My following book reviews first appeared over the past few years in an alternative tabloid publication in Hamilton. Perhaps reading the following paragraphs will tempt you to visit your local independent bookstore and to check them out there. Here’s Part III:
1.)Business Cards 3: Design on Saying Hello (Laurence King Publishing) presents “over 200 innovative interpretations of the humble business card, from designers and clients around the world and across the creative industries” and it’s a good thing too. All too often one is handed a business card that makes little impression or, worse, a negative one for some reason and here, with such variety to consider, one can isolate the qualities that make an aesthetically-compelling business card, and perhaps a client, a keeper. There are many creatively exciting examples here to consider. Within the perspective of history,
2.),Made in France by Reed Darmon (Chronicle Books) is a dandy little goldmine of images from the past century of “everyday French design and pop culture ephemera.” It includes posters from travel, cinema, cafes, packaging for cigarettes (O, Gitanes and Gauloises, I remember thee well!), Pathe record labels, and much else, all given visual representation, usually with nods to Art Nouveau and Art Deco.
3.)The most visually poetic volume this month is Sites of Impact: Meteorite Craters Around the World, with eerie and stunning photographs by Stan Gaz, no doubt in part because it reminds one how vulnerable the earth and its inhabitants are to destruction. Or put it this way: “The instant an asteroid collides with Earth, the billion-year course of geological and environmental history is changed forever. Energy is transferred. Matter is displaced. Climates are irrevocably altered. Entire species of plants and animals are obliterated.” Photographer Gaz takes us to ten locations, four in Australia, three in the United States, and one in each of South Africa, Namibia, and, also, Quebec. Our Canadian crater is 1.4 million years old, 3.4 kilometers in diameter, and currently doing its duty as a lake of 270 meters in depth. Introductory essays explain structures and photographs, but the fact that “the impacting meteorite melts or vaporizes during impact” is reminder enough that in this universe of ours, humanity’s most damning and perhaps redeeming quality is our insignificance among natural forces. From Princeton Architectural Press.
4.)The 2008 Canadian Subsidy Directory promises to be “the most complete and up-to-date publication available for anyone searching for Canadian grants, loans and government programs” and it certainly delivers the goods -3208 times, in fact! Indeed, the possible sources of dollars described here from just the Canada Council for the Arts alone number over 150. The directory is available in print version for $149.95 or, as either a CD or pdf file, for $69.95. Everyone in the country from the Armenian National Committee of Canada to the Hamilton Police Pipe Band to York University to the town of Tillsonburg seems to have a copy because, as one can see, this outstanding resource is both comprehensive and easy to use and it suggests new possibilities with every scan of its contents. Businesses, non-profit organizations and individuals can find, inside, detailed contact information for each funding body along with a description of each grant, loan or program available. Order toll free by calling 1-866-322-3376 and for clarification of grants, scholarships, loans, mortgages, and venture capital, check out the website at http://www.canadianpublications.net/. Do so and you’ll save yourself hours of research and frustration.
5.)Another outstanding resource, one for those wanting to know “where & how to sell what you write,” is the immensely popular Writer’s Market, with ‘over 5 million copies sold” and published annually by Writer’s Digest Books. This 88th edition for 2009 contains over “3,500 listings for book publishers, consumer magazines, trade journals, literary agents and more” -and you’ll find this blurb is rather modest since this volume contains much, much more indeed. For examples, the editor has decided to anticipate the stuff people always ask in chapters titled “Query Letter Clinic,” Freelance Newspaper Writing 101,” “How Much Should I Charge?” and “Launching Your Freelance Business.” The amount of content in a volume of 1170 pages could easily overwhelm, but Writer’s Market is, first, designed with kindness to the reader’s eyes in mind and, second, helpfully divided into categories and sub-categories that allow easy negotiation of sections on Literary Agents, Book Publishers, Consumer Magazines, Trade Journals, and Contests & Awards. Included also are sections on Canadian Book Publishers, Small Presses, and especially useful, one called Book Publishers Subject Index to let you know who publishes specific genres like Experimental, Feminist, Science Fiction, Gay/Lesbian, and Gardening, to name a few of many.
6.)Scott Yanow has, for over thirty years, written for every key jazz magazine around, from DownBeat to Coda, and I’ve long heeded his reviews in the All Music Guide to Jazz. He is thoroughly-brewed in both his love and knowledge of jazz; he is balanced, giving but firm, and engagingly passionate in his assessments; he has a knack for placing crucial historical and biographical facts; and yes, he is a pleasure to read. In his appropriately titled The Jazz Singers: The Ultimate Guide, published by Backbeat Books, Yanow provides profiles of over 500 vocalists in the idiom from the likes of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton up to the freshly-minted breed of today that includes Diana Krall and Cassandra Wilson. You’ll find here many lesser known but worthy vocalists, recommended recordings, often websites of the singers, and chapters titled “198 Other Jazz Singers of Today,”55 Others Who Have Also Sung Jazz,” “30 Jazz Vocal Groups,” and a listing of suggested DVDs. One reason, I’ll read and re-read this Guide is for a fresh take on the singers; for example, I’ve known swing and classic jazz singer Alex Pangman for some years and still learned new stuff from Yanow’s entry on Alex.
7.)Because so many musicals set up sets locally in Toronto, Hamilton, the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, and your nearby amateur theatre, The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film and Television by Thomas Hischak is certainly essential to any music-lover’s library. With the enthusiastic and well-deserved endorsements of Marvin Hamlisch, Carol Channing and Jonathan Pryce, this hefty reference weighs in at 923 densely-packed and addictive pages and scores for many reasons: it includes over 2,000 entries; it features musicals, producers, composers, lyricists, choreographers, and of course performers; it covers all three media; it is designed for visual appeal, with its informative box inserts and many evocative photos; it allows easy cross-reference. I especially appreciate the writing here –thoroughly informed, deeply involved, many an entry with a surprising and previously unknown detail that brings the subject to new and vivid life, judgments throughout that seem well-reasoned and inevitable. Be warned, however: this volume is a repeatedly delicious experience from within the world of musical theatre, as much as a comprehensive resource, and, once in, you won’t want to leave.
8.)My current favourite guide to everything is the Penguin Book of Facts, edited by David Crystal and deemed by the Independent on Sunday as “One of the greatest reference books ever published.” Did you know of The Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion?” I didn’t. Do you remember your Chemistry Table of Elements? I don’t. Can you provide the capital, currency, ethnic groups, brief history, climate, and head of state for every country on the planet? Me neither. And what can you tell me about Radioactivity Units, every Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the development of computers, Saints’ Days, the perpetual calendar from 1821 to 2020, the grape varieties of every region of France, the length of pregnancy in various mammals, the major works of Shostakovich?…..and et cetera ad infinitum. This too: as a flexible and sturdy paperback, the Penguin Book of Facts is comfortable to use too!
9.)The best reeference (sorry, I could not pass without…) book of the month, is The Official High Times Pot Smoker’s Handbook (Chronicle Books), by David Bienenstock and the editors of High Times Magazine. It promises to be “the definitive guide to pot culture” and, if you are high or not, it will no doubt take you higher. Chapters cover How to Smoke-proof your dorm room, the best pot scenes in movies, Holy Smokes: Was Jesus a Stoner?, 30 Years of High Times’ Best Buds, and –start at #1 folks- 420 things to do when you’re stoned. This one will keep you rolling in the aisles or anywhere else, for that matter, and, once you weed out your friends, this will make a nice token gift (Okay, no more).
10.)Back in the early nineties, I found myself in the south of England chatting with Jon Wynne-Tyson about his play on the relationship between Jon’s mother Esme and Noel Coward, a script which eventually was heard on the BBC. Letters between Stoj and Poj, as they called each other, are included in The Letters of Noel Coward (Knopf), a 780 page goldmine from the playwright’s private world of correspondence which embraces as well Virginia Woolf, Greta Garbo, Ian Fleming, Marlene Dietrich, FDR, GBS, T. E. Lawrence and everyone else in the Who’s Who of his era. This indispensible collection reveals much of the man and certainly confirms Sir Noel’s “talent to amuse” -and his talent to surprise as in his remark, “Did I mention that Mexico City is a cunt?”
Because I adore Coward’s plays quite often as theatrical perfection, I especially enjoy this collection’s behind the scenes documentation such as Coward musing: “I wonder why it is that my plays are such traps for directors….Nobody seems capable of leaving well enough alone and allowing the words to take care of themselves.” The account of Coward’s song “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans,” which FDR loved and which Coward was obliged by Churchill to sing until he was hoarse, is hilarious, especially because the offended folks at the BBC missed completely the irony of the song. Some quibbles: editor Barry Day’s flip analogy of the Spanish Civil War as “an out-of-town tryout for what was to come” is glib and shallow, to be sure. But Coward, for me always suggests a complex and intense fellow, behind the seemingly easy theatrical genius on stage, and this volume helps to reveal why.
11.)With over 2,000 entries and 506 pages, Researching the Song (Oxford University Press), by Shirlee Emmons and Wilbur Watkins Lewis, is intended to guide performers, teachers and enthusiasts through “most of the mythological, historical, geographical and literary references contained in western art song.” If your familiarity touches only the works of, say, Schubert, you’ll find that many of the entries here enrishing. Did you know that Igor Stravinsky wrote “In Memoriam Dylan Thomas?” That Walt Whitman’s poetry has been set to music by at least fifteen composers who include Ned Rorem and Charles Ives, but also Vaughan Williams and Hindemith? That Schonberg set Nietzsche to music? That Shostakovich did likewise with Robbie Burns? Entries include Wilhelm Muller, whose poems were set to music not only famously by Schubert but also by Fanny Mendelssohn, Mother Goose, Sodom, and “blows his nail,” an expression used in Elizabethan lyrics. This endlessly informative volume is a constantly delightful read and an essential cornerstone for any classical music library.
12.)The most visually stunning book this month is Image and Imagination Georgia O’Keefe (Chronicle) by John Loengard, the Life photographer whose 39 haunting photographs of the 80 year old O’Keefe are here juxtaposed to stunning effect with the elderly artist’s iconic paintings. This memorable volume is visually breathtaking and evokes inner feeling akin to serenity.
13.)Fascinating as a thorough look at the many dozens of careers and occupations in the ancient world, Vicki Leon’s cleverly titled Working IX to V (Walker & Company) covers dozens of ways, some quite bizarre, that people of antiquity made a buck. Leon’s perky, entertaining and inherently enthusiastic style brings the working folk of ancient Greece and Rome to vivid life and you’ll be surprised to read about occupations such as Orgy Planner, Sycophant, Funeral Clown, Stercorarius (Manure Entrepreneur), Pirate, Vestal Virgin, and Armpit Plucker.