This is another one of those fairly good design books that relies far more on the images than on analysis and description. While the objects should certainly be able to speak for themselves, and they do, their age and what they meant at the time of their invention need far more explanation than is available here. Indeed, many pages have only a paragarph or less of text, a mere supplement to beautiful photos.

That being said, I learned a lot about the early history of industrial design from this book, from its origins as a reaction to the drab and near-featurelessness of early efforts to mass manufacture everyday objects to the abstract philosophy of the constructionists and the heavy duty functionalism of the Bauhaus. The longest treatment is rightfully reserved for Bauhaus and its immediate predecessors in the Werkbund, all Germans who were attempting to systematically merge artistic expression with the demands of industrial production, thereby creating a new movement. These developments are covered to a near-acceptable degree, but the language is confusing and often abstruce or cryptic and hence hard to understand. THe text also assumes a lot of knowledge and hence is not introductory, though at least it does not get lost in academic jargon.

I got the lightest introduction to the early history of industrial design in this book, but obviously I wanted more. I guess I will have to keep reading. Also, the Art Deco movement, which is a French/American development from the same period and largely a reaction to the utilitarianism and minimalism of the Germanic schools, is mentioned in a single paragraph and hence left completely unexplored.

One thing that really struck me was the direct line of continuity with much contemporary design. There must be subtle differences that I hope to discover later, but it made a lot of what I admire now look derivative. That was interesting and extremely stimulating.

Recommended as a starting point and a visual feast. It can be read at leisure in one day.

After having read McCullogh's splendid series on Rome, I turned to this fat, dense book with great expectations. I was not disappointed: the stories are endlessly fascinating, from their basic details on ancient history to the bizarre asides that reveal the pre-Christianised mind-set of the author.

Like all great books, this one can be read on innumerable levels. First, there is the moralising philosophy that is perhaps the principal purpose of the author to advance - each life holds lessons on proper conduct of great and notorious leaders alike. You get Caesar, Perikles, and Alcibiades, and scores of others who are compared and contrasted. Second, there is the content. Plutarch is an invaluable source of data for historians and the curious. Third, there is the reflection of religious and other beliefs of the 1C AD: oracles and omens are respected as are the classical gods. For example, while in Greece, Sulla is reported as having found a satyr, which he attempted unsuccesfully to question for its auguring abilities during his miltary campaign in Greece! It is a wonderful window into the mystery of life and human belief systems. That being said, Plutarch is skeptical of these occurances and both questions their relevance and shows how some shrewd leaders, like Sertorious with his white fawn in Spain, used them to great advantage.

Finally, this is a document that was used for nearly 2000 years in schools as a vital part of classical education - the well-bred person knew all these personalities and stories, which intimately informed their vocabulary and literary references until the beginning of the 20C. That in itself is a wonderful view into what was on people's minds and how they conceived things over the ages. As is well known, Plutarch is the principal source of many of Shakespeare's plays, such as Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. But it was also the source of the now obscure fascination with the rivalry of Marius and Sulla, as depicted in paintings and poetry that we still easily encounter if we are at all interested in art. Thus, this is essential reading for aspiring pedants (like me).

Of course, there are plenty of flaws in the work. It assumes an understanding of much historical detail, and the cases in which I lacked it hugely lessened my enjoyment. At over 320 years old, the translation is also dated and the prose somewhat stilted, and so it took me 300 pages to get used to it. Moreover, strictly speaking, there are many inaccuracies, of which the reader must beware.

Warmly recommended as a great and frequently entertaining historical document.

There is absolutely nothing about this movie to recommend itself. The plot is so utterly pedestrian, the acting is poor to fair, and there is not an iota of subtlty or any interesting twist to it. Yes, Pacino makes a pretty good devil, but that is about it. Keanu Reeves is totally unbelivable as a superduper hot-shot lawyer - he is so bad that it is simply embarassing and almost painful to watch him; he is best suited to comic book roles, like that in Matrix, and this film required someone better to make it come alive. As such, this is a total dud. TOTAL.

As such, it is the merest snapshot in time of some currently available products that were indeed beautiful and exciting. THe only thing that I got from this book is that some interesting companies I didn't know were flagged. What is written is sloppily researched and there are frequent mistakes that are appalling: Ideo, for example, is repeatedly called Ideo Europe. Little things like that show how slip shod a job this is. To see what companies there are out there, the reader would be better off with a magazine.

Not recommended.

THis is a very brief history of post-war furniture and lighting design to accompany an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Design. There are 5 essays, each on a decade of design starting in 1950. They are succinct, very well written, and interesting in that they look at the more general history of the period as well as covering the design movements. However, they are so short that you can read them all in a single sitting, which is what I just did. As I am quite ignorent of design history, it was extremely enlightening for me - I now feel ready for a bigger meal. It was the ideal preparation for a project I am embarking on on design. Furthermore, there are wonderful photos and features on many famous objects, all of which have solid descriptions of what the design innovation represented and what is new about them. All in all, it is a masterful book even if I expected just a bit more.

Recommmended to beginners in the field and as a reference.

THis is an interesting book about how some very good product designs were done. However, I was not satisfied with the level of detail of each story: not only did each case study make it appear that an optimal design was acheived, but it undercovered the human and organizational dramas that underlie such design processes. In many instances, there is a whiff of the true complexity and it made my mouth water, but then didn't go deep enough. As a result, the whole process comes off too logical and rational, too panglossian if you wish.

From my own experience, I know that the design process is far more difficult than the reader would glean from the book. Designers, like artists, are high strung people who live for and in their work - if you criticise their work, you are criticising them personally and they react. Their egos are as big as their talents. Bitter fights result with engineers and the holders of the corporate largesse, the purse strings that make or break an experiment. THere are difficult compromises, often political, and plenty of ongoing acrimony. How should they be handled and nurtured? Does a separate group need to be insulated? Should they just grow up or would that kill part of the creative process? None of this is sufficiently covered in this book and they all represent key management issues. Moreover, there is not enough about the companies in the book - who they are, what they believe in terms of philosophy, how they calculate and market themselves.

Nonetheless, the stories are exciting and the photography is excellent. Certain common techniques also emerge, such as the importance of rapid prototyping and marketing shortcuts that don't ignore cumstomer needs but rather find way to tap into new ones. These too are fascinating issues that require deeper treatment.

Recommended, but only as a start.

With the close of this novel, the last in the series, I feel as if I have lost a good and trusty friend. In a word, these have been the best and most fascinating continuous historical novels that I have ever read. As with friendships, of course, they age: there is no question that McCullough has said her piece and done her thing and this is where it should stop: while the section leading to Caesar's assassination is wonderful, the aftermath in which the assassins are hunted down systematically or simply self-destruct has the feel of too abrupt a summary. Perhaps after a certain time her imagination will replenish itself, and a new series will follow.

At the heart of the novel, in my reading, Caesar has taken on too much even for a man of universal genius (military, political, rhetorical, and in governance) and is exhausted and almost tired of living. As he deals defeat after defeat to his old foes, whom he hopes will survive to offer him an opposition that can strengthen him and help him refine his ideas, his vision for Roman society remains unsurpassed and more far-seeing than everyone else. He is also searching for an heir and communing with (the ugly) Cleopatra, who comes off as an intelligent, if rather conventional and brutal autocrat. He challenges her to think more broadly of the future, and attempts to transmit much of his vision to her in the few spare moments they have to talk.

Then, as Caesar returns to the wreckage and chaos of a Rome rent by decades of civil war, he confronts the mismanagement of less gifted and visionary men in a towering rage, which makes him take on the enormous task of setting the capital back on its feet and creates new enemies. He is disappointed that no one of the stature of Cicero or his old Boni adversaries emerges. In McCulloughs' view, Caesar is the last great republican of a growing empire that requires autocracy to function with its immense size and complexity.

Caesar's heir, who uses his inherited "godhead" with ruthless shrewdness, is a very different man: he is as cold-blooded as a cobra, vengeful rather than offering clemency to his Roman foes, and full of patient guile ("he doesn't need to die yet"); he is sickly rather than robust, and while handsome lacks the sexual magnetism of his mentor. While hardly a military genius like Caesar, he grows into political manipulation and subterfuge at an extremely tender age, which remains unexplained. The portrait is truly fascinating, a taste of the new system of government to come, but it is here that McCulloughs' energy begins to wane. The reader, at least in my case, cannot understand what he is planning and why he acts as he does in many instances. Thus, it is just the lightest taste of what this man will become and do.

There are a number of personalities that continue to develop in this volume, most of whom meet their fates with all of the brutality one might expect from a semi-savage society. The reader sees Cicero, Brutus, Mark Anthony, Cato and many many others in novel and wonderful interpretations, all of it stimulating the desire to learn more. Sometimes melodramatic, McCullough has done her homework with the historical details and it is a feast for the imagination. While the finishing chapters are too brief, the writing remains solid, if unexceptional. This is not high literature, but very very good storytelling. Finally, through this coverage of politics and personalities, McCulloguh brilliantly succeeds in portraying Roman society in great depth, from the intrigues of the Forum to the mismanaged and brutalised subjects in the provinces.

I will miss this series very much, but it was time for it to end, at least for now. Warmly recommended.

Gould never ceases to astound me with his talents. Not only does he have fascinating insights into science, but each of his books is a literary event of exceptional clarity, with elegant yet distinctively quirky prose and humor. Reading his books, I think, is like drinking truly fine wine, each sip to savor and each vintage subtly different.

This book covers a revolution that Gould argues was hidden from the public, that is, the complete reinterpretation of the Burgess Shale, which is the most important Cambrian fossil bed ever to have been found. In my reading, there were two fundamental ideas Gould wanted to get across: 1) that, with explosions of new forms of life that follow grand extinctions or leaps in evolutionary development, there is actually more rather than less diversity in basic forms; 2) this fact flatly contradicts our assumptions that life "progresses" by becoming ever more complex (and to some, evolutionarily superior, culminating in man). What Gould says is that, if you rewound the tape of life through all the contingencies that led to homo sapiens, it is more likely than not that we would never have existed. He would, in other words, remove us from the inevitability of occupying the apex of life's hierarchy.

For anyone familiar with Gould's essays, which I believe rank as works of genius in the genre of science popularization, will recognize these themes. What sets this book apart is his systematic, highly technical argument from the evidence of the re-interpretation. Much of the revolution depends on the numbers of joints in fossil legs, rendering them different than all the insect species that evolved from different ancestors, and other minutiae that Gould describes with peerless elegance. As such, I believe, he has succeeded in producing that most difficult of books: hard science for specialists that is also intended for the interested (and persistent) lay reader. This is a true virtuoso performance that is an incredible pleasure to read. As always, the persona he presents in the book is wonderfully companionable and open-minded.

As a reporter of science, I was surprised to learn that Gould was disdained by many of his colleagues at Harvard and the wider Cambridge area as having fallen behind the more mathematical and progressist-evolutionary approaches that have taken over the field of paleontology and biology. As I understood it - and this does not fully do justice to the objections of these scholars to Gould - they seemed to feel that he was wrong when he argued that many attributes did not have meaning or evolutionary significance and hence all should not be treated as such (i.e. catalogued ad infinitum in a scholastic manner that ignores certain assumptions). Instead, in my reading, Gould argued that, when catastrophic changes in the environment killed off huge numbers of species, the traits that allowed some to survive were usually evolved for other reasons and were perhaps redundant or useless at the time of the event. This book makes the most detailed case for Gould's position on these issues. I happen to believe that Gould is correct and that the vogue may one day shift back in his direction, i.e. become less determinist.

Warmly recommended.

This is a fairly interesting novel from the standpoint of portraying what it was like for a great artist to work in 17C Holland, that is, Vermeer. The frame of the story is from the point of view of a maid, whose family has fallen from relative affluence and hence she was forced into degrading labor in spite of her considerable intelligence.

The sensibility is extremely delicate and prosaic, in that what the maid worries incessantly about are everyday battles for status within the household with children, another maid, and Vermeer's spoilt and narrow-minded spouse. Indeed, the maid's world, while complete in all its distressing detail, is petty to the point of boredom for the reader, or at least for me. Because her personal freedom and possibility were so sadly limited, I could not identify beyond a certain point with her anxieties and hopes as she was forced into a succession of servitudes and humiliations. Moreover, there is not a single jot of humor. Nonetheless, late in the book, her relationship with Vermeer becomes very interesting indeed, as he puts her into a painting as a model for a rich patron - the psychology is subtle and far-reaching. The reader also gets some perspective on the tensions between Catholic and Protestant groups that persisted even in the tolerant cities of Holland.

Recommended, but tepidly.

This is a well written and researched book on one of the great early shows that was on US television. As such, it offers a fascinating look into a medium that was evolving and how a group of great innovators molded the process.

Creating great comedy is not just about funny guys doing strange things. As with all true innovators, great comedians also tend to be members of great teams. Their goals are similar to those of visionary businessmen, scientists, and designers: they want to achieve something revolutionary and they want to advance their careers and, by extension, make money. That is why Your Show of Shows, a 1950s American television comedy series starring Sid Caesar, offers fascinating lessons on one of the most successful creative teams in TV. Not only did Caesar's writers challenge the standard practices of a new and rapidly evolving industry, but they did so consistently over a number of years with seemingly impossible deadlines every week.

How did they do it? In a nutshell, Sid Caesar put a group of phenomenally talented writers into an empty room and let them be themselves while offering subtle, if occasionally brutal, hints at how they should work together rather than directing (or "micro-managing") them. Caesar nurtured an environment to spawn creativity and he had a great producer behind him who knew how to line up corporate support. Amazingly - and typical of the audacity that went into this show - the first few shows were aired without sponsorship and yet were unprecedented in their production costs.

The group included Mel Brooks, who went on to create a number of pioneering comedies. Woody Allen also got his big break as part of Caesar's team and later came into his own as an Oscar-winning scriptwriter and filmmaker. In addition, there was the celebrated producer, director, writer, and comedian Carl Reiner (creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show) as well as Larry Gelbart, who created of the M*A*S*H television series and the Broadway play City of Angels. Finally, prior to becoming one of America's most successful Broadway playwrights, Neil Simon began his writing career on the Caesar show. In spite of their huge egos and now-famous eccentricities, this group worked as a team, sometimes offering solo performances, but always as a part of something bigger than themselves alone.

These personalities stand out in the book, in all their quirkiness and egotism and talent. The pressure on the team was enormous: not only would they have to meet the highest standards of sophistication, quality, and originality as set by Caesar and Liebman, who did not want the ordinary slapstick that was popular then, but every week Caesar and the other performers would have to entertain a live audience during a 90-minute, nationwide broadcast. Caesar describes it as putting on half of a Broadway play - new - each week, and doing it in real time. As such, it is also a facinating study of leadership, even if by a comedian.

Nonetheless, there are long sections of descriptions of the shows' content. I found that boring, but it is a matter of taste and what you are expecting. I was looking more for a histrry of TV and how an innovative team worked, and I got it in this book very satisfactorily. I did not want tv criticism or recapitulations of things that are better seen than analysed.

Recommended.