“When we choose a typeface,” asks Garfield, “what are we really saying?” His book offers an informed and pleasing answer,...
A thoroughly entertaining, well-informed tour of typefaces, some now 560 years old, some invented within just the last few years.
If you own a computer, chances are good that you have hundreds of fonts available on your machine. Unless you’re a typophile, then the chances are equally good that you don’t make full use of all those possibilities—or know why Minion is different from Garamond is different from Times New Roman. Enter Garfield, a genial Briton who confesses to “a soft spot for Requiem Fine Roman and HT Gelateria.” Some fonts, by the author’s account, are dear and necessary—the late-Renaissance inventions of Claude Garamond, for instance, which, adapted by the English compositor William Caslon, “would provide the letters for the American Declaration of Independence,” or Sabon, “one of the most readable of all book fonts.” Others are an offense to the eye, such as Comic Sans, which started life innocently enough but has been used so overly and wrongly as to constitute a typographic felony. (Garfield defends the font’s designer, though, who also designed Trebuchet, “which is a nicely rounded semi-formal humanist font ideal for web design.” The author traces the evolution of font families over the several technologies of typemaking and typesetting that have emerged in the last half-millennium, including some of the digital ones that are used today. He is just old enough, too, to pay homage to typography in quite another context, namely the “boastful B” and “dropped T” spelling out “The Beatles” on Ringo Starr’s drum kit. He also offers pointers on what fonts work best for what uses, even if some of his profiles should remain lost forever: The world would be a better place without Souvenir Light and Cooper Black.
“When we choose a typeface,” asks Garfield, “what are we really saying?” His book offers an informed and pleasing answer, and a lively companion to books such as Robert Bringhurst’s essential Elements of Typographic Style (1992) and John Lewis’s classic Typography: Design and Practice.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59240-652-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© 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.
