Books about Documentaries from Amazon.com

For serious amateur photographers who already shoot perfectly focused, accurately exposed images but want to be more creative with a camera, here's the book to consult. More than seventy techniques, both popular and less-familiar approaches, are covered in detail, including advanced exposure, bounced flash and candlelight, infrared, multiple images, soft-focus effects, unusual vantage points, zooming, and other carefully chosen ways to enhance photographs. The A-Z format make sit easy for readers to find a specific technique, and each one is explained in jargon-free language. Top Tips for each technique help readers achieve superb results, even on the first attempt..
Price: $14.29 [Notify me when price goes down.]

21 Nights--a first book by Prince and celebrated photographer Randee St. Nicholas is a stunning multimedia volume offering a rare glimpse into the life, lyrics and mystique of one of the most notable and prolific musicians of our time. This beautifully designed photographic essay flows from Prince's sensational, unprecedented, record-breaking, sold-out 21 concerts in 21 Nights at London's 02 Arena in 2007. Giving insight into his dueling worlds of performance and solitude, 21 Nights incorporates Prince's evocative poetry and lyrics to new songs and other selections, and 124 full-color, sumptuous never-before-published images by Randee St. Nicholas. As part of the multi-dimensional experience, it will also include "Indigo Night," a CD--available only with the book--capturing Prince's after-hours, live after-show sessions--rare and profound moments of musical genius.

21 Nights takes the reader from the passenger seat of a limousine zipping through the streets of London to his sleeping quarters in a luxury hotel. In between we see him and his phenomenal band of musicians, singers and dancers backstage in the make up room to onstage, bathed in purple lights and a fog of gray smoke. Like a movie-in-a-book, readers are taken on his journey from London to Prague, in a style that takes glam rock to a new level.

Then there is poetry and lyrics that reveal the heart and soul of Prince--in addition to his incomparable talent. Going beyond the catchy hook, he expresses himself on everything from the destructive forces of war, greed and superficiality the life giving energy of love, beauty, and--of course--music..
Price: $31.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Patriotism or practical joke?

Harrison, NH -- Ninth-grade student Philip Malloy was suspended from school for singing along to The Star-Spangled Banner in his homeroom, causing what his teacher, Margaret Narwin, called "a disturbance." But was he standing up for his patriotic ideals, only to be squelched by the school system? Was Ms. Narwin simply trying to be a good teacher? Or could it all be just a misunderstanding gone bad -- very bad? What is the truth here? Can it ever be known?

Heroism, hoax, or mistake, what happened at Harrison High changes everything for everyone in ways no one -- least of all Philip -- could have ever predicted.

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Price: $2.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In honor of the United Nations-sponsored International Year of the Family in 1994, award-winning photojournalist Peter Menzel brought together 16 of the world's leading photographers to create a visual portrait of life in 30 nations Material World tackles its wide subject by zooming in, allowing one household to represent an entire nation. Photographers spent one week living with a "statistically average" family in each country, learning about their work, their attitudes toward their possessions, and their hopes for the future. Then a "big picture" shot of the family was taken outside the dwelling, surrounded by all their (many or few) material goods.

The book provides sidebars offering statistics and a brief history for each country, as well as personal notes from the photographers about their experiences. But it is the "big pictures" that tell most of the story. In one, a British family pauses before a meal of tea and crumpets under a cloudy sky. In another, wary Bosnians sit beside mattresses used as sniper barricades. A Malian family composed of a husband, his two wives, and their children rests before a few cooking and washing implements in golden afternoon light. Material World is a lesson in economics and geography, reminding us of the world's inequities, but also of humanity's common threads. An engrossing, enlightening book. --Maria Dolan .
Price: $14.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

It's an inspired idea--to better understand the human diet, explore what culturally diverse families eat for a week. That's what photographer Peter Menzel and author-journalist Faith D'Alusio, authors of the equally ambitious Material World, do in Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, a comparative photo-chronicle of their visits to 30 families in 24 countries for 600 meals in all. Their personal-is-political portraits feature pictures of each family with a week's worth of food purchases; weekly food-intake lists with costs noted; typical family recipes; and illuminating essays, such as "Diabesity," on the growing threat of obesity and diabetes. Among the families, we meet the Mellanders, a German household of five who enjoy cinnamon rolls, chocolate croissants, and beef roulades, and whose weekly food expenses amount to $500. We also encounter the Natomos of Mali, a family of one husband, his two wives, and their nine children, whose corn and millet-based diet costs $26.39 weekly.

We soon learn that diet is determined by largely uncontrollable forces like poverty, conflict and globalization, which can bring change with startling speed. Thus cultures can move--sometimes in a single jump--from traditional diets to the vexed plenty of global-food production. People have more to eat and, too often, eat more of nutritionally questionable food. Their health suffers.

Because the book makes many of its points through the eye, we see--and feel--more than we might otherwise. Issues that influence how the families are nourished (or not) are made more immediate. Quietly, the book reveals the intersection of nutrition and politics, of the particular and universal. It's a wonderful and worthy feat. --Arthur Boehm.
Price: $15.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"When we're on the road, all we watch is VBS, and our favorite series is Norwegian Black Metal." (Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters) Documentary photographer Peter Beste has spent the last five years working in the milieu of the Norwegian black metal scene. This scene, with its notorious events of murder, church arson, and self-mythology, is absolutely sealed to outsiders. The international black metal fan base is one of the most devoted, fanatical, and proprietary in the world. Beste's access and insight into this world is unprecedented and has yielded an amazing photographic journey, along with a very popular documentary series on VBS.tv, also available on YouTube. Beste, together with Johan Kugelberg, noted writer, editor, and collector of documentary photography, has brought the images into a hermeneutic narrative that makes for a compelling experience along the lines of Anders Petersen's Café Lehmitz, Ed Van Der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank, or William Klein's Life Is Good and Good for You in New York..
Price: $37.80 [Notify me when price goes down.]

One of the most beautifully crafted books I have ever read, with some of the most poetic prose passages I could imagine, such as the following, resonating with a stately and timeless quality so absent in our modern life:

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

Born in England in 1902, Markham was taken by her father to East Africa in 1906. She spent her childhood playing with native Maruni children and apprenticing with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. In the 1930s, she became an African bush pilot, and in September 1936, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. .
Price: $3.17 [Notify me when price goes down.]