Here are 100 books that Luminance fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been a documentary photographer for the past 50 years and my work has been featured in major magazines in the United States and Europe including The New York Times Magazine, Life, Fortune, Geo, Time & Newsweek, and others.I have six books in print, including JAZZ with Wynton Marsalis & Nonfiction Photographs with filmmaker Errol Morris. I love teaching photography and co-founded the Essex Photographic Workshop in 1975. My work is in many collections, including The Peabody Essex Museum, The Worcester Art Museum, Polaroid Collection, Agfa Corporation, Participant Productions, Bose Corporation, Bibliotheque Nacionale, France. Solo exhibitions of my work include the Walker Art Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Burden Gallery.
I have loved this book of black & white photographs for nearly 5 decades and still look at it often. It’s like a book of poetry, meant to be lived with rather than simply looked at one or twice. What I like is how quiet these images are while at the same time being incredibly compelling. I see something new in these images almost every time I look at them. What could be better in a book of photographs? What I’ve learned is that photographs embrace poetry more naturally than narrative storytelling. Yes—it's a picture of a parsnip—but is that an eye in the middle of it looking back at me?
I’ve been a documentary photographer for the past 50 years and my work has been featured in major magazines in the United States and Europe including The New York Times Magazine, Life, Fortune, Geo, Time & Newsweek, and others.I have six books in print, including JAZZ with Wynton Marsalis & Nonfiction Photographs with filmmaker Errol Morris. I love teaching photography and co-founded the Essex Photographic Workshop in 1975. My work is in many collections, including The Peabody Essex Museum, The Worcester Art Museum, Polaroid Collection, Agfa Corporation, Participant Productions, Bose Corporation, Bibliotheque Nacionale, France. Solo exhibitions of my work include the Walker Art Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Burden Gallery.
I own five signed copies of this book which I loan out to young photographers. The lesson in this book of documentary photographs is the irrelevance of information and the importance of emotion. In this way, Jeff’s work redefines photography by expanding the very notion of what a documentary photograph is….and can be. In 2004 Jeff was diagnosed with lymphoma. Soon afterwards Kodak discontinued the production of Kodachrome, the film his entire visual vocabulary was based on and now was gone forever. What do you do when confronted with physical and creative mortality? The Last Roll, by Jeff Jacobson, is an amazing response to this question.
"A few days before Christmas, 2004, I was diagnosed with lymphoma," writes Jeff Jacobson in his preface to The Last Roll. The NY Times LENS Blog described Jacobson as "pushing the visual boundaries of photojournalism" in this work providing a first-person depiction of a cancer patient's changing perspectives on life, death, art, and the world at-large.
A former Magnum photographer known for his quirky style, Jeff Jacobson was one of the first art photographers to use color film exclusively. For his 1991 book My Fellow Americans he traveled the country, capturing the look and mood of a decade. Over time,…
I’ve been a documentary photographer for the past 50 years and my work has been featured in major magazines in the United States and Europe including The New York Times Magazine, Life, Fortune, Geo, Time & Newsweek, and others.I have six books in print, including JAZZ with Wynton Marsalis & Nonfiction Photographs with filmmaker Errol Morris. I love teaching photography and co-founded the Essex Photographic Workshop in 1975. My work is in many collections, including The Peabody Essex Museum, The Worcester Art Museum, Polaroid Collection, Agfa Corporation, Participant Productions, Bose Corporation, Bibliotheque Nacionale, France. Solo exhibitions of my work include the Walker Art Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Burden Gallery.
When my wife and I met in 1975, one of the things we had in common was that we both owned a copy of Growing Up Female. And the bindings on both copies were pretty worn out. This is a deeply personal journal of compelling photographs and eloquent text about women—from a feminist’s point of view. What I love about this book is how deeply moving it is and how well it demonstrates a narrative approach to taking, editing, and sequencing first-person photographs. Not to mention that this book sold 25,000 copies (unheard of for books of photography) and had a significant impact on the view of a woman’s place in our culture.
I’ve been a documentary photographer for the past 50 years and my work has been featured in major magazines in the United States and Europe including The New York Times Magazine, Life, Fortune, Geo, Time & Newsweek, and others.I have six books in print, including JAZZ with Wynton Marsalis & Nonfiction Photographs with filmmaker Errol Morris. I love teaching photography and co-founded the Essex Photographic Workshop in 1975. My work is in many collections, including The Peabody Essex Museum, The Worcester Art Museum, Polaroid Collection, Agfa Corporation, Participant Productions, Bose Corporation, Bibliotheque Nacionale, France. Solo exhibitions of my work include the Walker Art Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Burden Gallery.
There’s an image of a large white horse standing above a man who’s kneeling in front of him, gesturing toward the horse’s face with one hand. He is having a conversation with this horse, trying to convince him of something. It’s one of the most beautiful photographs ever! On another page is a fully feathered chicken being dried out, hanging upside down from a clothesline in what appears to be a field of wheat. It’s astonishing how beautiful this image is. Josef Koudelka is one of the great masters of photography who has taught us all how to see the mystery and awe in places we walk by every day. Through his work, Koudelka has shown me the breadth and depth that photography embraces.
About Exiles, Cornell Capa once wrote, Koudelka's unsentimental, stark, brooding, intensely human imagery reflect his own spirit, the very essence of an exile who is at home wherever his wandering body finds haven in the night. In this newly revised and expanded edition of the 1988 classic, which includes ten new images, Koudelka's work once more forms a powerful document of the spiritual and physical state of exile. The sense of private mystery that fills these photographs mostly taken during Koudelkas many years of wandering through Europe since leaving his native Czechoslovakia in 1968 speaks of passion and reserve, of…
As a fantasy author, I love stories set within complex and unusual worlds. I especially enjoy worlds where the rules of physics and metaphysics are re-imagined, adding an extra dimension to the story. Most fantasy worlds are much like our own – big, spherical, ordinary climactic zones, normal physics. Magic sort of exists around the edges. A handful of fantasy worlds are different: the world is flat, layered, hollow, has physical and metaphysical laws that change when you step across a political border – or is wholly contained within an infinite House with oceans pouring through the lower levels. Those are worlds I find especially delightful to visit – and to write about!
The Pyramids of London has the most ornate, baroque alternative-history setting of any novel in the entire history of fantasy novels. Seriously. To start with, every kind of mythology is true in whatever region that mythology developed. Also, the pharaohs of Egypt have been vampires for thousands of years. Plus, when they die, vampires might become stars. Which are also gods. Plus France is ruled by the Fae. At night, when the Fae Court of the Moon arises in Paris, gravity suddenly drops dramatically.
Insert a murder mystery into this wildly ornate setting, plus fully realized characters you both believe in and root for, and off you go, on a fantastic journey through a world that is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
In a world where lightning sustained the Roman Empire, and Egypt's vampiric god-kings spread their influence through medicine and good weather, tiny Prytennia's fortunes are rising with the ships that have made her undisputed ruler of the air. But the peace of recent decades is under threat. Rome's automaton-driven wealth is waning along with the New Republic's supply of power crystals, while Sweden uses fear of Rome to add to her Protectorates. And Prytennia is under attack from the wind itself. Relentless daily blasts destroy crops, buildings, and lives, and neither the weather vampires nor Prytennia's Trifold Goddess have been…
Since I first visited Africa in 2004 I’ve found it difficult to tear myself away. I’ve lived in South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, and Sudan and travelled in all corners of the continent. I’ve participated in a revolution, hung out with the illegal fishermen of Lake Victoria, been cursed—and protected—by witch doctors, and learned Swahili. I’ve also read extensively about the place, written three books about it, and broadcast from it for the BBC World Service. In my other life I research and write about international development for universities and global organisations. This too has a focus on Africa.
This is a beautifully written tale of the author’s time living in rural Egypt in the 1980s.
Ghosh’s accounts of his meetings and friendships with Egyptians unused to foreigners resonate with my own experiences in rural Africa, and the way he pieces together the long-forgotten history of an anonymous twelfth-century Indian slave and his Arab Jewish trader master and weaves it into the story is astonishingly deft.
I read it again recently and enjoyed it just as much as the first time.
Once upon a time an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out an Indian slave, name unknown, who some seven hundred years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors. Combining shrewd observations with painstaking historical research, Ghosh serves up skeptics and holy men, merchants and sorcerers. Some of these figures are real, some only imagined, but all…
I have a life-long interest in the intersection of the real and the mythical when it comes to travel and adventuring in foreign lands. This has driven my own exploration of many parts of Asia and the Himalayan regions. One tiny nugget of information can take you on a wild journey that leads to great discoveries. Curiously, we keep losing precious knowledge through war and neglect—and then re-discover it. The finest example of lost and found cultural facets has to be hieroglyphics. The meaning of the writing was lost for over a thousand years until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, which enabled us to decipher Egyptian temple art again. So hieroglyphics entered the realm of the mythical and then returned to reality once decoded.
It is eminently possible that author James Hilton modelled his Shangri-La hideaway on the Tibetan realm of Shambhala. The two fabled realms share a lot in common. There are several Tibetan versions of the legend of Shambhala, but they run in the same pattern. Somewhere to the north of India is a kingdom ringed by impenetrable snowcapped mountains. In this sanctuary, poverty, hunger, crime, and sickness are unknown, and people live a hundred years. In the city of Kalapa, there is a glittering palace where sacred teachings are kept.
In a future several hundred years from now, the world will erupt in chaotic warfare. When the last barbarian thinks he has conquered the world, the king of Shambhala will ride forth and destroy the forces of evil—and establish a new Golden Age. The legend first appeared in India and later travelled to Tibet. Tibetan guidebooks written In centuries past pointed…
Investigates the myth of Shambhala, a Tibetan kingdom surrounded by mountains, where Buddhist priests preserve the best of art, literature, and science against a time when war will destroy the world
Richard Nisbett is one of the world’s preeminent psychologists. His thinking is primarily about thought, but it is extremely wide-ranging – from biopsychology to social psychology to criminology to philosophy. His influence on philosophy has been compared to that of Freud and Skinner.
The book shows some of the remarkable ways that Eastern and Western thought differs. I read the book 10 years before a brilliant Chinese student named Kaiping Peng came to work with me and told me right off the bat that I thought linearly and logically and he thought non-linearly and dialectically. That sounded like an exaggeration, but Nakamura’s book encouraged me to take Peng seriously. Our research together showed he was absolutely right. East Asian thought was shown by our experiments to be radically different in many ways from Western thought.
I’m a spiritual mutt. Raised with a variegated Christian background (Mom Charismatic, Dad Quaker, Grandparents Wesleyan), I rejected all things biblical and turned to Jack Daniels for Southern Comfort. In college I reconnected with a high school friend who demonstrated God was real by his changed life and showed the Bible’s concrete historical connections in a way I could understand. The words that had so confounded me as a child began to make sense. I dumped Jack Daniels, married that friend, and no longer needed Southern Comfort. Now, through research, study, and a little imagination, I write biblical novels, chug Living Water, and tell Bible stories to eight grandkids.
I always start my research at a library. I find the shelves on Egyptian history, grab a stack of books, plop down on the floor, and read until I can’t feel my legs. There’s never a shortage of Egyptology resources, but why must the scholars always disagree? Only by reading widely can I find a golden thread of agreement across the many sources. Oftentimes, a particular scholar will emerge as the leading expert on a particular time period and appear in a majority of quoted material and/or bibliographies. The Oxford History of Ancient Egyptwas both easy to understand and included interesting details while also following the consensus of the best New Kingdom scholars.
The essays and illustrations in this history portray the emergence and development of the distinctive civilization of the ancient Egyptians, from their prehistoric origins to their incorporation into the Roman Empire, covering the period from around 7000 BCE to 311. The authors outline the principal sequence of political events, including detailed examinations of the three so-called "intermediate periods" which were previously regarded as "dark ages" and are only now beginning to be better understood. Against the backdrop of the rise and fall of ruling dynasties, this book also examines cultural and social patterns, including stylistic developments in art and literature.…
Dr. Jeanne Reames is a professional historian, college professor, and specialist in ancient Macedonia and Alexander the Great. She also earned a degree in creative writing and has published fiction and poetry. She’s been collecting fiction about Alexander the Great for almost 35 years, and previously managed the website Beyond Renault: Alexander the Great in Fiction since WW I, until retiring it after over ten years. She has (almost) every professionally published English-language novel about Alexander, and has penned several articles on Alexander in fiction, including “Alexander the Great and Hephaistion in Fiction after Stonewall,” for The Routledge Companion to the Reception of Ancient Greek and Roman Sexuality (forthcoming).
Although Stealing Fire takes place during the early Successor Wars that followed Alexander’s death, it contains enough flashbacks to qualify as about Alexander too. Or really, about Hephaistion, whose presence is stronger. Like Renault and Tarr, Graham depicts Hephaistion’s relationship with Alexander as more than friendship. Her main character Lysias began as Hephaistion’s groom, then became an officer under his command. Lysias hero-worships Hephaistion. After Hephaistion’s, then Alexander’s, deaths, he falls under the command of Ptolemy, helping him to establish the Ptolemaic empire in Egypt. Like Tarr, Graham does very well at showing magic as conceived of in the ancient world, but she also writes a mean battle scene—of which there are several. Her Hephaistion is one of the most engaging in print.
Alexander the Great's soldier, Lydias of Miletus, has survived the final campaigns of the king's life. He now has to deal with the chaos surrounding his death. Lydias throws his lot in with Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals who has grabbed Egypt as his personal territory. Aided by the eunuch Bagoas, the Persian archer Artashir, and the Athenian courtesan Thais, Ptolemy and Lydias must take on all the contenders in a desperate adventure whose prize is the fate of a white city by the sea, and Alexander's legacy.
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