An engaging and occasionally provocative analysis.
Having devoted decades of his professional life to the Bauhaus school of art and design, the author celebrates the iPhone as the perfect realization of that movement’s sensibility.
For Weber (The Bauhaus Group, 2009, etc.), Bauhaus is much more than a design collective that began a century ago in Germany, where “all in all, it would last only fourteen years.” It is more than the aesthetic principles that have been kept alive by adherents in the worlds of visual art and architecture. It is more, even, than a design for living, though it is very much that. It is a religion, a cosmology, a way of ordering and understanding the universe, a spirit that Weber traces from Plato—whose “best-known broad-sweeping profundity” was “the good is the beautiful”—through Steve Jobs, among the latest to apprehend that “design—capable of miracles, truthful and alluring—was the new religion.” Of course, this religion has a moral code: to serve the many rather than the elite with its simple beauty and to avoid any ostentatious filigree in its devotion to the streamlined essential. “In the 1970s, I devoured Bauhaus values at the source. I bridge the gap between two great epochs in the modernization of civilization,” writes the author, whose book bridges those eras as well. For more than four decades, Weber has served as executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, keepers of the Bauhaus flame, founded by the couple who “were like a two-person religious sect. The Bauhaus had been the place where they had met and started to practice their faith.” Flash-forward over the decades, and we see the emergence of Steve Jobs as a kind of second coming, with the iPhone serving as “the perfect Bauhaus design.” The narrative contains more Bauhaus elements than most iPhone devotees have ever paused to consider, but the author makes a strong case that a revolution in modernist design has found fulfillment in contemporary culture.
An engaging and occasionally provocative analysis.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65728-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
In a whirlwind tour of 13 archaeological sites around the world, Fagan's sleepy, fact-heavy narrative fails to present major scientific discoveries as much more than the sum of their plodding details. Fagan (Quest for the Past, 1994, etc.) has a solid grasp of the complexities and innovations of the discipline's techniques. Nevertheless, his central point, that archaeologists are now using advanced scientific technology and have transformed themselves from ``diggers to time detectives,'' should come as no surprise to anyone with even a mild interest in science. The book is compelling in those sections where Fagan details the highly specific conclusions that archaeologists draw from mundane bits of evidence (bone-fragment analysis reveals the prehistoric Anasazi of the American Southwest practiced cannibalism) and the use of high-technology instruments to explain the mysteries of ancient civilizations (the use of NASA satellites to determine how the Maya fed their large population). But Fagan undermines his stated purpose by discussing several major discoveries that were based on low-technology innovations (the flotation tank that separates out prehistoric seeds from a site on the Euphrates river) and no technology (the interpretation of Mayan glyphs by creative linguists). Nowhere does the book explain why these particular discoveries were profiled, and not all chapters include explanatory illustrations beyond a map. As such, Time Detectives is plagued by a general sense of incoherence, which is heightened by overgeneralizations, absurd arguments (the ``similarity'' between violent conflict among the pre-Columbian Chumash Indians and present-day homicide statistics), and glaringly obvious statements: ``No single genius `invented' agriculture.'' The most serious flaw is Fagan's failure to communicate the excitement of archaeological research. We are left with a detailed but superficial review of the important findings of several modern archaeologists. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen; 26 line drawings)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-79385-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
In this eloquent memoir, on the eve of his 80th birthday, Hay (The Bird of Light, 1991) reviews the lessons of a life lived close to nature. Widely recognized as the dean of modern nature writing, Hay divides his retirement between Cape Cod and Maine. Here he cultivates a deepening connection to nature, whether in reading the wild grasses to understand the land that lies beneath or observing in trees the stages of growth that parallel his own. As a child in Manhattan, he was first enchanted with nature in a diorama of timber wolves chasing deer across the moonlit snow at the American Museum of Natural History. There is much to be said for the ``eye of a child,'' Hay recalls, as it conveys a wonder that does not seek to control or define what it sees. Adults miss that wonder when they rush to explain rather than appreciate such mysteries as why pilot whales strand themselves on a beach. He laments the distance that the introduction of technology has opened up between humankind and nature. In the fishing industry, dragnets and radar have encouraged grossly wasteful harvesting that has destroyed entire marine ecosystems. When we repeatedly cut ourselves off from the realities of nature by viewing fish in terms of profit and loss rather than as essential food, we risk ``casting ourselves into a limbo, a darkness of our own making.'' Everywhere around him, Hay sees our desecration of nature, from the death of the Chesapeake Bay to the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains. Both his point and his examples are less than fresh, but he compellingly presents his argument that ``we ignore a deeper reality that the land is better known through respecting its mysteries than putting it on a shopping list.'' This memoir shows no diminution in Hay's genius for expressing a powerful and contagious appreciation of nature.
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1995
ISBN: 0-8070-8532-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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