BOOK REVIEWS FROM MY RECENT ARCHIVES
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 IV:
1.)My title-says-it-all awards this month go to Chronicle Books for What Your Poo is Telling You, by Josh Richman and Anish Sheth, which considers 27 types of poo – laugh all you want, but ignorance of what you leave behind may prove fatal. 2.)Also to Eric Groves’ Butt Rot & Bottom Gas: A Glossary of Tragically Misunderstood Words, from Quirk Books, which includes terms like maidenhead locator system, “a system used by radio operators to locate sites on earth,” and cum dividend, “a payment received by share buyers if a stock is sold.” No doubt the authors of these two wee books had much fun compiling them as you certainly will while reading the same.
3.)My favorite books this month are truly special volumes to which I expect to return many times. Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (Oxford University Press) covers twenty-seven themes like Towering Figures, Inspiration, Turning Points, Scandals, Dancing and the Movies, On Partnering and Partnerships, and Injuries, Maladies, Misfortunes, and Cures. Each page offers a surprising insight, a fascinating snippet of information, or a delightful piece of writing that one savors and rereads. For example, here’s Eleanor Powell on Fred Astaire: “Fred dances on the off-beat and mostly on the foot, while I am always on-beat and get most of my taps from my heel.” Alastair Macaulay’s passage on Fonteyn and Nureyev in Romeo and Juliet, and their profound effect on him, is a memorable piece of exquisite prose.
4.)After many profoundly-felt hours in cemeteries like Pere Lachaise in Paris, Highgate in London, and the Zeltralfriedhof in Vienna, and perhaps because in the last dozen years I’ve had too many dear ones return in death to the earth, I find Firefly Books’ Old Canadian Cemeteries: Places of Memory by Jane Irwin a deeply moving and treasured experience. John de Visser’s 250 photographs alone -each one evocative, aesthetically potent, unaffectedly atmospheric, and intuitively sensitive to a given subject- would make this an invaluable volume, but it’s the writing itself that subtly reaches through one’s individual and collective consciousness and deep into the soil beneath one’s feet. Irwin’s concerns are the burial places across our land that denote, in commemoration, the customs of our ancestors and serve as anchors for the “future of memory.” Irwin’s admirable approach reveals historical and cultural sensitivity, plus an uncompromising dedication to human scale and human values. Most important, she argues that our dead are within us and, that in destroying their monuments, we erase a crucial means to sustain their spirit and our humanity.
5.)David Thomson’s Have You Seen…? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (Knopf) is a film-lover’s mine of information. For example, we learn –at least I didn’t know- that Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published in April 1939, Nunnally Johnson’s script was ready by July 13, 1939, John Ford started shooting it October 4, 1939, and the picture opened October 4, 1940. And that, for Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu, “Coco Chanel made the clothes and Henri Cartier-Bresson was an assistant.” It’s also a seductive, challenging, occasionally obscure, joyfully idiosyncratic and always delicious read. The thoroughly informed and incisively opinionated Thomson can be blunt in condemnation, as in his speculation as to how Dirk Bogarde brought himself to howl with grief in Visconti’s The Damned: “Bogarde could only get himself to cry out loud by asking the question, ‘How did I get into a piece of shit like this?’” Sometimes one agrees –“Steiger became a nearly unwatchable actor as he grew older”- or disagrees –High Noon is “not a film to see more than once”-but always, in reading Thomson, one loves film more.
6.)Spatiality is fundamental to our experience of the world and the 114 architects featured in The New Architectural Generation by Kieran Long (Laurence King Publishing) give sometimes exhilarating, sometimes unsettling, but always challenging indication of the structures we will, in the near future, live our lives within. Like each of the 800 mind-expanding photographs and drawings here that challenge one’s conceptual and aesthetic complacency, the writing does likewise, say in this passage by Tom Wiscombe: “Emergent’s approach is informed by contemporary models of biology and systems theory rather than by the arts. Ecologies and economies are evolutionary, interactive and resilient –vital qualities that are conspicuously missing from architecture, but necessary for survival in post-industrial culture.” Wiscombe attempts to move beyond the “the dead-end logic of ordering, vertical structure and façade composition” in which much of the world lives. Are we ready?
7.)Since 1968, when economics joined the ranks, there are now six categories in which Nobel Prizes are awarded annually, the rest being physics, chemistry, literature, medicine/physiology, and peace. Nobel: A Century of Prize Winners, Selected and edited by Michael Worek (Firefly) groups winners in annotated lists by decade and then by year and also provides “photographs and background information on more than 200 of the most famous and most interesting laureates,” usually a page each and sometimes more –Churchill, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama. It’s all fascinating as biographical information and did you know that Linus Pauling “was the only man in history to have accepted two Nobel Prizes in two different countries?” Another special pleasure is the inclusion of here a page beside Banting and Macleod explaining Insulin or another beside Tonegawa on Gene Theory and the Immune System or one beside Chandrashekar considering The Death of a Star, that for which each took a respective prize.
8.)The Art of the Movie Poster with text by Dave Hehr ( Chronicle Books) measures 13 ¼ by 11 ¼ inches, it’s 1 3/8 inches thick, and it contains 1,500 posters for films from “every corner of the globe for the last 60 years” in glorious colour. So let’s put it this way: if you are interested in film or graphic arts or differences in cultural aesthetics or creative imagination or iconography or media, be sure to warn family and friends, before you open the cover, that you’ll be gone a few days. For starters, try the five posters for Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, one from each of Italy, France, United States, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia and see where art and sensual sophistication of a culture combine. Or Gary Cooper in High Noon fulfilling various archetypal propensities in Argentine, Polish, Belgian, Italian and Czech posters. Or check out the distinctive and memorable –or is it unforgettable? -styles of Bob Peak (My Fair Lady), Peter Strausfeld (Seventh Seal), or Saul Bass (West Side Story, Exodus, Anatomy of a Murder). Or the designers playing with sexual censorship in Bhowani Junction, the Bond films with all those phallic guns, Blow Up, Magnificent Obsession and most other films. And have, with each image, a creative experience before you….after all, why did they do it that way and how did they know to do it that way? You’ll soon realize that each poster here was individually, by itself, intended, with all sorts of artistic and psychological acumen behind it, to stop you in your tracks and get your butt into the local cinema. Multiply that by 1,500 and this book gets intense.
9.)Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies, and moviemaking, edited by Eric Lax and published by Alfred A. Knopf, is a book bursting with revelations from inside the creative world, process and life. Allen confirms my initial feeling that his Truffaut-like Vicky Christina “is almost more of a French movie” and, in self-effacing comparison of himself to Bergman, comments, “I’m more in control than that on a cerebral level and less in control on a competence level.” Elsewhere he notes that “whether a film is in black and white or color is of no import” and in the chapter on Directing he provides several lists of his fall-time favourite films. In Writing It, he remarks, “I think in the cracks all the time. I never stop. I don’t need peace and quiet to think…..When it comes to write, I need some space.” Also, “I always loved Eve Arden.” Me too.
10.)Cally Brackman’s One Hundred Years of Menswear (Laurence King Publishing) certainly proves that the garments we don are a costume, one that helps to create what we assume to be inner and outer reality, and that we are indeed the clothes we wear. This beautiful and intriguing volume wins on many counts, especially with hundreds of imaginatively chosen and often rare photographs and commentary that is academically informed and colloquially bubbling. While Johnny Rotten is captioned with “After punk, the power to shock through dress dissipated; never again would clothing be so disturbing,” we also encounter in 1926 “Cambridge graduates in plus fours” who also look like style-challenged idiots. My surprise is Tsuguharu Foujita, whose self portrait hangs in our dining room, in “a collarless peasant print shirt with a jacquard-knit jacket c. 1924. I especially love the Brylcreem ad from 1954 when all of us were greasy and yucky but oh so cool..
11.)I have long been annoyed by writers on wine who drop a handy and trendy vocabulary of assessment into monthly columns, as if a common language and, more fundamental, a common experience of wine existed, as we tilted a glass of Bordeaux or Burgundy and their international kin toward our eager lips. Thus, the cleverly titled Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, edited by Barry C. Smith and published by Oxford, is both enjoyable and appreciated as a consideration of the experience of tasting wine. Contributors include a biochemist, a linguist, a wine critic and several philosophers who consider, in ten chapters, topics that consider “What good is knowledge (in enjoying wine)?” “Wine and the brain,” “Can wines be brawny?: Reflections on wine vocabulary,” and “Wine as an aesthetic object.” In other words, henceforth, drink but think!
12.) It was the loss of his wife, his father and his mother within six months that inspired Hamiltonian Jeff Seffinga to write his latest collection of poetry, In Times of Changing Seasons. Seffinga’s voice here is at once colloquial and noble with resolution, while his knack for achingly evocative and heart-enriching details makes the poetry resonate quietly with a profound and dignified passion. What do we do about the deaths of those love? Seffinga’s answer is a book of poetry that comes with us into the fibre of our own hearts and shows us we are not alone in grief. It’s published by Serengeti Press.