Archive for category: Book reviews

Book reviews

This just in: Publishing still moribund    (2021.06.20)

Helen Andrews’ Boomers shows the futility of the publishing oligopoly, which takes most of your money and still lets you get obvious facts wrong. But the alternate option – self-publishing without expert help – is also doomed to failure

Books of the year 2019    (2019.12.31)

Including three that permanently reset my mindset (term used advisedly)

Books of the year 2017    (2017.12.29)

Billy Hayes’ Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me; Douglas Thomas’ Never Use Futura

Vision first, texture second    (2017.08.18)

Eric Kandel brilliantly explains how we see first, then perceive texture second. This explains why I like a lot of things I like, but nobody’s really taking me up on that knowledge, are they, now

Book of the year    (2016.01.04)

Here by Richard McGuire, which has radically recalibrated my sense of time. (Nº 2: Norwegian Wood)

‘The AIDS Generation’    (2014.01.24)

The atrociously edited and sequenced book The AIDS Generation by Halkitis has a tiny saving grace in direct testimony from eldergays about their estrangement from gay culture

‘The Gentrification of the Mind’    (2012.09.10)

When not inveighing against racist, elite white gay men, Sarah Schulman provides novel and useful analysis of “gentrification,” literature, gay men, AIDS, and more in The Gentrification of the Mind

Hetïsm    (2012.07.09)

Nobody told me that the now-notorious Sheila Heti review in the New Yorker included a stunning photograph of the authoress

‘Design Is a Job’    (2012.04.12)

A designer tells a client why his designs say what the client means. Young designers need Monteiro’s Design Is a Job to learn how to do that. Design Is a Job needed an editor