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John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, Center for American Places/University
of Virginia Press, 2004
A great title, a great subject, and a great book. Just the other
day we were saying “why aren’t there more books about
parking?” Well now there are.
Gregory Dicum, Chronicle Books, 2004
Another one of those “Geez, we should have thought of that”
titles. But there is room for more, as this is a very basic overview,
and dwells much on reading the natural topographic features. We
recommend that the author does a sequel: “Guide to Using
Your GPS Receiver to Figure Out The Exact Location of the Places
You See Out the Window of the Airplane.”
Erik Slotboom, 2003
One of the best publications to come out of any press in 2003
is this self-published textbook about the freeway system of the
nation’s fourth largest city. The author, a Houstonian in
his mid thirties, worked in the energy industry, then the software
industry, started a website on Houston highways in 2000, and after
being let go in the dotcom bust, set to work on this epic work
of stunning clarity, modesty, and honesty.
David Maisel, Nazraeli Press, 2004
A big square flat thin book, like we have come to expect from
Nazraeli, with 77 images of the multicolored phantasmagoric swirls,
ponds, puddles, pools, and piles of Owens Lake, as seen through
the lens of David Maisel's camera, while flying above the lakebed.
This work was featured as part of a digital projection in the
CLUI exhibit Diversions and Dislocations: California’s Owens
Valley.
L.B. Deyo and David “Lefty” Leibowitz, Three Rivers
Press, 2004
The overdressed hipsters behind the infiltrative Jinx Project
discuss some of their urban and infrastructural spelunking and
surmountings, as if they were doing us a favor, which they are,
of course – saving the rest of us the trouble of having
to climb on to the roof of the Tweed Courthouse and such. The
value of the research, thoughtstyling, and ground-truthing inherent
in the project would be a lot easier to ingest without the faux-secret-government-speak
and the conquering attitude.
Center for American Places/Johns Hopkins, 2002
Historical images from the Civil War are juxtaposed with contemporary
color photographs of the same places by the author. Not a rephotographic
project, but rather a site selection project, where the images
reveal the ghosts that lurk in everyday areas, the residential
streets, strip malls, playing fields, parking lots, and places
in between these places, that are now, still and will always be
those same killing fields.
Paul Shambroom, Center for American Places/Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2003
Like Robert Del Tredici’s mid 1980’s books like At
Work in the Field of the Bombs, this new book shows the state
of the nuclear warfare landscape of the US today – in 2003.
Big clear photos in vivid color, just as they should be. Another
great book from the Center for American Places’ Creating
the North American Landscape series, published by Johns Hopkins.
Jane Wolff, William Stout Publishers, 2003
This elusive and mysterious part of California is perfectly captured
in this unusual publication, which presents the Delta as a set
of playing cards, each describing a feature of the region for
consideration.
Norman Klein, The New Press, 2004
Norman Klein’s new masterwork is a freefalling epic. The
73 pages of notes make for a bonus enumerated book within a book.
Our only complaint about this book is the linearity of the format
- it’s a book.
Constance M. Lewallen and Steve Seid, University of California
Press, 2004
Ant Farm somehow possessed the commendable post-hippie characteristics
of activist pranksterism, mock corporeity, optimistic modernism,
innovative design, and pragmatic utopianism, without seeming conflicted
about it. This is the catalog of the retrospective of the work
of Ant Farm that is currently traveling around the country.
David Paul Bayles, Sierra Club
Occasionally the Sierra Club puts out a real winner, like Dead
Tech, or this one. The trees photographed in this book - contorted,
pruned, truncated, and mutated - are absurd, humorous, tragic,
resilient, dignified and heroic - living, incidental sculptures
of characteristics we humans usually ascribe to ourselves.
Paul Virilio
Thames & Hudson, 2004
Pictures and words of death and destruction from the French philosopher.
A voyeuristic harangue that is totally savant and au courant.
Michael Christopher Carroll, William Morrow, 2004
The extremities of Long Island contain extremes of human behavior,
pushed to the edge, but still, it seems, too close to everyone
else. Just off Orient Point at the northeast tip is 840 acre Plum
Island, a US Department of Agriculture animal disease research
center which has been involved in bacterial and viral projects
that are capable of escaping to the outside world, and may have
done so already.
Richard Ross
Princeton Architectural Press, 2004
The interiors of bomb shelters of the world are explored in this
photo book, from the still maintained public shelters in Zurich
to the de-radicalized Church Universal and Triumphant in Montana.
One impression that lingers after reading this book is how small
this underground world is, even though it is spread out around
the globe.
CCA Wattis Institute, 2004
The catalog of the exhibit of the same name, which is now traveling
up and down the coast, would have been great, except for that
CLUI “essay” in the back.
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