FullReviews Index

Ignore Everybody : And 39 Other Keys to Creativity
'Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity' is the reincarnation of a piece Hugh MacLeod published years ago on his website entitled "How to Be Creative," which has been downloaded over a million times. It's a small book with large type and lots of pictures, but MacLeod squeezes a lot of meaning into this small package, as with his business card drawings.

The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape
It's no surprise that California's spiritual landscape is as diverse as its natural surroundings. The Visionary State weaves text and image into a compelling narrative of religion, architecture, and consciousness in California, from neopaganism to televangelism, UFO cults to austere Zen Buddhism. Acclaimed culture critic Erik Davis brings together the immigrant and homegrown religious influences that have been part of the region's character from its earliest days...

Making Art Together
In Making Art Together, Boston-based artist Mark Cooper, with teacher Lisa Sjostrom, advocates for the power of collaborative art-making among school children. Cooper, an internationally recognized artist and a professor of art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Boston College, has led collaborative art projects in classrooms all over the country. In Making Art Together, he pulls this personal experience into a guide for teachers who would benefit from his work.

A Year in Japan
Avoiding the usual clichés — Williamson focuses on some lesser-known aspects of the country and culture. In stunning watercolors and piquant texts, she explains the terms used to order various amounts of tofu, the electric rugs found in many Japanese homes, and how to distinguish a maiko from a geisha. A Year in Japan is a colorful journey to the beauty, poetry, and quirkiness of modern Japan—a book not just to look at but to experience.

Street Art: The Spray Files
Louis Bou's Street Art begins with an explanation of the difference between street art and graffiti, along with new trends and styles. Each medium is then explored in a different chapter—stickers and posters, stencils, textured surfaces, traffic signs, buildings and furniture. Also included are chapters on street art characters and panoramic murals. Woven throughout are biographies of the artists—all internationally known—and an interview with each one.

de Kooning: An American Master
In de Kooning: An American Master, Stevens and Swann present de Kooning as a profoundly influential American artist who lived a rich and contradictory life. In a book brimming with personal detail the authors tell the uniquely American story of a working class Dutch immigrant who became an international success after years of struggle, failure and persistence in New York.

ReadyMade: How to Make [Almost] Everything: A Do-It-Yourself Primer
ReadyMade: How to Make [Almost] Everything: A Do-It-Yourself Primer: You need this book. As the stuff of life piles up and things spin out of control, we could all use a little help. These never-before-seen designs and how-tos are full of surprise and wonder. Learn how to turn everyday objects into spellbinding inventions to give away to friends or keep for yourself. Our simple self-improvement techniques will make you smarter, better-looking, and more well-adjusted.

Drawing from Life: The Journal as Art
Who hasn't, at one time or other, kept a journal? The impulse to record our daily lives is universal. Still, only a few of us have the discipline to make it past the first few entries, and fewer still manage to create diaries whose insight can inspire any but their authors. Drawing from Life: The Journal as Art is an exploration of these exceptions-books of obsessive wonder filled to their borders with drawings, sketches, watercolors, graphs, charts, lists, collages, portraits, and photographs.

Letters to a Young Actor
The founder and director of the Yale Repertory Theater, as well as Harvard's American Repertory Theater, and the drama critic for The New Republic for going on thirty years, Robert Brustein is a living legend in theatrical circles. In Letters to a Young Actor, he not only seeks to inspire the multitudes of struggling dramatists out pounding the pavement, but also to reinvigorate the very state of the art of acting itself.

Regarding the Pain of Others
Twenty-five years after her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag returns to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in our culture today. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to horrific images of Bosnia, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.

You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination
You Are Here is a wide-ranging collection of superbly inventive maps. These chart places you won't find, but a voyages you take in your mind: an exploration of a country estate from a dog's perspective; a guide to buried treasure on Skeleton Island; a trip down the road to success; or the world as imagined by an inmate of a mental institution. With over 100 maps from artists, cartographers, and explorers, You are Here gives the reader a breath-taking view of real and imaginary worlds.