Brooklyn Storefronts by Paul Lacy My rating: 5 of 5 stars A lovely collection of artistic shop signs, tastefully photographed and displayed. View all my reviews
Continue readingCategory: Book Review
Review: The Flirt
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 readingBook 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
Continue readingReview: Beasley’s Christmas Party
Beasley’s Christmas Party by Booth Tarkington My rating: 4 of 5 stars I got interested in Booth Tarkington via the credit from Orson Welles at the end of his adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons. I assume that’s about the only way anyone becomes interested in Tarkington, except for academics seeking thoroughly eclipsed literary figures to investigate. Even in its studio-truncated form, Welles’ Ambersons was, well, magnificent, and I wanted to understand the literary source of this masterpiece. It was visually stunning and as literary a film as I’d ever seen. That’s not always a comfortable combination, but it was Welles’
Continue readingReview: John Martin
John Martin by Martin Myrone My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was awed by the ultra-detailed epic paintings by John Martin I had seen at the Tate and the Smithsonian. The ridiculous level of detail and the apocalyptic imagery oscillate between brilliance and kitsch. This book, tied to an exhibition I’d dearly love to see, tries to explain why. It turns out there was more to Martin than meets the eye. Click here to see images of Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon. View all my reviews
Continue readingReview: Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography
Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography by Errol Morris My rating: 5 of 5 stars Errol Morris brings the same brilliant curiosity to this book about the nature of photographs as he does to his films. To appreciate this book you need to care deeply about photography, but if you do you likely will. View all my reviews
Continue reading
Book Review: John Margolies, Roadside America
John Margolies, Roadside America, edited by Jim Heimann, with contributions by Phil Patton, C. Ford Peatross and photos by John Margolies. Taschen, 288 pages, about 400 color photos, 2010. ISBN: 978-3-8365-1173-5. Hard cover $39.99. The enthusiasm for vernacular expression that began flowering in the United States in the 1970s never quite gelled into a unified movement. Yet a new generation did learn to value the work of self-taught artists and a sizable coterie of writers, photographers, architects and others discovered an exterior landscape whose aesthetic dimension was almost entirely accidental, but all the more striking for it.
Continue reading