To call myself an expert on love would imply success in the field. You can think of me then as a passionate amateur. “Write what you know,” they always say, and there might be nothing I know better than the excitement and heartache of looking for, and finding, and losing, somebody in the world who’s unlike everybody else. Up until recently, I mostly wrote young adult mystery fiction, but my latest book, Words of Love, is evidence that “Will they or won’t they” is still the mystery, the central question, that I seek to resolve not just in my reading, or in my writing, but in my life.
It might seem pompous and affected to recommend this masterpiece by one of the greatest deities in the literary pantheon (who’s no stranger to accusations of pompousness and affectation himself…)—especially when it’s not immediately clear who’s on the other side of Isabel Archer’s “will they or won’t they?” story. Is it the competent, hardworking Caspar Goodwood? The aristocratic, lovelorn Lord Warburton? Her kind, ailing benefactor Ralph Touchett? Or the uncaring art collector Gilbert Osmond? It is evidence of Henry James’ genius that I felt, at the end of the novel, that I had encountered every one of these characters at some point in my life (occasionally in myself)—and his brilliant heroine became the unhearing recipient of all the advice I’ve ever needed to give myself on how to choose a partner.
The talented and beautiful Isabel Archer, courted by several suitors and enriched by her dying uncle, chooses to marry the cold and ambitious Gilbert Osmond. The heroine soon discovers to her cost that freedom of choice is never what it seems.
Steven G. Marks is a historian who has written extensively on Russian economic and cultural history, the global impact of Russian ideas, and the history of capitalism. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has spent more than 30 years teaching Russian and world history at Clemson University in South Carolina.
Fully abstract art was a Russian invention, but until this remarkable book by Aaron Cohen came out, there was no treatment of the subject that explained the historical context in which it emerged in the work of Kandinsky, Malevich, Tatlin, and others. Other art historians have traced the aesthetic process that led, seemingly ineluctably, toward abstraction, but Cohen shows us how closely linked it was to the despair felt during the First World War. In this short but accessible work that makes extensive use of previously untouched Russian sources, he brings to life the debates over the issue among Russian artists and critics and details the response of the art market to the turmoil of the period and the birth of avant-garde movements that revolutionized art worldwide.
As World War I shaped and molded European culture to an unprecedented degree, it also had a profound influence on the politics and aesthetics of early-twentieth-century Russian culture. In this provocative and fascinating work, Aaron J. Cohen shows how World War I changed Russian culture and especially Russian art. A wartime public culture destabilized conventional patterns in cultural politics and aesthetics and fostered a new artistic world by integrating the iconoclastic avant-garde into the art establishment and mass culture. This new wartime culture helped give birth to nonobjective abstraction (including Kazimir Malevich's famous Black Square), which revolutionized modern aesthetics. Of…
I was a freelance writer for The Oxford Times for 20 years when it was well respected. For ten of those years, I wrote the Oxford Castaway series in which I cast away inspirational people from 5 continents whose lives have been affected by their time in the city. Even Lord Chris Pattern of Barnes – the Chancellor of Oxford University and former Governor of Hong Kong let me cast him away on Oxtopia! Oxford is still divided between Town and Gown but I stride the two and my husband was an academic at that other Oxford University: Oxford Brookes.
Weimin was the university's artist-in-residence recording the restoration of the C18th Observatory and Radcliffe hospital, the bulldozing of the site, and the building of the Maths Institute and Blavatnik School of Government near Jericho. This historic collection of art evokes past, present, and future, and Town and Gown. The artist comes from Manchuria so to me, it represents Oxford as an international city.
This book is only available from the author, email Weimin He for a signed copy for £20 plus postage.
I’ve had a lifelong admiration for William Morris’s eloquent writings on political optimism. And how these fit with the personal life of his wife Janey and daughter May. This began with my biography of the two women, published by the feminist Pandora Press and continuing through to editing Jane Morris’s Collected Letters. Admiration is also critical engagement rather than simple fandom. We need to think, act, and endeavor to promote how we might live better lives in the world. I love the task of relating individual lives in the context of their time. Biography involves historical imagination to fill the gaps in recorded information and conceive how those in the past thought, felt and behaved.
It’s a compact 100+ pages with 80 images, showcasing Morris’s passionately held view that beautiful, functional design should be accessible to all. All expressed through quotations from his own words and those of his friends, colleagues, and biographers.
Fits in a pocket and is a perfect introduction for those who do not yet know of Morris’s ideas and influence. Also a handy source of quotations on the aesthetics of design.
Born in London in 1834, William Morris was a radical thinker whose democratic vision for society and art has continued to influence designers, artists and writersto this day, long after his death in 1896. He was a gifted poet, architect, painter, writer and textile designer, who also founded the Kelmscott Press, the most famous of the Arts and Crafts private presses. Morris's ideas later came to influence the Garden City movement, as well as numerous artists and craftspeople, who sought to negotiate a viable place within the modern world in the troubled years that followed the First World War. His…
As the author of a historical/mystery/romance series that has won over sixty international awards in multiple categories, I’m attracted to books that cannot be pinned to one genre. I love sweeping sagas with elements of all three, perhaps because I was so immersed in classic literature as a kid and fascinated by stories of the past. I suspect I may have once lived in the 1930s and, having yet to discover a handy time machine lying around, I have resorted to writing about the era as a way of getting myself back there. I am, not surprisingly, addicted to period dramas and big band music.
I read all of Catherine Cookson’s novels at a much too-young age, having “borrowed” them from my mom’s bookshelf when she wasn’t looking. I was immediately hooked. So many of Cookson’s books, not just The Girl, pit the wealthy, landed class against their poorer servants, and this theme made a deep impression on me. In fact, I think that Cookson, along with Dickens, probably had the most influence on my personal writing style.
She appeared in Ned Riley's stable yard like some wraith of the morning mist to seek Ned's help. Her name was Hannah Boyle, she was eight years old, and she had walked many miles from Newcastle with her mother, who was seriously ill.
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