Imagine paddling along, just ahead of a wave that has risen to a monstrous 70 ft - a thousand tons of moving liquid arching over your head whilst you accelerate up to 55 mph, then fly through the arc of rushing water in a race to pull clear before it collapses upon you. 'Extreme surf' is a tribute to the adrenalin rush of catching a big wave. A fascinating journey through the world's most awe-inspiring surfing locations, from Teahupoo, Tahiti to Mavericks, North California, it describes one of the currently most loved, yet dangerous sports. Beginning with a history of the sport's evolution, the book takes us to the most remote, most popular, and most dangerous surfing spots. From the longest, fastest, coldest and warmest waves to the deadliest waters, this book will thrill with its images and text. 'Extreme Surf' is the 4th title in the successful 'Extreme' sport series ('Extreme Golf 04'; 'Extreme Sail 06', 'Extreme Running 07'.) This is mini-edition.

Flynn loves bubble gum. He wanted to blow a bubbleso big that it would lift him off the ground. But Flynnwasn't prepared for the adventure his bubble wasabout to take him on...

Flynn loves bubble gum. He wanted to blow a bubble so big that it would lift him off the ground. But Flynn wasn't prepared for the adventure his bubble was about to take him onaEURO|

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a true sense of the man and the mans' theets of his thought. A separate volume will consist of his book "The Arcades Project," the magnum opus of his Paris years.

The writer Walter Benjamin emerged our of the head-on collision of an idealistic youth movement and the First World War, which Benjamin and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from the wreck scarred yet determined "to be considered as the principal critic of German literature." But the scene as he found it was dominated by "talented fakes," so-to use his words-"only a terrorist campaign would I suffice" to effect radical change. This book offers the record of the first phase of that campaign, culminating with "One-Way Street," one of the most significant products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties. Against conformism, homogeneity, and gentrification of all life into a new world order, Benjamin made the word his sword.

Volume I of the "Selected Writings" brings together essays long and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before been translated into English. The contents begin in 1913, when Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was president of a radical youth group, and take usthrough 1926, when he had already begun, with his explorations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany's most influential journals.

The volume includes a number of his most important works, including "Two Poems by Friedrich Holderlin," "Goethe's Elective Affinities," "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," "The Task of the Translator," and "One-Way Street." He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children's books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or epistemology. We meet Benjamin the youthful idealist, the sober moralist, the political theorist, the experimentalist, the translator, and, above all, the virtual king of criticism, with his magisterial exposition of the basic problems of aesthetics.

Benjamin's sentences provoke us to return to them again and again, luring us as though with the promise of some final revelation that is always being postponed. He is by turns fierce and tender, melancholy and ebullient; he is at once classically rooted, even archaic, in his explorations of the human psyche and the world of things, and strikingly progressive in his attitude toward society and what he likes to call the organs of the collective (its architectures, fashions, signboards). Throughout, he displays a far-sighted urgency, judging the present on the basis of possible futures. And he is gifted with a keen sense of humor. Mysterious though he may sometimes be (his Latvian love, Asia Lacis, once described him as a visitor from another planet), Benjamin remains perhaps the most consistently surprising and challenging of critical writers.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.