Books about Vechten from Amazon.com

More than 120,000 couples annually flock to Sin City to tie the knot, most at one of the nearly 60 wedding chapels of popular imagination and lore. Here's a no-holds-barred, independent, critical, and fun look at how and where to get married in Las Vegas. It visits each chapel--with a few stops at other less typical venues--and tells anticipatory brides (and at least a few grooms) exactly what's in store. If the proprietor is rude, you'll know. If the Web site pictures are a sham, it's noted. If couples roll through like cars on an assembly line, it says so right here. You'll know everything there is to know about the beautiful, the bad, the kitschy, and even the touching in chapeldom. You'll even learn about some of the best places to stay, eat, and play..
Price: $8.46 [Notify me when price goes down.]

No other contemporary novel received the volume and intensity of criticism and curiosity that greeted "Nigger Heaven" upon its publication in 1926. Carl Van Vechten's novel generated a storm of controversy because of its scandalous title and fed an insatiable hunger on the part of the reading public for material relating to the black culture of Harlem's jazz clubs, cabarets, and social events. 'The book and not the title is the thing', James Weldon Johnson insisted with regard to "Nigger Heaven", and the book is indeed a nuanced and vibrant portrait of 'the great black walled city' of Harlem. Opening on a scene of tawdry sensationalism, "Nigger Heaven" shifts decisively to a world of black middle-class respectability, defined by intellectual values, professional ambition, and an acute consciousness of class and racial identity.Here is a Harlem where upper-class elites discuss art in well-appointed drawing rooms; rowdy and lascivious drunks spend long nights in jazz clubs and speakeasies; and, politically conscious young intellectuals drink coffee and debate 'the race problem' in walk-up apartments. At the center of the story, two young people - a quiet, serious librarian and a volatile aspiring writer - struggle to love each other as their dreams are slowly suffocated by racism. This reissue is based on the seventh printing, which included poetry composed by Langston Hughes especially for the book. Kathleen Pfeiffer's astute introduction investigates the controversy surrounding the shocking title and shows how the novel functioned in its time as a site to contest racial violence. She also signals questions of racial authenticity and racial identity raised by a novel about black culture written by a white admirer of that culture..
Price: $17.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

These engaging and wonderfully alive letters paint an intimate portrait of two of the most important and influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Carl Van Vechten--older, established, and white--was at first a mentor to the younger, gifted, and black Langston Hughes. But the relationship quickly grew into a great friendship--and for nearly four decades the two men wrote to each other expressively and constantly.

They discussed literature and publishing. They exchanged favorite blues lyrics ("So now I know what Bessie Smith really meant by 'Thirty days in jail / With ma back turned to de wall,'" Hughes wrote Van Vechten after a stay in a Cleveland jail on trumped-up charges). They traded stories about the hottest parties and the wildest speakeasies. They argued politics. They gossiped about the people they knew in common--James Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, H. L. Mencken. They wrote from near (of racism in Scottsboro) and far (of dancing in Cuba and trekking across the Soviet Union), and always with playfulness and mutual affection.

Today Van Vechten is a controversial figure; some consider him exploitative, at best peripheral to the Harlem Renaissance--or, indeed, as the author of the novel Nigger Heaven, a blemish upon it, and upon Hughes by association. The letters tell a different, more subtle and complex story: Van Vechten did, in fact, help Hughes (and many other young black writers) to get published; Hughes in turn appreciated what Van Vechten was trying to do in Nigger Heaven and defended him, fiercely. For all their differences, Hughes and Van Vechten remained staunchly loyal to each other throughout their lives.

A correspondence of great cultural significance, judiciously gathered together here for the first time and annotated by the insightful young scholar Emily Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem shows us an unlikely friendship, one that is essential to our understanding of literature and race relations in twentieth-century America..
Price: $3.35 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) was perhaps the most notorious white patron of the arts of black America, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance In 1932, he gave up a career as a theater critic and a novelist of light fiction to become a full-time amateur photographer. His photographs of the era's celebrated African American cultural figures are well-known, but until recently his private, homoerotic interracial photographs were sealed in an archive.

Author James Smalls considers how these images relate to Van Vechten's public persona and private desires. He discusses the interracial photographs in the context of white privilege and exotic tourism, primitivism's relation to modernism, camp sensibility and theatricality, and the vibrancy of underground gay visual culture during periods of political oppression. He also considers contemporary viewers' conflicting responses to the eroticized black male body in Van Vechten's and later twentieth-century photography. This original and provocative book embraces transracial voyeuristic pleasure while acknowledging the negative political implications of that pleasure.

Amply illustrated with 60 pioneering duotones, The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten celebrates the sensual nude male form with both candor and reverence, offering a rare glimpse into the private domain of the master photographer and his handsome subjects..
Price: $25.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this massive 300+ page resource, you have the step-by-step guidelines for starting (or repositioning) and running a successful telephone sales operation This is a complete how-to guide for managers, giving you proven, field-tested strategic and tactical information you will use to avoid costly mistakes, and run your telephone sales operation like a well-oiled, money making machine. Starting and running a telephone sales department--the right way--is much more than sticking a few low paid part timers in an unused corner of the office, throwing some leads at them, and saying, "Go make some calls." And it's a completely different animal than running and managing an outside sales operation. Just ask the thousands of companies and managers who failed in the process. In this 300+page, 8 1/2 x 11 paperback book, you will get the benefit of Lee Van Vechten's 30+ years in telephone sales management and consulting. He has consulted with over 200 companies, and started up over 25 successful inside sales operations. To buy Lee's time to get the same information he shares with you in this book would require an investment of thousands of dollars. In this massive resource, you have the step-by-step guidelines for starting (or repositioning) and running a successful telephone sales operation. This is a complete how-to guide for managers, giving you proven, field-tested strategic and tactical information (including actual job descriptions, salary guidelines, budgeting formulas, job interview questions) you will use to avoid costly mistakes, and run your telephone sales operation like a well-oiled, money making machine. Not Theory; Specific, Detailed Information You Can Use This is not a book about the theory of telephone sales written by some academic type who has never set foot in a telephone sales department or gotten a phone slammed in his ear on a cold call. It's meat, pure and simple. Battle tested stuff you can use. You'll get specifics for, * Knowing what types of calling missions work with telephone sales, and what is sure to guarantee headaches and failure * Step-by-step guidelines, ads, forms, job descriptions, and interview questions for recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training inside sales reps * How to compensate and motivate to minimize turnover and maximize morale and productivity, and, knowing when and how to cut your losses * Specifics on hands-on day-to-day management and training of sales reps * Preventing conflict with outside sales department, and other sales channels Starting Up a New Department * Seven reasons telephone sales departments fail, and how to avoid these traps * Should you start with one, two, three, or more reps? See results of companies that have tried them all. * How you should physically set up your environment for maximum productivity. Offices vs. cubicles? Where should you be in proximity to other departments? Get all the answers. * Seven reasons telephone sales departments fail, and how to avoid these traps Hiring Telephone Reps * Should you hire product knowledge, or sales skills? See the answer, and why. * How to create a Job Description for your reps * Recruitment Ads: examples, where to place them * How to read resumes, warning signs to be aware of * How to conduct interviews * Employment agreements and forms * When to cut your losses * Specifics on how to measure performance, and how to do performance appraisals Management * Word-for-word example of an actual Territory Management Plan you can model * How to smoothly integrate your department into the overall operation without conflict * How to budget. Specific numbers and formulas * Compensating and Motivating Telephone Sales Reps, Supervisors, and You as Manager * Negative and positive motivators; what works and what doesn't * How to set up a comp plan based on margins, or actual sales dollars * Selling your comp plans to upper-level management so they enthusiastically accept it * A "values survey" you can give to your reps to determine what motivates them * Should you post individual sales results for everyone to see? You'll find out the best ways. Training * At what point do you put someone on the phone during initial training? You might be surprised. * Monitoring calls: the amount of time, percentage-wise you should do it. And you'll learn whether you should do it silently and remotely, or side-by-side with reps * Example of an actual training manual

Regardless of whether you're a veteran telephone sales manager, or just looking to start up an inside sales department, you'll have the benefit of Lee VanVechten's 37+ years of experience in telemarketing sales, management, and consulting. Businesses gladly pay thousands of dollars to hire Lee personally for his expertise, and it makes them hundreds of thousands, and in many cases, millions of dollars..
Price: $79.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

“A god, a companion to sorceresses at the Witches’ Sabbath, a beast who is royal in Siam, who in Japan is called ‘the tiger that eats from the hand,’ the adored of Mohammed, Laura’s rival with Petrarch, the friend of Richelieu, the favorite of poets”—such are just a few of the feline distinctions that Carl Van Vechten records in this glorious historical overview of humanity’s long love affair with the cat. As delightful as it is learned, Tiger in the House explores science, art, and history to assemble a treasury of cat lore, while Van Vechten’s sumptuous baroque prose
makes the book’s every page an inexhaustible pleasure..
Price: $13.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) was a starstruck Midwesterner who led a colorful life, a social butterfly who established himself as a music and theater critic before enjoying success as a novelist in the 1920s. When the Leica revolutionized photography in the early 1930s, the amateur shutterbug embraced the rapid-fire 35mm camera and reinvented himself as a celebrity portraitist. Keith Davis discusses Van Vechten's evocative work in crisp, distinctive prose that is the perfect complement to the artist's dynamic black-and-white images. Gertrude Stein, Bessie Smith, George Gershwin, Frida Kahlo, and Paul Robeson are among the personalities who paraded through his makeshift apartment studio..
Price: $24.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $4.89 [Notify me when price goes down.]