A coffee table–ready tribute to photography and design.
A glossy photography collection featuring a broad variety of typography and design combinations.
This book brings together photographs taken by Bhatti (a photographer and designer who published under his artistic identity, Mannbutte) and interpretations of those photographs by the author and 14 of his fellow artists and designers. Many of those interpretations make use of typography, often in the form of tributes to a typeface the designer clearly admires: “The girl was tall. Her legs were slender. Kind of like Akzidenz Grotesk,” says text accompanying the silhouette of one leggy model. Sometimes the typefaces are anthropomorphized: “Meet Futura. Thin and bold. And sometimes when she’s had one too many, italic.” Besides serving as a tribute to the variety of typefaces available to designers, the book also celebrates the range of artistic imagination. Many of the photographs in the collection have been interpreted by more than one contributor, often with strikingly different results. Photographs are reprocessed, transformed by color and given new meaning through design overlays. Some of the photographs are displayed without any typographical design at all—a surprising choice given the book’s title. In fact, aside from the occasional clever wordplay, typefaces make up a far less substantial portion of the book than the title and introduction might lead readers to expect. The emphasis is clearly on the images as well as the fact that these designers want readers to know that the contributors see themselves as creators of profound, meaningful art. Whether the reader agrees will depend on his or her patience with the concept, particularly as it is represented by attractive females with come-hither expressions. There is no question, however, that the book as a whole is an attractive package, well-laid-out with high-quality, full-bleed printing. The collaboration effectively blends the styles of a variety of different artistic perspectives, both contrasting and complementary.
A coffee table–ready tribute to photography and design.Pub Date: March 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483604787
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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