Book Description
William T. Baker is a name synonymous across North America with quality architecture and luxury living
Customer Reviews:
Beautiful and educational.......2006-12-19
We bought this book because Mr. Baker is on the short list of architects we are considering for our new home. It is a very beautiful and educational book, with comprehensive pictures of the exteriors and interiors of many lovely homes of all styles. It has helped me greatly in deciding what I like and do not like - I have spent hours pouring over this book and will spend many more I am sure.
I also purchased Bill Harrison's book at the same time and it is not nearly as good as this one, although Mr. Harrison has designed many lovely homes too. Mr. Baker's homes, for the most part, seem to be homes you could actually live in - cozy and warm, even though many are large. Lots of close ups of the details, and even some landscape plans as well.
All in all, a very good purchase!
STYLE PERSONIFIED.......2006-10-30
If a book can be elegant, this one is, the images are crisp and vivid and the text is very informative. The book is very thorough, though never pedantic, you are educated not lectured. If you any interest beautiful new homes or just enjoy beautiful books, then I can imagine you being disappointed. Highly recommended.
Book Description
Features classical, stunning homes by southern born architect Ken Tate.
Customer Reviews:
Ken Tate Architect.......2007-05-13
The projects shown are extremely well executed.
The book combines photographs and drawings in a way that allows the reader to actually learn something about residential design.
Book Description
Truly deserving of the accolade a modern classic, Donna Tartt’s novel is a remarkable achievement—both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
Customer Reviews:
Just not sure.......2007-08-27
I just finished reading Donna Tartt's "The Secret History".
Let me just say that I thought the prose was really nice, and I enjoyed the references to the Classics because I studied some Classics in University. The book set a mood, and I enjoyed that aspect of it as well.
I was a bit disappointed over all however, mostly with the characters, who were quite superficial and as a result, impossible to really sympathyze with, especially considering their actions in the book. I would have liked the relationship between Richard and Camilla to have been explored more for instance, or at least why Richard was so infatuated with her.
I found that the book was in serious need of editing, particularly towards the end, where Tartt seemed to just add all these little conflicts to add more volume to the thin story (with the exception of Julian and the letter).
I found the whole business with Bunny was unecessary and extreme, and even though he wasn't a very likeable character, I felt bad for him, his girfriend and his poor family, and once again, absolutely no sympathy towards Henry, Charles, Francis or Camilla, who were pretentious, petty and foolish at the same time or Richard, who I actually found to be passive to the point of being disgusting.
Maybe the plot was just unbelievable - as well as the whole idea of killing one of your best mates and thinking nothing of it. Throw in a cluster of flat characters that the reader doesn't really get to know, and you just end up wishing that the lot of them get what they deserve for what they did to Bunny.
Want a suggestion for a dark, haunting and beautful novel? Read The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides.
A gripping story........2007-08-02
I really enjoyed this book by Donna Tartt. I immediately picked up her other novel Little Friend, after I finished this one. To me, that is the mark of a great novelist.
Tartt has a way with the pace of the story that sucks the reader in almost immediately and doesn't let go. This story is bizarre and thrilling. I couldn't put it down.
Highly recommended read!
A modern Greek tragedy.......2007-08-02
"The Secret History" is a story about a group of undergraduate classical studies students who kill one of their friends. Don't worry, I'm not giving away the plot: the murder occurs on the very first page of the book, and then the reader is taken back to the events leading up to the incident.
The narrator of the story is Richard Papen, a young man who leaves his lower-class California family in search of bigger and better things on the East Coast. Shortly after enrolling at a small college in Vermont, Richard switch over to a major in classical studies. This major is unlike any other program in the school in that there is only one professor, the brilliant but immoral Julian. Furthermore, Julian insists that Richard drops all his other classes in order to fully devote himself to the demanding classical studies curriculum.
In addition to Richard, there are five other students participating in the classical studies program. They come across as snobby and arrogant at first, but Richard finds himself drawn to them and is eventually accepted into their circle. After a while, Richard learns a terrible secret about four of his new friends: they accidentally killed a man during a crazy bacchanalian revel. When a member of their group, Bunny, appears likely to spill the secret, the others decide that the only solution is to kill him, too. Not surprisingly, Bunny's death has a powerful effect on everyone in the group, and they each begin acting out in their own ways.
This is an intriguing book that really pays tribute to the classic Greek tragedies: the story features betrayal, conspiracy, murder, and even incest. It's interesting to see how the violent events in the story take a toll on each of the characters individually. Author Donna Tartt is an amazing storyteller who really keeps the reader in suspense throughout the entire book. My only complaint is that this book is overly detailed, and as a result could easily be about 200 pages shorter. In spite of it's length, though, this is a brilliantly written psychological thriller, and it's a truly amazing effort for a first novel.
A gripping and compelling page-turner.......2007-07-08
As many other reviewers have noted, this is a novel that is so easy to read it almost seems to read itself. There is nothing simplistic or superficially "easy" about the book, but it the story is just told so well and is so inherently compelling that almost no effort whatsoever is required to work one's way through it. It is, in short, a delight to read.
The story concerns the killing of one student by a group of other students in a small liberal arts college in Vermont (think along the lines of Middlebury). This is not a spoiler since we are apprised of this on the first couple of pages of the novel. From there the question for the reader is why they killed him. The knowledge from the very beginning of the novel that Bunny was doomed lends a strangely tragic atmosphere over every page in which he appears. I initially wondered if the author had given away too much by revealing the murder at the beginning of the novel, but as I read I found this knowledge framed the novel in a way not otherwise possible had we not knowledge that Bunny was doomed. I think it was a brilliant move.
The novel deals a great deal with class distinction in the US without really saying much about class. This is one of the books few flaws. Five of the six students are privileged, either economically or socially. Richard, the novel's narrator, is a working class student from California, while the other five are from the east coast. The latter five are presented as decadent. Most of them are hard drinking, drug abusing, and in some instances sexually deviant (and I'm not referring to the student who turns out to be gay). They also turn out to be murderous.
The central story of the novel is concerns Richard's entrance to the world of the novel's fictitious Vermont college and his initiation into the small, closed off world of the students who work under the college's eccentric but gifted Classics professor Julian Morrow. The novel's central irony is that Julian clearly believes he is educating the elite of not only Hampden College but of society at large. That they all possessed the "fatal flaw" mentioned in the book's first sentence is the central conceit of the novel. Tartt details in fine form Richard's growing friendships and experiences with the other five students and the intricate web of betrayal and deceit it grows into. The main delight of the novel derives from how outstandingly Tartt details this story. Whatever else the book is, it is a great yarn.
I'd like to single one aspect out for special praise. Most of the characters in the novel are male while the author is female. Now, it should not really matter what gender a writer belongs to, but unfortunately many writers simply don't handle the opposite sex very well. Think of the many complaints of Hemingway's depiction of female character. I've often complained of the male characters in Iris Murdoch's novels. It is obvious that even very good writers--and both Hemingway and Murdoch fall into that category--do not always create compelling characters of the opposite sex. Other writers manage to avoid the problems by mainly writing from the standpoint of a character with the same sex as their own. Think in this regard of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Their protagonists are almost always male. Or Margaret Atwood, who almost always writes from the standpoint of a woman. Now, there is nothing wrong about any of this. Donna Tartt has written a novel centered almost exclusively on male characters (there is one major female character, but she usually remains somewhat quietly in the background), written from a male point of view. And she has done so marvelously. This is an achievement that should not be underrated.
In short, this is an extremely fine novel in every way. I can give it my strongest possible endorsement. And many thanks to my daughter Elizabeth for giving this to me as a Christmas present.
A Literary Gem.......2007-06-19
This is destined to be an assigned book in college classes that have even a peripheral connection to Ancient Greece. It will also make for a fascinating comparison of this college setting (a small Vermont campus)with that of the reader. This is a world of drugs, booze and the laxest academic requirements imaginable. Beautifully researched, with plenty of suspense and a loud ring of authenticity. It will help if you have at least a smattering of aquaintance with The Illiad.
Book Description
In this groundbreaking volume, conventional assumptions about one of England’s greatest and most influential classical architects are turned on their head. Traditionally, Inigo Jones has been looked upon as an isolated, even old-fashioned, figure in European architecture, still espousing the Palladian ideals of the 16th century when European contemporaries were turning to the Baroque. Yet an investigation of contemporary European architecture and of Jones’s buildings belies this impression, demonstrating that Jones must be viewed in the context of a European-wide, early-17th-century classicist movement.
Giles Worsley examines the full range of Jones’s architecture, from humble stable to royal palace. Worsley shows that key motifs that have been seen as proof of Jones’s Palladian loyalties—particularly the Serliana, the portico, and the centrally planned villa—have a much older and deeper meaning as symbols of sovereignty. The book transforms our understanding not only of Inigo Jones but also of the architecture of his time.
Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Book Description
In a career that spanned the first half of this century, Philip Trammell Shutze produced over 750 architectural works. Because his production was so large, this first book to examine his buildings concentrates on the more important ones, which as a body represent an architectural achievement of a very high order of refinement, grace, and beauty.
Although Shutze practiced from 1912 to 1968, covering the period of the ascendancy of modernism through its final triumph, he remained a firmly committed classicist, practicing out of an office in Atlanta where he produced an extraordinary body of monumental commercial and institutional buildings and country villas.
After graduating from Georgia Tech, Shutze stayed a year at Columbia University before he won the prestigious Rome Prize in 1915. Travelling to Rome later that year, he became a member of one of the earliest classes of fellows to occupy the recently completed American Academy on the Janiculum overlooking the city. The magnificent palazzo designed by America's most renowned architectural firm, McKim, Mead, and White, did not however please the fellows, who found it "too new," and therefore not authentic (Shutze would later devote much attention to techniques for instantly aging building facades).
With the coming of the First World War, Shutze and most of his classmates stayed in Rome as Red Cross volunteers, but when the war was over they returned to he Academy and to their studies. During his five years in Rome, Shutze immersed himself in learning everything he could about the great buildings of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. He painstakingly measured those buildings as well as the monuments of the Roman Empire, committing the smallest of details to paper and to memory.
Returning to the U.S. in 1920, Shutze worked in New York for Mott Schmidt, who designed townhouses for such families as the Astors, Morgans, and Vanderbilts, and he also worked for F. Burrall Hoffman, whose masterpiece is Villa Vizcaya in Miami. Within a few years, though, he returned to Georgia where he remained as the epitome of the "gentleman architect," designing some of the most beautiful buildings ever to grace the American landscape.
Customer Reviews:
Classic Atlanta.......2006-02-18
This is a wonderful book on one of Atlanta's finest residential architects. Mr. Shutze had a command of many styles, but he most famous for his Neo-Palladian Swan House, he built for the Inman's in Buckhead, this home is simply a masterpiece and we are so fortunite that it is today open to the public. This book has wonderful images of the Inman home and many other opulant mansions that Philip Shutze designed in and around Atlanta. The text is quite scholarly and informative, and as I had already stated the book includes many vivid images. Atlanta was fortunite to have had an architect of this calibur designing its great homes during the Golden Age of American craftmanship. Like Houston's great residential architect John Staub, Shutze was a master of many styles, but always knew one didn't need to guild the lilly, so to speak, he also, like Staub, always designed a home to integrate fluidly with it's natural surroundings, this I believe was his greatest talent. Wonderful book on a great talent..highly recommended.
Average customer rating:
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Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. Volume II: Historical Chronology (Oxford-Warburg Studies)
Anthony Grafton
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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ASIN: 0199206015 |
Book Description
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries technical chronology, the study of calendars and of dates in ancient and medieval history, was both a fashionable and a controversial discipline. Theologians debated the dates of the Creation, the Flood, and the Crucifixion. Astronomers and historians argued about the identity of the eclipses that could supply absolute dates for events long past. Classical scholars reconstructed the religious beliefs and political practices that had governed the Greek and Roman calendars. Clerics and consultant experts, finally, debated what was to be done to mend the obviously faulty calendar of the western Church. Poliziano and Pico, Luther and Melanchthon, Copernicus and Kepler all studied and wrote about chronology. Late in the 1570s Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) turned his attention to this field. He had already established himself as an innovative and ingenious editor of Latin texts, as the first volume of this study showed. But he now became one of the most celebrated scholars in Europe. He synthesized the work of dozens of other scholars, many of them now forgotten. He started or took part in many technical debates. And on such central problems as the date and nature of the Last Supper, the reliability of the various Old Testament texts, and the worth of the fragmentary historians of the ancient Near East, he showed remarkable erudition and insight. This book tells the stories of chronology and of Scaliger himself. It describes the scholarly circles in which he moved - above all the University of Leiden, the most innovative in Europe, where he spent the last decade and a half of his life. And it reconstructs his relations with contemporary scholars and scientists - notably Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler - and his remarkable, if wholly unofficial, career as a teacher. It is a sequel to volume I: Textual Criticism and Exegesis, published in 1983.
Book Description
By turns wickedly funny and profoundly illuminating, Encounters and Reflections presents a captivating and unconventional portrait of the life and works of Seth Benardete. One of the leading scholars of ancient thought, Benardete here reflects on both the people he knew and the topics that fascinated him throughout his career in a series of candid, freewheeling conversations with Robert Berman, Ronna Burger, and Michael Davis.
The first part of the book discloses vignettes about fellow students, colleagues, and acquaintances of Benardete's who later became major figures in the academic and intellectual life of twentieth-century America. We glimpse the student days of Alan Bloom, Stanley Rosen, George Steiner, and we discover the life of the mind as lived by well-known scholars such as David Grene, Jacob Klein, and Benardete's mentor Leo Strauss. We also encounter a number of other learned, devoted, and sometimes eccentric luminaries, including T.S. Eliot, James Baldwin, Werner Jaeger, John Davidson Beazley, and Willard Quine. In the book's second part, Benardete reflects on his own intellectual growth and on his ever-evolving understanding of the texts and ideas he spent a lifetime studying. Revisiting some of his recurrent themes—among them eros and the beautiful, the city and the law, and the gods and the human soul—Benardete shares his views on thinkers such as Plato, Homer, and Heidegger, as well as the relations between philosophy and science and between Christianity and ancient Roman thought.
Engaging and informative, Encounters and Reflections brings Benardete's thought to life to enlighten and inspire a new generation of thinkers.
Customer Reviews:
The elements of style.......2003-10-20
Encounters: Lady Beazley hates Germans. Peter Blanckenhagen hates hospitals. Leo Strauss is baffled by physics, Richard Rorty is diagnosed with Weltschmerz, Hilary Putnam welcomes the Maoist insurgency, and Eva Brann is oblivious to her own allure. Arthur Darby Nock bares it all; Jacob Klein reveals his divinity.
Reflections: St. Paul the Leninist, Plato the poet, Herodotus the philosopher. This is clearly where the meat lies, but it doesn't make for as many pithy headlines. A tip of the cap to anyone who can explain the reading of Apuleius.
Good book, fascinating thinker, too slim.......2003-08-11
I'm not going to review this book. (Well, not much, anyhow. Anyone who has come this far, and is looking at these reviews, is already going to be either sufficiently curious about Benardete -- meaning my review won't make a difference -- or already knowledgeable about his writings.) This generally excellent book deals with both Benardete's life and writings. Therein lies my complaint. I like the book and the format -- basically, two interviewers ask SB questions -- but I feel that the book could've provided more, and, moreover, that I deserved more (30$ being a hefty price tag for a book as slim as this one). Frankly, it was a tremendously enjoyable read, but I really do feel that the latter parts of the book (where SB touches on many interesting philosophical issues, and on topics he treats in his books) could have been fifty to one hundred pages longer. I would have been happier if the biographical section had been shorter, IF that had made room for a correspondingly larger 'intellectual' section: that is, more SB on philosophy. Benardete had an enviable ability to convey a lot in short pithy sentences, and greedily I simply wanted his thoughts and opinions on a myriad of topics.
Platonists in Rolls Royces.......2003-04-06
A nice, chatty book. Benardete's insights into Plato, Homer, and Sophocles are beyond compare, and here you get to hang out with him for a while. Time ran out on these conversations, but one wishes both for a little bit more "behind-the-scenes" fun with the Rat Pack Straussians tooling around Chicago in antique Rolls Royces, drinking, and arguing (hardly Kingsley Amis stuff) and for some indications of Benardete's intentions. --Keep it next to your copy of Bellow's Ravelstein for handy reference when watching how the future unfolds.
learning fan.......2003-02-27
Two parts make this book. In the first part Benardete shares memories of his youth and family, education and professional preparation, friends and colleagues. This section is gossipy in the best of ways concerning the climate and personalities that made the University of Chicago and Harvard such dynamic places of learning during the last four decades or so. Bloom, Strauss, Grene, Rorty, Bellow, Dardan, Steiner, Rosen are some of the names named at the U of C alone. I loved reading that student members of the Committee for Social Thought pursued grand projects and perused authors in the voluminous reading time they were granted, allowing many to develop profoundly thick or curiosly sharp lenses with which to scrutinze the world. Benardete peppers most accounts with humour and sharp descriptions. I enjoyed to the Rolls Royce Road Trip.
The second part of the book presents formulation of the ideas and opinions that Benardete developed during his productive career as a scholar and teacher. The most frequently engaged authors are Plato and Homer, but the author smears the canon of classical works with his thoughts. I cannot say I am convinced by or necessarily in agreement with many of Bernardete's idiosyncratic readings, but I remain dazzled by the cleverness and intensity of the author's talent as a reader and interpreter of ancient writings.
The second part of the book is surely richer and more likely to engender rereading. The first part makes for excellent mind candy. On the whole the volume nicely circuits the career of Benardete, who seems to have been an admired teacher and thoughtful scholar. Funny and light, heavy and thoughtful, this book resembles its author.
Book Description
This collection of houses illustrates a splendid diversity of stylistic approaches and range of creative possibilities. An obvious love of the traditions of architecture is evident in each one - no mater what the historical precedent or geographic location.
Customer Reviews:
Faulty construction (the book, not the buildings).......2005-08-11
This book includes many semi-opaque illustrated papers that are pasted or taped to the bound pages. It's a nice idea, but the paste and/or tape in my copy arrived dried out so that the inserts are loose, and the acids or oils in the glue seeped through the paper so the inserts are also blemished. I'm assuming this was a design flaw, and did not just affect my copy. Did anyone else have this problem? Aside from this disappointment, this is a pleasant and attractively laid out picture book of one architect's expensive new dwellings using classical idioms. In my opinion, best suited for fans of the types of showplaces that are favored by Architectural Digest.
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Marginal Comment: A Memoir
Kenneth Dover
Manufacturer: Focus Pub R Pullins & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0715626302 |
Book Description
The first full study of the life and career of architect Arthur Brown Jr. (1874-1957).
This book examines Arthur Brown Jr.'s achievements within their architectural and social context, and details the development of his major works, including San Francisco's City Hall, the Labor-ICC complex at the Federal Triangle in Washington, DC, and many other, civic, commercial, religious, academic, and residential buildings. 200 illustrations.
Customer Reviews:
BEAUX ART MASTER.......2006-03-16
I have alway's thought the San Francisco City Hall was spectacular, as impressive inside as out. It is great to have a book on the architect of that building and many more, his buildings in the Federal Triangle are wonderful, classic, yet functional. This book has fantastic images and the text is fascinating. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in spectacular architecture in the classical style.
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