Simon Winchester HarperCollins ($27.99) by Ryder W. Miller Simon Winchester, author of more than a dozen books and frequent traveler on the Atlantic, takes on the difficult task of trying to explain that ocean’s history and wonder. Unlike Hugh Ambrose’s recent The Pacific, which chronicles the personal experiences of soldiers during and after World War II, Atlantic is […]
Marianne Tatom Letts Indiana University Press ($19.95) by Jeremy Wade Morris On Feb 18, 2011, Radiohead launched their newest album, The King Of Limbs, on their website. The digital download cost $9, though fans could also pre-order (for $50) what the band described as the world’s first “newspaper” album: a deluxe audio-visual package consisting of 2 […]
Robert Morrison Pegasus Books ($35) by Spencer Dew There may have been a Malay, one day, who dropped by unexpectedly at Dove Cottage, and he may have hit up England’s most famous addict for some opium. Thomas De Quincey, to whose dubious recollection we owe this tale, tried, lacking any “Asiatic” language, to communicate by […]
edited by Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski Zone Books ($24.95) by W. C. Bamberger The access to knowledge movement, which often goes by the acronym A2K, is like an iceberg: only a small part of it rises to the top of the media stream where nonactivists get a glimpse of it. The most visible struggle […]
Douglas Coupland Atlas & Co. ($24) by Mark Gustafson To call Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) a media prophet, albeit a reluctant one, is not news. The works by which he is known, includingThe Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium is the Massage, are not much read anymore; on a superficial level, they have left two time-worn bytes: […]
Edited by David Shields and Bradford Morrow W. W. Norton ($17.95) by Scott F. Parker One of the defining questions of the 20th century was, as David Shields and Bradford Morrow write in their introduction to this new anthology, “if there is no transcendental meaning, and we know we are mortal, how do we construct a […]
Edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner University of Chicago Press ($25) by Patricia Briggs What does making art look like? Because artists’ studios are considered off limits, it’s pretty hard for the average person to know. Viewers typically encounter the object d’art in the pristine environment of a gallery as a completed thing—the concluding statement […]
Graham E. Fuller Little, Brown and Company ($25.99) by Spencer Dew “If there was no Islam,” Graham Fuller argues, “there would certainly be other religions around playing similar roles under similar conditions. With no religions at all, we would still readily find or create other ideologies to justify the same acts. Thus, a world without […]
Guy de la Valdène Lyons Press ($24.95) by Andrew Cleary Guy de la Valdène is a remnant of what he prefers to call the "sporting life." This means something distinct from the hunting La Valdène observes in his old age, something that hearkens back to a certain nobility in the endeavor that he imbibed in […]
Kevin Grange University of Nebraska Press ($19.95) by Barb Teed “I had to wonder—why are the most beautiful places in the world also the most dangerous?” The lure of legends and the allure of mountains have possessed the human race for eons. Kevin Grange’s remarkable debut, Beneath Blossom Rain: Discovering Bhutan on the Toughest Trek in […]