The Flirt by Booth Tarkington My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Flirt, like so many Tarkington stories, is first of all an exercise in gentleness. Tarkington loved his characters to a fault. To his heroes and heroines he showed gentle affection, to his comic relief gentle condescension, and to his villains gentle contempt. All that gentleness throws up a fog of good feeling, but behind the fog there are crags and cliffs of unhappiness, struggle and decay. In the fog is nostalgic escapism to what seems like a “simpler” time and place. But life turns out to be the
Continue readingMonth: January 2012
Book Review: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern
Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, essay by Pamela Kort. Michael Werner Gallery, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-8850-1381-1. Paperback $55 Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern images of unexcelled symbolic intensity marked him as one of the most creative German artists of the mid-20th Century, but also an artist whose weirdly eroticized work was unlikely to be found on gallery walls in his own time. He was also hugely eccentric, putting in time as both a charlatan occultist and a mental patient, according to Pamela Kort’s essay in the recently published catalog for the exhibit From Barefoot Prophet to Avant-Garde Artist at Michael Werner Gallery in New York. His serious
Continue readingReview: The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries My rating: 4 of 5 stars If the test of a good business book is how many ideas inspire you to take notes, this one passes quite nicely. I especially like the arguments for replacing a prioritization culture with a test culture. View all my reviews
Continue readingReview: Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History by Robert Hughes My rating: 3 of 5 stars If you’re interested in the history of Rome, with a bias toward the artistic history, this book is entertaining and engaging, even if poorly edited. There are numerous instances of redundancy and inaccuracy. As you get into the modern period, Hughes’ critical biases come a bit much to the fore. But still, I mostly enjoyed it. View all my reviews
Continue readingReview: Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism
Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism by Gary Gand My rating: 4 of 5 stars I grew up in a suburb where the kinds of houses described in this book provided welcome variation from the dominant ranches, colonials and split levels. (Indeed, I grew up visiting one of the houses featured in the book.) These buildings grasped at the actual promise of suburban living that, through lack of imagination, was thoroughly obscured where I typically commonly spent my childhood days. They were invariably set on heavily wooded lots. Their flat roofs and wide expanses of glass facing the trees meant they
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