Review: The Iliad

The Iliad by Homer My rating: 5 of 5 stars An eminently readable translation brings the appalling gore, risible gods, tragic heroes and wondrous poetry to life. A great way to reacquaint, or acquaint, yourself with one of the world’s great works of literature. My reading partners via readingodyssey.org help a lot too. View all my reviews

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The Beauty of Silence

Just saw The Artist. It reminds me of what was lost when sound came into the movies. Filmmakers achieved an amazing level of visual sophistication and power before sound, and it took years — some would say decades — to regain the artistic momentum stopped dead by sounds’ enormous technical overhead. Indeed, there is an argument that the artistic requirements of building movies around dialogue are inherently at odds with realizing their full visual potential. That’s a bit overstated, but there’s a point to it. If The Artist, produced when filmmakers are basically amateurs in the art of silent movies,

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Book Review: African Signs

African Signs, by Rob Floor, Gert van Zanten andPaul Faber, KIT Publishers, 208 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-9-4602-2080-7. Soft cover $45 Every once in a while those of us who don’t often make it to Africa have an opportunity to glimpse the continent’s extraordinary commercial visual culture. As recently as this summer vibrant examples of hand-painted movie posters from the 1980s and ‘90s were on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, which also mounted a show in 1996 of elaborate decorated coffins from Ghana. Both genres have books devoted to the, African hair salon and barber shop signs, meanwhile, were featured

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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

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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

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Review: 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

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Review: 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

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