Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme(What's this?)
I came to this product with limited Creative Suite knowledge. The only CS5 programme I use regularly is After Effects, and I've never had formal training. When I've needed to learn new tricks in the past I've watched video tutorials on websites like Creative Cow.
The format and pacing of this product surprised me at first. It goes through pretty much every button/ interface/ menu drop down from (to my mind) the blindingly obvious to the less self-explanatory. The voice guide, compared to other online tutorials which often sound two or three pots of coffee to the good, was plodding and methodical. I found myself fast forwarding through most of the individual videos.
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme(What's this?)
Two unrelated events affected my reading of this collection:
1. Listening to David Means read a Raymond Carver short story for the excellent New Yorker Fiction podcast in 2010. 2. Starting the collection in a beach house on the British south coast, and losing my copy before I'd finished.
On the first point, Means is somewhat like Carver. To the reviewers who criticised a lack of narrative, I would counter that (superficially) the same can feel true in some of Carver's work. But - like Carver - the texture of Means's writing and the details of the lives he portrays are often revelatory, and it is from these details that his stories propel themselves forward… Read more
