This anthology drawn from the pages of Ray Gun, one of the most visually idiosyncratic and original music magazines now being published, demonstrates just how consistently inventive and challenging the design of the magazine is but doesn't make the ``new niche cool'' publication any easier to understand. Kuipers, its editor, argues that too many magazines are addicted to ``the megalomaniacal need to control people, to steer culture away from the radical and toward the safe.'' One way in which they do that is by compartmentalizing art and text. Ray Gun doesn't: Words flow over images, dense blocks of text are squeezed into spreads featuring glowing color photographs or collages, a wide variety of typefaces are crowded into an issue. Another way in which magazines assert a rigid worldview is by strictly defining the roles of artists, writers, designers, and subjects: Ray Gun has recruited John Travolta, William S. Burroughs, Quentin Tarantino, Frank Zappa, and Keith Richards, among many others, as contributors, providing ``an open forum'' for the artists ``who define youth (or music) culture.'' The anthology offers a stunning gallery of cutting-edge design, but its highly experimental mix of images and text is likely to make it of interest only to designers and the already initiated.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83980-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
Problematic structure aside, a comprehensive history of Latin America's largest country.
A thoroughly documented scholarly treatise on Brazilian history.
In the first of two volumes spanning 500 years of Brazilian history, Hufferd focuses on the first 300 years of colonization in the northeast region. Portugal was seeking to build maritime trade to compete successfully with archrival Spain and to retain its national identity. The colony expanded westward from a number of large tracts of lands called captaincies, granted by Portuguese monarchs to wealthy royal favorites in return for profits gained through trade, breeding cattle and other ventures. These captaincies eventually gained the status of states, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Mato Grasso, Manaus and Amazonia. Over subsequent decades, enterprising adventurers and explorers from these captaincies ventured inland, establishing sugar mills, cultivating grazing land and extracting gold, silver and precious gems. All ventures were highly labor-intensive, requiring massive amounts of manpower driven by slaves from Africa and native tribes. In the second volume, Hufferd focuses on the final 200 years of Brazil's rapid industrialization. After the Portuguese monarchy was forced to relocate its base from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, it became the fulcrum of a delicate political system within the new country. The social and political structure favored privileged hereditary landowners, even after the last reigning Emperor Pedro II was deposed amidst strong republican sentiment. Continuing the narrative through 2000, Hufferd chronicles upheavals most often caused by the chronic underdevelopment of existing resources, as the landowners maintained authority over the land, to the detriment of the black, mulatto and tribal segments of Brazilian society, who remained disenfranchised until recent years. In each volume, the author illustrates his vast knowledge of the topic, and he weaves political, economic, social and biographical threads throughout the panoramic narrative. While the expansive footnotes demonstrate impeccable research, they eventually hinder the narrative flow, requiring endless paging back and forth–the dissertation-style format ultimately detracts from the book's impact.
Problematic structure aside, a comprehensive history of Latin America's largest country.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2006
ISBN: 1-4208-0278-X, Vol.
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
At 91, Spock (Dr. Spock on Parenting, 1988, etc.) offers his twilight thoughts on American society—and they're not happy ones. Although Spock's jabs come from the political left, his diagnosis is not unlike that of social conservatives like William Bennett. Among his points: The unraveling of family cohesiveness is a major cause of the country's social ills; there is a ``progressive coarsening of the society's attitude toward love and sexuality, which is further cheapened and exploited by television, films and popular music.'' But Spock also argues for better day-care facilities so that single motherhood needn't sentence both parent and child to poverty. He also discusses racial and gender discrimination. At heart, the old doctor is battling against a bottom-line, instrumental valuation of human life, an obsession with material riches rather than an appreciation of emotional richness.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1994
ISBN: 1-882605-12-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
