Puck

The multi-talented Virginia Lee Burton is best remembered for her pioneering work as a children’s picture book writer and illustrator. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel remains a steady seller for its publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, since it was first published in 1939. She was first and foremost a graphic designer who, in her home of Folley Cove, Massachusetts, taught the locals how to design and block print fabric.

From a photographic point of view, Rawn Fulton’s film Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place is boring: for all Burton’s geometries, the drama of angularity that plays throughout her illustrations in her books and the print designs that Folley Cove Designers still sells, the camera simply pans across pages and fabrics with plain-Jane horizontals and verticals, penetrating the material with slow zooms, the old in-and-out. It works, but it’s dull. Continue reading on Curled Up with a Good DVD…

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review by Brian Charles Clark

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuścinśki
A Vintage International paperback
288 pages, June 2008
4.5 stars (out of five possible)

The world-traveled Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuścinśki had a special affinity for the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. Herodotus, in Kapuścinśki’s estimation, was himself a world-traveled journalist by the time he wrote his famous Histories. It’s an audacious move to write a memoir in parallel to such a venerable book, but that, thankfully, is just what Kapuścinśki has done in Travels with Herodotus.

Travels with Herodotus is a marvel of concise, open-ended insight—or “outsight,” more accurately, since both Kapuścinśki and Herodotus are concerned more with anthropology than psychology. Travels is also that rare book that teaches writing as it entertains. For teachers, Travels is a curricular field day, bringing structure and focus to a wide array of subjects, from science to art, from the ethics of violence to the perplexities of love. For lovers of travel writing, Kapuścinśki has created an engine of armchair transportation that moves through both time and space. For students of the reporter’s craft, Kapuścinśki is patient and profound. Continue Reading »

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Curled Up With a Good DVD just published my review of the Kennedy Film Collection by Robert Drew.

Robert Drew’s Primary reopens an old conundrum: does technological innovation drive cultural change, or does cultural need drive technological innovation? In other words, do inventors work in a cultural vacuum producing stuff people then find a need and a market, or are cultural niches filled by market-incentivized innovators? Whichever side you agree with, there’s no question that Primary is a landmark in film history, marking a place where our expectations about what a film should be changed in tandem with the way we make them.

The innovation was a portable camera that allowed photographers to more or less unobtrusively immerse themselves in events, recording without distinction the mundane and the monumental. More or less because, in fact, though certainly smaller and lighter than previous pro-grade equipment, the cameras used by Drew and his gang of photographers looked like snub-nosed bazookas and probably weighed about the same.

Read more on Curled Up.

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review by Brian Charles Clark

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
Pantheon, Nov. 2007
1024 pages, cloth
5 of 5 possible stars

Herodotus - where would we be without him? The fifth-century Greek writer is known as the Father of History, and although the sophistication of writing history has certainly changed in the intervening centuries, the overall shape and method have not. Herodotus is a landmark in the history of civilization.

Herodotus was the first (at least in the West and as far as we know) to systematically collect documentary materials to form the basis of what he wrote and to arrange those materials in a narrative that captures the reader’s imagination. He even made some effort to verify his sources, a practice that led more or less directly to the rigors of the modern academy. In The Histories, Herodotus also set another standard: history is to be written by the winners. Continue Reading »

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review by Brian Charles Clark

The Plot to Save Socrates
Paul Levinson
Tor Books, 2006

Socrates said he knew nothing but, even so, he was the smartest guy in Athens. Apparently a lot of Athenians found that amusing—at least for a while. Eventually, though, he got on enough people’s nerves, and in ancient Athens that was enough to get a death sentence. (In the contemporary U.S., it just gets you a life sentence, unless you’re being held in Guantanamo, in which case nobody bothers with a trial.) Paul Levin’s novel, which resonates with the current political climate, is premised on the thought that some future time traveler might time-warp back to 399 B.C. (or whatever they called it back then) to try to persuade Socrates from drinking the hemlock. Continue Reading »

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review by Brian Charles Clark

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
by Reza Aslan
Publisher: Random House, 2006

Reza Aslan has written an important and wonderfully readable book on the history of Islam. A devout Muslim who cares deeply about his religion, Aslan is also a thoughtful humanist. No god but God generously, gracefully and intelligently incorporates both these sets of values. It’s important for Americans to read this book: we keep asking, Why do they hate us?, and reply foolishly with thoughtless answers like, Because they’re jealous of our freedoms (as George W. Bush has maintained for the past several years). More likely, it seems to me, the answer lies in our own ignorance: what do we really know about Islam? Recently I was asked to teach an Introduction to Humanities class at a community college. The regular instructor bailed out at the last minute; I was given a textbook on a Friday and told to be prepared to start teaching the following Monday. I read fast, but knew I had to skim most of the required textbook in order to prepare. One of the chapters I read in detail, though, was the one on the history of Islam. To my horror is read, in this widely used textbook, the authors’ claim that the Prophet Mohammed married Fatima. This kind of ignorance of other cultures and other faiths is deeply offensive. In this case, Fatima, as we all should know, was the Prophet’s daughter (his wife’s name was Khadija). How could the authors (an archeologist and a theologian, both of prestigious U.S. universities) implicitly accuse Mohammad of a crime—incest—that all the children of Abraham find offensive? Continue Reading »

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review by Brian Charles Clark

The System of the World: The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3
by Neal Stephenson
Publisher: HarperCollins, 2005

We’ve been around the world with Jack Shaftoe, the King of the Vagabonds, and his Solomonic-gold pirating crew. We’ve sat on the edge of our seats while Daniel Waterhouse, friend of Isaac Newton and Godfreid Libniz, made his way back to London from pirate-infested Boston Bay. Dark conspiracies have unfolded before our scarce-believing eyes. Oh! The early seventeenth century never looked like so much fun!

Neal Stephenson is a brainiac monster, and it is futile to resist the tentacles of his imagination. Although some are better than others, he’s never written a dull book. Few, however, have written a more exciting piece of historical fiction. At roughly 2,500 pages, and spanning three fat volumes, few have written longer ones, but the pages flow like a fast moving river along the entire course of The Baroque Cycle. It is intimidating to speculate about the IQ of a writer who can hold so much historical detail in mind, but that figure must been in the low zillions. For not only is there a tremendous amount of detail, but Stephenson messes with history as well, rerouting the river for the sake of a wondrous tale. Continue Reading »

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review by Brian Charles Clark

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
Reza Aslan
Random House, 2005

Reza Aslan has written an important and wonderfully readable book on the history of Islam. A devout Muslim who cares deeply about his religion, Aslan is also a thoughtful humanist. No god but God generously, gracefully and intelligently incorporates both these sets of values. It’s important for Americans to read this book: we keep asking, Why do they hate us?, and reply foolishly with thoughtless answers like, Because they’re jealous of our freedoms (as George W. Bush has maintained for the past several years). More likely, it seems to me, the answer lies in our own ignorance: what do we really know about Islam? Recently I was asked to teach an Introduction to the Humanities class at a community college. The regular instructor bailed out at the last minute; I was given a textbook on a Friday and told to be prepared to start teaching the following Monday. I read fast, but knew I had to skim most of the required textbook in order to prepare. One of the chapters I read in detail, though, was the one on the history of Islam. To my horror is read, in this widely used textbook, the authors’ claim that the Prophet Mohammed married Fatima. This kind of ignorance of other cultures and other faiths is deeply offensive. In this case, Fatima, as we all should know, was the Prophet’s daughter (his wife’s name was Khadija). How could the authors (an archeologist and a theologian, both of prestigious U.S. universities) implicitly accuse Mohammad of a crime—incest—that all the children of Abraham find offensive? Continue Reading »

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review by Brian Charles Clark

Mason and Dixon
Thomas Pynchon
Picador, 2004

“Snow-Balls have… their Arcs,” Thomas Pynchon’s fifth novel begins. Trying to calculate the arc of the narrative of Mason & Dixon is as difficult as the calculus involved in calculating the arc of a thrown snowball. It’s a huge book, not just in number of pages, but in ideas, both comic and profound, and in erudition.

The story involves the lives, travels and adventures of two globe-trotting Brits, an astronomer and a surveyor, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, as they travel south to the Cape of Good Hope and then west, into North America. Mason and Dixon survive, of course, into the present as the name of the line that separates North from South (the southern boundary of Pennsylvania). But Pynchon, as ever, is never only writing biography or history; indeed, he writes that “Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base.” Continue Reading »

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review by Brian Charles Clark

Vancouver
David Cruise and Alison Griffiths
Publisher: HarperCollin, 2003

Cruise and Griffiths had plenty of models for their thick novel, Vancouver, and all by one writer: James Mitchner. Mitchner was the pioneer of the “sweeping saga” sub-sub-genre of historical fiction, and Cruise and Griffiths have followed closely in his steps. The model is simple: step forward in time, starting at some suitably dim point in the ancient past, to the present day.

Vancouver starts, not in the Pacific Northwest of British Columbia, but somewhere farther north 15,000 years before the present. Like Mitchner (and, incidentally, like Ayn Rand), Cruise and Griffiths subscribe to the “great man” theory of history: progress, advance and change are made by unique individuals who rise above circumstance to do great things. The great man who first came south to the present location of the beautiful city on the coast of British Columbia, they imagine, was a fellow named Manto. Manto traveled through an ice-free corridor. Never mind that the existence of an ice-free corridor probably never existed, and that the most likely route to the peopling of North America was by coastal island-hoppers: Manto’s story, like all the stories in this novel, is exciting. Continue Reading »

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