Results tagged “bookreview”

Author, critic and journalist Steven Heller started out as someone who, in the words of Paula Scher, "had been more or less oblivious to design," but went on not only to launch the careers of some of our most well-known illustrators, but also to chronicle graphic design in more than 100 books. Heller also has been a contributing editor to Print, Eye, Baseline and I.D., writes obituaries for The New York Times and a column for the Book Review. A Times art director for 33 years, 30 of which he spent at the Book Review, Heller, a New York City native, is the co-founder and co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts (he has lectured at SVA for 14 years). Today, a retrospective of Mr. Heller’s work opens at the School of Visual Art’s Visual Arts Museum.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting on Davidson Ave. in the Bronx, an armed robbery on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn, and a shooting at 40th Ave. and 10th St. in Queens.
• Bye-bye, birdie: Ziggy, the 6-week old red-tail hawk who fell and was saved in Midtown last week, was released into Central Park today.
• “When voters get confused, they vote no.” That almost seems like a sensible tack to take if you overlook just abstaining while in a voting booth. Abstaining is exactly what residents of an upstate community will be doing soon, because they were voting on a resolution regarding whether or not beer should be allowed to be sold in their town. Now it’s a dry town.
• Come on Down Rosie O’Donnell! She may be the next host of game show “The Price Is Right” now that Bob Barker has retired.
• Streetsblog notes a new street feature: the bike box. It’s a designated space at intersections reserved for cyclists so they’re the first moving at a green light. Seems like a good idea, but will probably just add another meaning to the traffic term “blocking the box.”
• Eater reports that restaurateur Keith McNally is again calling out The New York Times’ restaurant critic Frank Bruni, accusing him of favoritism and shilling for friends.
• Pete Hamill reviewed “TAXI! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver” in The Times’ Sunday Book Review.
• WNBC’s Gabe Pressman muses on the question: “Do Public Authorities Really Care About the Public?”

EVENT: Upstairs at the Square, the bookstores series featuring musicians and authors in conversation & performing their work, is happening tonight. This one will be featuring musician Badly Drawn Boy and author Dana Spiotta, with host Katherine Lanpher.

Ooh, here's some obscure weather trivia. The big rain we had last week pushed Central Park's total for the year to over 50 inches. That makes 2006 the fourth consecutive year in which precipitation exceeded 50 inches --the first time that's happened since records began in 1869.

With the fifth anniversary of September 11 drawing near, many related books are being released this and next week. One of the most intriguing is The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon. Both have a rich history in comics: USA Today explains, "Jacobson, 76, created Richie Rich and was executive editor of Marvel and Harvey Comics, and Colon, 75, drew Casper and Wonder Woman" - but the book is a graphic interpretation of The 9/11 Commission's report on the events of Septemer 11, because they found it difficult to get through the 568-page report. Colon said, "For a government report, it was well written, but still hard to follow — lots of Arabic names, and a lot of things going on at the same time in different places." Slate has been excerpting the book, and from those excerpts, it seems to work very well.

-Police saved a man yesterday from an oncoming train.

We'd been eyeing the huge book, New Art City, which is about American artists hitting their stride in the mid-20th century New York City. However, we were concerned that at 665 pages, we would throw out our back carrying it back home from the store (or cause UPS to slip a disc) and then it would break out coffee table. John Updike reviewed it this weekend in the NY Times Book Review, and he assuaged our fears: "This is not a coffee-table art book; its illustrations, though numerous, are small, and black-and-white. A dense text rules the textbook-sized pages - 557 of them, not counting notes, acknowledgments and index." The book looks at the famous - Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, and Donald Judd - and the lesser known - Hans Hofmann, Joan Mitchell, Fairfield Porter, and John Graham. Author Jed Perl will be speaking at a few events here, so it should be interesting if you're at all interested in modern American art.

Liev Schreiber, Everything Is Illuminated

-Rachel Donadio has a fun essay in the Book Review on how the information age will effect future biographers and historians (the moral: make sure your Boswell backs up your hard drive).

- Suddenly under a storm of bullets, a 13-year-old Brooklyn boy threw himself over a 10-year-old girl in an attempt to keep her safe (he got shot twice in the back, she was hit on the arms). The kids, who were getting their hair braided on a stoop at 2 a.m. when the shooting occurred, are in stable condition and security tapes are being reviewed.

NY Times Ethicist Randy Cohen announces to readers (Gothamist assumes he means all NY Times readers, though he just mentions "Book Review" readers) that he wants their suggestions to make a literary map of Manhattan, places where literary characters walked, brooded, or traipsed. Email suggestions to bookmap@nytimes.com (there are more rules and regs, like having page numbers and quotes, here), credit will be given to the first person who sends in a submission for a particular book. And, friends, Lyle, Lyle Crocodile has already been submitted:

Bernard Waber places Lyle, Lyle Crocodile for us: "This is the house. The house on East 88th Street." But where on East 88th Street? The clue comes in an illustration: the amiable reptile stands on his front stoop looking at a house to his left marked No. 234. That puts Lyle's own house at No. 236. Alas, a visit to the block shows not the charming brownstone where Lyle lolled but an ordinary tenement. Lyle's house, like Lyle, is a fiction. As it happens, Harriet the Spy lives in the same neighborhood, in a house on East 87th. You'd think someone as clever as she would have noticed a crocodile around the block.