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[Longhorn Review] Jeff Beck’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Party
By: Jeff Beck
Jeff Beck is a legend and for good reason…he is one of the few true innovators of the electric guitar. His touch and tone are always breathtaking, and his phrasing is inimitable. Beck’s tribute to the music of Les Paul and Mary Ford is much more than a waltz through some of the duo’s finest work, it is an historical account of Beck’s formative years. Scottish diva Imelda May shines throughout the concert, turning in consistently fabulous performances including an intoxicating version of the Shangri-Las classic “Walking in the Sand”. 72 yr. old Gary U.S. Bonds absolutely brings the roof down with a crackling rendition of his 1960 hit “New Orleans”. Brian Setzer’s walk on performance of the Eddie Cochran classic “Twenty Flight Rock” is just awesome! However, throughout the recording the star is Beck’s powerful yet understated playing, filled with elegance and passion for his own Rockabilly roots.
Reviewer: Longhorn Reviewer
[Longhorn Review] Shadows of a fleeting world : pictorial photography and the Seattle Camera Club
By:
Wonderful book with beautiful photographs.
Reviewer: Laura
[Longhorn Review] Lettera di Stefano Arteaga a Gio: Batista Bodoni intorno alla censura pubblicata dal caval. Clementino Vannetti accademico fiorentino contro l’edizione parmense dell’Orazio del MDCCXCI.
By: Giambattista Bodoni
Just want to point out that Crisopoli (in publication info) is actually the ancient name for Parma, and this is where Bodoni worked–not Turkey.
Reviewer: Valerie Lester
[Longhorn Review] A Satyr against Mankind – Rochester
By: Earl of Rochester (1647-80)
Aj R587 +679s copy 1 contains the rare misprints at line 46 ‘Baud’ for ‘Band’, and at line 100 ‘distinguishes which’ for ‘distinguishes by’; other copies are at the Bodleian, Oxford; Boston Public Library and Houghton, Harvard, making the HRC copy a rarity.
Reviewer: Nicholas Fisher
[Longhorn Review] Mathematical principles of mental philosophy
By: Sadao Shibahara.
An attempt to use topology and other mathematical tools, to model human thought.
The prose is dry, presumptious, and overwritten, in the turgid para-academic style favored by pseudointellectuals seemingly the world over. But the book is one of those “almost made it” works that simply must be produced every so often.
It could be studied by a psychologist, statistician, philosopher, mathematician, or even a mystic, and provide numerous tangential ideas or “rabbits” to chase down strange holes of thought.
The author has a few interesting ideas, and a great many uninteresting ones gussied up in this pseudo-academic prose. The author shows _great_ endurance elaborating both kinds of them in occasionally agonizing detail. His approach is organized and methodical overall, even though the prose is far worse than Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, most of R. Buckminster Fuller’s work, or anything by Marshall McLuhan, for instance. Like the preceding three authors, if anyone extracts a useful set of concepts or practices from this book, it isn’t the author’s fault….
Shibahara promised a completed work in three volumes. This volume 1 was printed in a run of 500 copies, and one of them somehow finding its way to Texas. This weird book has found a home in Austin.
I am going to skim this strange volume deeply, and I hope he publishes the whole thing some day. Good Luck to him, he’s 87 at this writing.
essdee
Reviewer: Steve Devine
[Longhorn Review] The City and The City
By: mIEVILLE, cHINA
So you are reading along in this noirish meta-police procedural, indebted to Bruno Schulz and Italo Calvino and maybe Raymond Chandler, with its surreal atmosphere of quantum physics, and suddenly you slip down into it. You are trying to read the story, but the decontextualized puzzles and jokes are getting in the way. You try to unsee them, but sometimes you just can’t and you lose the thread. You breach – the streets look familiar, the dialog is the same, but there is something else going on. Elegant, witty, not as elaborate as “The Name of the Rose”, but sly, like P.I. Taibo.
Reviewer: dennis trombatore
[Longhorn Review] The Hare with Amber Eyes
By: De Waal, Edmund
In 2011, there is a drumbeat of political discourse about immigration when, in truth, the real topic we should be considering is the experience of emigration, the act of running and hiding. While America is a nation of immigrants, we have spent the last century and more living in a world of émigrés, a world of people in various states of homelessness, statelessness, asylum seekers, refugees, boat people, diasporans of one stripe or another. Global war and global economy have given us mass movements and migrations, some under force of arms, some under crushing economic necessity, but today, nearly everyone is or is recently descended from émigrés.
There is no end of tales from these people under the sense of Hegel’s ‘Aufhebung’, peoples zeroed out in the name of creating new societies and new worlds. We, I, who are their descendants, produce and consume these explorations of the fragility and insubstantiality of time and history with wonder and sadness, but we ourselves never see it coming. We hear the phrase ‘never again’, and we think we understand that, but almost no one in America understood the first time, and almost none of us have understood that ‘again and again’ would be a more appropriate description of global forced emigration since the fall of the Hapsburg Empire in 1918.
Edmund De Waal has written a family saga around a collection of 264 netsuke – tiny carvings in ivory and wood from pre-modern Japan. De Waal’s forebears, wealthy and powerful Jewish grain dealers from Odessa, Vienna and Paris, thought that their European assimilation was complete, that their business ties and social integration would protect them from the winds of history, and yet, when everything changed, in a matter of weeks they found themselves with one suitcase and an exit permit each, and they were the lucky ones.
De Waal is a ceramic artist, and this tale, lovingly told through and around the artistic and literary movements of the time, is tactile, intimate, personal, and almost mythological, like the netsuke that are at the center of the family biography and which, as the collective soul of the Ephrussi family, are all that is saved, and that under the mattress of the maid with no last name. Are the Ephrussi’s more to be pitied because they stood so close to the center of the society that so violently rejected them? Or does this only serve as a warning to the rest of us that it is not only the benighted who find themselves in the crosshairs of modern economic history? Satchel Paige reportedly said ‘Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.’ This little gem of a book is an achingly sad look back that reveals that something is indeed gaining on all of us, and that maybe art can save us after all, if anything can.
Reviewer: dennis trombatore
[Longhorn Review] I’ll be home for the Christmas rush : letters from Europe, 1944-45
By: Albert W. Hoffman ; edited for publication by David R. Hoffman.
The author is a mutual friend. Anyone who had a parent or grandparent who lived in Texas in the mid-Twentieth Century, or just knows somebody raised in that time and place, will find this a most fascinating read.
In the present age of cell phones and ever-evolving electronic media it’s hard to imagine the importance of the written word, especially during such hard times as war, and there being no feasible alternative, a written word the only means of communicating with a loved one, despite the unpredictability of mail service. And thanks to a collection of letters written by a Texan in Europe to his wife and children in Brownwood during the Normandy invasion, one war veteran’s story, what got through the censors’ hands, is carefully preserved.
Sadly, due to regulations, those letters received by this man from family and friends on the home front had to be quickly read, then burned to be kept from enemy hands in case of capture. So even though about half the story is missing, “I’ll Be Home…” tells it like no movie or newsreel ever could.
Extensive research was done to note people, places and things mentioned in the correspondence. The author notes the dates which these letters were written and received stateside. While some of the words may be deemed “incorrect” we cannot change the attitudes of another era. This book is real treasure and time capsule of a nearly-forgotten age.
Reviewer: Longhorn Reviewer
[Longhorn Review] From Wagons to the Moon
By: David Carrol Wallace
This is the autobiography of Texan D. C. Wallace. It is a series of vignettes starting with his early memories of the 1920s and 30s. He describes his family’s moves by horse drawn wagon from one rural Texas farmstead to another, his service in World War II including his advanced technical training, his post war success as a service station worker and eventual owner, and finally his retirement. The writing style is charmingly candid, providing the reader with an overview of both the American Dream and the social (and racial) sentiments of the times as his personal success parallels the economic and technical advancement of the United States. I found it amazing to contemplate how adaptable his generation was. Being born at a time when airplanes (made of wood and fabric) were an unusual sight, they lived to see men walk on the moon, women command the space shuttle, and NASA probes reach the outer solar system. Overall a delightful piece of Americana/Texana covering a remarkable period of social and technical progress.
Reviewer: James Stolpa
