Perhaps it's Love, the original element, which gives this book its name, concerns four young adults that play a vital role to follow their hearts; sometimes without adequate preparation, or the appropriate equipment as a test of the will. This of course, nearly crushes each person's spirit. In one-way or another, each youth is linked to each other (ages between 18 and 21). The novel is primarily concerned with choices in love, in some cases a manifesto about its dangers. At the end it, it must be said, nothing was tolerable but the best. No one was without sin. Four youths [l96768], while being in the process of growth get stirred up quite a lot, some even lost in the commotion of events, while feelings become nourished and intensified, all aching for love, in their own way. A lesson might well be learned if they can only harness their crying hearts; but first unhappiness has to be conquered (part of the theme and plot). The story has a shy-charm to it, a quick gaiety, and objective tenderness. It is dramatic; it has an exploring inner mind. Many parts of this book are based on actual events, transformed into historical fiction.

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm. What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. “A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum