Category Archives: Books

New Photography-History Books: “Vienna – Portrait Of A City” (Taschen)

From a Taschenn online listing:

Vienna Portrait of a City BookThis volume is a treasure trove of photography from the last 175 years, following the evolution of Vienna from imperial capital to modern metropolis. Like a visual walk through time and cityscape, hundreds of carefully curated pictures trace the developments in Vienna’s built environment and the cultural and historical trends they reflect, whether the urban Gesamtkunstwerk of the 19th-century Ringstrasse or the experiments of “Red Vienna” in the 1920s, when the city had a social democrat government for the first time.

Vienna Portrait of a City BookVienna combines drama and elegance like no other. For centuries the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the stately city on the Danube, has been defined by vast palaces and imperial grandeur—but behind the Baroque opulence, Vienna is also a place of genteel coffee house culture, epicurean tradition, and a heritage of both delicate and daring music, art, and design, from Johann Strauss to Egon Schiele, from Gustav Mahler to Josef Hoffmann.

To read more: https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/photography/all/05323/facts.vienna_portrait_of_a_city.htm?change_user_country=US&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIp-TVlunx5QIVRdFkCh3XGQ0KEAEYASACEgI5EPD_BwE

 

Book Review Podcasts: Nicholas Buccola (“The Fire Is Upon Us”) Discusses A Great Intellectual Debate In 1965 (NY Times)

The Fire Is Upon Us Nicholas BuccolaIn 1965, James Baldwin, by then internationally famous, faced off against William F. Buckley Jr., one of the leading voices of American conservatism, in a debate hosted by the Cambridge Union in England. The debate proposition before the house was: “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

Nicholas Buccola’s “The Fire Is Upon Us” tells the story of that intellectual prizefight as well as the larger story of Buckley’s and Baldwin’s lives.

 

Book Review Podcasts: “In Love With George Eliot” By Kathy O’Shaughnessy (BBC)

Kathy O'Shaughnessy In Love With George EliotKathy O’Shaughnessy talks to Mariella about her novel charting the life of George Eliot.

Who was the real George Eliot? In Love with George Eliot is a glorious debut novel which tells the compelling story of England’s greatest woman novelist as you’ve never read it before.

Marian Evans is a scandalous figure, living in sin with a married man, George Henry Lewes. She has shocked polite society, and women rarely deign to visit her. In secret, though, she has begun writing fiction under the pseudonym George Eliot. As Adam Bede’s fame grows, curiosity rises as to the identity of its mysterious writer. Gradually it becomes apparent that the moral genius Eliot is none other than the disgraced woman living with Lewes.

Website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07tf569

Book Review Podcasts: “Antisocial” By Andrew Marantz, “No Stopping Us Now” By Gail Collins (NYT)

AntiSocial Andrew Marantz

From the New York Times Book Review:

“Antisocial,” the new book by Andrew Marantz, plainly states its subject in its subtitle: “Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.” In order to write it, Marantz immersed himself in corners of the internet most of us would go out of our way to avoid.

Gail Collins visits the podcast this week to discuss her new book, “No Stopping Us Now,” an eye-opening chronicle of older women’s journey to progress in the United States over the years. “It used to be, the whole vision of your life if you were a woman was that you got married, you had children and, once the children were grown, you were old — done,” 

No Stopping Us Now Gail Collins

Collins says on the podcast this week. “That was the thing I was looking at: What counted as old, and then what did women do when they got to what was regarded as old? How did they use it, how did they fight it?”

To read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/books/review/Andrew-Marantz-Gail-Collins-interview.html

New Art History Books: “A Month In Siena” By HISHAM MATAR Is A “Triumph”

From a Penguin Random House release:

A Month In Siena by Hisham Matar 2019Including beautiful full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in the writer’s life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with a city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape—current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude—and shed further light on the present world around us.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life.

Listen to an excerpt below:


 
After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he’d had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments.

To read more: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609913/a-month-in-siena-by-hisham-matar/

New Books: “Airline Maps – A CENTURY OF ART AND DESIGN” By MARK OVENDEN and MAXWELL ROBERTS

From a Penguin Random House review:

Airline Maps A Century of Art and Design Mark OvendenIn this gorgeously illustrated collection of airline route maps, Mark Ovenden and Maxwell Roberts look to the skies and transport readers to another time. Hundreds of images span a century of passenger flight, from the rudimentary trajectory of routes to the most intricately detailed birds-eye views of the land to be flown over. Advertisements for the first scheduled commercial passenger flights featured only a few destinations, with stunning views of the countryside and graphics of biplanes. As aviation took off, speed and mileage were trumpeted on bold posters featuring busy routes. Major airlines produced highly stylized illustrations of their global presence, establishing now-classic brands. With trendy and forward-looking designs, cartographers celebrated the coming together of different cultures and made the earth look ever smaller.

Airline Maps A Century of Art and Design Mark Ovenden Book Cover

A nostalgic and celebratory look back at one hundred years of passenger flight, featuring full-color reproductions of route maps and posters from the world’s most iconic airlines, from the author of bestselling cult classic Transit Maps of the World.

To read more: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600815/airline-maps-by-mark-ovenden-and-maxwell-roberts/

Top New Nature Books: “Turning The Boat For Home” By Richard Mabey

From a Cotswold Life online interview/review:

Turning The Boat For Home Richard Mabey cover“I suppose I started off with a fairly literal view of the world,” he says. “But, quite early on, it became clear to me that there was much more going on than simply the picture I was seeing; that the natural world had an agenda of its own; that it was going to live out life, regardless of how we viewed it and how we used it; and, indeed, regardless of the fancy metaphors that we used.”

Oh my goodness. Where to begin?

I could start with the ‘Praying Beech’ – a tree whose (‘whose’? The human possessive feels simultaneously wrong and yet just right) two branch stubs clasped each other like hands. Once, when the rain fell in an apocalyptic burst, Richard Mabey watched its bark melt in front of his eyes. It was, of course, no stranger to extremes of weather: one summer past, the tree had been split by lightning, bees hunkering down in its newly-created hollows. Sometime later, a storm had toppled it, leaving fungi free to colonise its delicious surfaces: knobbly coral spots; dead man’s fingers rising corpse-like from the tree’s own rot; white porcelain tufts, like Royal Worcester plates awaiting a delicate slice of egg-yellow sponge.

To read more: https://www.cotswoldlife.co.uk/people/interview-with-nature-writer-richard-mabey-1-6357450?utm_medium=email&utm_source=eshot&utm_campaign=newsletterlinknewtemplate

Literary Milestones: A Letter To Sylvia Beach, Founder, “Shakespeare And Company” In Paris (100 Years Old This Month)

From a Shakespeare and Company email:

Dear Sylvia Beach,

Sylvia Beach Shakespeare and Company 1919-1941One hundred years ago this month, you opened the shutters of a small bookshop on rue Dupuytren. Its name was Shakespeare and Company. I often wonder if, on that first morning, you could ever have imagined how important your story would be.

You were only 32 but had already lived quite a life. Soulful and fearless, witty and energetic, you’d been active in the women’s suffrage movement, studied French poetry in Paris, and served with the Red Cross in Serbia during the First World War. You had also met Adrienne Monnier, one of the first women in France to found her own bookshop. Adrienne would be your companion for decades to come.

Your bookshop—first on rue Dupuytren, then around the corner on rue de l’Odéon—became a sanctuary for Anglophone and Francophone writers. T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as André Gide, Paul Valéry, and Louis Aragon, among many others, all bought and borrowed books from you, and attended readings and parties at Shakespeare and Company. As André Chamson wrote about you: “Sylvia Beach carried pollen like a bee. She cross-fertilised these writers. She did more to link England, the United States, Ireland, and France than four great ambassadors combined.” I think of this whenever I ponder the role booksellers and bookshops can play during this age of political and ecological turbulence. When James Joyce couldn’t find anyone to publish Ulysses—his modernist masterpiece that had been condemned for obscenity—you stepped up. Even when you closed your bookshop in 1941, it was not an act of defeat but of defiance—you would rather see your life’s work shuttered forever than sell Finnegans Wake to a high-ranking Nazi officer.

Sylvia Whitman Shakespeare and Company Paris
Sylvia Whitman

When my father, George Whitman, opened this bookshop in 1951, you were not just a regular visitor but an inspiration. You had shown how a true bookseller must also be prepared to be a librarian, a publisher, a PO box, a banker, a hotelier, and—most importantly—a friend to writers and readers. For your belief that a love of reading is more important than the quest for profit, you have been called the patron saint of independent bookstores. We’re sure that your extraordinary memoir and your beautiful letters continue to embolden booksellers the world over, just as they embolden us. Particularly during hard times, your story stands like a beacon when we need direction, comfort, or inspiration.

Thank you, Sylvia, for everything you did and everything you stood for.

In loving homage,

Sylvia Whitman
Proprietor
Shakespeare And Company

https://shakespeareandcompany.com/

Shakespeare And Company Parisjpg

 

New Mental Health Books: “The Great Pretender” By Susannah Cahalan Looks At “Madness” In Society

Psychiatry, as a distinct branch of medicine, has come far in its short life span. (The term psychiatrist is less than 150 years old.) The field has rejected the famously horrific practices of the recent past—the lobotomies, forced sterilizations, human warehousing. Today’s psychiatric practitioners boast a varied arsenal of effective drugs and have largely dropped the unscientific trappings of psychoanalytic psychobabble, the “schizophrenogenic mothers” of yesteryear who had been thought to have somehow triggered insanity in their unwitting offspring. Two decades into the 21st century, psychiatry now views severe mental illnesses as legitimate brain diseases. Despite all these advancements, however, the field still relies solely on self-reported symptoms and observable signs for diagnosis. Though the American Psychiatry Association reassures us that psychiatrists are uniquely qualified to “assess both the mental and physical aspects of psychological problems,” they are, like all of medicine, limited by the tools at hand. There are not, as of this writing, any consistent objective measures that can render a definitive psychiatric diagnosis.

Literary Destinations: The Faulkner House Bookstore, New Orleans

From an Atlas Obscura online review:

Faulkner House Bookstore New Orleans interiorInside, the small store has a good selection of literary fiction ranging from classics to current publications. There is also a great selection of books about New Orleans and local culture. There is, of course, a dedicated area, almost shrine-like, for Faulkner’s works, and the shop owner will let you take a look at those more expensive books, “if you want to get in trouble with your wallet.”

Blink while passing through New Orleans’s French Quarter, and you may miss this small, charming bookstore. But step inside, and you’ll steal a quick peek at the space where William Faulkner himself lived while in the city.

Though he later penned famous works like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner wasn’t much of anybody yet when he moved to New Orleans, and in fact published his first work in a local journal. There is a historical plaque outside the building that states that Faulkner wrote his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, while in residence there in 1925.

To read more: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/faulkner-house-books?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5bf02e2e8b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_31_02_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f36db9c480-5bf02e2e8b-63029309&mc_cid=5bf02e2e8b&mc_eid=9baf474570