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The Work of Art

The Work of Art is a visionary compendium of ephemera that makes visible the bridge between idea and artwork.
The Work of Art is a visionary compendium of ephemera that makes visible the bridge between idea and artwork.
NonfictionBiography

Ingenious

Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.
Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Didion and Babitz

Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.
Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.
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Self-HelpLifestyles

Moving on up

Review by bookpagedev

Joel Osteen’s book Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, offers an outline for a higher level of existence in the here and now. Osteen is the young, enthusiastic pastor of the diverse, Houston-based Lakewood Church, which has more than 30,000 members, and his inspirational television program is viewed in 100 million households worldwide. Clearly, Osteen’s outline for a life of health, abundance and victory comes from a Christian perspective. He believes that while God wants to help us, we must do our part to allow God to promote us, to increase us, to give us more. The seven steps he describes are a means to opening that path. Like Ford, he encourages us to dream big and move beyond the mundane. Osteen recognizes that life can throw everything from disappointment to disaster at us, but his outlook remains optimistic. Our human tendency, he writes, is to want everything easily. But without opposition or resistance, there is no potential for progress. Without the resistance of air, an eagle can’t soar. Linda Stankard continues to be her own work in progress.

Joel Osteen's book Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, offers an outline for a higher level of existence in the here and now. Osteen is the young, enthusiastic pastor of the diverse, Houston-based Lakewood Church, which has more than…
Self-HelpLifestyles

A guide to help you reach a personal peak this year

Review by bookpagedev

Remember the old adage: Good, better, best; never let it rest until your good is better and your better is best ? Well, here are four books that can show you how to move from mediocre to marvelous in 2005. Best-selling author Debbie Ford (The Dark Side of the Light) offers a guide to reaching out and grasping the life we have always dreamed about in The Best Year of Your Life: Dream It, Plan It, Live It. Stop believing that the best year of your life exists somewhere off in the future, she admonishes. According to Ford, the time is here and now, and the choice is yours. As the title indicates, the book is divided into three sections. The Dream It section emphasizes the importance of dreams and desires, and how creating a powerful intent is the first step in creating your best self. The Plan It section offers a structured approach to defining and achieving goals which includes strategic exercises and straightforward examples, such as a 15-question checklist for taking charge of your life. Finally, the Live It section explains how to put those plans into action with zest, integrity and joy. Ford does not shirk from acknowledging that her plan requires effort, commitment and courage. But if you give 100 percent to the process, she ensures that having your best year yet will be more than a pipe dream; it will be your destiny. Linda Stankard continues to be her own work in progress.

Remember the old adage: Good, better, best; never let it rest until your good is better and your better is best ? Well, here are four books that can show you how to move from mediocre to marvelous in 2005. Best-selling author Debbie Ford (The…
Lifestyles

Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe: Silver hell

Review by bookpagedev

Editor’s note: Each month we see lots of books. Some of the curiouser arrivals are featured in this space.
J. Shimon and J. Lindemann grew up in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, home of Aluminum Specialty, the company that manufactured that stalwart of hipster holidays, the aluminum Christmas tree. Shimon and Lindemann, both professional photographers, celebrate the tinsel icons of their youth in Season’s Gleamings: The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Tree. "Although they can be viewed solely as aesthetically stunning objects," the duo write of their subjects, "their existence will always be informed by each viewer’s holiday baggage."

Right. Aluminum trees played a large role in the holidays of my quintessentially 1970s childhood. Sticking all of those branches covered in potentially blinding strips of metal into the tree’s wooden base was a time-consuming chore, only slightly less annoying than maneuvering them back into their sheaths at the end of the season. And who can forget the ordeal of having to rethread limbs that became detached from their silver fringe?

Still, the trees are retro-cool in a future-past, Jetsons kind of way, which is why Shimon and Lindemann quietly prowled yard sales and sneaked into attics and basements, eventually collecting 40 trees. Season’s Gleamings isn’t a decorating guide or history of the trees (though it does include a little background); it’s merely an homage to a space-age ideal.

Editor's note: Each month we see lots of books. Some of the curiouser arrivals are featured in this space.
J. Shimon and J. Lindemann grew up in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, home of Aluminum Specialty, the company that manufactured that stalwart of hipster holidays, the…

History

The man who followed Lincoln

Review by bookpagedev

American history will probably never produce a thornier personality than Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln’s misunderstood presidential successor and the overseer of a misshapen Reconstruction. Johnson’s legacy is tainted even those who know little about him presume he was possibly our worst chief executive ever. Howard Means’ The Avenger Takes His Place: Andrew Johnson and the 45 Days That Changed the Nation is not designed to right Johnson’s reputation, but this surprisingly important, sometimes powerfully crafted volume puts his strengths and flaws into context.

Means offers solid biographical background and explains why Johnson was impeached and nearly thrown out of office in 1868, the final year of a term made problematic from its outset by Lincoln’s assassination. Yet the bulk of this book focuses on the six weeks following Lincoln’s death, when Johnson, an anti-secession Democrat and former governor and U.S. senator from Tennessee, was thrust into unlikely power on the heels of his scandalous public inebriation on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1865. Fortunately, Johnson, as Lincoln knew for certain, was not a drunk. From beginnings even humbler than Honest Abe’s, Johnson a tailor originally from Raleigh, North Carolina, and later hardscrabble East Tennessee proved antagonistic toward aristocrats and particularly Southern plantation owners, believed in spending public monies in service to the common man, and, in fact, because of his own determined rise from poverty, was blessedly incorruptible.

Alas, he was also lacking vision, stubborn as a mule, and a somewhat reluctant pragmatist when it came to the slave question, a position that earned him the enmity of powerful Republican Radicals who sought a more punitive approach to the makers of the Southern rebellion. Once he took office, Johnson turned out to be flexible enough to adhere to Lincoln’s own with malice toward none credo. But without Lincoln’s people skills and great imaginative wisdom, Johnson ran afoul of those both to his left and right. Means’ contribution to the Johnson record is a fascinating portrait of a complex man chosen by fate to tackle possibly the toughest assignment in U.S. political history save maybe for Lincoln’s own.

American history will probably never produce a thornier personality than Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln's misunderstood presidential successor and the overseer of a misshapen Reconstruction. Johnson's legacy is tainted even those who know little about him presume he was possibly our worst chief executive ever.…
Pop CultureArts & Culture

Such a strange vibration

Review by bookpagedev

You would expect a book about hippies to be visually exciting, titillating even. After all, hippies were on the experimental edge of a ’60s youth culture that rejected the black-and-white world of the ’50s. Hippies came in colors everywhere. They danced naked in the streets. They took their trips on LSD. They launched a rock ‘n’ roll revolution. And they created vibrant, colorful, sometimes disorienting photographic and graphical styles to represent their experiences.

So it’s no real surprise that Barry Miles’ excellent book Hippie with its wealth of photographs, psychedelic album-cover art and exotic typefaces captures the dynamic visual energy of the youth culture of the ’60s, an energy that continues to influence the way we see things to this day. What is a surprise is that Hippie is so readable, so interesting and, for the most part, so good humored. Miles begins his look at hippie youth culture in 1965, "the first year in which a discernible youth movement began to emerge," and ends in 1971, the year "Jim Morrison joined Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix in the roll call of rock ‘n’ roll superhero deaths." Going year by year, Miles employs brief, sharply drawn vignettes to cover everything from the summer of love (which he wryly notes is now copyrighted by Bill Graham Enterprises) to the Manson family, from Timothy Leary’s LSD trips to George Harrison’s strange walk through Haight Ashbury, from the rise of the Grateful Dead to the end of the Beatles.

Miles dedicates his book "to all the old freaks and hippies everywhere." Yet the book seems remarkably free of nostalgia. Hippie winds up being a refreshing book that is not just for old freaks or young freaks, but rather for any reader with an interest in the look, the feel, the history of a special era.

 

You would expect a book about hippies to be visually exciting, titillating even. After all, hippies were on the experimental edge of a '60s youth culture that rejected the black-and-white world of the '50s. Hippies came in colors everywhere. They danced naked in the…

NonfictionEssays

Love’s labors found

Review by bookpagedev

<B>Love’s labors found</B> The saying "all the world loves a lover" has never rung truer than in the case of that famous, ill-fated couple, Heloise and Abelard. Their tumultuous story, which has been chronicled intriguingly but briefly in the lovers’ eight letters, is one of history’s most scrutinized romances, the subject of countless books, articles, films, plays, paintings and poems. Now, British author and newspaper columnist James Burge has added to the mix with <B>Heloise and Abelard: A New Biography of History’s Great Lovers</B>.

Burge, with genial wit and a special sensitivity to the tenor of ecclesiastical 12th-century times, draws a new portrait of the lovers based upon New Zealand scholar Constant Mews’ recently discovered cache of Heloise and Abelard’s "lost" correspondence, a collection of 113 early letters between the philosopher-monk and his brilliant pupil. These missives reveal the origins of the lovers’ erotic, intellectual and spiritual passions. The large scope of this correspondence (an excerpted appendix is included in the book) allows Burge to render a meticulous, but always engaging, explication of each lover’s innermost desires, human foibles and, best of all, includes his sympathetic conjecture on how both Heloise and Abelard viewed their own characters and times.

Against the backdrop of 12th-century Paris and Europe, Burge gives an impressively researched account of the life and heresy trials of Peter Abelard, his pursuit of Heloise, their secret love affair and marriage, and the violent tragedy that would force the lovers to separate and pursue religious lives. His keen analysis of the new letters depicts Heloise as a strong-willed, exceptionally intelligent woman, fully equal to her lover in intellect and accomplishment. Abelard’s portrait, in comparison, pales a bit, but readers may forgive the philosopher’s often selfish, single-minded tendencies when he is seen through the light of Heloise’s powerful love: "For I often come with parched throat longing to be refreshed by the nectar of your delightful mouth and to drink thirstily the riches scattered in your heart. . . .

With God as my witness, I declare that there is no one in this world breathing life-giving air whom I desire to love more than you." <I>Alison Hood is a writer in San Rafael, California.</I>

<B>Love's labors found</B> The saying "all the world loves a lover" has never rung truer than in the case of that famous, ill-fated couple, Heloise and Abelard. Their tumultuous story, which has been chronicled intriguingly but briefly in the lovers' eight letters, is one of…

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