Not surprisingly, I loved this book. I love photography, and I’ve been enthralled by the Haight-Ashbury era and the music coming out of that scene for years. Jim Marshall was a spectacular photographer who not only took iconic photos of musicians (he’s the guy responsible for the photo of Hendrix setting his guitar ablaze at Monterey Pop, Johnny Cash famously…
This was a pretty intense novel. It tells the tragic story of Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee, and Sarah, a young widow in England. The lives of these two women intersected violently on a Nigerian beach years before the novel opens, and their reunion brings forth a devastating tale that haunts you long after the book is finished. The author…
Continue to Part 6 of our Trip to Peru
The role of photography in the world today has gotten tougher to assess, given that everybody has a camera with them at all times. The author argues that photography should be reassessed, and be thought of as a visual “language”. To do this, we need to discard the pre-conceived notion that successful photography is defined by a single successful image…
Mark Howard is a Canadian record producer who has worked with a lot of bands over the years. I was hoping for some cool stories about the artists he’s worked with, and the book has them, but not nearly enough pages are devoted to this. Instead, you get a lot of detailed jargon about recording equipment, as well as endless…
Continue to Part 5 of our trip to Peru – Machu Picchu
Although I’m not an avid viewer, I did regularly watch the show 60 Minutes years ago during its heyday. I’d heard that there was a lot of drama that occurred behind the scenes at the show, and this author promised a candid account. He did not disappoint. You quickly learn what a total prick and sexist pig Mike Wallace was,…
This is a pretty intense book. Catherine Gildiner is a (now retired) psychotherapist from Canada. She has treated thousands of patients over the years, but five of them stand out in particular. These are patients who have suffered terrible, horrific childhood trauma, both psychological and physical, and manage to survive and overcome it through the use of varying coping mechanisms. …
Continue to Part 4 of our trip to Peru – The Dogs of Peru
In the fall of 2017, an object was discovered zipping through our solar system at an unusual speed. It was studied extensively, but no one could figure out exactly what it was. One thing was for certain, however: the object came from outside our solar system. Named “Oumuamua”, (a Hawaiian word for “a messenger from afar arriving first”), this was…
Check out Part 3 of our Peruvian journey HERE
Ed Van der Elsken is one of the Netherlands’ most famous photographers. In late 2019, the Rijksmuseum and the Netherlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam acquired Van der Elsken’s entire photographic legacy. Among the many obscure and forgotten photographs was the design for a photobook called feest (feast). It was compiled by Van der Elsken himself. He created a ‘dummy’ book around 1960, but…
As a cat veterinarian, I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to diagnose and treat the many physical ailments, and address the myriad physical issues, that afflict cats. As for their mental state, that’s always been a challenge and a mystery, and I was hoping this book would give me a little more wisdom in this area. It turned…
Vondelpark is undoubtedly the most well known park in Amsterdam, and probably the Netherlands. Located not far from the Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum, and Van Gogh Museum, it gets tons of visitors every year. Although you can find quiet areas in the park to relax and chill out, that’s not why most people come here. This is a park for people…