reviews

Galen Rowell

Sierra Club, ISBN: 0871563673 Publisher, Buy online

Galen Rowell was a world-class mountaineer and photographer. He passed away with his wife in an airplane crash on August 11, 2002.

He was a master of color landscapes and had the knack of catching unique combinations of light in the memorable photos that can be seen in his Mountain Light Gallery. Interestingly, he eschewed the large format cameras used by Ansel Adams and used exclusively 35mm cameras from Nikon (thus thoroughly debunking the orthodoxy that 35mm cannot be used for serious landscape photography).

In this book, Rowell lays out his relation to mountains, his artistic vision and his photographic techniques, in an engaging and lively style alternating between theoretical text and more illustrative intermezzos with detailed descriptions of the story behind each image (reminiscent of Ansel Adams’ Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs. Like Ansel Adams, he was a member of the Sierra Club, but ecological preoccupations are woven subtly in the text. He shows a photo taken near a 4900 year old bristlecone pine that was felled by a botanist who couldn’t be troubled to special-order a core sampling borer from Switzerland.

The photos in the book are gorgeous, but this is no mere coffee-table book (it is too affordable to be one, for starters). All in all, I believe this book is a must-read for anyone interested in landscape photography, even if you are not into the strenuous physical style he favored.

In his A History of Eternity, Borges rightfully attacked Richard Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights as being sensationalist and emphasizing the savage and brutal (not to mention sensual) nature of the Orient to pander to his thrill-seeking British audience.

One of the great virtues of Burton’s text, however, is the wealth of footnotes he supplies. Many are very witty, and collected, they are sometimes more interesting than the original text itself.

A case in point, this footnote on the colloquial word for “police”: “Arab. Al-Zalamah lit. = tyrants, oppressors, applied to the police and generally to employés of Government. It is a word which tells a history”. It seems little has changed since…

The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown

NESFA (New England SF Association), ISBN: 1886778183 Publisher, Buy online

Fredric Brown is arguably the finest writer of science-fiction short stories ever, just as Jorge Luis Borges is the master of the metaphysical fantastic stories.

Curiously, his SF work is more easily available abroad, notably the French translations by Denoël, than in his native US, and most of his books still in print are his mystery novels. This is why I applaud the NESFA’s decision to collect and reprint all the short stories.

Many of these are masterpieces of the genre, with surprising endings that pack a wallop. If you like the TV series “The Twilight Zone”, you know what I mean. Many of them are technically not SF, like the bawdy “The ring of Hans Carvel” in which a medieval man sells his soul for a way to keep his young wife faithful, but they are all extremely enjoyable.

For fans of Ansel Adams, the Library of Congress has an online exhibit based on his book “Born Free and Equal”. This book is a series of photographs taken at the Manzanar camp in California where Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II.

A book version has been reprinted.

Update (2002-09-16): This article in The Atlantic sheds some light on the background for the original exhibition.

Ruari McLean

Thames and Hudson, ISBN: 0500680221  Publisher

This is a curious book, part tutorial, part cookbook, part personal war stories, including the author’s pet tools and techniques.  It was obviously designed before computers were commonplace and many sections dealing with hot metal type or phototypesetting are completely obsolete nowadays.

The beginning has a decent introduction to the history of typography and typefaces.

The middle part concerns itself with working around the constraints of metal or copyediting before word processing systems became commonplace. If nothing else, it should give us a renewed appreciation of how much tedious labor computers save us, such as not having to count characters to find out how many pages will be required.

The final part on layout for stationery, books and magazines is pretty good, but not very systematic, and carries the same war story flavor as the section on recommended tools.

All in all, this book has some interesting information, but I would not recommend it to anyone who wants to learn how to produce beautiful documents out of his desktop publishing setup. Robin Williams’s “The PC is not a typewriter”, Robert Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographical Style” or even Donald Knuth’s books on computers and typography are better choices in this respect.