Commentary

Friday Remainders

stacked books
Erin Hogan’s Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West was honored in the “Books Briefly Noted” section of the New Yorker:

Standing in Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, in the high desert, amid four hundred stainless-steel poles, Hogan ruminates on how the work affects our sense of time, space, size, and scale. She is at her best when she re-examines the precepts of modernism in the changing light of New Mexico, and shows how the human body is meant to be a participant in these grand constructions.

Read an excerpt and an interview with the author.
George E. Lewis’s A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music received a favorable review in Frieze Magazine this past Sunday that praises Lewis’s account of the rise of the AACM as a “thoroughly engaging” scholarly study that nonetheless remains in touch with the people and music it seeks to explore. Read an excerpt from the book.
William Davies King new book Collections of Nothing was reviewed today by Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller. Keller praises the book not only as an engaging autobiographical account of the author’s habit of amassing unusual collections, but for the insights it offers on American materialism. Read the review on the Tribune website. Also read an excerpt and an essay by the author.
The NYT‘s Freakonomics blog posted this week about the the American public’s lack of financial literacy drawing on the expert knowledge of economist and author Annamaria Lusardi, who edited the forthcoming book on the subject, Overcoming the Saving Slump: How to Increase the Effectiveness of Financial Education and Saving Programs. Read the posting featuring a Q & A with Lusardi.
Also, the August 7 edition of the Detroit News ran an article on Detroit’s “festival of combustivity” Crusin’ MotorCities, which begins Friday with various automobile-related events spanning the next ten days. The article draws from Brian Ladd’s forthcoming book Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age to explore American’s changing relationship to the automobile, especially in light of the nation’s current environmental, energy, and economic crises—factors which have already deeply affected American’s attitudes towards autos. Read the article on the Detroit News website.