To celebrate our forthcoming book about Japan, we are presenting a new film series that dives into the intriguing ecosystem that has preserved Japanese traditional skills over centuries. Meet the people who are future-proofing the age-old know-how.
Category Archives: Books
Book Interviews: “Out Of Darkness, Shining Light” Author Petina Gappah
BBC Radio 4 speaks to Petina Gappah on her new book, “Out of Darkness, Shining Light”.
“This is how we carried out of Africa the poor broken body of Bwana Daudi, the Doctor, David Livingstone, so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own land.”
So begins Petina Gappah’s powerful novel of exploration and adventure in nineteenth-century Africa—the captivating story of the loyal men and women who carried explorer and missionary Dr. Livingstone’s body, his papers and maps, fifteen hundred miles across the continent of Africa, so his remains could be returned home to England and his work preserved there.
Narrated by Halima, the doctor’s sharp-tongued cook, and Jacob Wainwright, a rigidly pious freed slave, this is a story that encompasses all of the hypocrisy of slavery and colonization—the hypocrisy at the core of the human heart—while celebrating resilience, loyalty, and love.
New Travel Books: “Do You Read Me?” – Bookstores Of The World (Gestalten)
From Daikanyama Tsutaya Books in Tokyo to Kosmos Buchsalon in Zurich, Do You Read Me? travels the globe to discover these gems and some of the people behind them, who turn an ordinary trip to the bookstore into an extraordinary experience.
Bookstores are more than just places that sell books. They are focal points of communities, a warm welcome to a city, a place for first-time visitors and longtime residents alike to gather in a shared love of the written word. They are places where time moves a little slower, where customers can get lost in the pages of a book, or enjoy readings, concerts, and events that bring together like-minded individuals with a thirst for knowledge.
Each bookstore is as unique as the diverse customers who frequent them. There are the secret ones tucked away with stacks reaching floor to ceiling; there are minimalist concept stores; there are dazzling book temples. There are ones in apartments, on boats, and in Gothic cathedrals.
Travel writer Marianne Julia Strauss has scoured the globe for the past decade in search of the top bookstores. In Do You Read Me? she has collected a selection of the ones you need to include in your next itinerary.
Cookbooks: “Les Dîners de Gala” (1973) By Salvador Dalí Reprinted By Taschen
From an Art Daily online article (March 19, 2020):
“I love eating suits of arms, in fact I love all shell fish… food that only a battle to peel makes it vulnerable to the conquest of our palate.”
This reprint features all 136 recipes over 12 chapters, specially illustrated by Dalí, and organized by meal courses, including aphrodisiacs. The illustrations and recipes are accompanied by Dalí’s extravagant musings on subjects such as dinner conversation: “The jaw is our best tool to grasp philosophical knowledge.”
NEW YORK, NY.- “Les diners de Gala is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of taste … If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.”—Salvador Dalí
Read fabulous review in Brain Pickings
Food and surrealism make perfect bedfellows: sex and lobsters, collage and cannibalism, the meeting of a swan and a toothbrush on a pastry case. The opulent dinner parties thrown by Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) and his wife and muse, Gala (1894–1982) were the stuff of legend. Luckily for us, Dalí published a cookbook in 1973, Les diners de Gala, which reveals some of the sensual, imaginative, and exotic elements that made up their notorious gatherings.
Art Books: “At First Light – Two Centuries Of Maine Artists, Their Homes And Studios” (Rizzoli, Mar 2020)
At First Light chronicles twenty-six extraordinary artists of the last two hundred years who have lived and worked in Maine. Published to coincide with the state’s bicentennial in 2020, the volume considers the significant contributions artists have made to a deeper and more profound understanding of Maine’s history, its land and its peoples. Maine’s unique and breathtaking landscape–from its rugged coastline, quaint harbors, majestic mountains, and verdant forests–continues to have a powerful effect on the artists who are drawn to its shores.
New Environment Books: “Koolhaas. Countryside, A Report” (Taschen, Apr 2020)
The rural, remote, and wild territories we call “countryside”, or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities, make up the front line where today’s most powerful forces―climate and ecological devastation, migration, tech, demographic lurches―are playing out. Increasingly under a ‘Cartesian’ regime―gridded, mechanized, and optimized for maximal production―these sites are changing beyond recognition.
In his latest publication, Rem Koolhaas explores the rapid and often hidden transformations underway across the Earth’s vast non-urban areas.Countryside, A Report gathers travelogue essays exploring territories marked by global forces and experimentation at the edge of our consciousness: a test site near Fukushima, where the robots that will maintain Japan’s infrastructure and agriculture are tested; a greenhouse city in the Netherlands that may be the origin for the cosmology of today’s countryside; the rapidly thawing permafrost of Central Siberia, a region wrestling with the possibility of relocation; refugees populating dying villages in the German countryside and intersecting with climate change activists; habituated mountain gorillas confronting humans on ‘their’ territory in Uganda; the American Midwest, where industrial-scale farming operations are coming to grips with regenerative agriculture; and Chinese villages transformed into all-in-one factory, e-commerce stores, and fulfillment centers.
This book is the official companion to the Guggenheim Museum exhibition Countryside, The Future. The exhibition and book mark a new area of investigation for architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas, who launched his career with two city-centric entities: The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (1975) and Delirious New York (1978). It’s designed by Irma Boom, who drew inspiration for the book’s pocket-sized concept, as well as its innovative typography and layout, from her research in the Vatican library.
The book brings together collaborative research by AMO, Koolhaas, and students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design; the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Wageningen University in the Netherlands; and the University of Nairobi. Contributors also include Samir Bantal, Janna Bystrykh, Troy Conrad Therrien, Lenora Ditzler, Clemens Driessen, Alexandra Kharitonova, Keigo Kobayashi, Niklas Maak, Etta Madete, Federico Martelli, Ingo Niermann, Dr. Linda Nkatha Gichuyia, Kayoko Ota, Stephan Petermann, and Anne M. Schneider.
Podcasts: The “Brilliance” Of Hilary Mantel’s Trilogy On Thomas Cromwell
Robert Bound, John Mitchinson and Ted Hodgkinson review the final – and rather hefty – instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy.
Interviews: Author Alex Michaelides On His Dubut Book “The Silent Patient”
Screenwriter-cum-author Alex Michaelides’ influences range from Agatha Christie to Euripides. His most recent book, ‘The Silent Patient’, has garnered much acclaim: the thriller is being made into a film having gripped audiences worldwide and topped The New York Times bestseller list.
Alex Michaelides was born in Cyprus to a Greek father and English mother. He studied English literature at Cambridge University and got his MA in screenwriting at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. He wrote the film The Devil You Know (2013) starring Rosamund Pike and co-wrote The Brits are Coming (2018), starring Uma Thurman, Tim Roth, Parker Posey and Sofia Vergara. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Silent Patient.
Video Interviews: 73-Year Old “Gritty” Black & White Photographer Chris Killip
Born on the Isle of Man in 1946, Chris Killip was a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University where he had taught from 1991.
Since 2012 he has held solo exhibitions at Museum Folkwang, Essen; Le Bal, Paris; Tate Britain, London; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Killip’s works are held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His books with Steidl are ‘Pirelli Work’ (2006), ‘Seacoal’ (2011), ‘Arbeit / Work’ (2012), ‘Isle of Man Revisited’ (2015), ‘In Flagrante Two’ (2016) and most recently ‘The Station’ (2020).
Chris Killip (born 11 July 1946) is a Manx photographer who worked at Harvard University in Cambridge, from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. Killip is well known for his gritty black and white images of people and places.
Killip is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award (for In Flagrante). He has exhibited all over the world, written extensively, appeared on radio and television, and has curated many exhibitions.
From Wikipedia
Best New Fiction Books: 57-Year Old Author Lily King’s “Writers & Lovers” – On The Road To Happiness
Writers & Lovers follows Casey―a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist―in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King’s trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.
Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, 
Lily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.
Lily King is the author of five award-winning novels. Her most recent novel, Writers & Lovers, will be published on March 3rd, 2020. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Award, The New England Book Award, The Maine Fiction Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME’s Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, as well as on Amazon, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, and Salon’s Best Books of 2014.
Boomers Daily 