ZOOM IN on Books

GALATEAS Carla van de Puttelaar (Le caillou bleu - Editions) BUY NOW	This ethereal monograph of Carla van de Puttelaar’s distinctive photographs is serene on the surface. The subjects are nude young women, captured with eyes closed… sleeping, dreaming. There is nothing to focus on beyond their bodies...no background objects, no visible windows...just an occasional wrinkled sheet or quilt. The background is black. Nothing to distract us from the skin and the light—classical, painterly soft light. The women lie framed in shards of sunlight. Shadows of Eros, of beauty undisturbed, adrift...restless. One senses a shifting, a subtle movement of finger, hand or foot. Are they about to awaken or simply daydreaming? In her evocative and candid introduction, Kristien Hemmerechts refers to the subjects as “sleeping beauties” as the seeds of fairy tale lie here. One is struck by the pale skin of these beauties— so pale, in fact, that the viewer experiences the poignancy of mortality...fleeting beauty. One cropped photo of a woman’s hand and arm extended downward has a distinctly morgue-like feel. Here, the line between death and sleep is blurred...the photograph turning from the erotic to the unsettling in a blink. The book’s title suggests we return to the myth of a statue suddenly come to life. These women are alive, if barely stirring. We’re close enough to hear them breathe. If only we could read their minds, their dreams. Galateas is haunting and provocative.
PHOTOWISDOM: Master Photographers on Their Art Edited by Lewis Blackwell (Chronicle Books) BUY NOW	Investors with a wise eye will snap up this edition, as it has “collector’s item” written all over it. Everyone else...or, rather, anyone with a deep interest in art photography will want to own it. It was born for the coffee table, exquisitely designed, and sized too large to fit many bookcases. The list of contributors includes such luminaries as Chuck Close, David LaChapelle, Elliot Erwitt, Loretta Lux, Erwin Olaf, Joyce Tenneson, Pierre et Gilles, and many others. This anthology tends to the postmodern, with interviews and texts—most of which appear to have been prepared specifically for this book. Beautiful reproductions accompany each contribution, and there are bios and web links appended. The focus is on each photographer’s approach to making an image and it’s the next best thing to seeing through the eyes of these modern masters.
GAME CHANGE: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann & Mark Halperin (Harper) BUY NOW	Now that the hype and hoopla have passed, we can report that GAME CHANGE is not a collection of tabloid gossip, but a fascinating, pulse-pounding account of the 2008 presidential campaign. From the primaries to the main event of Obama vs. McCain, the book takes the reader behind the scenes where the decisions, mishaps, and absurdities played out. Of particular note is the narrative action which cuts back and forth between the Clinton and Obama camps. It's vivid, cinematic, and suspenseful. GAME CHANGE drills deep and unearths the real story of what went down off-camera—grime, slime and all. What's refreshing here is that, unlike other campaign chronicles, the authors don't jump on stage to overshadow the events, so readers get to draw their own conclusions. First-rate reporting makes this book a must-read for every political-junkie.
LET'S NOT KEEP FIGHTING THE TROJAN WARD by Edward Sanders (Coffee House Press) BUY NOW	Edward Sanders is the quintessential rebel… a singing bard, a mischief-making troubadour, part-beatnik, porn-ape, hippie, yippie-yodeling scholar; ex-Fug, book-pusher, protestor, environmentalist, publisher, and investigative ode-meister. His latest collection, Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War features visionary odes to a potential peace-lined future; moving works aimed at unborn revolutionaries; inspired nostalgia, memories of friends who’ve passed away like Allen Ginsberg and Charles Olson… odes to the land, to his love-wife Miriam. The book is a masterful mix of history, myth, rock and roll, green dreams, and bardic screams against greed and war. It sparkles with satiric ”ha- ha-hee” here and there, with planet tants’, and billows of sheer spirit-clouds… timeless riffs that rebel on the page and soar from head to heart. Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War is fuel for the soul by an anti-war hero.
BEAT by Christopher Felver (Last Gasp) BUY NOW	Christopher Felver’s beatific scrapbook glows, flows, glitters and howls. BEAT is packed with the author’s photographic portraits of Beat luminaries. This is truly the face of BEAT, as well as the heart and soul. It’s cool jazz, true minds, and word tantrums, wrapped in newspaper clippings, collaged with rare covers, manuscript pages, hand-written poems, post cards & scattered ephemera. All the hip excitement on the streets of San Francisco and the Lower East Side comes alive here. You can fairly smell the incense, the grass, the black coffee. These were heady times when a poetry broadside published by City Lights had the power to send tremors from San Francisco to the East Village. My childhood heroes—poets all—are packed inside like crackerjack toys: Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Tuli Kupferberg, Diane DiPrima, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Bob Kaufman, and many more. Sadly, the one angelic face absent from these pages is the great Kenneth Patchen. Be that as it may, thank Ra such a gifted photographer as Felver was on the scene to capture these creatures in public and private. Take a joyride down this raucous American highway… here are the best minds of a generation illuminated in black and white.
March QUICK PICKS
	"From James Rosenquist, one of our most iconic pop artists—along with Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein—comes this candid and fascinating memoir. Unlike these artists, Rosenquist often works in three-dimensional forms, with highly dramatic shifts in scale and a far more complex palette, including grisaille and Day-Glo colors. A skilled traditional painter, he avoided the stencils and silk screens of Warhol and Lichtenstein. His vast canvases full of brilliant, surreally juxtaposed images would influence both many of his contemporaries and younger generations, as well as revolutionize twentieth-century painting." BUY NOW
	"Set in San Francisco in 1940, Stanley's stunning first in a new series introduces a gutsy, independent heroine who isn't always likable. As the city celebrates the Chinese New Year with the Rice Bowl Party, a three-day carnival to raise money for China's war relief, PI Miranda Corbie sees Eddie Takahashi, a young Japanese numbers runner, shot dead in front of her on a crowded, fireworks-filled Chinatown street. When the police tell her to forget about Takahashi (Chalk him up to Nanking), the outraged Miranda decides to seek justice on her own. In her quest for Takahashi's killer, she encounters racism and sexism at nearly every turn. A former escort who's reinvented herself as a detective, the 33-year-old Miranda isn't taken seriously by the cops, who enjoy rehashing her past. Stanley (Nox Dormienda) aptly describes San Francisco as a city redolent and glistening with sin and lamplight, forever a girl you didn't take home to Mother." BUY NOW
	"Masterfully reported....[Cohan] has turned into one of our most able financial journalists....he deploys not only his hands-on experience of this exotic corner of the financial industry but also a remarkable gift for plain-spoken explanation...the other great strength of this important book is the breadth and skill of the author's interviews...Cohan does a brilliant job of sketching in the eccentric, vulgar, greedy, profane and coarse individuals who ignored all these warnings to their own profit and the ruin of so many others. It's impossible to do justice to his reportorial detail in a brief review..." —Los Angeles Times BUY NOW
	"Marli Renfro was a model who played a part in one of the most iconic scenes in American movies- as Janet Leigh's nude body double in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho-only to fade into obscurity, a footnote in Hollywood history. It wasn't until 1988 that Marli Renfro made news again-raped and murdered by a serial killer with a fetish for the classic Hitchcock shocker. But as Graysmith investigated Marli's story, a nagging doubt entered his mind. What if Marli was still alive? What if another woman had been murdered in her place? And if Marli was still alive, would he ever find her?" BUY NOW
	"In this thoroughly-researched book, Kirby follows three families and communities whose lives are utterly changed by immense neighboring animal farms. These farms (known as “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations,” or CAFOs), confine thousands of pigs, dairy cattle, and poultry in small spaces, often under horrifying conditions, and generate enormous volumes of fecal and biological waste as well as other toxins. Weaving science, politics, law, big business, and everyday life, Kirby accompanies these families in their struggles against animal factories. A North Carolina fisherman takes on pig farms upstream to preserve his river, his family’s life, and his home. A mother in a small Illinois town pushes back against an outsized dairy farm and its devastating impact. And, a Washington state grandmother becomes an unlikely activist when her home is covered with soot and her water supply is compromised by runoff from leaking lagoons of cattle waste." BUY NOW
	"Turning his camera to the world of birds, Andrew Zuckerman has a created a new body of work showcasing more than 200 stunning photographs of nearly 75 different species. These winged creatures from exotic parrots to everyday sparrows, and endangered penguins to woody owls are captured with Zuckerman's painstaking perspective against a stark white background to reveal the vivid colors, textures, and personalities of each subject in extraordinary and exquisite detail. The ultimate art book for ornithologists and nature enthusiasts alike, Bird is a volume of sublime beauty." BUY NOW
	"After saving New York City in 2009's The Silent Man, CIA agent John Wells, the hero of bestseller Berenson's exceptional espionage series, retreats to rural New Hampshire in his compelling fourth outing. He hikes and thinks, accompanied only by his dog, Tonka, but soon enough, John hears from Ellis Shafer, his sort-of boss at the agency, who calls him back to Washington, D.C., for a new assignment. An unknown assassin is targeting members of Task Force 673, a now-disbanded secret unit whose job was interrogating terrorists, in particular high-value detainees, by any necessary means. Five of the 10-person squad are missing or dead, with the rest in mortal danger. In his pursuit of the killer, John encounters all manner of political intrigue, including convoluted plots set in motion by agency chiefs vying for control of America's security apparatus, who rely on low-level field spies to carry out their various and bloody plans."—Publishers Weekly BUY NOW
	"Young had been the senator’s closest aide and most trusted friend. He believed that John Edwards could be a great president, and was assured throughout the cover-up that his boss and friend would ultimately step forward to both tell the truth and protect his aide’s career. Neither promise was kept. Not only a moving personal account of Andrew Young’s political education, THE POLITICIAN offers a look at the trajectory which made John Edwards the ideal Democratic candidate for president, and the hubris which brought him down, leaving his career, his marriage and his dreams in ashes." BUY NOW