A few years ago, I read Demick’s book “Nothing to Envy”, about life in North Korea, and it was fascinating. In her new book, she explores another mysterious part of the world, the town of Ngaba, eleven thousand feet above sea level, in Tibet. It was one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese communists encountered one…
This is a big, heavy coffee-table book about the graphic design of the punk music scene. The author, an American, became obsessed with UK punk in 1977. (I did, too, so I can relate.) He found the graphic design of punk records, posters, buttons, and fliers fascinating, and he began collecting them. His collection grew to massive proportions. This book…
This book tells the story of Hendrix’s rise to fame as the best and most creative guitarist in rock, taking us through his childhood of poverty, hunger, and severe neglect, his enlisting in the army, his fascination with music, and his ultimate mastery of the instrument. The book goes into his troubled family life, the girlfriends and other women in…
This is a collection of stories (13 of them) that mostly focus on the personal and family life of the son of an immigrant family in Houston. The father is Latino and the mother is black, and as the son grows into adulthood, he has to deal with life as an immigrant, namely the prejudices and economic realities in his…
This is an informative little book photographic forensics, namely, how to tell whether a photograph has been altered. The book is published by MIT Press, so it’s no surprise that the book goes into a lot of technical details. The details are complicated, and it practically turns the book into a technical manual. The author does describe several court cases…
I’m not sure what to make of this book. A middle-aged white couple and their two teenage kids are vacationing at a secluded Airbnb in the Hamptons. Unexpectedly, the black owners of the home knock on the door, telling the guests that the power on the east coast is knocked out, presumably due to some nebulous national incident. They’d feel…
This might be the best novel I’ve read all year. This book is a combination of fairy tale, murder mystery, and philosophy book. Who has the right to live? Who has the right to kill? Who determines who is sane or not? It’s the tale of an intelligent, quirky old woman living in a remote Polish village near the border…
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…
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…
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. …
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…
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…