A grand tribute and informative contribution to publishing history.
A visionary publishing house.
To commemorate 75 years of the publishing house Thames & Hudson, historian Nyburg contributes three essays chronicling its evolution from its founding in 1949 to the present. From the start, Austrian émigré Walter Neurath and his partner, Eva Feuchtwang, aimed to produce a “museum without walls”: beautiful and affordable illustrated books on arts and culture. They chose to name their company after two important rivers, in London and New York, nodding to their international aspirations. Their inaugural volume, published in 1950, was English Cathedrals. Early partnerships with the American publisher Abrams and the French publisher Fernand Hazan expanded their list, and more international alliances followed; the company eventually had offices around the world. Titles often were suggested by the many cultural figures who served as T&H’s eyes and ears. As their publication of art books grew—100 titles about Picasso alone—so did their reputation for the high quality of their reproductions. Nyburg discusses the many series they developed over the years: Man and Myth, edited by Joseph Campbell; The Past in the Present, edited by archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes; World of Art, edited by noted art historian Herbert Read; Art and Imagination; and the Library of European Civilization, among scores more on architecture, photography, biography, design, music, and fashion. After Neurath’s death in 1967, T&H was led by his son, Thomas, along with his daughter, Constance, and Feuchtwang; Thomas stepped down in 2005, leaving two daughters in key positions in a company that had expanded both in England and abroad. Alert to cultural and technological changes, T&H titles came to include topics as diverse as countercultural movements and chocolate. The visually stunning volume contains 2,000 illustrations, 1,800 in color.
A grand tribute and informative contribution to publishing history.Pub Date: March 12, 2026
ISBN: 9780500028063
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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