No comments about New Spas and Resorts.

No comments about Handbook of Mediterranean Roman Pottery.

1 comments about The Beader's Guide to Survival Book (Beading Book).

1. This book covers it all! I strongly urge any beader, be they a novice or a pro to buy this book! There are many patented techniques in here that are so easy and so amazingly helpful. This is the book for all beaders and I think it's a great gift too!

No comments about Stories in Stone: Conserving Mosaics of Roman Africa.

1 comments about Egyptian Erotica: The Essence of Ancient Egyptian Erotica in Art and Literature (Essence of Erotica series).

1. This varied collection pulls together little-known material from the classical Egyptian era, a span of more than 3000 years. They were an agricultural people so fertility had profound meaning for them. And, like us, they were vividly aware of the many meanings of human sexuality. Those concerns and delights both had their place in the writings and visual art that have come down to us.
   
   This presents many samples from that long-lived civilization. Those include pictures from many papyri and other sources, from rough and iconic (p.123) to the more polished. I was especially impressed by the statuary and carvings, whether sensual and restrained (p.33, 102), comically bawdy (p.27), or functional as a lady's toy (p.39). The writings cover much the same range, including a Cinderella story where the glass slipper is replaced by a tuft of pubic hair!
   
   Despite the enjoyable parts of this book, it suffers systematic flaws. Many of the photos are out of focus, and many modern line drawings are interspersed with the original images. I found them annoying until I realized that they were tracings of originals, possibly ones that had been rendered almost illegible by the ravages of time. A caption or two would have helped the modern drawings to make sense. That leads to my biggest problem with this book: it's lack of attributions. As the authors point out, the classical period of Egypt lasted longer than any other civilization by thousands of years, and went through many cycles of cultural change during that time. Despite that, almost none of the artworks or writings are tied to any particular era or area. The resulting image of the people's beliefs about sex and sexuality has been torn into kaleidoscopic pieces and scattered throughout the book. Because there are no attributions or bibliography, the authors make it impossible for me to piece that history together on my own.
   
   This is OK as a coffee table book, despite the many flaws in the way it presents its images. It will disappoint any more serious reader, especially those who want a coherent picture of historical trends.
   
   //wiredweird

1 comments about Looking at Greek Vases.

1. This was a gift to a 14 yr old collector who lives in Rome Italy, He says it is wonderful, read the whole thing right thru. He actually finds this stuff (parts of)in fields near Rome!

1 comments about Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews With Environmental Artists.

1. John Grande's new book Art Nature Dialogues is not only informative, but it presents the scuptors and artists ideas, points of view without the usual critical control or monologue.
   Included are David Nash, Nils-Udo, Hamish Fulton, Patrick Dougherty, Bruni Babarit, Bill Vazan, Alan Sonfist, Betty Beaumont, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Peter von Tiesenhausen and herman de vries (apioneer of earth art from the 1950s in Holland)
   '
   This is one book thatshakes the art world softly, gently and with a sense of the physical, realworld of nature . Bye Bye PostModernsim. Hello respect for the Earth.
   
   
   
   
   It is about time a writer focusssed on earth sensitive artists instead of the od generation of minimalist earth movers like Smithson, Heizer who destroyed the earth for art./.

No comments about Bordello: With A Foreword By Karl Lagerfeld.

2 comments about A Sourcebook of Nasca Ceramic Iconography: Reading a Culture through Its Art.

1. Donald A. Proulx's book begins with a brief overview of the people who produced Nasca pottery. It then describes the rules or canons used by Nasca potters to form and decorate their pottery. It summarizes the discovery of the first Nasca pottery. It describes how 800 years of Nasca art are divided into various periods and the basis for the chronology. It also describes the methodology of both Proulx and other experts in organizing Nasca art.
   
   Then, as Proulx writes on his website: "The centerpiece of the book is a detailed classification and description of the iconography along with an interpretation of their meaning in the context of the Nasca Culture. [Then] I use the iconography (along with archaeological evidence) to reconstruct the religion, political organization and everyday life of the people of this ancient civilization."
   
   For the general reader like myself, the images in the "centerpiece" are incredible, and stay in the mind well after the pages are closed. Images of realistic plants, animals, birds, and fish and numerous abstract anthropomorphic creatures persist in memory, even though even to experts, some of the forms and meanings are incomprehensible today. I was particularly struck by the comparison between the images on the pottery and the shapes of the Nasca Lines, which Proulx has also studied. I poured over the reconstructions with a sense of real excitement.
   
   I was fascinated with how Proulx created this incredible collection of images. 45 years ago as a student he was hired to catalog a collection of Peruvian artifacts. He continued his interest by photographing Nasca collections throughout Peru and the United States as well as key museum collections in Germany and Great Britain. He added all of the images he found in books as well as museum collections available on the Internet. He then digitized the entire archive and now has approximately 24,000 images in an electronic archive representing pieces from over 150 museums and private collections. There is no doubt that this book, and the conclusions Proulx reaches, are based on the largest collection of Nasca images ever assembled.
   
   As a consumer, I asked myself, so why, oh why doesn't this book include an CD containing all of these images? It would be so much fun to search and compare images from several different pages, and perhaps even find a connection that Proulx had missed.
   
   His answer, also perfectly comprehensible appears on his excellent website [Google "Donald A. Proulx"]: "It has always been my desire to share my archive with other scholars until I realized the legal prohibitions of distributing the disks. I would have to obtain permission from over 200 sources to be able to do this. I also discovered that the file names that I generated on my Macintosh computer are not all compatible with PCs, and many of these names would have to be modified to be used on these other operating systems."
   
   I am very disappointed that I can't play with these images on my own computer. Nevertheless, the book is a treasure. As a lover of art and a student of how art is integrated into culture, I was enchanted. I'll return to these images over and over again.
   
   Robert C. Ross 2008



2. For those captivated by ancient Andean imagery Don Proulx's A Sourcebook of Nasca Ceramic Iconography provides an indispensable guide to the colourful world of the Nasca. Located on Peru's south coast in the first centuries A.D., Nasca potters left a visual account of their world view in an astounding array of depictive designs. Drawing on forty years of study, Proulx offers the first comprehensive catalogue of Nasca motifs, along with his own identifications and interpretations. In addition to the motif catalogue, Proulx provides the most extensive description of the nine-phase Nasca pottery sequence ever published in one place. This contribution alone makes this book a "must have" reference. The Sourcebook also contains Proulx's own overview of Nasca culture, covering special topics such as religion, subsistence, daily life, material culture, and dwellings. A Sourcebook of Nasca Ceramic Iconography is destined to be a standard reference for generations to come. It represents the crowning achievement of Proulx's long and distinguished career, though not, we hope, the last we hear from Don Proulx.

No comments about Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-painting of the Fourth Century B.C. (J. Paul Getty Museum).