Washington University Books

"Lawrence (1917-2000) grew up in Harlem, then worked and studied in many parts of the country and in New York until 1971, when he joined the faculty of the U. of Washington in Seattle. Editors Nesbett and DuBois, both of the Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonn<'e> [sic] Project, bring together eight in-depth essays by distinguished art historians who explore and interpret Lawrence's work and life[,] his brilliant art and his identity as an African American artist. Also included is an essay on the binding media and pigments found in Lawrence's paintings and a chronology of his life and reception. This edition was published in conjunction with a major retrospective organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. in 2001 (and scheduled to travel to several venues through 2003); a previous edition was published in 2000 (minus 50 pages of information about the exhibition) as part of a two-volume set titled [?]. The essays are illustrated with about 140 color reproductions, and the catalogue section features small reproductions of works in the exhibition."--Booknews

Jacob Lawrence, who died a year ago at age 82, was one of the great American artists of the 20th century -- or any century for that matter. I had the privilege recently of viewing "The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence" at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and was extremely impressed. If you can't make it to the Phillips Collection, this book is the next best thing, with more than 200 full color reproductions of Lawrence's work.

And what a powerful body of work it is, mainly -- but not only -- on the African-American experience. Themes include: slavery; escape via the Underground Railroad; heros and heroines like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman (plus Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture); black migration to the North; continued persecution (lynchings, Jim Crow) well into the 20th century; the Harlem Renaissance; and more. Lawrence's style is simple (but NOT simplistic!), urgent, and direct, using inexpensive materials (cheap store-bought poster paints on hardboard -- whatever Lawrence could afford), which give new meaning to the expression, "less is more!" You get the feeling in looking at these paintings that Lawrence HAD to paint, to bear witness, and to let the world know the situation of his people.

"Over the Line" is a valuable book for many reasons. For one thing, my understanding is that these paintings, sketches, etc. have never before been published in color, or at all, in any other books on Lawrence. "Over the Line" also give you information on Lawrence's life, which was very interesting in its own right. Finally, these painting are simply a joy to look at, over and over, which this book will allow you to do. I strongly recommend that you get a hold of it!

True, this is a large collection of Lawrence's work, however it is very incomplete. In the beginning of Lawrence's career, only 21 years old, he produced the Toussaint L'Ouverture Series. A 41 panel series dedicated to the struggle of enslaved Africans and their victory, which was never more blatantly successful than that of Haiti under the slave-born revolutionary known as Toussaint L'Ouverture. In 1938, when this series was completed it was so monumental for the Pan-African American experience, yet this book refuses to acknowledge it.

First, there is only one print, and one that is subtle and not graphic (such as black soldiers defeating whites which was a major theme of the series). It is an insult to the origin of Lawrence's genius and his legacy, especially in regards to pre-Civil Rights African America:which was his community, not the pseudo-intermingled America of today that is now trying to claim him as an "American" artist, taking away his true existence as an African American artist, not American, especially during an era when his people were so restricted from full citizenship.

Only purchase this book if you want a false story, one that ignores and criticizes (the author had the audacity to ridicule Lawrence for the Toussaint Series because the author claims Lawrence was not knowledgable about the Haitian revolution). Though I think Lawrence was aware, it is irrelevant. As a black man descended from slaves, the revolution was within him, he did not have to read about it. He felt it. The Haitian revolution belongs not to just Haiti, it is a symbol of the enslaved African's struggle against white oppression and the ability to be victorious at it. Even if that is all he knew, it is enough. He did not have to read about a struggle for equality, it was his very existence.

I honestly have to say that the lure to the book "Northwest Coast Art: A Guide to Crests, Beings, and Symbols" was the cover. Wow! If you love Northwest Coast Art, the beautiful hat with the frog crest motif is a big fat warm dangling from a hook and you're the fish. It's a wonderful book for those who are just starting to have interest in the art forms of the Northwest Coast peoples, but it will not interest those who have a firm foundation of the culture and symbols. Its set up like a dictionary and alphabetizes terms, animals, ceremonies, and more. I liked it, for the most part, but it felt more like it was gaged for the high school reader; but you got to love that cover! I won't lie. That's definetly what reeled me in to purchasing this book on-line.

A wonderful reference book for anyone interested in
understanding the intricacies and symbolism of the
art of Northwest Coast native peoples. Well illustrated.

This is a very good book that fills a definite need.

It is very easy to use, because it is organized like an encyclopedia (although nowhere near as large), with entries listed alphabetically. Each entry is between one paragraph and half a page in length.

The book covers a nice range of topics. It covers the standard myths and legends in a very condensed way that gives you the gist of what you need to know so when someone says "this shows the Raven stealing the Sun" you'll know why that's important.

The author also covers everyday items in a native's life, like clams and coppers, and tells why these things are important.

The third type of entry is totally mythological beings, like Sisiyutl, and tells just enough to get a good sense of who each is and why it is important.

The breadth of the book is excellent, as the author also covers things that are rarely covered in other books. For example, the Heron was not uncommonly used as a crest and in artwork, but it is almost never even mentioned in other books. This book has it.

The title is somewhat misleading, however, because it does not really explain the meaning of Northwest Coast art, per se, but rather explains the meaning of the things that are depicted in the artwork.

For example, the entry on Beaver goes for 8 paragraphs talking about why beaver is important to the people for its fur, along with some of the myths and legends and Beaver's place in the world of mythological creates. Right at the end of the entry, the author finally gives 3 sentences telling us the characteristics of a beaver as it is depicted in the art in order to help you identify a beaver carving or drawing. So you understand the meaning of the THING, but not of the ART. Some of the similar types of entries don't even tell how the thing is normally depicted.

If your primary goal is to understand how the art is created, or how to identify the various creatures by looking at the artwork, or even how to draw it yourself, this is not the book for you. the few pages in the appendix are well done, but far too brief. Instead, get "Looking at Indian Art of the Northwest Coast" by Stewart, "Learning by Designing" by Gilbert and Clark, and "Northwest Coast Indian Art, an Analysis of Form" by Holm.

If you want more extensive descriptions of myths and legends, there are a large number of books available. Also, this book has very little in the way of artwork or pictures. It is very text-oriented.

Nonetheless, if you want a handy, easy-to-use, easy-to-read book that is more broad in its coverage than any I've found so far, and at the same time gets right to the point in each entry, this is the book for you. It is well worth having as part of your library.

A great tale about some truly remarkable people, especially when read in light of our soft and pampered current society. I have been involved in Boy Scouts for more than 20 years and have hiked (more or less) the route of the Press Expedition on two separate 50 mile hikes. It was a life changing experience for the 24 young men and adults who experienced it. A large part of the experience was sharing exerpts from a borrowed copy of this book with the group. Some of the experiences from the book are truly remarkable. Those hikes have been more than a decade ago now. I'm going on a 50 mile hike in the southern Sierra Nevadas this summer with a group of 18 and am buying my own copy of the book to share the experiences with a new generation.

An excellent book for those obssessed with these mountains. Read what the first western visitors experienced.

This AIA guide to Washington, DC is a great resource for those interested in learning a little about the many interesting buildings in the nation's capital. It is concise enough to add more interest and depth to a tourist's visit to DC and comprehensive enough to offer enough information to keep an amateur architecture enthusiast informed about DC's architecture. As a student of classical architecture in the nation's capital, I used this book to provide me with some fundamental, perfunctory background about the monuments, federal buildings, and privately-owned buildings of the city. It has served me well and I have no doubt that it will provide most with a more than adequate introduction to the finer points of this nation's city.

This is a wonderful book that highlights all the most important buildings in the District. It gives a short synopsis on each buiding highlighted, some like the Capitol and the White House getting a bit more coverage. It was quite comprehensive, and the buildings covered came with pictures. It is not up to the level of the AIA Guide to Detriot or New York, but it is a nice guide none the less. I definitly recommend it to anyone interested in the architecture of the District.

I read this book for my History of Alaska course and found it to be an excellent resource. Spanning from the arrival of the first people in Alaska to modern times, it provides great summaries of every major event in Alaskan history. The text is extremely full of people, places and happenings. If you are looking for an in-depth history of Alaska, this is it.

The book contains more of a history of the Russian occupation as opposed to Alaska's history as a territory and State. In that sense, the title is misleading. also, it is not very "readable" either. The writing style does not grab me and I have a hard time making it through the chapters.

This is a wonderful storybook for grownups who used to listen wide-eyed to their family storytellers. Many familiar friends here in different guises.

Also useful for those doing folklore research as the book is well documented.

This collection of stories is a fascinating selection of Scandinavian folklore. Much of the material is from archives and earlier studies, but the authors bring the material to life through a discussion of the storytellers who told the tales. The book provides a good introduction to the storytelling traditions of the Scandinavian countries. Tales are indexed to tale types and motifs thereby providing good resources to connect the tales to other compilations of international folktales. The information on the storytellers, themselves, is well presented and provides insight into the connections between tellers and tales.

This book offers compelling proof that presidents have dumbed down their public speech in the last two centuries. It is one of the very few political books I've read that is not at all partisan - Lim places equal blame on Clinton as he does on Bush. Lim nevertheless makes it clear that because presidents now tell us what we want to hear rather than what we need to hear, we are headed for trouble.

Lim offers a fascinating account of how the very people who write presidential speeches also call these speeches "rose garden garbage." I especially enjoyed the chapter on speechwriters, all of whom - Republican or Democratic - complain about the fact that, as Peggy Noonan says, America's only "unstimulated organ (is) the brain." If even speechwriters complain of dumbing down, then Houston, we got a problem.

Lim does a good job of defending his case against the accusation of elitism, reminding us that when presidents dumb down, they are the ones who are being cynical. The American people deserve, and can handle better, he argues. Lim offers a particularly poignant account of President Bush's speeches on Iraq in the early months of the war, and argues that the country would have been better served if the president had been pushed to specify and demonstrate the evidence that Saddam Hussein had indeed possessed weapons of mass destruction. Instead, we allowed the president to talk us into war with such rousing, but meaningless catch-phrases as the "axis of evil." Thinking back on those years, Lim's explanation for how we were persuaded to go to war rings more true than any account I have read.

A short book that packs a lot of punch, this is a no-holds barred book on the dangers of a White House perpetually concerned with public relations. While the statistical analysis can be dry at times, Lim's wry, engaging prose (which reminds me of Christopher Hitchen's style) more than makes up for it.

So many academics consider themselves to be "intellectuals" - and most express bafflement at why they are so rejected by the public at large as well as national leaderships. The answer, of course, is that most intellectuals have nothing of value to offer. Lim quotes Lyndon Johnson, unarguably one of the great political manipulators to ever prowl the Senate halls, as saying of intellectuals: " They are "more concerned with style than they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with the trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America." It should be remembered that Johnson was not only college educated, but a former teacher as well. Golly, a different turn or two and he could have been a genuine intellectual!

As you can probably tell, I have little sympathy for Lim's argument. Contrary to Lim, Presidential rhetoric has never been "intellectual", but rather practical and political. Intellectual influence in Washington resulted in disasters like Wilson's Presidency, Kennedy's involving us in Vietnam and the Cuban missile fiasco. Needless to say, Wilson is one of Lim's paragons of presidential rhetoric along with FDR, whose intellectual advisors argues Amity Shales delayed recovery from the Great Depression by years. Obviously I am not in agreement with Lim's models.

Lim's self-professed "aim" is to "provide a measure of [the] decline of [Presidential discourse] beyond the anecdotal accounts already offered by demonstrating the relentless simplification of presidential rhetoric in the last two centuries and the increasing substitution ocf arguments and applause-rendering platitudes, partisan punch lines, and emotional and human interest appeals. I characterize these rhetoricval trends as manifestations of the anti-intellectual presidency."

Central to Lim's argument is the claimed exceptionalism of intellectuals. If you don't agree with Lim's strawman, you are, de facto, anti-intellectual. In other words, if you don't intrinsically believe that an intellectual knows more about living your life than you do, you are anti-intellectual. The hollowness of the argument is both apparent and revealing: this is a book for unappreciated intellectuals written by an aspiring intellectual. (Lim is an assistant professor.)

Of course, in Lim's view, "presidential anti-intellectualism is a threat to our democracy." Again, intellectuals are smarter than you and if you don't listen to them, democracy is in danger, a hypothesis I do not agree with.

Lim dates presidential anti-intellectualism as beginning in 1969, heaping yet another burden on the much maligned Nixon.

Among the many rhetorical outrages in this book is Lim's attempt to cast an obvious jocular portion of a speech delivered by George W. Bush to a Yale graduating class as "one of the best remembered episodes of anti-intellectualism in recent history". We normal folks thought it was a good joke, but "intellectuals" were obviously offended. Or perhaps they simply have no sense of humor? In this same section, Lim makes it clear that common people with their "simple locution" just don't get it. They're anti-intellectuals too.

Presidential rhetoric was never as good as Lim pretends it was. The Presidency, like every other elective office, is above all first a battle to get elected. To get elected, it takes the votes of the common people, not the self-proclaimed intellectuals - and our democracy is better for that in many ways.

Few in politics listen seriously to the intellectuals because they really don't have much of practical value to say. This book is proof of that. That said, Lim's research and his "linguistical analysis" are interesting.

Jerry

I read Ellen Dissanayake's previous 2 books and found this current publication a little disappointing in comparison. She has developed a philosophy of the arts called 'consilience' based on her Darwinian (biosocial) perspective which unifies biological and cultural viewpoints. The chapters cover her theory of mother/infant mutuality, the need to belong to a group, finding meaning, hands-on competence (making things), and elaboration (making special) as they pertain to the evolution of the arts in human development. My concern is mainly focussed on her ideas of a 'Naturalistic Aesthetics' found in the appendix. She aims to emcompass all the arts (music, dance, drama, visual arts) in developing criteria for assigning aesthetic quality to the artistic process (or is it product??) but fails to convince me that these criteria span all of the arts. For instance, the criteria 'strikingness' is something I would attribute to visual arts but certainly not music where the visual component is not a sense priority. She rightly claims that the meaning of aesthetics is currently fraught with ambiguity in its association with the definition of 'beauty'. Beauty, to me, is highly subjective and not necessarily a universal characteristic amongst all cultural groups. I feel until 'aesthetics' is properly redefined (possibly as 'the power to communicate emotion and value systems') we as arts educators looking for philosophies to give us direction, will continue to beat down the wrong garden path. I can only hope that Dissanayake will receive enough constructive feedback from scholars of other arts disciplines so that she can round out her philosophical viewpoint.

I have been trying for some time to write a review of this book. I give up: I simply cannot do it justice in 1,000 words or less. The book is not flawless, but in the two years since I first read it, I have come back to it again and again, always learning something. It took a long time to read in the first place, because every few pages I would run into an idea that required a few days' thought.

The book is illustrated with wonderful photos. Nobody can look at those babies in Chapter 1 without smiling, thus proving Dissanayake's points. My particular favorite is the little girl in Sudan absorbed in her drawing (p197). Some photos I wish had been bigger. The mbari house on page 153 is barely distinguishable.

Anybody interested in human affairs will benefit from this book. Even those outside human concerns should read it, simply to see how perceptive and stimulating the ideas are.

As a fiber artist, I found this book to be an excellent resource on textiles from around the world. The amazing thing is how truly old weaving is (6000-7000 years old), and yet the technology advanced so rapidly that complex textiles like brocades were being produced very early on. Also, that the old engineering principle of form following function has never been so well documented as it has been in looms!

The Art of the Loom is really inspirational for a beginning weaver like myself. There are beautiful color and black and white photographs of stunning pieces from around the world and throughout time, and people weaving on many different types of traditional looms. There are also illustrations explaining how much of the weaving is done, although many of them were difficult for me to digest as I am brand new at weaving. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in traditional and multi-cultural weaving.

Basically, this was somewhat of a boring read, and that's coming from a guy (me) who loves baseball history from 70-125 years ago and is a huge admirer of Walter Johnson.

The Johnson-led Washington Nationals shocked the baseball world in 1924 by winning the pennant and then the World Series, but author Reed Browning's account of it is too dry. He goes almost day-by-day with accounts of games with nothing bnt scores of each game and statistical highlights. Where are the colorful stories of that season? Where's the spark in this account? It isn't there; just a bunch of statistics in written form, mainly.

I did appreciate the "why" behind the statement that 1924 was a better year than 1908. It leads to some honest debate over which year offered the most when it comes to baseball history, and I enjoyed reading how our nation's capital went bonkers over their team......something very rare in the annuals of MLB. The chapters NOT dealing with the 1924 season were actually the best.

Don't get me wrong: it's not a bad book, but it isn't half as interesting as other books about the great old days of baseball and the exploits of its unique characters.

Reed Browning's "Baseball's Greatest Season, 1924" makes the assertion that, given the close pennant races in both leagues, the 1924 season is the greatest in history. I thought that 1908 was pretty good, maybe the best, but Browning does have some convincing arguments for 1924: it was a watershed year for baseball, after World War I, the lively ball, the rookies and near rookies who began then or were breaking in around that time, and the last major scandal involving the throwing of games. Plus, it had a very exciting World Series involving a first time league champion versus one that had just won its league for the fourth time in a row.

Browning constructed his book in an interesting way, alternating the happenings of the sixteen teams during the year with the off-the-field aspects of baseball during that time. It is an effective way of getting a well-rounded picture of the total baseball scene for 1924. For example, a chapter may cover the period from Memorial Day to the 4th of July, and the surges and failings of the pennant contenders and second division teams are outlined. The next chapter may be about the business of baseball in the mid-1920s: how the money was earned by each club, how it was spent, and how much might be spent on which items. There are some that may find this kind of information less interesting than pennant races, or a distraction to the flow of the book, but there are also those who find this information interesting and may enjoy this slight break in the 1924 season to get an overall view of baseball in that era.

Overall, it is most interesting book, one that has the drama of exciting pennant races, the joy of a national hero making his first World Series appearance, a seven-game contest between contrasting styles of play, extra inning dramatics several times during the Series, unexpected quirks of fate in the last game, and, as in all good plots, a surprising ending. It's definitely a good book to read.