In a personal tour of modern architecture and the colorful, eccentric, clannish men (all men)—mostly displaced Europeans- -responsible for it, Blake (Curator for Architecture and Industrial Design/Museum of Modern Art; Form Follows Fiasco, 1977, etc.—not reviewed) recovers the energy, vision, and dedication that he says characterized the profession in the decades following WW II. Born in Germany, educated in England, Blake acquired his credentials in the conservative tradition of the University of Pennsylvania, under the tutelage of the puckish Louis Kahn. Sent on tour by Architectural Forum after WW II, he met the century's most influential architectural and design talents: Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Buckminster Fuller, Philip Johnson, et al. Living in Manhattan, Blake also met artists and photographers, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Piet Mondrian, and Alexey Brodovitch, art director for Harper's Bazaar. The author conveys the creative heat, high temperament, and inevitable politics that prevailed at luncheons with these artists and in their experimental houses on Long Island and in Connecticut, where the best and brightest argued that architects could offer social solutions to poverty, overpopulation, and fascism, and that architecture was responsible for the quality of the environment, even the future of mankind. But in 1963, laments Blake, idealism turned to careerism when, in order to satisfy a client, the redesigned Pan Am building was allowed to deface the Manhattan skyline. Gradually, says the author, more and more good people began to do bad work for the people who would pay the bills, and—in place of the silent, unassuming purity of the past—there arose a generation of ``postmodern poseurs'' and ``massive outpourings of gobbledygook.'' Blake's writing, like the architecture he admires, is simple, functional, humane, and profound, restoring with clarity and conviction the ``First Principles'' of modernism—which he celebrates in the conclusion of this powerful and outspoken book. (Ninety illustrations)
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-54896-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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