A book about books that deserves a spot in every bibliophile’s collection.
A lively compendium that proves that, at least in some respects, you can indeed judge a book by its cover.
The cover or dust jacket of a book does many jobs, write literary scholar Alworth and designer Mendelsund, creative director at the Atlantic: It’s meant to sell the book, of course, but it’s also ideally a work of art. The latter requires explanation, “since art is usually understood to have no commercial purpose whatever, and there’s no getting around the fact that book covers are advertisements.” In the most memorable instances, there’s no question of the art aspect: Think of the cover of The Great Gatsby, with its all-seeing female eyes, an image that figures at several points in this book. The challenge of doing double duty as art and ad grows greater with the increased digitization of the book, whether as an e-book or as a physical object sold online, in either instance requiring the cover to be “as effective at 1 1/2 inches tall, which is the size of an Amazon thumbnail image, as they are at 9 inches tall, displayed in the window of the brick-and-mortar bookstore.” Alworth and Mendelsund range widely in their examples, from pulp fiction to the most elevated literature—Ulysses, for example, whose cover made highly effective use of the then-new Futura typeface. Some covers are accidental, as when the designer of A Clockwork Orange, in its movie tie-in edition, failed to come through, requiring an all-night session from the art director. “Every time I see that image,” he says, “all I see are the mistakes.” Mistakes or no, the design is brilliant, as are the covers of Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman (its single drop of blood signals the genre) and Lee Clay Johnson’s Nitro Mountain, whose designer notes that the photo of “a deer alerted to footsteps” connects to “The premise in film that fear builds in the anticipation, rather than in the thing itself.”
A book about books that deserves a spot in every bibliophile’s collection.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-58102-1
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
A detailed look at an important chapter in the life of one of the iconic artists of the late 20th century.
Lavishly illustrated volume chronicling Lennon and Ono’s years in New York, leading up to the recording of John’s 1973 album, Mind Games.
The book is organized largely along chronological lines, with photos, interviews, letters, and poems from each period. The photos are the weakest element, with too many minor variations of the same shots. There is a fair amount of material on their political activism, a lot of it in response to Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign for reelection. At first the couple associated with American radicals such as Abbie Hoffman and John Sinclair, but the attraction wore off when it became clear that they saw Lennon mainly as someone who could help draw attention to the movement. Lennon underwent a protracted battle to avoid deportation, nominally because of his 1970 London arrest for possession of marijuana, but just as likely because of his political activism. There is also a good bit of material on Lennon’s conversion to feminism and his work for women’s rights, on the mystical influences on his and Ono’s work, and on their lives together. The most interesting aspect of the book to students of Lennon’s music is undoubtedly the inclusion of lyrics from his songs of the era, usually accompanied on facing pages by the former Beatle’s handwritten drafts, with guitar chords indicated and his comments on the song’s inspiration. The final few pages are given up to interviews of the backing musicians and recording engineers who worked on the Mind Games album.
A detailed look at an important chapter in the life of one of the iconic artists of the late 20th century.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780500027783
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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