Product Description
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Ralph Steadman (born Wallasey, 15 May 1936) is a British cartoonist and caricaturist who is perhaps best known for his work with American author Hunter S. Thompson. Born in Wallasey, Cheshire, and brought up in Towyn, North Wales, Steadman attended Ysgol Emrys Ap Iwan (high school), Abergele, East Ham Technical College and the London College of Printing during the 1960s, doing freelance work for Punch, Private Eye, the Daily Telegraph, The New York Times and Rolling Stone during this time. Steadman currently lives with his wife in Kent, England. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Ralph (Idris) Steadman, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2893 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Customer Reviews (2)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Thompson practiced total immersion journalism.This form of reporting is called gonzo journalism.

Hunter Thompson drove to Las Vegas to report on a motorcycle race and ended up writing a story about himself writing a story about a motorcycle race.If he would have written a conventional report on motorcycle racing it would have been interesting to motorcycle enthusiasts for a few days.Since he wrote a gonzo story he had a very wide canvas and he used it well to create a classic.

The reader might be turned off by the obstreperous behavior, extreme self indulgence and offensive inconsiderate language.If you can look past this offensive conduct and you will see that Hunter Thompson gave us an insight into the American character of the 1970's.

See also: Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Modern Library)

I completely enjoyed this book and recommend it to others.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Thompson practiced total immersion journalism.This form of reporting is called gonzo journalism.

Hunter Thompson drove to Las Vegas to report on a motorcycle race and ended up writing a story about himself writing a story about a motorcycle race.If he would have written a conventional report on motorcycle racing it would have been interesting to motorcycle enthusiasts for a few days.Since he wrote a gonzo story he had a very wide canvas and he used it well to create a classic.

The reader might be turned off by the obstreperous behavior, extreme self indulgence and offensive inconsiderate language.If you can look past this offensive conduct and you will see that Hunter Thompson gave us an insight into the American character of the 1970's.

See also: Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Modern Library)

I completely enjoyed this book and recommend it to others.

... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: James Gillray, George Cruikshank, Ken Gill, Leslie Ward, Ralph Steadman, Thomas Rowlandson, Godfrey Douglas Giles, Isaac Robert Cruikshank, Clive Francis, George Moutard Woodward, Francis Carruthers Gould, James Sayers, Roger Law, Charles Williams, William Heath, Peter Fluck, Henry Wigstead. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 67. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: James Gillray, sometimes spelled Gilray (13 August 1757 1 June 1815), was a British caricaturist and printmaker famous for his etched political and social satires, mainly published between 1792 and 1810. He was born in Chelsea. His father, a native of Lanark, had served as a soldier, losing an arm at the Battle of Fontenoy, and was admitted, first as an inmate, and afterwards as an outdoor pensioner, at Chelsea Hospital. Gillray commenced life by learning letter-engraving, at which he soon became adept. This employment, however, proved irksome to James, so he wandered about for a time with a company of strolling players. After a very checkered experience he returned to London and was admitted as a student in the Royal Academy, supporting himself by engraving, and probably issuing a considerable number of caricatures under fictitious names. His caricatures are almost all in etching, some also with aquatint, and a few using stipple technique. None can correctly be described as engravings, although this term is often loosely used to describe them. Hogarth's works were the delight and study of his early years. Paddy on Horseback, which appeared in 1779, is the first caricature which is certainly his. Two caricatures on Rodney's naval victory, issued in 1782, were among the first of the memorable series of his political sketches. Very Slippy-Weather (1808)The name of Gillray's publisher and print seller, Miss Hannah Hump...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=279657 ... Read more

Product Description
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a novel by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. The book is a roman à clef, rooted in autobiographical incidents. The story follows its protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas to chase the American Dream through a drug-induced haze. The novel first appeared as a two-part series in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, was printed as a book in 1972, and was later adapted into a film of the same name in 1998 starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro. ... Read more

Product Description
Ten years after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve classmates and a teacher, Columbine remains the world's most iconic school shooting.

Columbine: A True Crime Story, a victim, the killers and the nation's search for answers is the first book of investigative journalism to tell the complete story of that day, the far-reaching consequences, and the common denominators among school shooters across the country.

Jeff Kass was one of the first reporters on the scene and has continued to cover the story as a staff writer for Denver's Rocky Mountain News.

He has broken national stories on the shootings such as leaked crime scene photos, and the sealed diversion files of the killers. He has also reported the story extensively for the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, and U.S. News & World Report.

The result of ten years of research and exclusive information, the book reaches into fundamental American themes of violence, racism, parenting and policing.

Concluding with the tale of the tattered police investigation and how one of the most controversial victims' families faces down a modern American tragedy as the cameras roll, Columbine: A True Crime Story is a classic in the tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song.

Foreword by noted historian Douglas Brinkley, exclusive cover art by renowned artist and cultural commentator Ralph Steadman, and photos from the archives of the Rocky Mountain News, which won the Pulitzer for its Columbine photography. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (29)

Worth a Read but Flawed
I read this book after just finishing David Cullen's Columbine and at its beginning I found myself wondering if the two authors were writing about the same two individuals.Mr. Kass comes upon this story with what appear to be some preconceived biases that are fed by the air of deception that has surrounded the case since the beginning.

Throughout the book he appears to really want to blame the usual suspects, guns, video games, a cliquish high school culture, etc... But he can't quite do it.The evidence to the contrary is too great.He almost glibly attempts to dismiss the symbiotic relationship between the two shooters and Eric Harris' psychopathic personality which was the catalyst and driving force behind the attack.He glosses over the facts that it was Harris who built the bombs and Harris who did most of the shooting.He offers vague descriptions of how Harris and Klebold were bullied but beyond some references by Brooks Brown, offers no substantiation.Kass cannot commit to any real cause of the killer's actions.The psychological causes don't support where he wants to place the blame and neither do the facts.

The victims of the crime receive short shrift in the book; they appear to be nothing more than props in the story, the lone exception being Isaiah Sholes, whose family receives a chapter devoted solely to them.One of the great controversies of the crime, the Cassie Bernall story, does not even rate a mention.

The most bothersome feature of the book comes at the end in which Mr. Kass details his difficulties in acquiring responses to his requests for documents from various government agencies, vaguely hinting that it is all part of the ongoing cover up.All writers experience difficulty acquiring documents but to somehow underscore is efforts he treats us to copies of his correspondence with various lawyers and government agencies.In spite of his letters, what Mr. Kass pictures as conspiracy is likely simple bureaucratic incompetence.

In spite of its shortcomings the book is worth a read if only for the raw data Kass provides.He prints drawings from the killers day planners and verbatim re-printings of some of their writings, giving us an insight to their minds that has evaded the public before now.But if you are already familiar with the case, don't look for anything new here.

Kass nailed it . . .
If you are interested in Columbine then I think you must read the Kass book. Unlike Cullen, who's only giving you the information that supports the FBI's psychological assessment, Kass is laying it all out there. Sometimes, especially in the beginning, he's giving you too much background information. And there's not an index to help you. However, I got a better feeling for the two boys as human beings and a closer look at the parents and families. If you are interested in the Diversion program and the counselors especially you will get a lot more information on that in this book. I was not impressed by the counselors! But I was interested in the argument that it may have been the Diversion program that pushed these boys over the edge.

One of the most revealing inclusions is the paper that Dylan wrote in which he identifies with a murderer who looks like himself and that his teacher found "disturbing." Cullen omits the fact that the victims in this story are preppies who had taunted the killer previously, setting up Dylan's conclusion that he understood why the killer had acted the way he did. In the end I thought Kass did a better job of explaining Columbine than Cullen by putting this crime in the context of other school shootings. You can see that Dylan especially fits the mold of the typical school shooter, to the extent that you can measure such a thing.I gathered from Kass that the problem is largely one of alienation in which school shooters perceive themselves as inferior and without alternatives in the homogenous society of small-town or suburban America. The whole world seems to be against them and they're willing to lash out indiscriminately against an oppressive system symbolized by the school.

One thing that Kass points out is that as computer geeks these two kids were poised to ride the coming wave of technological innovation to successful careers if they'd cared about that. But they obviously were far too troubled psychologically. We get the first mention in the Kass book on the part of Sue Klebold that Dylan had always been fascinated with guns and explosives. I didn't see that in Cullen. There's a lot of stuff like that in this book that make it worth comparing to Cullen. In the end, the most frustrating thing about this is the police cover up, for me. Those people are supposed to be serving the public interest. As the parent of one victim said, "We were planning the funeral and they were already planning the cover up." Kass ends the book by stating: "It is no leap to expect that thousands of Columbine documents remain locked in government file cabinets." It doesn't sound like we'll ever know the whole story on Columbine. There are too many people, including the parents, who are too afraid of the legal repercussions for that to happen.That is perhaps the most chilling conclusion of this remarkable book.

Columbine: A True Crime Story
"Their final count for the day will be 188 shots; Harris 124 and Klebold 64. But they save that last two for themselves," (pg 18). In the book, "Columbine: A True Crime Story," by Jeff Kass, he writes the whole biography about the Columbine Massacre that happened in Jefferson Country, Colorado from beginning to end. Kass explains exactly what the two teenagers looked like. He explains how they were raised, how their parents grew up, and what led them to get to the point where they could not hold their anger in anymore. Kass put some pictures in the book of the boys, their parents, pictures and letters the boys drew, newspapers, victims parents, and survivors. He puts in several facts, evidence, stories, points of views, and a great background. Kass goes in depth about how the boys created their own weapons, how they were able to hide everything before it actually happened, and just the flat out story of it all. He is very accurate and he uncovered tons of information that was unknown.
I enjoyed reading this book a lot; it was easy to follow and it never really got boring. It is one of those books when you are reading it and you start putting yourself in other peoples' shoes because you can feel what they are feeling. It helped me understand further what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were actually going through. Yes they were killers, but this book shows you that they did not just go around killing for no reason. Their classmates bullied them for their whole lives and their parents were never around. Of course this should not give them the right to go insane and kill other peoples loved ones, but this book helps you understand what got them to this point. I like reading books and watching movies that have a purpose or an effect on you and I felt that this book did its job. I thought it would irritate me that Jeff Kass was writing some about their parents background and I thought that it would be useless information; but it actually came togood use because it kind of showed you that their parents genetically passed on some traits (such as depression) that effected the killers.
I would definitely recommend reading this book even if you are slightly interested. Jeff Kass writes in a style that makes you want to continue on reading. I knew some things about the Columbine Massacre before reading this book, but I had no idea that I would learn all the things I did after reading it. It really makes you think about what goes on in other peoples' lives. There were parts of the book that were a little slower than others but for the most part it was pretty entertaining. It was difficult to predict what he was going to talk about next. The only thing that was kind of hard to follow was all the characters that were mentioned. He mentions several family members from both sides, victims that were killed and their family members, teachers and their families. It is just hard to follow who is who in that sense. I am doing a project on the Columbine Massacre, this is the first book I have read about it and I already feel that I know everything about it.

hard journalism
Kass' Columbine book was released in the wake the tenth anniversary of the tragedy along with another from a fellow reporter.Compared to Cullen's "Columbine" which I read prior, "A True Crime Story" lacks the narrative storytelling, but it is hardcore investigative journalism. He fully exposes the incompetence and mistakes in the authorities' response to the shooting as well as the ongoing investigation.

Kass' coverage is broad, from the event itself, to the events preceding, the investigation, lives of victim's families in the ten years hence, etc. Occasionally the digression into loosely related topics takes the book off-balance, but generally most of the material is relevant.

The text includes very interesting drawings and notes from the killers' journals as well as multiple photographs from news coverage, end notes on sources, and various letters to the killers' parents and government officials soliciting assistance for additional information. Despite the otherwise fine journalistic effort, there was no index and there were numerous grammatical errors (although many from direct quoting of source texts).

This is a sad, depressing recap of death, incompetence and ruined lives. Like a car wreck on the highway, the reader is drawn to the carnage and suffering. It's difficult to put down while in the midst of reading, but you are glad to be done with it once you have finished.

Good...BUT
Good book BUT I don't see why people try to constantly compare it to Dave Cullens' "Columbine" book all the time. The two books are apples & oranges.
This one is a narative (It covers the parents testamonies a little better, and catches a slip up that Sue Klebold made in her statements early on.)

Cullens reads more like a action novel, still the same facts but very "First person" perspective. it reads faster but no less informative.

Now for the bad part.
I feel that ANY book about a historical event has to be unbiased and this one isn't. It has a extreme twinge of "anti-gun setiment" that I found distasteful. I don't care how you stand on a issue a book that's supposed to be about facts shouldn't reflect your personal feelings at all. Cullens book was completley unbiased.

Jeff Kass also tries to make some kind of connection to the fact that Columbine happened because the boys "Lived in the West" where "The gun is a more acceptible response" and then even tries to connect The Virginia tech Massacre to this theory becasue it took place in the south. Cho Seung Hui was a South Korean immigrant, I doubt he felt a connection to old west gunfighters anymore than Eric & Dylan did.

Dwayne Fuselier was a top FBI profiler, when he tells you they did it for apocolyptic fame and not because they were bullied outcasts, it's time to accept it.
Sadly this book doesn't. ... Read more

Product Description
Winner of the 1972 Francis Williams Book Illustration Award, First US Paperback Edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Beautiful book, but not an easy read
I bought this book for my daughter.This quality of this book tells you that it is meant to be a keepsake.It is very well printed on high-quality paper, beautifully bound, and comes with a hard slipcover.The illustrations are amazing, but I found their style to be a bit dark for my 7-year old.The book is very text heavy, making it cumbersome to read aloud to a child, and a lot of the prose itself is on an adult level.Although my daughter is an excellent reader for her age, she has lost interest in trying to get through this book.I have read it myself, and while it captures the story of Alice in Wonderland nicely, it is, indeed a commitment to get through.

Capuring the Absurd Surreality and Fright of Wonderland
Lewis Carroll's story of the young girl Alice who chases a rabbit down a hole and discovers a completely new, beautiful, surreal, yet, dangerous world is a tale beloved by both children and adults.There are countless editions of the story available.This one is published by Templar Books and is illustrated by Rodney Matthews.The book comes in a wonderful hardcover slipcase.The illustrations that accompany the story are quite lavish and capture both the absurdity and fright that is an intricate part of Wonderland.The book includes at least one or two full-color, full-page illustrations for ever chapter as well as smaller, black-and-white illustrations of a quarter-page or less about every other page.Very young children (probably 4 and under) might not enjoy this particular edition of the story because there aren't enough "pictures".However, it is an ideal book for slightly older children as well as an edition to read to younger children.This isn't the best illustrated version of the Carroll's story, but it's not too shabby either.

Beautifully packaged, makes a lovely gift
A high quality book with beautiful cover. I would have preferred more illustrations because I am reading it to my Alice obsessed 4 year old. She starts to lose interest with the text being quite adult. The quality of the illustrations are high and most suitable for older children at the stage where they can read it alone. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (3)

Self is a wizard of the English language.
Sorted into column sized vignettes, Will Self paints an amazing picture of a scrambled world. With an even steady hand, he's able to make English suburbs seem as exotic, absurd, and strange as Singapore or Kashmir. For anyone's who's flown and felt the disorientation of modern air travel, Will speaks to the 21st Century traveling man. In addition to Will's stupefying master of his native language, the book is wonderful illustrated by Ralph Steadman.

More frustrating than satisfying
I enjoy a good read that introduces me to words I do not know- it's a great opportunity for me to attempt to build my vocabulary.However, a work in which the author strives to pull the most archaic, out-of-use, and unknown words into every sentence is not a good time.Will Self seems more interested in trying to prove that he is a poetic writer with a encyclopedic thesaurus at his fingertips than actually conveying a well written story.Granted, some of the jargon is simply british-english slang that doesn't ring a bell in american-english, but for the most part the author purposefully chooses words that are completely outside of the common lexicon and unknown to the masses.

To further complicate matters the majority of his antiquated verbiage isn't even in an average dictionary.The words are simply ones he stumbled across and fit to suit his purpose.(Within 6 paragraphs I came across 11 words I was unfamiliar with- 6 of which were not in my run-of-the-mill dictionary)! If you want to try and read this work of mangled words I suggest you have a hefty encyclopedic dictionary by your side.

Modern Situationist
Psychogeography in its contemporary manifestation owes much to the 1950s situationists from the Left Bank of Paris believing (this was after several carafes of vin de table) that by traversing the city on foot they could bring down the micro climate structures of capitalism - the pod like enclaves of home, train and office and instigate the revolution.

They failed. But Guy Debord, a founder member of this group, with his seminal text 'The Society of the Spectacle' laid the foundations for a Marxist interpretation of modern life as a chimera, mediated through the lens of the media and technology, so nothing is real any more.

Will Self, himself a long time lancer of contemporary societal virtues and mores, tries to reorient himself eotechnically amongst the modern climate of car and aeroplane. (For an interesting exposition of this concept, check out his google lecture on the subject, available easily via, er, google). He walks, not in the standard fashion - rugged Appalachian trail, romantic sunset beach - but amongst the Ballardian structures of urban life - the motorways, industrial estates, retail boulevards and urban hinterlands, traditionally neglected by the visually snobbish flaneur.

Starting out, he details a walk he took aiming to fuse the twin parts of his psyche - his base in Vauxhall, South London, and his mother's homeland, New York. He walks from South London to Heathrow, flies business class to New York - giving opportunity for a delicious metaphor of forming a cupola with fellow traveller 'anonymous lovers spent by mercantile soixante-neuf' - and walks from JFK to the centre of Manhattan accompanied by several members of the great and good of New York literary society who become puzzlingly engaged in the walk (and cop quite a few blisters on the way).

The rest of the book consists of bite sized articles from Well Self's Independent newspaper 'Psychogeography' column. A vast array of points on the globe are covered: Morocco, Ohio, Barcelona, Dublin, Rio (though not so much east of Suez). Reading these pieces as a collection you pick up a sense of how the flow of the column works: Self visits a place, often in the context of a book tour, or a family trip, or sometimes - as in the case of a visit to the Buncefield oil depot leak - purely his own curiousity. Once there he puts out his imaginative and surrealist feelers to get a sense of how the architecture, landscape and people of a place rub him up and affect his sense of psyche. Hence the pieces in urban areas are written in a more boiler plated, grittier style, with appropriate metaphors than those in cleaner, sparsely populated areas. The resulting text is often far more surreal, and studded with more references to contemporary culture, architecture, politics (anything that fills Self's voluminous memory) than you could probably imagine.

Generally, the book is an entertaining coffee table work, full of well written, 'glib satires' as Self terms them. They are generally not his greatest journalistic performances. Sometimes he draws up a keen sense of psyche and place, at other times clearly nothing much is happening and Self draws on his vast memory reserves to regale us with a tale from his myriad past. The writing is always fresh and pungent and the illustrations by Ralph Steadman - engorged, satirical grotesques in the spirit of Dali - are ideal accompaniments. ... Read more