Perspective Books

This book will serve the sincere student of Qabala and Tarot for many years. The Tarot illustrations are very poor, but the student should have their own deck anyway. The book summarises many years of training in a single volume. Packed with no non-sense technical content but the real reason to buy this book are for the excellent meditations and exercises. A MUST HAVE.

Perez-Gomez wrote a very important book, the research on thearchitectural representation, and its roots, is enlightning, anddisturbing, in the sense that he pushes us to rethink our reflexes of perceptions and representation of architecture.

I am a graduate student of architecture:
This is a wonderful and exciting text.
Ingraham, coming from a literary background, enters onto the stage of architecture with an fresh perspective of the production and reproduction of architecture.
Her study pays accute attention to the productive details of architectural drawing, and provides an interesting analysis of such production in political, gender and historical terms.

This book shows some of the best architectural illustrators in the world. It is a must for architects, illustrators and anyone interested in the art of architectural illustration.

George Fredrickson is one of the few remaining genuine heavy weights still writing on the issue of race in America. There are 17 essays in this book, grouped into three sections. The essays in Section One summarizes the intellectual history of race up through Reconstruction. Section Two does the same thing for the slave era; and Section Three attempts a cross-cultural analysis of slavery. The introductory essays do an excellent job of setting the stage for the reader in each of the later sections.

The present volume argues for retaining the psycho-cultural interpretation as opposed to the more "Socialist-leaning" attempts to conflate racism and "classism," a trend that is currently in vogue in much of the social and even sociological writings. I personally identify strongly with the point of view set forth here by the authors, since classism itself has a demonstrably clear racist component embedded within it.

The question this book poses and attempts to answer in the affirmative, is: Does race consciousness constitute an independent variable in American culture?

An alternative hypothesis is that since racism began with slavery--a European idea rooted in the economics of labor exploitation--it must thus be based solely on impersonal but rational calculations and on the economic circumstances that ushered in the slave era. Racism must therefore be a European idea transplanted to American shores where it remains today still alien to American instincts, values, mores, ethics and traditions. It is a facile argument indeed, but one made at times by both black and white scholars. However, a stronger, if not more compelling case can be made that even though racism was inspired by the European derived economic exploitation of slavery, it eventually took on an indigenous and a peculiarly devastating American life of its own. That American life of racism is still rooted not just in economics, but also in the psychological, ideological, cultural and social history and identity of white Americans. That this is an undeniable fact of American life is a conclusion difficult for any serious scholar to avoid. As George M. Frederick has put it: "... racism, although the child of slavery, not only outlived its parent but grew stronger and more independent after slavery's demise.

The Neo-Marxists have tried, with varying degrees of failure, to fit American racism into the neo-Marxist made "procrustean bed" of the model of a Marxist economic class-struggle. As they have so well known, the fly in that ointment has always been that working class whites do not adhere to the mentality or ideology of the Marxist Proletarian model, preferring instead to identify with the corporate class that exploits them as much as they exploit the non-white working class, against whom they see themselves as competing against.

This point of course underscores one of the more glaring gaps in the Marxist analysis: that it fails to take into account the overwhelming significance of race in the functioning of U.S. culture. Before the socialist class struggle model can be applied or analyzed in the context of American social life, it too must first be segregated along racial lines. As W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out in his Dusk of Dawn: "...the split between white and black workers [is] greater than between white workers and the capitalist." Serious analysts and scholars must be suspicious of any approaches that would subordinate the race question to class or gender questions--that is to say of those that ignore or leave unexamined the intellectual, cultural, and psychological roots of race prejudice in the U.S.

It is true, as Du Bois has pointed out, that plantation capitalists relied on free black labor during slavery and very cheap black labor thereafter [and on other mostly minority labor throughout most of American history]. However, this system was legitimized by, greatly facilitated and sustained by, the racism and prejudice of whites who failed to benefit directly from the economic exploitation of blacks. The wages of the white workers was always only slightly greater than the built-in benefits of slavery. Frederickson quotes Du Bois as suggesting that even the planters themselves may have been motivated more by class interest considerations than by economic ones.

No researchers can forget that racism still is a product of the American caste social order. This order, although affected by the means of production and the economic system, is still independent of it. White racism is, and always has been, an autonomous and independent source of social power and identity in America, free-standing from almost all economic concerns. This apparently is a difficult lesson about American culture for the Socialist thinkers to grasp. Were it not so, America would have long since developed a genuine interracial class-consciousness. It is racism alone that has prevented the development of an interracial class-consciousness, or anything close to it, or even a firm basis for it. It is thus clear (at least to this reader) that a hybrid interactionist approach offers the best opportunity to get at the underlying truth of black-white relationships in the U.S. Neither the Marxists dismissal of racism as uninteresting, nor the primordialists view that it is inevitable and a relative constant force of great potency, encourages a close examination of the role actually played by racial consciousness.

Racial injustice is a distinct evil, much more heinous and insidious than normal capitalism inequality. As George M. Frederickson has said: Demoting people from the ranks of humanity on grounds of race or ethnicity, and treating them accordingly, is a sin of unique and horrendous character. In seeking to combat this malignancy we need to confront it directly and not simply subsume it under some other form of injustice or inequality.

Intellectual discussion on race in America do not get better than this. Fifty stars.

The relationship of art to politics has always been an uneasy one, and never more so than in the twentieth century. Governments seek to bend art to their own purposes; artists resist and subvert such efforts. But what happens when artists work on behalf of a political program or idea? Is their art corrupted? Exactly when is art propaganda?

As Toby Clark argues, propaganda appears in many guises, not all of them suspect. Nor is the desire to persuade always at odds with the desire to create works of beauty. What is the relatonship of propaganda to the avant-garde? How do artists use scale and style to create political effects? How do art styles become identified with political systems? Is art tainted or elevated by its political content?

In this wide ranging book, Clark examines work from all points of the globe, from the state propaganda of communism to the public art of democracies, from protest art of the 1960s to the efforts of artists in the nations of modern Africa. Beginning with the classic propaganda art of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Stalin's Soviet Union - each with its own style, motives, and purposes - he then examines how democratic governments have also sponsored propaganda art, especially in wartime, exploring such problamatic issues as the representation of enemies and the commemoration of the dead.

Art created in opposition to ruling ideas and values may also fall under the rubric of propaganda. Since the beginning of the century radical artists have embraced revolutionary, pacifist, feminist, and anticolonial causes. Clark describes the spectrum of competing theories and goals of protest art from Africa to Latin America, from Europe to the United States to China, and uncovers the complex rhetoric, the high beauty, and the ambiguous role of art that dwells in the political realm.
--- from book's back cover

Art and Reality, the ways of the creative process by Joyce Cary who wrote some great fiction, including THE HORSES MOUTH, starts with 'intuition', a right brain function in today's lexicon which is what we can learn from dogs and cats and other visionaries. Discovery of some truth through intuition unleashes the creative force, and Cary knew this through his own writing. He uses examples of all the great writers, Melville, Austen et al....and the great painters...Monet who found expression in mere objects, and Picasso who could break down objects and insights into abstractions. Great book, hard to get, but worth it if you can find it.

Good multidisciplinary studies are rare, but this one is a masterpiece. Willats presents a systematic study of images, which allows to describe in a unified framework not only artworks from all periods and locations, but also technical drawings, children drawings, etc. This solid framework then allows very coherent and relevant description, comparisons and studies of evolution.

His main thesis is the separation between drawing systems (exact perspective, naive perspective, orthographics projection, etc.) and the denotation system (line drawing, silhouette, optical representation, etc.) He includes recent advances in computer vision, art history, children psychology and human vision to ground this classification.

This book is of high interest for all those who are interested in images and representation: art historian, critics, artists, illustrators, psychologists, computer scientists, etc. I had loved Art and Illusion (Gombrich) and Art and Visual Perception (Arnheim), Willats' book is their natural complement.

.....read this book. This book was written from the heart. For the most part, it is written for an audience of young physicians but with an awareness that the patient may also be reading. It is told from the perspective of the experienced physician, in this case the author, Edward C. Rosenow III, M.D., who worked at Mayo Clinic for 31 years who learned "that many times the gift of caring and compassion are more effective in healing than the power of modern medicine." There are two main sections: The Art of Living and the Art of MedicinePeople will find it an invaluable guide for their own life and work.

I particularly enjoyed the chapters on How to Be a Patient, Qualities of the Respected Person, Simplify Your Life, Your Relationship to People You Work With. The chapter called End of Life Issues was incredibly well done. Amazing work.

A major philosophy repeated in the book was: "FAMILY, FRIENDS, FUN/FELLOWSHIP, FORGIVE, FORGET ....... work." The book is sprinkled with quotes collected by Dr. Rosenow over the years. Colette says, "What a wonderful life I've had, I only wish I realized it sooner!"

The book is filled with lots of advice such as these gems from the section on volunteering:

"The gift of self-giving can be as simple as smiling!"
"The best thing you have to give is yourself!"
"Volunteering develops compassion, improves your self-esteem, and creates a transient euphoria."

The casual style of the writing gave me the feeling that I was listening and learning from a compassionate mentor. The book is published "on-demand." It is not a slickly produced or over-edited. I found that added to the charm. The author's voice was clear and true.

Even if you are just interested in learning more about how a successful physician thinks and works, you'll enjoy this book. I know I'll be a better patient for reading it and I'm sure the care I receive will improve as a result.

This brilliant essay, wich won in Spain the prestigious Anagrama Prize, was writting by Eugenio Trias, the only spaniard philosopher who won Nietszche Award, the Nobel
in philosophy.
Since Plato and the ancient greeks there has been a " marriage"between" eros and poiesis, between life and
creativity,and the artist and his subjectivity and the common
laws and culture of the "polis" . There was also a changing
alliance between these terms trought the Rennaisance
thinker Pico della Mirandola, Goethe, Hegel and Nietzshe,
but there are a very divorce, as has seen for example novelist Thomas Mann, in modern art. because and excese of criticism. A divorce that we have to put end, or art will .never have again its own and lost fertility.