Virtual Skipper 3 Review

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(More customer reviews)I am new to the world of sailing having played games such as Sea Dogs, Pirates of the Carib. ect. that really lack the reality of really being on the open sea and focus more on combat which is slow, boring and bad for the most part but when I tried the DEMO out of this game I couldn't believe the detail and the graphics to boot!
First of all the graphics rival those of Far Cry and DOOM 3. Excellent!
The water looks real and the waves splash against your sail boat as if you are really there. You can almost feel the wind as it swings your sail back and forth!
Next, unlike PC Gamers review on this game it's not that hard to learn, really! I figured it out in about ten or so minutes and I'm pretty dense when it comes to PC games.
Al you have to do is figure out what task you want your crew of AI to do and they will get the job done. Focus on the navigational meter on the bottom because that help a great deal with direction and steering your boat to the finnish line correctly. Choosing the sail is a little harder especially if you are not learner with sailing but by experimenting with this in a few mintues you'll have it down.
PC Gamer said because of lack of a trainer the game really lacks but I think you would have to be pretty dense not to accomplish this by yourself. Sorry PC Gamer I think this game is awsome!

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Illustrations of Rockwell Kent Review

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(More customer reviews)My father had several Modern Library books that were illustrated by Rockwell Kent, including "Moby Dick" and "The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer." For years I have assumed that those memorable plates were wood block prints, which seemed the best explanation for Kent's masterful use of black in his work. But reading "The Illustrations of Rockwell Kent: 231 Examples from Books, Magazines and Advertising Art" I am rather stunned to learn these are ink drawings. However, this only makes them even more impressive.
Rockwell Kent was arguably the most important American book illustrator of the 1920s and 1930s, although there are some early examples from 1914 and 1915 and work from as late as 1963, including some marvelous ship drawings for "A Treasury of Sea Stories." His art was highly individualized style of formalized realism that looks glorious in black & white. This volume represents the first time that the best of his illustrations from these various sources. In addition to the aforementioned classic books there are selections from "Candide," "Salamina," "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare," and "Goethe's Faust." But the volume includes lesser-known works such as "A Basket of Poses," "Venus and Adonis," and "To Thee, America!"
This is not simply a collection of Kent's illustrations. Fridolf Johnson, editor of "The American Artist," not only helped select this artwork, he also provides a detailed introductory essay tracing Kent's development as an illustrator along with captions for the illustrations and an annotated bibliography. Because the reproductions are in black & white there are some illustrations that were originally done with tints in two colors (e.g., "The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio), so that effect is lost. But if you did not read the captions you would never know the reproductions were lacking in any regard. This volume should be especially appealing to both those who remember stumbling upon Kent's distinctive artwork in former days, or those who are interested in what can be accomplished with black ink on white paper.

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Salamina Review

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(More customer reviews)Observe Rockwell Kent's hand-printed notes on the Frontispiece, and you will see the legend: "This is Salamina -- apparently hanging out nothing but a clothes pin. If I had given her wash it would have covered up her hands. She always tried to cover them, for they were working hands. This book permits of no concealment."

The book, thus launched in truth, combines Kent's pen and ink chapter-head sketches, full-length portraits of native friends, and engaging text that transport the reader through the icy climes of Greenland in a year-long adventure beginning in 1931. Along the way, Kent describes the hospitality of Greenlanders, which he found humbling and at times frustrating. Readers will discover that many of his stories hold a chuckle or two, if not a good belly-laugh. Salamina, his widowed housekeeper, is the heroine, but main figures in the book are people who gave to him and stole from him. The book is social anthropology, crisply and entertainingly served, of a people and their ways, now gone forever.
The Foreword by Kent-archivist Scott R. Ferris anticipates your first question. Ferris quotes two reviewers when the book first appeared in 1935: Lewis Gannett of the New York Herald Tribune wrote that Salamina "has in it a moving sense of wonder of the virgin universe, the dignity of mountains and of sea, and a rarely intimate picture of Greenlanders at play." A review for The New Yorker opined Kent's "style is abrupt, rhapsodic, hearty . . . it is good anthropology and even better adventure narrative." Said Ferris: "This is why Kent's sagas continue to be reissued."

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First published in 1935, Salamina details artist and adventurer Rockwell Kent's second trip to Greenland. Salamina unfolds as a series of vivid vignettes, each illustrated with Kent's bold black and white drawings. Through his accounts of fishing trips and Christmas festivities, shared meals and budding friendships, Kent acquaints us with the Eskimo and Danish inhabitants of the small vibrant community of Igdlorssuit. Both the native people and the forbidding Arctic landscape held a special beauty for Kent, and he describes them with an artist's eye. Salamina is Kent's Eskimo housekeeper (kifak), who becomes a central figure in the book when she and her daughter come to share Kent's small hut for the year. Kent's wry self-reflection and his poetic meditations on nature, humanity and love make this an enduring classic of travel literature and artistic quest. This Wesleyan edition includes a foreword by art historian Scott R. Ferris that highlights the cultural importance of the text and illustrations and shows that for Kent, inspiration comes from life.

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Voyaging: Southward from the Strait of Magellan Review

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(More customer reviews)Armchair adventurers who love sailing, roughing it through forests, bogs and mountains in strange lands, and meeting new people in brief encounters will love "Voyaging," by Rockwell Kent. The book begins with a shocking confession in the Introduction, and carries the reader through 184 pages of high excitement and magnificent descriptions of one of the most desolate and forsaken places in the world -- the area about Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America.
The book's main characters are (1) Kent, about 40; (2) his mate, a Norwegian of 26 years who started his life by shipping to sea under his father when 14, who after a few months of beatings jumped ship, cursing as he went, apparently never to see his father again; (3) a lifeboat, which Kent bought for $20 and named Kathleen, and with a group of tradesmen modified to include cabin, mast and rigging for sails; (4) the West Wind, which whistled ceaselessly and tossed the little boat about dangerously, and (5) a menagerie of people along the way who extended hospitality, most with loving kindness, a few with malice.
A touching moment came on Bailey Island when Kent asked 20-year-old Margarita García, the name of her three-month-old suckling daughter. The baby has no name because she has not been baptized, Margarita replied. There in that inhospitable land Kent converted a dirty hovel into a cathedral and "baptized" the child, giving her his wife's name Kathleen Kent García. Kent writes that Father García, a murderer who earlier was released from a nearby prison after serving time, said "the ceremony had pleased him particularly as it was in truth the baptism of his child."
Characteristically, Kent illustrates the book well with black-and-white drawings of the stark landscape, and a few portraits of his new acquaintances. He also includes several maps by which the reader may follow the men's attempt to sail around Cape Horn -- an adventure that did not always go according to plan, as the reader will discover. -- Allen Long, Arlington, VA.

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N by E Review

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(More customer reviews)A glorious story of adventure when Kent and two friends sailed on a private schooner from Labrador and Newfoundland to Greenland. We are carried along through deep fogs, icebergs, storms and calms until the men are shipwrecked in a violent storm on Greenland's rocky shore. The story also presents an absorbing and tender tale of the relationships of Kent with the people of Newfoundland, his two shipmates and the Stone Age Eskimos of Greenland -- who threw him a highly successful party in spite of the language barrier. Kent illustrated the text with over 100 magnificent sketches and woodblock drawings that in themselves are worth the price.

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When artist, illustrator, writer, and adventurer Rockwell Kent first published N by Ein a limited edition in 1930, his account of a voyage on a 33-foot cutter from New York Harbor to the rugged shores of Greenland quickly became a collectors' item. Little wonder, for readers are immediately drawn to Kent's vivid descriptions of the experience; we share "the feeling of wind and wet and cold, of lifting seas and steep descents, of rolling over as the wind gusts hit," and the sound "of wind in the shrouds, of hard spray flung on a drum-tight canvas, of rushing water at the scuppers, of the gale shearing a tormented sea." When the ship sinks in a storm-swept fjord within 50 miles of its destination, the story turns to the stranding and subsequent rescue of the three-man crew, salvage of the vessel, and life among native Greenlanders. Magnificently illustrated by Kent's wood-block prints and narrated in his poetic and highly entertaining style, this tale of the perils of killer nor'easters, treacherous icebergs, and impenetrable fog -- and the joys of sperm whales breaching or dawn unmasking a longed-for landfall -- is a rare treat for old salts and landlubbers alike.

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