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Book Rate
A
digested book "review": cheap shots, glib commentary,
shameless advocacy of insidious ideology of social and economic
justice and idiosyncratic and totally arbitrary choices of books
that come our way via our gallant and steadfast UPS drivers and
other routes...
Maybe.
Note: (RB) = Robert
Birnbaum; (SB) = Summer
Block.
Last updated: February 28, 2006
Angel’s World: The New York Photographs
of Angelo Rizzuto – Michael Lesy (WW Norton, 128 p.p.)
Michael Lesy, from his first published work, the cult
classic Wisconsin
Death Trip, to his last book, Long Time Coming,
has continued to find the fascinating photographic treasures that
are scattered and buried in archives and dusty basements around
the country—some hidden in plain sight. The 90 tri-tones in
this book represent a sliver of the 60,000 images that Angel
Rizzuto bequeathed to the Library of Congress when he died in
1965. He was a man who lived in a NYC rundown hotel and every day
left his room at 2:00 PM to photograph the city in all its dimensions
and its complexity. Lesy both tastefully curates this vivid collection
of black-and-white photographs and incisively looks at the odd person
that was Angel Rizzuto. (RB)
President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination
- Richard Reeves (Simon & Schuster, 491 p.p.)
American Journey: Traveling with de Tocqueville in searching
for Democracy in America - Richard Reeves (Simon & Schuster,
397 p.p.)
Such is my profound respect for veteran journalist
Reeves
that I set aside my great antipathy toward Ronald Reagan and his
mythic legacy and read this well-written examination of his presidency.
Reeves, who is no stranger to this enterprise, having written well-received
books on the Kennedy and Nixon presidencies, has removed the scales
from my eyes about Reagan, who I had always dismissed as literally
a dummy who was manipulated by the craven hucksters and thieves
of the right-wing lackeys of the ruling class. It turns out Reagan
grasped the essentials of the presidency (to lead, not to govern)
and understood the leap required to end the serious danger of nuclear
war between superpowers. And despite the excesses of his hagiographers,
it is appropriate to credit him with an understanding of the inevitability
of the Soviet collapse, something right-wing ideologues failed to
see at the time.
Mark Twain opined that a classic “is a book
much praised and rarely read.” Which I would venture to say
applies to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
These days we have French intellectual superstar Bernard Henri Levy’s
alleged revisitation of the 19th century Frenchman’s intention
for Atlantic Monthly and now in a tome that was vividly
attacked in the pages of the New
York Times Book Review by world-class ignoramus Garrison
Keillor. You will note that not mentioning BHL’s (as he is
known in France) tome is a sign that it is an ambient element in
this present context. My cause is the 1982 Richard Reeves book that
marked the 150th anniversary of Tocqueville’s journey’s
in which Reeves revisits locations and such to refresh our sense
of that “classic” work. Does the phrase “demonic
commerce” ring a bell? (RB)
Literature is Freedom - Susan Sontag
(Winterhouse
Editions, 48 p.p.)
Susan Sontag was awarded the Friedenspreis des
Deutschen Buchhandels (the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
previously awarded to Martin Buber, Hermann Hesse, Paul Tillich,
Ernst Bloch, Max Frisch, Octavio Paz, Vaclav Havel, Mario Vargas
Llosa, Amos Oz, Fritz Stern, and Chinua Achebe) in 2003, which did
nothing to endear Sontag to America’s vast gaggle of right-wing
conspirators, and a virtual news blackout on her remarks denied
many readers the benefit of the luminous insights found in her acceptance.
Such as:
Indeed, sometimes I have to pinch myself to
be sure I am not dreaming: that what many people in my own country
now hold against Germany, which wreaked such horrors on the world
for nearly a century --- the new "German problem," as
it were --- is that Germans are repelled by war; that much of
German public opinion is now virtually ... pacifist!
Were America and Europe never partners, never friends? Of
course. But perhaps it is true that the periods of unity --- of
common feeling --- have been exceptions, rather than the rule.
One such time was from the Second World War through the early
Cold War, when Europeans were profoundly grateful for America's
intervention, succor, and support. Americans are comfortable seeing
themselves in the role of Europe's savior. But then, America will
expect the Europeans to be forever grateful, which is not what
Europeans are feeling right now.
From "old" Europe's point of view, America seems
bent on squandering the admiration --- and gratitude --- felt
by most Europeans. The immense sympathy for the United States
in the aftermath of the attack on September 11, 2001 was genuine.
(I can testify to its resounding ardor and sincerity in Germany;
I was in Berlin at the time.) But what has followed is an increasing
estrangement on both sides. The citizens of the richest and most
powerful nation in history have to know that America is loved,
and envied ... and resented. More than a few who travel abroad
know that Americans are regarded as crude, boorish, uncultivated
by many Europeans, and don't hesitate to match these expectations
with behavior that suggests the ressentiment of the ex-colonials.
And some of the cultivated Europeans who seem most to enjoy visiting
or living in the United States attribute to it, condescendingly,
the liberating ambiance of a colony where one can throw off the
restrictions and high-culture burdens of "back home…”
Winterhouse Editions offers two versions of this tome,
one a (as one would expect) handsomely designed soft cover and a
deluxe cloth edition of imported Japanese paper. (RB)
The
Judgement of Paris: The Revolutionary
Decade that Gave the World Impressionism –
Ross King (Walker & Co, 464 p.p.)
Of late I find myself reading more nonfiction as talented
and adventurous writers uncover more stories that have the narrative
oomph of a good novel. Books like Wittgenstein’s Poker,
Rousseau’s Dog or The Courtesan and the Philosopher
or The
Devil and the White City provide many if not all the pleasures
of my favorite novels. Add Ross King’s account of mid-19th
-century Paris and the rise and struggle for acceptance of Impressionist
painting to the above list. The struggle between the highly popular
and revered Ernest Meissonier and the reviled Edourd Manet resulted
a cataclysmic change in the history of art with a constellation
of artists including Zola, Delacroix, Courvbet, Baudelaire, Whistler,
Monet and Hugo as a supporting cast. It is, of course, a subject
of intense fascination when an aesthetic clash had the power to
divide a nation. (RB)
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences
– Lawrence Weschler (McSweeney’s, 236 p.p.)
Lawrence Weschler’s literary modus operandi
is clear from the title of the magazine he is trying to launch (of
which a prototype has been published), Omnivore. And a
quick scan of the titles of his, uh, oeuvre reinforces that judgement.
This book is about, as Weschler remarks in the introduction, “I
have increasingly found myself being visited by similarly uncanny
moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered
recollections—sometimes in the weirdest places...The range
in tone of these convergences was considerable: some were fanciful,
others polemical; some merely silly, others almost transcendental.
Some tended toward some deep-hidden, long submerged causal relation;
others veritably reveled in their manifest unlikelihood.”
Still not clear what this book is about? Here are the headings that
divide this volume’s subjects: Exemplary Instances, Women’s
Bodies, Images Without Text, Political Occasions, Trees, Neurons
Networks, and Coda/Credo. And that’s all we are going to say.
(RB)
Portraits – David Hockney,
edited by Sarah Howgate and Barbara Stern Shapiro with essays by
Mark Glazebrook, Edmund White, Marco Livingstone (Yale University
Press, 256 p.p.)
David Hockney’s exhibition at
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (Sunday, February 26, 2006
- Sunday, May 14, 2006) is accompanied by a handsome book featuring
more than 250 works from the past fifty year including members of
Hockney’s family and private circle, as well as portraits
of such artists and cultural figures as Lucian Freud, Francesco
Clemente, R. B. Kitaj, Helmet Newton, Lawrence Weschler, and W.
H. Auden. It’s a beautifully illustrated book containing 35
black-and-white, 260 color illustrations examining Hockney’s
portraits in all media—painting, drawing, photography. (RB)
Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle
of the Turmoil of Our Times – Amitav Ghosh (Houghton
Mifflin, 303 p.p.)
Amitav
Ghosh’s The Glass Palace is one my favorite novels
of the 21st century, and having encountered his nonfiction and essays
in a variety of venues at particularly poignant times, I have welcomed
his assured and intelligent voice on manifold subjects from his
inspection
of post-tsunami SE Asia, to his interview of Pol Pot’s
sister-in-law and his ruminations on September 11, 2001, as he retrieved
his young daughter from school. The Wall Street Journal,
that paragon of things literary, observes, “Ghosh is adept
at delineating the complicated crosscurrents of emerging national
independence movements. He is even more impressive at portraying
the different ways in which individuals react to the turmoil, hardship,
and disorientation wrought by war.” Exactly. (RB)
Museum, Inc: Inside the Global Art World
– Paul Werner (Prickly Paradigm Press, 78 p.p.)
Paul Werner lectures at The School of Visual Arts and New York
University and edits WOID
and spent nine years at the Guggenheim Museum. He contributes to
Prickly
Paradigm's outstanding bibliography of provocative pamphlets
on subjects ranging from genetics to Elliot Weinberger’s 9/12:
New York After with this critical analysis of the effects of
that messy convergence of art and commerce and ”describes
from the inside the new arts conglomerates, whose roots are deeply
imbedded in corporate culture.” Sad but true, yes? (RB)
Best American Short Stories 2005, guest
edited by Michael Chabon (Houghton Mifflin, 409 p.p.)
It is almost automatic for me to be excited by this annual collection
(since 1915) despite Houghton Mifflin having turned Best American
into a brand. For one thing, this volume saves a lot of time and
money that might otherwise go to magazines and eventually, landfill.
It’s tough to single out the selections, but my favorites
are Thomas McGuane’s “Old Friends,” Edward P.
Jones’ “Old Boys, Old Girls,” Charles D’
Ambrosio’s “The Scheme of Things,” and George
Saunders’ “Bohemians”—all coincidentally
first published in the New Yorker. (RB)
Best American Essays 2005, edited by Susan Orlean
(Houghton Mifflin, 292 p.p.)
This is the second Best American series inaugurated by
Houghton Mifflin some dozen years ago under the stewardship of Robert
Atwan. The latest entry, ably guest edited by star journalist Susan
Orlean, features a wonderful cross-section of writers, many operating
off their normal turf. There is, of course, the by-now-famous piece,
“Consider the Lobster,” by David Foster Wallace, and
my favorites “The Prince of Possibility,” Robert Stone’s
homage to Ken Kesey; “The Sea of Information,” by Andrea
Barrett, a meditation on writing; and Ted Kooser’s memoiristic,
“Small Rooms in Time.” All of which are just a sampling
of the delights to be found in this year’s anthology. (RB)
Best American Travel Writing 2005, edited by Jamaica
Kincaid (Houghton Mifflin 374 p.p.)
Admittedly, I am a Jamaica Kincaid fanboy and thus would take up
anything, including her gardening book, with her name on it, despite
my lack of interest in horticulture. This sixth edition in the Best
American Travel Writing series does not disappoint—beginning
with Kincaid’s mesmerizing explication of this misunderstood
genre. I’m still working through this tome but I enjoyed rereading
Jim Harrison’s “A Really Big Lunch” about the
thirty-seven course meal to which a French friend invited him, and
Tom Bissell’s “War Wounds.” Arguably, these selections
might find their way into anthologies in other categories, but who’s
arguing? Not me. (RB)
Secrecy
& Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq,
by Robert
Parry
(The Media Consortium, 359 p.p.)
From the introduction by veteran investigative journalist Robert
Parry, the editor of the investigative magazine American Dispatches
and the website Consortiumnews: “This book became
a way to explore how the United States got to where it is today
with a political process that is impervious to fact or driven by
fear. Indeed one interpretation of the 30 years since the Watergate
scandal is that secrecy and dirty tricks that were the hallmarks
of Richard Nixon’s political style have simply become the
daily routine of today’s politics. Certainly, the post-Watergate
demands for greater government openness and limits on executive
authority seem a like distant echo more a memory than a legacy.”
And so Parry’s efforts seem to be an attempt to fill in the
spaces that remain after the investigations by Kevin Phillips in
American Dynasty and in Craig Unger’s House of Bush,
House of Saud—in case anyone is paying attention. (RB)
Frank Norris: A Life, by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr.
and Jesse S. Crisler (University of Illinois Press , 492 p.p..)
While we have umpteen biographies of Franz Kafka and every day
seems to bring another Virginia Woolf hagiography, Chicago-born
novelist Frank Norris, who transplanted to San Francisco in the
waning days of America’s nineteenth century and died at thirty-two
of a ruptured appendix, has waited seventy years for a worthy account
of his tragically short life. Author of The Octopus and
The Pit, inspired accounts of the coming of age of America
as an industrial power, Norris was prescient about the dangers and
evils of monopoly —which earned him a deserved place in the
American literary canon. Apparently scholars McElrath and Crisler
spent thirty years assembling materials to fashion this detailed
biography. No doubt it was worth the wait. (RB)
What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles, by Eliot
Weinberger (New Directions, 184 p.p.)
Essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger’s work, which includes
Works on Paper, Outside Stories, and Karmic
Traces, has been translated into over twenty languages and
he has translated Borges, Paz, and Bei Dao and received numerous
international awards.
When the essay “What I Heard about Iraq,” which occupies
about forty pages of this book, was posted on the London Review
of Books website, it was the most visited article ever posted
there and was linked to some 30,000 other sites. As Book Forum
opined, Weinberger’s political writing is “a ferocious
excoriation of the Haliburton administration.”
“What I Heard About Iraq” begins:
In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney,
then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to
invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying
to take over and govern Iraq’. I heard him say: ‘The
question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is
Saddam worth? And the answer is: not that damned many.’
And ends with:
I heard Attorney General John Ashcroft say, on the day of his
resignation: ‘The objective of securing the safety of Americans
from crime and terror has been achieved.’
I heard the president say: ‘For a while we were marching
to war. Now we’re marching to peace.’
I heard that the US military had purchased 1,500,000,000 bullets
for use in the coming year. That is 58 bullets for every Iraqi adult
and child.
While the voices Weinberger recounts have been smeared all over
the airwaves and op-ed pages, his incantational account of the past
four years is a stirring counterpoint to that noise. (RB)
Lovesick Blues: The Life Of Hank Williams, by
Paul Hemphill (Viking, 207 p.p.)
This seems to be a rich period of musical historiography for mid-century
American music—see, among others, Peter Guralnick’s
new biography of Sam Cooke. Of the few books on Hank Williams, known
as “the hillybilly Shakespeare,” Paul Hemphill’s
has the benefit of the author’s Southern origins and expertise
in and devotion to country music. Hemphill writes, “Hank Williams’
songs were cries in the lonely night, racing with the moon, the
wind whistling through the [truck’s] cab, gliding past See
Rock City barns and Burma Shave signs and spooky pastures milling
with dumbstruck cows.” (RB)
Always Magic In the Air, by Ken Emerson (Viking,
334 p.p.)
In Always Magic in the Air, Ken Emerson dishes out a rich
slice of pop music history. Anyone who knows the American songbook
of the last half of the twentieth century knows the names Leiber
& Stoller, Pomus & Schuman, Bacharach & David, Goffin
& King, Mann & Weil, and Barry & Greenwhich. And even
if the names aren’t familiar, the songs they wrote, from “Save
the Last Dance for Me” and “Walk On By,” to “Will
You Still Love me Tomorrow,” are indelibly imprinted on American
culture. Amazingly, the above mentioned song writing teams and much
more were all housed at one address, 1619 Broadway, the famous (at
least in music business circles) Brill Building. I owned and wore
out many of the records talked about in this book and the stories
of their creators still sing to me. (RB)
The Design of Dissent, by Milton Glaser &
Mirko Ilic (Rockport 240 p.p.)
Any book by or about Milton Glaser, the grand patriarch of contemporary
design, is a publishing event in its own right. This volume, a collaboration
with the highly regarded Mirko Illic, and including a forward by
Tony Kushner and an interview with Milton Glaser by New York
Times art director and graphic design historian Steven Heller,
is another must-own tome. The Design of Dissent is a compendium
of international posters and ephemera from the sixties to the present
with a focus on the last five years. Here from the Glaser interview,
“We do know that inevitably, powerful institutions begin to
oppress those who have less power …So in response to the whole
notion of unassailable power, dissent is a positive response and
as the button I designed says, ‘dissent protects democracy’…We
do know that there is at least an ethical core to the idea of dissent
and that dissent is very necessary because of the institutional
instinct to move toward a totalitarian position—that authority,
whatever its source…always attempts to marginalize people
and movements considered to be deviant…” Yeah, that’s
what I’m talking about. (RB)
By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design,
by Ned Drew & Paul Sternberger (Princeton Architectural Press,
192 p.p.)
By now, through the good works of the ebullient Mr. Chip Kidd and
his fellow designers at Knopf, book-cover designs have become their
own subject. This valuable book surveys and illustrates the history
of the relatively recent invention of the book dust jacket. And
that history/story is, of course, a narrative of the relationship
of graphic design to literature that this volume vividly features—including
the work of Rockwell Kent, E. McKnight Kauffer, Paul Rand, Alvin
Lustig, Rudy deHarak, and Roy Kuhlman along with more recent and
contemporary innovators, including Push Pin Studios [Seymour Chwast
and Milton Glaser], Paul Bacon, Louise Fili, Carin Goldberg, John
Gall and, yes, Chip Kidd. (RB)
Baghdad Journal: An Artist in Occupied Iraq,
by Steve Mumford (Drawn and Quarterly Books, 191 p.p..)
Continuing a tradition of war artists (beginning with Winslow Homer),
Mumford’s vivid watercolors and sketches admirably capture
the feeling of day to day life in war-torn Iraq. Not expressing
any political line, these images present a resonant reality that
is often obscured by photography. (RB)
Chip Kidd: Book One, Work 1986-2006, intro. by
John Updike (Rizzoli, 304 p.p..)
Graphic super star Kidd
lays claim to having designed an astounding array of bestsellers
and literary masterpieces (sometimes one and the same), but viewers
of this mid-career retrospective book will see that is only part
of his impressive talent. (RB)
Deep South, by Sally Mann (Bulfinch Press, 120
p.p.)
Widely acclaimed Sally Mann’s newest collection consists
of sixty-five tritone ethereal landscape photographs using collodion,
a nineteenth century process, as well as variety of toning techniques
that Mann opines capture “the radical light of the American
South.” (RB)
Blahnik by Boman: Shoes, Photographs, Conversation,
Manolo Blahnik, by Eric Boman (Chronicle Books, 224 p.p.)
If Giorgio Armani and Ralph Lauren’s cars can exhibit at
major art museum(s), shoe designers can also be taken seriously.
In the case of Manolo Blahnik’s creations, the elements that
make his shoes legendary and revered are artfully rendered in 150
color photographs by long-time friend and photographer Boman. (RB)
The Encyclopedia of New England, edited by Burt
Feintuch and David Waters, intro by Donald Hall (Yale University
Press, 1596 p.p.)
1300 entries, 500 maps and illustrations, 22 thematic sections
(from agriculture to tourism) provided by over a 1000 scholars and
writers, make this original effort a valuable resource which documents
and in some cases interprets New England’s history and culture.
(RB)
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by Leslie
Klinger (W.W. Norton, 992 p.p.)
Volume III completes the Holmes collection (Vol. I & Vol. II
contained fifty-six short stories) with four seminal novels, A
Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound
of the Baskervilles, and The Valley of Fear. With
1000 notes and 400 illustrations and period photographs, this slip-cased
opus is a feast for devoted Sherlockians and novices both. (RB)
Retail Architecture & Shopping, by Ian Luna
(Rizzoli, 288 p.p.)
Such are the stakes in luxury retail (and the pretensions of those
brands) that their emporia have been elevated from mere stores to
something else. Among architects and brands featured here are: Rem
Koolhaas and OMA /Prada; Frank Gerry and Miyake Herzog and De Meuron
and Prada; Tadao Ando and Armani: Renzo Piano and Hermès;
Richard Gluckman and Helmut Lang, and John Pawson and Calvin Klein.
(RB)
Sea Otters Gambolling in the Wild, Wild Surf,
by John Bennett (Vintage, 292 p.p.)
Though the title calls to mind a children’s book, these marine
mammals appear not as cuddly critters, but figures in a lurid objet
d’art discovered accidentally by sixteen-year-old Felix. Facing
the bleak possibility of spending the summer working for a crotchety
old woman, Felix decides to find the sculptor and sets off for an
impromptu trip to Hong Kong and China, Japan, and San Francisco.
Bennett has a true gift for conjuring the many contradictions of
teenage life, with monologues that veer between cynical posturing
and a blinkered idealism, casual vulgarity and awkward, self-conscious
reticence. As with many chase stories, Sea Otters stumbles
a bit at its conclusion; the final chapters feel forced. But maybe
that’s the point of growing up – learning that the question
is often more fun than the answer. (SB)
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