Lara's Book--Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider Phenomenon

Product Review

A digital love affair.

Lara Croft is much more than the sum of her 38,000 polygons. Having jumped out of her virtual 3D environment and into the real world saturated with magazines and rock concerts, Lara has taken on a life of her own. With countless Web sites, fan letters, merchandise, TV commercials, and comic books dedicated to the worship of the world's digital Diva, Lara's fandom has swept the globe. Get to know the real Lara Croft–a fearless, tough, and completely loveable femme fatale!

• Original fiction by Douglas Coupland starring Lara Croft
• Thousands of Lara pictures
• Exclusive interviews with Lara's designers and game developers
• Background on the Tomb Raider story
• Lara's impact on the game industry and world at large
• Exclusive info about Lara's future career
• Complete gameplay strategies for Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider II, and Tomb Raider Gold
• A guide to Lara's fandom: Internet sites, e-mail, merchandise, etc.
• Complete Lara stats

Ever alert to the trends of modern society in the digital age, Douglas Coupland turns his keen eye to the world's love affair with pop culture icon Lara Croft of the fabulously successful Tomb Raider video games. See Lara through the eyes of one of the 20th Century's most gripping young authors.

Amazon.com Review

Lara's Book is a love letter from definitive Gen X scribe Douglas Coupland to definitive Gen X pinup girl Lara Croft. The buxom star of Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II is idolized in both words (Coupland provides a work of fiction about Lara and waxes poetic about his feelings for her and her unique stardom) and pictures (literally thousands from digitally rendered images of Lara in a polo uniform to handmade drawings by her legions of fans). Coupland's story, "Air Tibet," illustrated wonderfully by Kris Renkewitz, is tons of genre-hopping fun, and his description of his obsession with Ms. Croft is singular and evocative of the freestyle interludes of Generation X.

If you're feeling a little weird about owning a glossy-paged, coffee-table-worthy pinup book dedicated to a video game, Lara's Book justifies itself by containing complete strategy guides for all the versions of Tomb Raider. Anyone interested in game development or the minutia of Lara's workstation-induced birth will find the Core team's account of Tomb Raider's development entertaining. Did we mention that it has thousands of pictures of Lara Croft? --Andrew Boscardin

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