Coffee-table Book Research Articles

Why We Are Here: Mobile and the Spirit of a Southern City by Edward O. Wilson and Alex Harris (review)

Reviewed by: Why We Are Here: Mobile and the Spirit of a Southern City by Edward O. Wilson and Alex Harris Scotty E. Kirkland Why We Are Here: Mobile and the Spirit of a Southern City. By Edward O. Wilson and Alex Harris. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2012. xi, 229 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-87140-470-1. In recent years, Edward O. Wilson, award-winning entomologist and author of more than twenty books, has turned a nostalgic eye towards Mobile. With the publication of his latest book, Why We Are Here, a collaboration with photographer Alex Harris, Wilson offers a kind of "reclining years" meditation on the place of his youth. Why We Are Here serves as Wilson's contribution to that most non-exclusive of literary clubs. There are, perhaps, more coffee table-style books on Mobile than any other city of comparable size in America. Among the authors of these highly-popular works include a number of historians, educators, award-winning journalists, politicians, preservationists, and even this reviewer. The format for each is relatively similar: Photographs are favored above context or nuance. One happy exception to this would be Mobile: The Life and Times of a Great Southern City (Windsor Publications, 1981), written by Drs. Melton A. McLaurin and Michael V. R. Thomason, which contained the first revisionist history of the Port City in more than two generations. It set a high bar that none of its successors in the photo book genre have yet to match and that only Thomason's more recent edited work, Mobile: The New History of Alabama's First City (Tuscaloosa, 2002) equals in terms of scope and significance. [End Page 155] To be fair, Why We Are Here is, perhaps, the most visually-appealing coffee table book on Mobile to be published in quite some time, due in no small part to the photography of Alex Harris. This is particularly true of his photographs capturing the interactions between Mobilians and their environment. Wilson asserts that his book seeks to capture the "spirit" or the "soul" of Mobile, the impact the city has upon both its lifelong residents and first-time visitors (x). His narrative is peppered throughout with a series of interesting personal accounts, like the story of bar pilot "Black Bill" Wilson, his hardscrabble ancestor who was imprisoned for refusing to guide Union vessels through the perils of Mobile Bay and the author's own experiences growing up on Charleston Street in a house filled with relatives. Indeed, Wilson's recounting of his own family stories constitutes the most evocative element of the book. It is tempting to give Why We Are Here too much credit, to invest upon its acclaimed authors a kind of unrealistic hope that the book will become something that it clearly is not. There is nothing new hidden within the book's pages, and inaccuracies abound. The French did not introduce ornate iron work to Mobile. The Clotilda, the last slave ship to enter America, plied the waters of the Mobile River in 1860, not 1859. Slackabamarinico, the pseudonym of that rebellious Joseph Stillwell Cain, founder of the city's modern Mardi Gras celebration, is misspelled. Sins of omission fill the narrative as well, for example, when Wilson chooses obfuscation over honesty, writing that the segregated nature of Mobile's Mardi Gras has "begun mercifully to devolve into insignificance." Nothing could be further from the truth. Mobile is a city of contradiction, an ever-changing, quixotic seaport seemingly encased at times in antebellum amber. Wilson may, in fact, be correct that Mobile has a soul. But it is a divided soul, one still uncertain about the future, its place in the wider world, and whether or not its people-the Mobilians-can do anything about it. [End Page 156] Scotty E. Kirkland History Museum of Mobile Copyright © 2013 Alabama Historical Association

Santa Rita del Cobre: A Copper Mining Community in New Mexico by Christopher J. Huggard and Terrence M. Humble (review)

Reviewed by: Santa Rita del Cobre: A Copper Mining Community in New Mexico by Christopher J. Huggard and Terrence M. Humble David A. Wolff Santa Rita del Cobre: A Copper Mining Community in New Mexico. By Christopher J. Huggard and Terrence M. Humble. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012. Pp. 272. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781607321521, $45.00 cloth.) The authors describe Santa Rita del Cobre as a "narrative and photographic history" of an "extraordinary mining community" (2), and these descriptors are basically correct. This over-sized volume contains more than 130 photographs and maps, making it resemble a coffee-table book, while Huggard and Humble's text is a full scholarly treatment of industrial copper mining. Then a number of reasons make Santa Rita an extraordinary place, such as the longevity of its existence, beginning in the eighteenth century, and the fact that it disappeared into the open pit mine, causing locals to recall it fondly as the "town in space" (1). What may be a little misleading is the word "community." With that in the title a reader [End Page 409] might expect the book to focus on the town and the people within it, but that is not the case. While those elements are important to the story, the authors have a much more expansive definition of community in mind, and they draw in all aspects of the copper business, from corporate machinations to labor relations. The narrative is roughly chronological, beginning with the arrival of the Spanish and ending essentially with the Phelps Dodge takeover in the 1980s. Within this flow of events, one chapter specifically explores the company town that Chino Copper began in the early twentieth century. Overall, the book presents a vast amount of information, to the point that the details can be overwhelming. But themes are evident, and if a reader keeps those in mind, the book will be easier to navigate. The authors identify seven themes in the introduction, but a conscientious reader can pick out even more. These themes include the evolution of mining technologies, race and ethnic relations, changing corporate mentalities, and the environmental cost of large-scale mining. One of the book's more compelling story lines deals with union formation and the fight for recognition, highlighted by lengthy strikes in the 1930s and 1960s. The authors comment that the latter strike was the "copper industry's longest strike," (203), and that its outcome "marked a new era of labor management relations" (204). Despite the book's thoroughness, there are places where a reader can become confused, and where a little more explanation might have helped clarify a point. For instance, the authors mention various places around Santa Rita, such as "Niagara Pit" (174) or "Booth Hill" (179), without effectively locating them. Occasional comments seem a little odd. One example is: "No longer did the workers want to be treated like dependent children" (104). While mining companies were paternalistic, it would be surprising to find workers who really wanted to be treated like "dependent children." Then at times the chronology seems fractured, with the narrative fluctuating back and forth in the timeline. In one case, it goes from the 1930s to the 1950s and then to the 1910s within two paragraphs. Perhaps the scope of the project requires a non-linear flow, but this approach can be confusing. Yet, these complaints do not outweigh the excellent information contained within this fine volume. A variety of readers will find it of interest, in part because of all the wonderful pictures, but mining historians and people interested in history of the American Southwest will find it particularly compelling. David A. Wolff Black Hills State University Copyright © 2013 The Texas State Historical Association

John Philip Sousa’s America: The Patriot’s Life in Images and Words by John Philip Sousa IV and Loras John Schissel, and: “Bully for the Band!”: The Civil War Letters and Diary of Four Brothers in the 10 th Vermont Infantry Band: Charles George, Herbert George, Jere George and Osman George ed. by James G. Davis, and: Connecticut’s Fife & Drum

(NORTH) AMERICANAJohn Philip Sousa's America: The Patriot's Life in Images and Words. By John Philip Sousa IV with Loras John Schissel. Chicago: GIA Publica - tions, 2012. [214 pp. ISBN 9781579998837. $34.95.] Illustrations, CD.Bully for the Band!: The Civil War Letters and Diary of Four Brothers in the 10th Vermont Infantry Band: Charles George, Herbert George, Jere George and Osman George. Edited by James G. Davis. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012. [x, 290 pp. ISBN 9780786466863. $49.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.Connecticut's Fife & Drum Tradition. By James Clark. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. [xiii, 167 pp. ISBN 9780819571410. $29.95] Musical examples, illustrations, bibliography.Without doubt, John Philip Sousa is America's most frequently performed and internationally recognized composer. While his operettas, songs, suites, waltzes and other concert pieces are performed infrequently these days, his marches are ubiquitous. With the unprecedented success of his Washington Post in Europe and America, especially after being adopted by dancing masters as the two-step, a British band journal in the 1890s suggested that Sousa should be called the King. Since then, there has been an Austrian March King ( Josef Franz Wagner), a British March King (Frederick Ricketts/Kenneth Alford), a Czech March King ( Julius Fuciik) and significant march composers in France (Gabriel Allier), Germany (Hermann Blanken burg, Franz von Blon) and Italy (Giovanni Orsomando), but while all of these have composed many excellent marches, none has achieved superiority over Sousa either for quantity or for consistently fine compositions. Recognition of Sousa's foremost place among march composers came in 1987 when Congress legislated The Stars and Stripes Forever as the national march of the United States of America.Paul Bierley has devoted his life to researching Sousa and his band. With a comprehensive biography ( John Philip Sousa, American Phenomenon, 1973, rev. 1998), a works list (The Works of John Philip Sousa, 1984), a revision of Sousa's 1928 autobiography (Marching Along: Recollections of Men, Women and Music, 1994), an index to The Sousa Band (Fraternal Society News, 1998), and an in-depth study of the Sousa Band, complete with performance dates, programs, and personnel (The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa, 2006), he has long hoped to prepare a coffee-table book filled with pictures and quotations of Sousa and the band members. Unfortunately, a stroke that lefthim partially paralyzed frustrated his efforts. He called on friends to help bring his dream to fruition.John Philip Sousa IV and Loras John Schissel have now accomplished that mission, and the book is dedicated to Paul Bierley and his wife Pauline. Although slim by coffee-table standards, the book is a delightful compilation of illustrations and quotations. With constant references to my my great-grandmother, my grandfather and Aunt Priscilla, it is obviously a labor of love on the part of their great-grandson. It is also a paean to his great-grandfather, so do not expect to find documentation, bibliography or index. It is not meant to be a scholarly book, but the illustrations, many of them new even to Sousa scholars, are delightful. Sousa IV credits co-author Schissel, who works at the Library of Congress, and the director and staffof the US Marine Band for help in finding the gems presented in the volume.The volume is divided into time frames, with photos, illustrations and quotations for each period, beginning with Sousa's early childhood. The many caricatures from newspapers give an idea of Sousa's conducting style on the podium. One sometimes regrets that complete identification of the musicians in the formal band portraits is not included, but then that would call for a different kind of book. In some cases, however, it would be interesting to have more information than what is given. …

Leah Price. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.

Leah Price. <i>How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain</i>.

David Douglas, A Naturalist at Work: An Illustrated Exploration Across Two Centuries in the Pacific Northwest by Jack Nisbet

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 2 effective at converting Native people. Thus the contemporary indigenous religious practice there contrasts sharply with what Hamill describes. In the Sahaptin areas of the Plateau, contemporary Waashat congregations are the central religious focus (see, for example, Helen H. Schuster,“Yakima Indian Traditionalism : Continuity and Change,” [Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, Seattle, 1975]; and Eugene S.Hunn,with James Selam and family, Nch’i-Wána “The Big River”: Mid-Columbia Indians and Their Land [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990]). Hamill’s account of the role of “dreams” as a source of musical inspiration nevertheless does apply throughout theColumbiaPlateauandiscentraltoWaashat, or “Seven Drums,” worship. Eugene S. Hunn University of Washington, Seattle David Douglas, a Naturalist at Work: An Illustrated Exploration Across Two Centuries in the Pacific Northwest by Jack Nisbet Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 2012. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 208 pages. $27.95 cloth. David Douglas, a Naturalist at Work is a companion book to the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture (Spokane) exhibit about Douglas’s Northwest travels (the exhibit runs through August 2013). The author, Jack Nisbet, is ideally suited to prepare such a volume: his admirable The Collector, David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest (2009), based on Douglas’snotesandjournals,describesindetail Douglas’scollectingintheNorthwestduringthe earlynineteenthcenturyandcapturestheexcitement European naturalists felt at seeing the impressive flora and fauna of the New World. The new book contains ten chapters of short essays on the areas Douglas explored, their geographic features,the flora and fauna he collected ,the Native peoples he encountered,and the scientific and institutional context in which he worked. The handsome and beautifully illustrated volume includes personal observations Nisbet makes about the places Douglas described.Nisbet visited locations and checked on the plant and animal species Douglas collected , and he writes in an engaging manner about the natural history of those experiences. Readers who want a more complete understanding of Douglas’s life and work should consult the earlier biography; but those who have some knowledge or interest in the natural history of the Northwest — and how the area came to the attention of the British — will find this volume charming. The chapters are short and filled with a wide range of illustrations, from photographs of nature to artifacts from Douglas’s day. Even for those who will not visit the exhibit in Spokane, the volume serves as both an attractive coffee table book and an accessible introduction to Douglas’s travels. Paul Farber Oregon State University Chinuk Wawa: As Our Elders Teach Us to Speak It by Chinuk Wawa Dictionary Project Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon, 2012. Illustrations, bibliography. 494 pages. $29.95 cloth. Chinook Wawa (“Chinook Language” or “Chinook Jargon”) originated before European contact as a pidgin version of the Chinookan languages spoken by Native Americans of the lower Columbia River. Later, with the arrival of European and American explorers, traders, and settlers, Chinook Wawa creolized many French, English, and other European words. ...

Review of Svalbard life, by PaulWassmann &amp; Rudi Caeyers (2013).

The author, Paul Wassmann, is a professor of marine biology at the University of Tromsø, and the designer, Rudi Caeyers, is a photographer and graphic designer at the same university. Svalbard life is a generously illustrated coffee-table book on the Svalbard Archipelago and surrounding seas.(Published: 11 December 2013)Citation: Polar Research 2013, 32, 23400, http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/polar.v32i0.23400

Historical Notes on Anaesthesia and Intensive Care .

Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, and Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology, Park Ridge, Illinois. ujyc@aol.comIn their authors’ note, “Chris” Ball and “Rod” Westhorpe introduce this hardcover book as representing “an evolution – of the Geoffrey Kaye Museum of Anaesthetic History, the Anaesthesia and Intensive Care journal and of anesthesia as a specialty.” In this long-awaited book, these honorary curators of the Geoffrey Kaye Museum have collated and expanded the cover notes that they penned from 1989 to 2011 for volumes 17–39 of the Australian journal Anaesthesia and Intensive Care . Revised but sequenced chronologically in their order of publication as cover notes, these “historical notes” fall naturally into the following unofficial groupings: clearing the airway, inhalers and vaporizers, flowmeters, intravenous and induction agents and equipment, local anesthesia, muscle relaxants, inhalation agents, patient monitoring, and analgesics and premedication.Strengths of Historical Notes include its scholarly content, pleasing readability, and splendid photography. The book’s weaknesses are those reflected by all such books. It represents a sampler of apparatus and pharmaceuticals and is consequently discontinuous in its timeline. Any such gallery-based book also manifests a geographic bias favoring the museum’s location (Melbourne, Australia) and the collecting bias of its founder (Geoffrey Kaye). Fortunately for the authors, Kaye traveled and collected widely. As illustrated throughout Historical Notes , anaesthetist Kaye was also a gifted machinist who enjoyed “sectioning” through apparatus for educational exhibits. Historical Notes guides both professional and lay readers through an exhilarating review of anesthesia and analgesia through the ages, but particularly through the past 170 yr. The book’s end notes provide a bonanza of information for scholars. The 11-page index is similarly useful to both researchers and readers at large.Because my own children have never grasped the historical tradition behind what anesthesiologists actually do for a living, I purchased a copy of Historical Notes as a holiday gift for each of them. Whether buying for a library or a loved one, anesthesiologists will be hard pressed to find a better researched or better illustrated “coffee table book” in our specialty. Finally, an anesthesia book that does not induce general anesthesia!A limited private printing by the Australian Society of Anaesthetists, this book can only be ordered from the merchandise section of the Society website.*Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, and Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology, Park Ridge, Illinois. ujyc@aol.com

Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany (review)

Reviewed by: Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany Joel Fishbane Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011) With Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany. By Stephen Sondheim. New York: Knopf, 2011; pp. 480. According to Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim, a good theatre critic is so passionate that he can persuade you to attend something you would never want to see. He might have been issuing reviewers a subtle plea: write something about his new book that will persuade those with little interest in musical theatre to read something they would never want to read. It is a Herculean task given the nature of Look, I Made a Hat, an exhaustive collection of lyrics interspersed with Sondheim’s curmudgeonly remarks about the world of theatre. Sondheim is the preeminent [End Page 627] composer/lyricist of the American stage and is so influential that New York Magazine once ran a cover story that dared to ask the question, “Is Stephen Sondheim God?” The answer is not as definitive as one might expect. For all his fame, Sondheim has long been accused of being the cold intellect, writing music that is “unhummable” and lyrics that keep his audience at arm’s length. At first glance, Hat threatens to be the literary proof of these accusations. It is an uneven companion to Finishing the Hat (2010), a collection of lyrics from the first half of Sondheim’s career. To his credit, he attempts to make it accessible to neophytes by including a plot synopsis between each song. Still, the inclusion of birthday songs written for friends, and a glossary explaining the references, feels more than a bit narcisstic. It would be all too easy to write off Hat as little more than a coffee-table book for the musical fanatic in your life. Thankfully, Hat ultimately proves to be something of an inadvertent memoir. It is stunningly intimate, as Sondheim graciously lays bare his creative life. For an artist, nothing could be more personal. His exhaustive set of lyrics and rewritten lyrics (and re-rewritten lyrics) may appear self-aggrandizing, but like the best musicals, the songs occur only in service of the plot. His narrative is his journey through the act of creation, and in giving us his lyrics, he delivers the portrait of the artist as a developing man. It is a compelling window into an artist’s methods, which, of course, means a window into the artist himself. This is not the most conventional way to structure a memoir, but then what would you expect from the composer of a plotless musical (Company) or a vaudeville about American assassins (Assassins)? The title of Hat comes from Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize–winning musical Sunday in the Park with George. During the first act, we find the artist Georges Seurat in the process of creating A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte . Lost in the work, Seurat ignores life as he struggles to finish a minor part of his masterpiece, a single hat: And when the woman that you wanted goes. You can say to yourself, “Well, I give what I give.” But the woman who won’t wait for you knows That however you live, There’s a part of you always standing by, Mapping out the sky, Finishing a hat, Starting on a hat, Finishing a hat… Look, I made a hat Where there never was a hat. (27) “Finishing the Hat,” writes Sondheim, “reflects an emotional experience shared by everybody to some degree or other, but more keenly and more often by creative artists . . . that phenomenon of losing the world” (ibid.). It is a telling remark. Like Seurat, Sondheim is a man who is always busy “finishing the hat”; his creative life is the most important aspect of his life. From this perspective, Hat might as well be a diary. Sondheim also takes the opportunity to deliver a playwriting masterclass: “Less Is More / Content Dictates Form / God Is in the Details / all in the service of / Clarity / without which nothing else matters” (xv). Nonetheless, Sondheim’s primary focus is...

Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible. Edited by Helen Moore and Julian Reid

This is the most beautiful of the books published in celebration of quatercentenary of the King James Bible (KJB). Accompanying exhibitions at the Bodleian Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library, it draws mostly on their rich biblical resources for its seventy-three color plates. Yet, fine as it would be as such, this is no mere coffee table book. The plates include primary sources, some never before reproduced. The clearest and most interesting manuscript specifying the translators and the rules for the KJB prefaces Chapter 4, “Materials and Methods.” In it, four of the six companies of translators are divided into halves, strongly implying that the companies subdivided their work. Moreover, this is a manuscript from the early days of work on the KJB, as it lacks the later fifteenth rule. Later in the chapter, there is a double-page spread from the Bodleian's 1602 Bishops' Bible with the translators' manuscript revisions, a page from the Lambeth Palace manuscript of the second Westminster company's work on the Epistles, and a page from the Cambridge translator John Bois's notes on the final discussions of the Epistles. These four things alone are a treasure for students of the KJB. Also in this chapter are pages from Bibles and other books owned by some of the Oxford translators, including a page of locusts and grasshoppers from an Italian entomological book owned by John Rainolds, a welcome demonstration of the range of knowledge the translators brought to their work. The chapter finishes with a manuscript account of translation work in Rainolds' last days. Such plates leave no doubt of the scholarly value to be found in this book's beauty.

Livro de mesa: conexão entre produto de nicho e público de massa

The objective of this article is to analyze the publishing line of tabletop books or, as they are commonly known on the market, coffee table books. The name defines a category of books with an artistic and luxurious finish that favors images and, with this esthetic/mediatic profile, they are exhibited for occasional reading, instead of being arranged or hidden on shelves. The thesis with which we worked is that, although they are considered to be segmented products, these books, symbolized here mainly by works from theTaschen book company, take advantage of mass communication resources in their conception, in order body of work stands out in the setting in which they will be on display. So that they can appeal to the occasional, but potentially broad, range of readers, theytend to offer, besides an impeccable presentation, popular subjects or authors.Key words: tabletop book, coffee table book, corpomídia, Taschen.

New and Recent Books

preface I am finding it increasingly difficult to find a satisfactory annual list of books for the Costume Society. The library on this subject has changed significantly in the last fifteen years or so. Publishers such as Berg (now part of Bloomsbury) are still publishing serious books on the subject, but the majority on offer now are large glossy coffee-table books promoting the work of fashion designers. When I first started to be interested in this subject as a theatre design student, it was called costume history. There were countless complete histories of Western costume available; Millia Davenport’s The Book of Costume and Francois Boucher’s A History of Costume in the West were favourites of mine. I slowly acquired all the Cunnington books on English costume, as well as others such as the ones on occupational dress, birth, marriage and death, and so on. As students we needed the classics on costume construction, Max Tilke, Norah Waugh and Janet Arnold. Once I had turned professional as a costume designer, my book buying became more focused on particular subjects I needed help with: Lou Taylor’s Mourning Dress, for example, or books on working dress, ecclesiastical dress, men’s dress; also Margaret Scott’s Late Gothic Europe and Stella Mary Newton’s The Dress of the Venetians 1495–1525. I do not think I noticed at the time that the word costume had been replaced by dress. I was certainly made aware of this when I studied History of Dress at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where I read more theoretical works, such as Flugel’s Psychology of Dress, Konig’s A Restless Image, Aileen Ribeiro’s Dress and Morality, Valerie Steele’s Fashion & Eroticism, Elizabeth Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams, and Roland Barthes’ The Fashion System. Today, as you can see below, serious work is still being done on the subject, but sadly many bookshop shelves do not always reflect this range.

Oil Landscapes

Oil Landscapes Maria Whiteman (bio) Oil. Edward Burtynsky. Steidl. http://www.steidlville.com 215 pages; cloth, $128.00. This extravagant book is larger than most coffee table books, and one that catches the eye not only because of its bulk but by the visual demand made by the photo on its cover: an army of pump jacks stretching away to the California desert horizon. This latest collection of Edward Burtynsky's photographs (winner of the 2010 Deutscher Fotobuchpreis Silver Medal) is made up of both new and old photos that address the topic of oil from every possible angle. In Burtynsky's characteristic style, which emphasizes scale and number (most often from the vantage point offered by a construction crane), these photos prompt shock and awe in the face of the visual representation of the sheer size of those varied infrastructures that enable oil to course through the veins of global society. Burtynsky describes Oil (which has been exhibited at galleries and museums around the world, beginning at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2009) as the outcome of an "oil epiphany" he had in 1997. "It occurred to me that all the vast man-altered landscapes I had pursued for over twenty years," he writes, "had been made possible by the discovery of oil and the progress occasioned by the internal combustion engine.... These images can be seen as notations by one artist— contemplating the world made possible through this massive energy force, and the cumulative effects of the industrial evolution." The book is divided into three sections intended to document the life cycle of oil, passing from "Extraction and Refinement" to "Transportation and Motor Culture" to "The End of Oil." The photos making up each section are heterogeneous in theme and content, and photographed at numerous locations around the world. "Extraction and Refinement" includes images of older oil fields in the California desert, which tend to be jam-packed with drill rigs and pump jacks; the expansive oil sands extraction sites and tailing ponds in Fort McMurray, Alberta; and the complex, visually dynamic (if virtually incomprehensible) twists and turns of refinery structures in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Texas. "Transportation and Motor Culture" begins with a series of M. C. Escher-like images of enormous highway interchanges before taking us to massive car import lots in the U.S. and China, as well as sites at which people accumulate around the fantasy of driving, as in the biker and trucker jamborees held in Sturgis, South Dakota and Walcott, Iowa, respectively. Click for larger view View full resolution Detail from Cover If the photos in the first two sections draw our attention to the apparatuses and infrastructures that produce and are produced by oil—from sites of extraction largely hidden from view to the quotidian landscape of highways and car lots—"The End of Oil" probes the consequences of oil society, especially through the detritus that it leaves behind. The multiple images of the ancient oilfields of Baku, as well as of gigantic graveyards of cars, helicopters, planes, jet engines, tires, and oil drums, are concluded [End Page 6] with a sequence of photos on which Burtynsky made his fame: the shipbreaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh, where nineteenth-century labor meets twentieth-century garbage through the mechanism of twenty-first century offshoring of multinational capitalism's expenses and responsibilities. Oil is a photo narrative—an attempt to tell a story through images. Rather than an exhibition of his latest pieces, the book (and the show it represents) is akin to a curatorial exercise in which one aspect of an artist's thematic preoccupations are drawn out of a larger body of work. What makes Oil unique is that in this case, the curator is the artist himself, who has revisited his large body of images in an effort to produce a tale that might generate in its viewers the same oil epiphany that prompted their production. Burtynsky is far from the only photographer to generate photo essays with political intent. One thinks immediately, for instance, of Allan Sekula's Fish Story (1996), though text (the powerful essays included alongside his photos in most of his published work) is important for...

Review: Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman by Eric Bricker, director

Eric Bricker, director. Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman . Arthouse Films, 2008, DVD, 83 mins., http://www.juliusshulmanfilm.com, $29.95 As the opening credits to Visual Acoustics roll to a close, a voice, which we later realize is that of Julius Shulman, advocates for architecture's importance: “Every part of a person's life is based upon an architect's presence.” Enveloping us, architecture provides spatial, formal, and textural coordinates for much of human existence. Yet only a few seconds later, the film's narrator, the actor Dustin Hoffman, complicates the equation. “Architects,” we hear, “live and die by the images taken of their work, as these images alone are what most people see.” Despite the fact that buildings surround us, the most famous among them can be elusive. That is especially true in Southern California, where Julius Shulman photographed for more than half a century. On mountain ridges and alongside desert washes, detached houses embody the region's leading architectural response—the desire of affluent Californians to dwell within a private yet probing architectural landscape, a framework of walls and windows encrypted by structural technologies of steel and glass and open to panoramic views of nature and distant cityscape. Since most of us see these private domains primarily through photographs, how does a photographer's approach structure our architectural impressions? Why did certain photographs, the kind Julius Shulman was famous for, become icons of modernism? Visual Acoustics, the title of first-time director Eric Bricker's film about Julius Shulman's architectural photography, sounds enigmatic at first. Can photographs of buildings capture the world of sound? What Bricker and Shulman, who suggested the title, are getting at, I believe, is the ability of a photograph not only to facilitate a viewer's perception of architectural space, but also its potential to engross that viewer's emotions within the optical journey. Successful concert-hall acoustics reverberate the sounds of performers on stage with an audience's ears, transporting listeners out of their ambient and …

Moss, C. J., H. Croze, and P. C. Lee (eds.).2011. The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-term Perspective on a Long-lived Mammal. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 383 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-226-54223-2 and ISBN-10 0-226-54223-8, price (hardbound), $65.00.

C. J. Moss, H. Croze, P. C. Lee (eds.). 2011. The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-term Perspective on a Long-lived Mammal. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 383 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-226-54223-2 and ISBN-10 0-226-54223-8, price (hardbound), $65.00. A 38-year program of research on a single population, the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, stands as a pinnacle example of mammalogy for its length and depth of investigation. This study, widely known through the scientific and popular writing of Cynthia Moss and Joyce Poole, is now put into full scientific context in this edited multiauthor volume that was 12 years in the making, or as the authors point out, “the gestation period of 5–6 elephant calves.” What the authors have achieved is not just a reference on the Amboseli population, but a compendium of biological, ecological, and natural history knowledge on elephants. By comparison, all the other great books on elephant behavior read more like travelogues or biographies. Be warned, readers looking for the common coffee table book with large glossy color photos and field anecdotes will be sorely disappointed. Appealingly, this book instead focuses on providing a well-organized overview of the Amboseli system and the elephants within it by summarizing previously published research findings (with updated information), as well as novel information not published in the peer-reviewed literature during this long-term project. The book is organized into 5 parts. In Part 1, the editors set the background for their subsequent detailed sections on elephant behavior. Harvey Croze and Keith Lindsay provide a background chapter devoted to the biotic and abiotic conditions of Amboseli and how those conditions changed over time. Kadzo Kangwana and Christine Brown-Nunez provide an intriguing and detailed account of how Maasai communities surrounding the park are shifting toward a more sedentary agricultural lifestyle that is incorporated into the commercial economy. Treated objectively in Part 1, the increasing importance of human land use and interactions with elephants is a recurrent theme throughout the book, and is revisited from the perspective of Amboseli Elephant Research Project proponents in …

The Sea Wolves by I. McAllister

McAllister, Ian, and Nicholas Read. The Sea Wolves: Living Wild in the Great Bear Rainforest. Vancouver: Orca, 2010. Print At first glance, The Sea Wolves is a small coffee table book. It is not, however, just a pretty photographic exploration of the wolves that inhabit The Great Bear Rainforest. It is a very long opinion piece written expressly to convince readers that wolves are not “the big bad wolf” of stories; rather, we should all love and respect them. Authors Ian McAllister, a founding director of both the Raincoast Conservation Society and Pacific Wild, and Nicholas Read, a journalist, pull no punches in their attempt to sway the reader. While the book does present facts about the wolves and their environment, many of them likely accurate, the authors make sweeping statements and claims which they require the reader to accept at face value. For example, though the authors state that there is “a great deal of evidence to suggest that over-fishing, fish farms and climate change have all played a role in [the wolves’] decline,” this statement does not direct the reader to any evidence. Part of the purpose of the book is to educate the reader about the wolves; however, it is also clearly designed to manipulate the readers’ emotions. The authors attempt to get the reader to identify with the wolves through anthropomorphizing the animals and by drawing extensive parallels between the lives of wolves and the lives of people. For example, they state that the reason that wolves save the “tastiest deer” for their young pups “could be because, just as in human families, wolf families like to spoil their babies.” Furthermore, throughout the book, the authors choose emotionally-laden words and images, stating, for example, that wolves “have been persecuted by humans, with a kind of madness,” or that they “romp on the beach in the ocean foam that burbles off the waves like bubble bath.” Each interpretation of the wolves’ behaviour seems designed to achieve the desired effect of garnering sympathy for the creatures. While there is nothing wrong with writing a polemic against the dangers to wolves and their environment, this book is presented by the publisher as juvenile non-fiction for ages 8 and up. Children in upper elementary or even junior high school grades may have difficulty distinguishing between facts and strongly-worded opinions presented in a book labelled as non-fiction. Recommended: Three stars out of fourReviewer: Sandy CampbellSandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

From Colonial Port to Post-Revolution: Urban Planning for 21st Century Havana

Coffee table books are filled with them: the cliches of Havana as frozen in time, scented with nostalgia for a bygone era. At first sight, the city's unique combination of urban design and architectural styles suggest a tension between the island's various historical and political periods. At second glance, the tension lessens into what is a mostly complimentary relationship between patterns, designs, and vision. That is, a city made rich by its combination of continuous innovation and historic preservation. The result is an avant-garde, mostly European (compact, pedestrian, gridbased), urban planning agenda with many assets and challenges to its name. This photo essay aims to: examine how Havana’s colonial history created the city’s basic modern grid street pattern, compact block structure; identify what elements make Havana's urban character different from that of other major Latin American cities; observe current projects as outlined by the New Master Plan; and, finally identify challenges ahead. By covering these points, the essay sets out to challenge the “frozen in time” perception of Havana by replacing it with one of a unique and historically rich city on the brink of major changes. Author’s Note Laura Penaranda Currie was born in Bogota, Colombia and attended high schools in Washington D.C., South America, southern Africa, and Jordan. She is currently on a gap year working on women’s rights in New York City while completing online classes through the Harvard Extension School on Journalism, International Law and Human Rights. Her passions include women’s rights, the Palestinian cause, and Latin American revolutionary movements. In August 2011, her most recent visit to Cuba, Laura hitch-hiked across the Cuba with her sister Isabel.

Virtual Topography: Poets, Painters, Publishers and the Reproduction of the Landscape in the Early Nineteenth Century

In this article I develop the work of a number of critics—Gillen Darcy Wood, Sophie Thomas, Peter Simonsen, Julia S. Carlson—who have recently begun to revise our understanding of the relationship of literary Romanticism, and in particular that of Wordsworth and Southey, to visual culture. I show first that new means of mechanical reproduction—the woodcut, the aquatint—combined with technological changes in book production, stimulated a new print genre known as Views—an ancestor of the coffee-table book and often a spin-off wherein the public could see engravings of the scenes their favourite landscape poets described. Pictures sold poets, and, for the first time in history, popular writers were marketed to a mass readership able—and avid—to buy images as well as words. Wordsworth and Southey were not popular writers and were not at first marketed as illustrated poets. And they at first disapproved of the visual turn of their culture. This disapproval, I show, was never consistent or total and in fact they strove to take advantage of the vogue for the visual, collaborating with artists to publish volumes of Views in which their writing was combined with engravings of landscape. And these collaborations, I argue, were greatly influential upon them, causing them to alter the form and style of their writing as well as the publication formats in which it appeared. Wordsworth and Southey, in their late work, became writers of a moralised picturesque—of words that deferred to pictured views and tourist sights—and that sought to derive truths about human nature, life and society from them. Departing from their earlier suspicion of the visual, and of Views, they became practitioners, in conjunction with artists, of a virtual topography. Their continued marketing, in the 21st century, as part of the visual packaging of the Lake District in picture-book, DVD, and website is therefore not as contrary to what they stood for as it first might seem, shallow though it often is.

Review: American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture, by Alice T. Friedman

Alice T. Friedman . American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture . New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010, ix +262 pp., 40 color and 125 b/w illus. $65.00, ISBN 9780300116540 You might imagine, from a quick glance at the dust jacket, that this volume would fall into the category of coffee-table book. Certainly the glossy image of poolside entertaining at Richard Neutra's Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs would suggest a title like Hot Resorts of Southern California or The New American Desert Style . The first part of the title, American Glamour , rendered in large letters that pick up the tint of the swimming pool, does nothing to dispel this impression. Title and image appear calculated to suggest that this is not a stuffy work of scholarship. Left at that, the reader might well assume it was another breezy romp through the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Only with the second line of the title is there an indication of how much higher the author has set her sights. In fact, this book is one of the most intriguing and compelling studies to date on modern architecture, at least on a key group of American midcentury examples of it. American architecture after World War II has inspired a great wave of recent work ranging from the ponderously erudite to the breathlessly enthusiastic. With this book Alice Friedman, a professor of art history at Wellesley College, weighs in …

The mysteries of Stradivari

Forgive this reviewer for breaking Rule One (‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’) when seeing the names on display here. Stradivari is practically a household name, synonymous with miraculously perfect craftsmanship, Stewart Pollens is one of the world's foremost authorities on musical instruments, and the Cambridge University Press imprint speaks for itself. The cover's real clincher, however, is the breathtaking photograph of a violin—not that this is a coffee-table book. There are other volumes with larger, more lavish pictures of instruments but few with so many excellent photographs and drawings of their associated paraphernalia. It is the author's unrivalled familiarity with, and ability to ‘read’ such things as forms, patterns, fittings and templates that makes this volume so valuable. Pollens manages to debunk many of the myths that have accumulated around Stradivari to an almost Shakespearean degree—there have even been claims that he never existed—without destroying the mystique of the man. Setting the scene with a panorama of Cremona and a biography of Stradivari, the author extracts everything there is to be found in the scanty documentation of the luthier's life. The following chapters are then devoted to each of the main areas of Stradivari's production. Pride of place goes to violins, violas, cellos and their bows, but then come pochettes, violas da gamba and d’amore, lutes, the mandola and mandolino, the guitar and the harp.

A Review of “Evolution and Biogeography of Australasian Vertebrates”

Cox (1985) wrote of the predecessor of this book, Archer and Clayton's (1984) Vertebrate Zoogeography and Evolution in Australasia, that it was less a coffee table book than a coffee table in itsel...