Review: Signs of Life

Signs of Life by Peter Sekaer My rating: 5 of 5 stars I had not heard of Sekaer until I saw this book. He was a student of Berenice Abbott and a pal — and sometime photographing companion — of Walker Evans. If you like those two you’ll most likely find his work quite interesting. View all my reviews

Continue reading

Review: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis My rating: 4 of 5 stars Pretty scary stuff about the global financial crisis, and great insights and anecdotes. I’m not sure I’m as convinced as Lewis that each country’s unique flavor of crisis can be attributed to each country’s unique national character, but it’s an interesting perspective. View all my reviews

Continue reading

Review: The Passage of Power

The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro My rating: 5 of 5 stars Caro continues to overwrite, but his obsessive love of detail not surprisingly makes for a fine-grained story, a mark of great history writing and sufficient payoff for those who have the patience to slog through it all. In this volume he also seems to moderate the distaste for his subject that has been evident throughout the biography. This covers the period, after all, where Johnson built a foundation of greatness as he rose above his predecessor’s accomplishments by passing the first strong civil rights law since

Continue reading

Review: The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers

The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers by James O’Shea My rating: 3 of 5 stars If you lived within the orbit of Tribune Co. or the L.A. Times within the last decade, this book will be interesting to you. It’s a quick read with a number of fine anecdotes. That means it’s mostly inside baseball, so if you’re looking for great insights into the fate of journalism in the (sadly likely) post-newspaper age, you’ll want to look elsewhere. O’Shea throws in a handful of mea culpas but little reflection on how the narrow

Continue reading

Review: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker My rating: 4 of 5 stars Steven Pinker’s core argument is compelling and important. Contrary to the nearly universal assumption that things have never been worse, human society is actually becoming less violent. As horrifically as the wars and genocides of the last 100 years loom in our consciousness, the long view of history demonstrates that life for many of our ancestors was far nastier. Genocide, rape and enslavement were routine, even heroic, aspects of war. Interpersonal violence was ubiquitous. Human rights as a concept was unknown.

Continue reading
Groundwaters book cover

Book Review: Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught And Outsider Artists

Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught And Outsider Artists, Charles Russell, Prestel, 256 pages, 180 color illustrations, 2011. ISBN: 978-3-7913-4490-4. Hardcover $65.00 Charles Russell’s Groundwaters has the look and feel of a conventional coffee table book, and it can indeed be appreciated simply for its many beautiful plates representing the work of important self-taught artists of the 20th Century. Start reading the text, however, and another kind of book emerges. Those pictures aren’t there just because they’re striking. Each one is referenced in the text to make or elucidate a point, and Russell has many to make. Their density

Continue reading

Review: A Murky Business

A Murky Business by Honoré de Balzac My rating: 4 of 5 stars Did Balzac write anything crummy? I’m not expert enough to know. This is another good one, though you really need a working knowledge of revolutionary and Napoleonic France to follow the plot. View all my reviews

Continue reading