The essential biography of the influential and beloved filmmaker George Lucas. On May 25, 1977, a problem-plagued, budget-straining independent science-fiction film opened in a mere thirty-two American movie theaters. Conceived, written, and directed by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas, the movie originally called The Star Wars quickly drew blocks-long lines, bursting box-office records and ushering in a new way for movies to be made, marketed, and merchandised. It is now one of the most adored-and successful-movie franchises of all time. Now, the author of the bestselling biography Jim Henson delivers a long-awaited, revelatory look into the life and times of the man who created Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Indiana Jones. If Star Wars wasn't game-changing enough, Lucas went on to create another blockbuster series with Indiana Jones, and he completely transformed the world of special effects and the way movies sound. His innovation and ambition forged Pixar and Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and THX sound. Lucas's colleagues and competitors offer tantalizing glimpses into his life. His entire career has been stimulated by innovators including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, actors such as Harrison Ford, and the very technologies that enabled the creation of his films-and allowed him to keep tinkering with them long after their original releases. Like his unforgettable characters and stories, his influence is unmatched.
Offers a guide to census indexes, including federal, state, county, and town records, available in print and online; arranged by year, geographically, and by topic.
Another hitch: missing autopsy The Walsh case was hampered by various problems, including a missing autopsy report and a glitch in identifying the remains. -- The Miami Herald, March 28, 2010 From The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh, Book One: The Adam Walsh story you know: After 6-year-old Adam was found murdered, his father, John Walsh, channeled his unbearable grief into becoming an angry crime-fighting TV host. Yet this is the story you don’t know: For decades, officials had never revealed the file proving the child was Adam. Astonishingly, it showed that the ID of the dead child had never been completed. Why? Was it because the evidence was either inconclusive—or showed that the child likely actually wasn’t Adam? After Hollywood Police closed the case in 2008, not only was the police investigative file made a public record, so were the medical examiners' files in two districts. Harris asked to see all of them and realized this: As shown by his smile in the "Missing" picture, Adam's top front baby teeth were both gone. But the found child had a buck tooth -- a left top front tooth that was in "almost all the way," in the words of a state forensic anthropologist who the police had later consulted. When was the "Missing" picture taken? How long before Adam vanished? John Walsh wrote it was one week. Harris found it was actually about a month. He found Adam's last best friend, who said he saw him a week or two before he disappeared and remembered that he still didn't have any top front teeth. However, the police's last-seen-alive description reads that his top left front tooth was partially in. So within the week or two before Adam disappeared, his new tooth had erupted. Two weeks after Adam was gone, the child's head was found. The Fort Lauderdale medical examiner told the newspapers then that the child (Adam, he said) had been dead for possibly all of the 14 days he had been missing. Teeth don't keep growing after death. In just that week or two before he disappeared, could Adam's top left front tooth have gone from eruption to in "almost all the way"? That would be very unusual if not impossible. More likely, it would have taken months, maybe up to six, pediatric and forensic dentists and parents of young children told Harris. If indeed Adam's top left front tooth doesn't match the same one in the found child, there also should be other indicators that they don't match. To compare discovered, abandoned bodies with missing people, forensic dentists use the missing person's dental charts and dental X-rays. The upstate medical examiner who made the positive ID wrote that Adam's dental chart showed that he had a filling in a lower left molar that matched a filling in the found child. But that was only enough for a "presumptive ID," which is less than a positive ID. It was only one filling, and it was in a common place for children to have cavities. And the dental chart he used is missing from his file -- as well as the files of Hollywood Police, which originally handled it, and the Fort Lauderdale medical examiner, who the upstate M.E. said he gave a copy to. Further, none of the files mention ever getting or using Adam's dental X-rays for a comparison. Those would have made for a definitive match -- or a negative match. Nor is there a mention anywhere of a forensic dental consultation, ordinarily done in such circumstances to make positive IDs. Adam's dentist says he no longer has the original records, so the examination that should have been done then can never be done in the future. Even worse, there is no autopsy report. The medical examiner who performed the autopsy admitted in writing that neither he nor anyone else in his office ever wrote one. Detectives, prosecutors, and defense attorneys who work homicides told Harris they had never heard of that ever happening before. This is what it all means: As there never has been, there never can be a trial for the murder of Adam Walsh because prosecutors can never establish that the murder victim was Adam Walsh. Instead, this case is about something different: crimes, injustices, and horrors against likely two young children, their families, and their communities: A child close in age to Adam who has never been correctly identified, whose parents were never notified and whose murder was never investigated, and who was not buried under his (or her) correct identity; And also the kidnapping of a young boy in a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida. Which leads to an incredible pair of questions: What ever happened to Adam Walsh? Could he still be alive?
The title of this book is a misnomer. It is not an attempt to get anyone to shut up, but rather to provoke a discussion. This book is intended to be a warning about the philosophy of "Christian postmodernism." The reader will learn some basic principles that can be used to engage their arguments. Part 1 is a response to some of the recent writings by Frank Schaeffer, the son of the late Francis Schaeffer. This was originally written as a defense against Frank's attacks on pro-life street activism - a movement that his father helped bring into being through his books. Part 2 is a response to Colonel Doner and his book, Christian Jihad: Neo-Fundamentalists and the Polarization of America. There are thousands who have had their lives impacted in a powerful way by the elder Francis Schaeffer. As a new generation is emerging, it is important to recognize the mistakes that Christian activists have made in the past even while holding to a vision for the future.
This book consists of essays that stand on their own but are also loosely connected. Part I documents how numbers and geometry arise in several cultural contexts and in nature: scale, proportion in architecture, ancient geometry, megalithic stone circles, the hidden pavements of the Laurentian library, the shapes of the Hebrew letters, and the shapes of biological forms. Part II shows how many of the same numbers and number sequences are related to the modern mathematical study of numbers, dynamical systems, chaos, and fractals.
William Faulkner has enjoyed a secure reputation as American modernism's foremost fiction writer, and as a landmark figure in international literary modernism, for well over half a century. Less secure, however, has been any scholarly consensus about what those modernist credentials actually entail. Over recent decades, there have been lively debates in modernist studies over the who, what, where, when, and how of the surprisingly elusive phenomena of modernism and modernity. This book broadens and deepens an understanding of Faulkner's oeuvre by following some of the guiding questions and insights of new modernism studies scholarship into understudied aspects of Faulkner's literary modernism and his cultural modernity. William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity explores Faulkner's rural Mississippians as modernizing subjects in their own right rather than mere objects of modernization; traces the new speed gradients, media formations, and intensifications of sensory and affective experience that the twentieth century brought to the cities and countryside of the US South; maps the fault lines in whiteness as a racial modernity under construction and contestation during the Jim Crow period; resituates Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County within the transnational counter-modernities of the Black Atlantic; and follows the author's imaginative engagement with modern biopolitics through his late work A Fable, a novel Faulkner hoped to make his 'magnum o.' By returning to the utterly uncontroversial fact of Faulkner's modernism with a critical sensibility sharpened by new modernism studies, William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity aims to spark further reappraisal of a distinguished and quite dazzling body of fiction. Perhaps even make it new.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • For the first time ever—a comprehensive biography of one of the twentieth century’s most innovative creative artists: the incomparable, irreplaceable Jim Henson He was a gentle dreamer whose genial bearded visage was recognized around the world, but most people got to know him only through the iconic characters born of his fertile imagination: Kermit the Frog, Bert and Ernie, Miss Piggy, Big Bird. The Muppets made Jim Henson a household name, but they were just part of his remarkable story. This extraordinary biography—written with the generous cooperation of the Henson family—covers the full arc of Henson’s all-too-brief life: from his childhood in Leland, Mississippi, through the years of burgeoning fame in America, to the decade of international celebrity that preceded his untimely death at age fifty-three. Drawing on hundreds of hours of new interviews with Henson's family, friends, and closest collaborators, as well as unprecedented access to private family and company archives, Brian Jay Jones explores the creation of the Muppets, Henson’s contributions to Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live, and his nearly ten-year campaign to bring The Muppet Show to television. Jones provides the imaginative context for Henson’s non-Muppet projects, including the richly imagined worlds of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth—as well as fascinating misfires like Henson’s dream of opening an inflatable psychedelic nightclub. An uncommonly intimate portrait, Jim Henson captures all the facets of this American original: the master craftsman who revolutionized the presentation of puppets on television, the savvy businessman whose dealmaking prowess won him a reputation as “the new Walt Disney,” and the creative team leader whose collaborative ethos earned him the undying loyalty of everyone who worked for him. Here also is insight into Henson’s intensely private personal life: his Christian Science upbringing, his love of fast cars and expensive art, and his weakness for women. Though an optimist by nature, Henson was haunted by the notion that he would not have time to do all the things he wanted to do in life—a fear that his heartbreaking final hours would prove all too well founded. An up-close look at the charmed life of a legend, Jim Henson gives the full measure to a man whose joyful genius transcended age, language, geography, and culture—and continues to beguile audiences worldwide. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BOOKPAGE “Jim Henson vibrantly delves into the magnificent man and his Muppet methods: It’s an absolute must-read!”—Neil Patrick Harris “An exhaustive work that is never exhausting, a credit both to Jones’s brisk style and to Henson’s exceptional life.”—The New York Times “[A] sweeping portrait that is a mix of humor, mirth and poignancy.”—Washington Independent Review of Books “A meticulously researched tome chock-full of gems about the Muppets and the most thorough portrait of their creator ever crafted.”—Associated Press
Based on the classic television show, modernized for the 21st century by New Line Television and hosted by Forest Whitaker, each of these books contains two killer stories with a sting in the tale. Original.
Riding Towards Me is the epic adventure story of Jay Kannaiyan who dropped everything he had in the US to ride his motorcycle back home to India by the longest possible route. The journey took him three years and three months as he rode through Latin America, Europe and Africa, finally reaching New Delhi in 2013. Jay and his motorcycle, sanDRina, encountered mechanical meltdowns, remote Mayan villages, weeks of high altitude desert isolation, Caribbean and Atlantic voyages, humility, friendship, and landscapes that almost destroyed the bike and Jay's spirit. His go-with-the-flow attitude and engineering background deliver a story of global trails and an adventuring insight that brought him fame amongst the off-road motorcycling fraternity before his journey was even complete.
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