When someone writes a seven hundred page book about someone I’m only vaguely aware of I’m intrigued. I bought this book and learned that Donald Barthelme was a literary innovator who helped re-direct American fiction along with a very small group of authors referred to as postmodernists for lack of a better term. This group [...]
Picasso – A Biography - John Richardson (two volumes of three) – What more do we need to know about Picasso? Picasso did not evolve from Cubism to his neo-classicism because he was an inveterate explorer who had exhausted the Cubist vein and had to discover a new avenue. He abandoned Cubism so save his [...]
This is a great book that establishes foremost, the chronology of Matisse’s artistic development. This allows an accurate assessment of his relationship to the key developments in the Paris avante-garde. With information in this careful chronology one can clearly see that it is Matisse rather than Picasso who is the progenitor of twentieth century painting, [...]
I first saw de Kooning’s paintings in the U.S. Pavilion at the 1962 Seattle world’s Fair when I was twelve. I have been following his work from his mid-career until the Linda and Paul McCartney phase when he was propped up at his huge canvasses at his Long Island studio In full Alzheimer’s dementia with [...]
Joseph Stalin was a published poet of significant stature as a teenager. Stalin robbed banks to send money to Lenin who used the funds to survive while planning the Russian Revolution. Because Stalin always found his way back to civilization after being sentenced to exile after conviction for crimes as a young man, this happened [...]
Ten thousand Frenchmen died of various tropical diseases in an effort to build a Panama canal. The French effort ended ten years prior to the start of the American work. The Americans solved two problems that stymied the French: mosquitoes (they carried the diseases) and where to put the dirt (it kept getting in the [...]
Under construction from 1870 to 1883,over fifty sand hogs died of nitrogen narcosis also known as the bends or caissons disease, while working over sixty feet below the surface of the water under massive wooden and steel caissons (think of a square pot upside down seventy five feet on a side). It was the bends [...]
If you see any titles here that you would like me to comment on please make a request and I’ll add it to “Book Notes”. Books to review: 1. A Few Bloody Noses – Robert Harvey 2. Horse People – Michael Korda 3. Ike (bio) – Michael Korda 4. The Making of the Atom Bomb [...]
6-12-09 – book Review Starbucks and Borders sell exactly the same things – just in different proportions. I bought this memoir at Starbucks, one of my bookstores. I enjoy writing to authors of books I read and the following is a letter to this author. I finished reading your memoir last week and have had [...]