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Links to Visit Independent Songwriter Web-Magazine - Jan Best is the Senior Editor and the ISWM Network host for "Independent Songwriters in Cyberspace" Indie Pride Song Camp- Annual song camp for new, intermediate, and advanced songwriters featuring the world's best songwriting instructors ISWM Network- The new and exciting portal for everything indie: music, film, business, and more! Personal Favs Realm Perfume by Erox - The perfume of choice since 1994. Contact Jan Best Management |
Updated for February 2008 - Latest Edition Family Update
In Kuwait: In New York: View Camden, New York right now on the village webcam. Shop at the Online Store You can view some of Jan's favorite movies and books at The Online Amazon Store. These are items that Jan owns and enjoys herself. Whether it's exploring the struggle between man and nature like Grizzly Man, or learning lessons in Jewish history like Paper Clips, these movies and books are meant to rattle the cobwebs of your consciousness... Top Book Picks 
 The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past by Keith Windschuttle---In The Killing of History, Windschuttle offers a devastating expose of attempts to substitute radically chic theorizing for real knowledge about the past. The result is revolutionary and unprecedented: contemporary historians are increasingly obscuring the facts on which truth about the past is built. Windschuttle offers a devastating expose of these developments. This fascinating narrative leads us into a series of case histories that demonstrate how radical theory has attempted to replace the learning of traditional history with its own political agenda. (amazon.com)---
 Defining Visual Rhetorics by Lawrence Erlbaum---Images play an important role in developing consciousness and the relationship of the self to its surroundings. In this distinctive collection, editors Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers examine the connection between visual images and persuasion, or how images act rhetorically upon viewers. Chapters included here highlight the differences and commonalities among a variety of projects identified as "visual rhetoric," leading to a more precise definition of the term and its role in rhetorical studies. (amazon.com)---
 Natural Theology by William Paley---'The consciousness of knowing little, need not beget a distrust of that which he does not know.' In Natural Theology William Paley set out to prove the existence of God from the evidence of the beauty and order of the natural world. Famously beginning by comparing the world to a watch, whose design is self-evident, he goes on to provide examples from biology, anatomy, and astronomy in order to demonstrate the intricacy and ingenuity of design that could only come from a wise and benevolent deity. Paley's legalistic approach and skilful use of metaphor and analogy were hugely successful, and equally controversial. Charles Darwin, whose investigations led to very different conclusions in the Origin of Species, was greatly influenced by the book's cumulative structure and accessible style. This edition reprints the original text of 1802, and sets the book in the context of the theological, philosophical, and scientific debates of the nineteenth century. (amazon.com)--- Top DVD Picks
 Grizzly Man - Starring Timothy Treadwell---Grizzly Man could easily have been sensational and exploitative, but in the hands of Werner Herzog, it becomes something extraordinary. Herzog was granted exclusive access to over 100 hours of video shot by amateur naturalist, wildlife advocate and troubled loner Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 summers in Alaska's Katmai National Park, where he grew to know and love the grizzly bears that lived there. He was also killed by one of them, in October 2003, along with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, and that seemingly inevitable fate informs every minute of Herzog's riveting combination of Treadwell's video with his own expert filmmaking and unique vision of nature and man. (amazon.com)---
 Super Size Me - Starring Morgan Spurlock---Fascinating and nauseating. As a life-style stunt, the documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock eats only at McDonald's for thirty days. It's not a happy set of meals: he puts on twenty pounds, develops heart palpitations, and is rendered impotent (much to the smirking dismay of his vegan girlfriend). While even "heavy users" of McDonald's don't eat fast food as often as Spurlock does during the experiment, he becomes an overweight case in point that Big Macs and their brethren have contributed to the supersizing and the deteriorating health of Americans. Even more worrying are Spurlock's forays into school cafeterias, which have become nutritional wastelands. He tells this toxic story with visual flair and the statistical punch of an inspired muckraker. And, if you want to eat something after the movie, be sure to look away during the shots of stomach-reducing surgery. (amazon.com)---
 Paper Clips - Directed by Joe Fab, Elliot Berlin---In 1998, a group of Tennessee school children embarked on a class project that would change their lives and impact those of countless others around the world. Responding to a history lesson about the Holocaust, the students began collecting 11 million paper clips (a Norwegian symbol of Nazi resistance) to commemorate each of the lives lost in the concentration camps. As news of the Paper Clip Project spread through the Internet, the children found themselves aided by total strangers in their effort to build a permanent memorial to tolerance and diversity in their schoolyard. Filmmakers Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab document the project in their documentary, PAPER CLIPS, for a moving testament to Margaret Mead's assertion that "a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world." (amazon.com)--- |
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