Nietzsche was right when he spoke of eternal return. After all, Woodstock came back, mud and all. Now, 25 years after the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog, comes this new edition designed to tell us where we can get the books, seeds, and software we need to live well. Luckily, this book looks to be a lot more relevant than the silly concert redux. Under the stewardship of Rheingold (The Virtual Community, 1993, etc.), some of the more doe-eyed utopianism of the original Catalog has given way to a cannier view of what it takes to get by in the world without becoming a rapine, sexist, racist, exploiting, polluting establishment lout. Technology, for instance, is now our friend. There are seven pages on cyberspace, offering resource information about bulletin boards and tips for the Internet. There's a section on women's health; lists of activist groups; and scads of stuff for econauts and other environmentally conscious folk. Presented in a postmodern stew of text and image, this Catalog is like a Table of Contents to the Zeitgeist—or the coolest Yellow Pages around.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-251141-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An eloquent and persuasive study of how the American jury system has degenerated since colonial times and what can be done to restore it. ``Jurors are forever smarter than assumed by lawyers working from manuals,'' writes Abramson (Politics/Brandeis; The Electronic Commonwealth, 1988), and he should know; he was a prosecutor in a DA's office. When he argues, for example, that juries should be empowered to vote their consciences even if that means nullifying the law as the judge explains it to them, he is writing both as a scholar well versed in jury practice at the time of the Founding Fathers and as someone with firsthand exposure to modern juries—a rare combination in a legal historian. Abramson probes the historic debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists over whether juries should be predominantly ``local'' (neighbors who know local customs but are not impartial with respect to the defendant) or predominantly ``impartial.'' Over time the impartial jury won out, but he argues that the notion of impartiality has come to mean both ``empty-minded'' (witness, he says, the selection of jurors in the trials of Oliver North and the Menendez brothers) and ``representational,'' a convocation of society's various subgroups voting according to their inevitable biases. Abramson has nothing against impanelling women or ethnic minorities on juries; on the contrary, he favors the inclusion of subgroups to insure ``enriched deliberations across group lines.'' His distaste for ``mere proportional representation for group differences'' may strike the reader as a philosophical quibble, but he suggests concrete ways to restore the jury to the 18th-century ideal: impanel well-informed citizens; instruct the jury that they may nullify unjust laws; end all peremptory challenges of jurors based on minority status; insist on unanimous verdicts (which state verdicts do not currently need to be). However, Abramson is also realistic: He knows that juries are incapable of handing down color-blind death sentences and finds that ``intolerable.'' Brilliant, accessible scholarship that perfectly complements Stephen J. Adler's recent, anecdotal The Jury (p. 893).
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-03698-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
The questionable premise of this data-packed book is that the avant-garde is dead, that the isolated artist spurned by a ridiculing public no longer exists, and that today challenging art is readily brought into mainstream venues. Altshuler, director of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in New York City, focuses on 19 exhibitions held between 1905 and 1969, when the avant-garde was still alive. He covers, among other movements, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, the Blaue Reiter, Dada, Action Painting, and Pop, ending with the ``When Attitudes Become Form'' show at the Bern, Switzerland, Kunsthalle, devoted to the work of conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth, Joseph Beuys, and Richard Artschwager. Altshuler notes that by the late '60s the art- loving public had come not just to tolerate difficult art, but to ``crave'' it. The story of the 20th-century artistic avant-garde is hardly unfamiliar. For years, the permanent collection of New York City's Museum of Modern Art followed the same time line as Attshuler's; also Robert Hughes covered similar ground in The Shock of the New (1981). But Altshuler emphasizes the intense battles artists fought to bring their work into the public eye; many of the century's ground-breaking shows, like the ``First Exhibition of the Editors of the Blaue Reiter'' (Munich, 1911), were organized by the artists themselves and financed by the group's wealthier members. The author describes a group in Japan, the little-known Gutai Art Association, whose activities were funded by Jiro Yoshihara, head of a cooking-oil empire. But unlike today's corporate sponsors, Yoshihara kept company with his artists and felt deeply about their work. Altshuler provides a fascinating account of ``Gutai's Experimental Outdoor Modern Art Exhibition to Challenge the Burning Midsummer Sun'' (outside of Osaka, 1955), showing how that work anticipated process, performance, and conceptual art. While Altshuler does raise valid points, his argument neglects today's increasingly conservative climate for art funding; many avant-garde artists whose grants have recently been withdrawn or their applications denied might feel less than coddled and coopted.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8109-3637-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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