 Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth |
- Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (2006)
| This is really a draft. The author was killed before she could complete the novel set at the time Parisians fled Paris as the Germans advanced. Like Pagnol or Dickens, she captures thoughts and mores at every level of society. This volume includes notebook entries to herself regarding how she intended to develop certain characters or incidents, what particularly pleased her, thoughts on rhythm and balance. It offers huge insight into a writer’s mind. And at the end, there are fervent letters after she was seized and separated from her family. |
- David Golder by Irene Nemirovsky (1929, 2007)
| The book that catapulted Nemirovsky to fame in France during her lifetime. (1929, published in English translation 2007) |
- A Visit to Don Octavio: A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico by Sybille Bedford ( 1953)
| One of the great travel books. Two sophisticated, erudite women in their forties, European and American, travel to Mexico on a lark and a shoestring. Their accounts of living among aristocrats, expatriots and hoi polloi are fabulous, vivid, and (apparently mostly) true. Plus, there’s a rich dose of Mexican history and context. This was the author’s breakthrough novel. |
- Quicksands: a Memoir by Sybille Bedford (2005)
| The complimentary bookend to her distinguished career. Now a sage and respected English writer, Ms. Bedford looks back at the astonishing patchwork that formed her life. Virtually devoid of formal education, she passed back and forth as a child among casual family acquaintances from the German Weimar Republic to London to Italy to France, aristocratic and bohemian. She mixed with the Bloomsbury writers in London, and lived long and close with Aldous Huxley and wife in the south of France |
- Everyman by Phillip Roth (2006)
| A vivid, though somewhat uneven book of the thoughts and urges, so rarely spoken, as life unwinds. I happen to have heard this read on ipod by George Guidall, who imparted pitch perfect emotion and voice to every character, and brought the book particularly alive. | | http://www.audible.com |
- In Camera: Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting by Martin Harrison (2005)
| Through bits of photographs, torn book pages, pictures of baboons, old Muybridge motion sequences, dental studies of deformed mouths—the thick detritus that littered Bacon’s studio—together with meticulous biographical anecdote and insight, Harrison carries one into the painter’s mind and hugely enriches access to his oeuvre. |
- James Carpenter: Environmental Refractions, by Sandro Marpillero, James Carpenter, Kenneth Frampton (2007)
| Mr. Carpenter’s artistic medium is glass and light and motion, which he has brought to bear, with great poetry, on architecture: discreet fenestration allows beautiful slanting shadows to play across a chapel’s alter; glass with special optical qualities abstracts the view outside; opaque glass flooring brings mystery to the space below as clear footprints carrying nimbus bodies pass back and forth overhead. In New York City, a huge wall of draped glass floods the glamour of the city into a jazz performance space. At the World Trade site, passers-by trigger tiny LCD elements to glow softly. There are elegant schematics in the book, diagrams of air flow and angle of light relative to season, site plans and photos, and text that articulates the problem each project addresses and how it was solved. Seeing each proposal and its solution from so many angles—verbal, visual, practical, aesthetic, green—lifted this reader into a Zen-like meditative zone. |
- Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth by Jock Reynolds et al. ( 2002)
| Sans horizon lines, these black and photographs read as beautiful, often abstract, paintings with smooth glimmering surfaces. Although their subject is the destructive meddling of mankind, what transmits is the enduring dignity of earth and space. Mr. Reynold’s text adds riveting insight. |
- Naming of Names by Anna Pavord (2005)
| This book begins with the author, an experienced European horticulturalist, trekking through a tangled rainforest in Guyana. No plant resembles any she knows. Which is poisonous, which medically powerful, which useful, which relate to others elsewhere in the world—she hasn’t a clue. Only by naming, and naming in universal fashion not just local vernacular, can mankind begin to get a grip on the wonders and order of the natural world. Focusing on the plant world, she begins with Greek philosophers’ first forays into taxonomy, on through the Middle Ages, to Linneas and the modern. She touches on the Greek puzzlement, for instance: does a plant have a soul? if so where does it reside when the plant dies back? in the roots? She includes beautiful illustrations from important herbals created for pharmaceutical instruction, and ones copied so often as to be useless. Fascinating. |
- The Compleat Cruiser by L. Francis Herreshoff (1956)
| The author's father, Nathaniel Herreshoff, designed sound, graceful wooden sailing boats that were (and still are) the delight of New England aristocracy. His little 12 1/2 foot beauty taught (and still does) generations to sail and race at Marble Head, Buzzards’ Bay, and North Haven . Their mention makes old timers melt to warm and fuzzy. This classic book is the best about cruising. Eschewing fancy yachts and their pretention, he focuses on the down to earth pleasures and nuts and bolts of taking a sail through all types of weather with good companions and a homey chowder bubbling in the galley. |
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