1.)My list of Notable New Books begins with an oversized The USA Book: A Journey Through America from lonely planet. This volume brings each of the fifty states to vivid life with four pages, for each one, that include half a dozen visually-intriguing photographs and concisely informative but evocative text. We learn about each state’s history, landscape, people, culture and traditions, economy, myths and legends, cuisine, representation in the arts and so much else. Tidbits include the etymology of each state’s name, its nickname, motto, and flower. As usual, lonely planet excels at pinpointing essential cultural flavours and bringing both land and its people to life.
2.)Ingrid Newkirk, president and founder of PETA, is a legendary force in our modern world, not only because she tries to reduce human cruelty to animals on a major scale, but also because she is unstoppably and comprehensively practical as in her new book The Peta Practical Guide to Animal Rights: Simple Acts of Kindness to Help Animals in Trouble (St. Martin’s Griffin). This essential guide includes endorsements from Woody Harrelson, who calls it “the ultimate animal rights encyclopedia” and Martin Sheen who calls it “a terrific book that uplifts you by showing you there are easy, sensible and clear ways to help animals,” plus a Foreword by Bill Maher, and its scope is enormous. Most chapters begin with the words “What You Can Do:” and this inspiring and practical volume belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who aspires to be forward-thinking and effectively compassionate.
3.)With richly detailed discussion of twenty-one topics such as “The conductor and the soloist,” “The central European Tradition,” “Women on the podium,” and “Conductors in rehearsal,” The Cambridge Companion to Conducting, edited by Jose Antonio Bowen, transforms the reader into an informed insider in the world of conducting and classical music. For example, a chapter titled “The orchestra speaks” provides advice for an incoming conductor that includes “Don’t skip intonation,” “Don’t conduct only the melody,” “Never be sarcastic and never lose your cool.” And did you know, for example, that Karajan “claimed to admire Toscanini for his precision and clarity, and Furtwangler for his elasticity and expression….and tried to combine these elements in his readings”? Or that Boulez “outmaneuvered the establishment by joining it?” This volume is a pleasure.
4.)Bird by Andrew Zuckerman and published by Chronicle Books is an experience that is breathtakingly surreal, boldly present, and exquisitely intimate, as it shows 75 species in 200 oversize photographs, with Zuckerman photographing each bird “against his trademark white background.” It is unnerving that the photographer takes the viewer so close into the faces and feathers of each bird that one is overwhelmed with the assured and potent sense of existence in the former and becomes lost in the infinitely delicate world of the latter. We are so close to these birds that we feel amazement at the shape and colour and internal life of each bird. Apparently, Zuckerman’s ideal shutter speed is 1/8000th of a second; as a result, he allows us to enter a new universe because we never get so close otherwise.
5.)Each photograph we take is an extension of our sensory makeup: we seek familiarity of some kind but, perhaps more essential to our development, we test what is new and explore its possibilities. At least that’s what I think while doing page by page of The Graphic Eye: Photographs by Graphic Designers From Around the Globe from Chronicle Books. As promised, the graphic designers featured here “have unique ways of looking at the world” and they certainly show both the relativity of what we see as already significant and the unique aesthetic brought to the fore by each photographer in setting up and taking a shot. Over and over, this book demands that we rethink the pictures we create and also rethink ourselves.
6&7)Both Secret Lives of the Great Artists and Secret Lives of the Great Composers (Quirk Books) by Elizabeth Lunday, who writes the ‘Masterpieces’ column for mental-floss magazine, promise “outrageous anecdotes” and the “seamy, steamy, and gritty history behind the great masters.”And, yep, we have Leonardo the ‘alleged sodomist’ and Caravaggio the ‘convicted murderer’ and Hopper the ‘alleged wife beater’ or Rossini the ‘draft-dodging womanizer’ and Wagner the ‘alleged cross-dresser.’ If the word “alleged” troubles you, you’ll still find delight here with this peppy and perky biography on the run format –six to nine pages per great artist/composer on heavy stock pages, variation in font and page design, the essence-grabbing and hilarious illustrations Mario Zucca, and Lunday’s freshly energetic prose that does indeed bring each creator to life, often with a twentieth century tone to the telling. The strange effect is that, while being informed and entertained, one gains a lively, if somewhat limited, sense of each artist or composer.
8.)“It’s a swamp adder,” cried Holmes, “the deadliest snake in India!” We then read, in The Sherlock Holmes Handbook by Rascom Riggs and published by Quirk, that “there is no such snake in India,” that snakes are deaf and so cannot respond to whistles,” and that “they are physically incapable of climbing ropes.” But, what the hell, The Speckled Band, the source of the quotation, is a gripping tale and so much else in this always entertaining, always informative Handbook redeems the sleuth of sleuths as a marvelously informed, wise and sharp fellow. One learns, for example, “How to use Analytical Reasoning,” “How to Fake Your Own Death,” “How to Deal with Friends and Relations,” and “How to Survive a Plunge Over a Waterfall.” For druggies there’s “Opium Dens and Narcotics in the Victorian Era” and for royalists there’s “How to Interact with Royalty.” In “How to Deal with Women,” Holmes says, “Women are never to be entirely trusted” and then advises “Always be a gentleman,” “Take care when attempting to deduce their motives,” ”Use their emotions to your advantage,” “Underestimate them at your own peril,” and “Beware a woman scorned.” A very useful book indeed.
9.)For those making the trek to Vancouver this winter or thereafter, lonely planet offers a hand and pocket size, visually splendid Vancouver Encounter which covers the city’s nine “neighbourhoods” under four headings each: See, Shop, Eat, Play. Other chapters include Museums & Galleries, Green Vancouver, Gay Vancouver, Accommodations, and Live Music. The many colourful maps herein are splendid in readability and the many box inserts are rich with surprising information. The prose, as one expects from lonely planet, is lived in, with it, and inspiring. Go west, my reader, go west!
10.)Pomegranate Books has just reissued The Art of Robert Bateman in a striking 25th anniversary volume that differs in several ways from the original edition published by Allen Lane. Most significant, the colours of the new version are bolder and brassier with an orange tint and yellowish backlighting that suggest sunset. The result is that detail stands out more, but there is also more repeated homogeneity of tone than in the more nuanced, tonally varied, warmer and mistier reproductions of the original edition. On the other hand, there is more revelatory colour in the expanded samplings of Bateman’s sketchbooks in the new edition. What makes having both volumes a necessity is that images are often cropped differently and differ in size between the two editions, so what one loses in omission, one gains in presence and detail. Ergo, you need both volumes of an artist sometimes maligned but always a crucial documenter, an icon maker, of our vanishing natural world. These images do inspire wonder and take one’s breath away.
11.)Dale Chihuly is certainly the most celebrated glass artist living today, renowned for his innovation and creative daring in both concept and method, and The Art of Dale Chihuly (Chronicle Books) is a dazzling celebration of the artist’s breath-seizing works. This volume, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, covers all of Chihuly’s thematic series and includes a major illustrated essay by Timothy Anglin Burgard which considers the artist in a historical and cultural context. But it’s the photographs that demonstrate imagination at work and show why glassblowers I know speak of Chihuly with reverence as if he were a maker of magic, which indeed he is.
12.)In Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress: Frida’s Wardrobe, Chronicle Books pays tribute to another legend, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, through a careful look at her famous garments which, as much as her beloved paintings, denoted a creative surge of unique individuality. Included are many photographs of Kahlo wearing the garments, shoes, jewelry and headdresses, now restored and illustrated here, in stunning display. Like the Chihuly volume, this very beautiful book pays tribute to aesthetic daring that ultimately shapes icons for the collective mind and proves that true beauty has guts to follow its own course.