The camera supposedly never lies, yet film's ability to frame, cut and reconstruct all that passed before its lens made cinema the pre-eminent medium of visual illusion and revelation from the early twentieth century onwards. This volume examines film's creative history of special effects and trickery, encompassing everything from George M?li?s' first trick films to the modern CGI era. Evaluating movements towards the use of computer-generated 'synthespians' in films such as "Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within (2001)," this title suggests that cinematic effects should be understood not as attempts to perfectly mimic real life, but as constructions of substitute realities, situating them in the cultural lineage of the stage performers and illusionists and of the nineteenth century. With analyses of films such as "Destination Moon" (1950), "Spider-Man" (2002) and the King Kong films (1933 and 2006), this new volume provides an insight into cinema's capacity to perform illusions.

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) gives you the best of Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, and Acceptance Test Driven Planning techniques, so you can create better software with self-documenting, executable tests that bring users and developers together with a common language. Get the most out of BDD in Ruby with "The RSpec Book," written by the lead developer of RSpec, David Chelimsky. You'll get started right away with RSpec 2 and Cucumber by developing a simple game, using Cucumber to express high-level requirements in language your customer understands, and RSpec to express more granular requirements that focus on the behavior of individual objects in the system. You'll learn how to use test doubles (mocks and stubs) to control the environment and focus the RSpec examples on one object at a time, and how to customize RSpec to "speak" in the language of your domain. You'll develop Rails 3 applications and use companion tools such as Webrat and Selenium to express requirements for web applications both in memory and in the browser. And you'll learn to specify Rails views, controllers, and models, each in complete isolation from the other. Whether you're developing applications, frameworks, or the libraries that power them, "The RSpec Book" will help you write better code, better tests, and deliver better software to happier users.

"Foner often let others take credit, but with his names and telephone numbers he was the man to call and take a call from. He was a champion of civil rights and civil liberties and an early and strong opponent of the Vietnam War when that was rare among labor." The Nation"For the daily truth behind phrases like 'first-generation American, ' 'labor movement, ' and 'civil rights, ' there is no better life story than that of Moe Foner. Like Emma Goldman, he insisted on dancing at the revolution, and on every American's right to joy and justice. In these dark times, his memoir is a beacon of past and future light." Gloria Steinem"I operated under the theory that a good union doesn't have to be dull." Moe Foner"Don't waste any time mourning organize." Joe HillMoe Foner, who died in January 2002, was a leading player in 1199/SEIU, New York's Health and Human Service Union, and a key strategist in the union's fight for recognition and higher wages for thousands of low-paid hospital workers. Foner also was the founder of Bread and Roses, 1199's cultural program created to add dimension and artistic outlets to workers' lives. Foner produced a musical about hospital workers; invited Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to perform for workers and their children; presented stars such as Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Alan Alda; and installed the only permanent art gallery at a union headquarters. One of Foner's last projects was a poster series called "Women of Hope," which celebrates African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latina women including Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Septima P. Clark, and the Delaney sisters Sarah and Elizabeth. Today his legacy is the largest and most important cultural program of any union.Not for Bread Alone traces Foner's development from an apolitical youth whose main concerns were basketball and music to a visionary whose pragmatism paved the way for legislation guaranteeing hospital workers the right to unionize. Foner writes eloquently about his early life in Brooklyn as the son of a seltzer delivery man and about many of the critical developments in the organization of hospital workers. He provides an insider's perspective on major strikes and the struggle for statewide collective bargaining; the leadership styles of Leon Davis, Doris Turner, and Dennis Rivera; and the union's connection to key events such as the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War."

Many British films never make it to the screen. Obstacles of finance, censorship, distribution or creative breakdown can appear in their way, and they might even fail to get beyond the script stage. This book collects new essays by leading scholars that use archival resources to reconstruct the stories behind a range of films by prominent film-makers. These thwarted productions are all too often excluded from histories of British cinema, but the accounts of their unmaking contained in Sights Unseen provides an illuminating insight into the factors which have served to undermine the stability of the film industry in Britain.