These 8 Gift Books Capture Cultures
Gift books are often read by those looking for just a bit of knowledge … and lots of pictures. These eight books, reviewed in our Fall 2016 issue, showcase captured cultural moments, along with a bit of spirit and whimsy.
The Spirituality of Wine
Gisela H. Kreglinger
Wm. B Eerdmans Publishing
Softcover $24.00 (304pp)
978-0-8028-6789-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son the ability to turn water into wine. This, it may be remembered, was Jesus’s first miracle. All of which proves that Jesus himself “affirms the importance of joyful feasting for Christian spirituality,” in the words of Gisela Kreglinger in her delightful The Spirituality of Wine. Kreglinger’s version of Christian spirituality emphasizes the grounded, everyday aspect of how we live a Christian life; that the ordinary—bread and wine, for example—is “imbued with spiritual meaning.” Early in the book, she explores the “scriptural and theological foundations of a spirituality of wine,” and then proceeds to meld contemporary views of wine with Christian spirituality. A remarkable work.
MATT SUTHERLAND (August 26, 2016)
The English Magic Tarot
Andy Letcher
Weiser Books
Softcover $21.95 (160pp)
978-1-57863-600-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
What we have here is the auspicious release of a new deck of tarot cards based in the mysticism, mysteries, rituals, and lore of Elizabethan-era England, perhaps history’s most fervent period and place for the magic arts. Think knights and fools, monarchs and highwaymen, in the animate land of Stonehenge and druids. These are tarot cards with the dynamism of a graphic novel. Not the stuff of mere fortune telling, they hint at a world rife with forces and cause-and-effect connections, where “change occurs in accordance with will.”
MATT SUTHERLAND (August 26, 2016)
Juxtapositions
Images from the Newseum Ted Polumbaum photo collection
Judy Polumbaum, editor
Ted Polumbaum, photographer
Gao House Press
Softcover $24.95 (96pp)
978-0-9970216-0-8
Buy: Amazon
Viva the camera as a weapon against those who seek to alter history. Indeed, memory and truth are happily captured in a photo. For nearly fifty years, on hundreds of assignment for Life and other magazines, Ted Polumbaum traveled the world preserving history and documenting extraordinary change in the last half of the twentieth century. The photos in this Newseum collection of his work show politicians and major events, but most often dwell on ordinary and incidental moments in the lives of the average and overlooked. Polumbaum’s talent reveals itself in the slow turning of the page—reader lingering, reader lost in thought over unmistakable images of truth.
MATT SUTHERLAND (August 26, 2016)
Beguiled By The Wild
The Art of Çharley Harper
Charley Harper
Roger Caras
Pomegranate
Hardcover $50.00 (132pp)
978-0-7649-7229-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
This genre-defying spectacle of color, form, and humor looks like an art book but acts the part of a playful, kid-friendly graphic novel masquerading as a field guide to animals. A conservationist and maestro of modernism and environmental art, Charley Harper called his work minimal realism, but his chipmunks, cardinals, chickadees, ladybugs, and other critters are mesmerizing in a magically realistic way. Not to forget Harper’s witty, paragraph-length captions accompanying each of the 110 illustrations.
MATT SUTHERLAND (August 26, 2016)
The Cartoon History of Humanism
Dale Debakcsy
The Humanist Press
Softcover
978-0-931779-70-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In its respect for scientific knowledge, the humanist movement embraces the essential value and goodness of human beings while cold-shouldering any belief in the divine or supernatural—we don’t need God to be good, humanists say. Throughout history, there have been a number of courageous individuals—Epicurus, Cicero, Spinoza, Hume, to name a few—who expanded the “intellectual horizons and freedoms of humanity.” In this graphically illustrated, sensational project, based on a long-running web column involving a time-traveling character named Dave, Dale DeBakcsy profiles more than thirty extraordinary thinkers, and humanism takes a bow in them all.
MATT SUTHERLAND (August 26, 2016)
Latin Inscriptions
Dirk Booms
Getty Publications
Softcover $18.95 (112pp)
978-1-60606-466-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Ever so generous, the ancient Romans left future history buffs all manner of Latin-inscribed relics to fawn over, from massive stadiums and temples to milestones, tombs, tableware, and coins. For most of us, the letters and numbers appear jumbled or coded, but Roman inscribers actually adhered to standardized abbreviations and grammatical rules easily understood by illiterate and scholarly Romans alike. All of which allows the messages to be translated by contemporary experts like Dirk Booms, curator of Roman Archaeology at the British Museum, and the author of this superb guide to understanding ancient Roman scripts.
MATT SUTHERLAND (August 26, 2016)
Buying a Bride
An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches
Marcia A. Zug
NYU Press
Hardcover $30.00 (320pp)
978-0-8147-7181-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
We know what you’re thinking: mail-order marriages involve socially challenged, disagreeable men and desperate foreign women. Well, you’re partly right. Even so, the four-hundred-year history of bride buying is complicated by the early years in American history, when Jamestown Colony sought out “tobacco wives” and pioneer brides rode stagecoaches and steam trains to the uncertain pleasures of a corn-husk bed. These courageous women were admired at the time. But perceptions gradually changed after the Civil War as the racial demographics of the brides shifted to Asian and Eastern and Southern European women seeking to maneuver around America’s immigration policies. So what’s a concerned bystander to think? “Despite significant risks, mail-order marriages are typically beneficial and even liberating for women,” says Marcia Zug, expressing a sentiment she never thought she’d write. Eye-opening and entertaining, this project deserves a large audience.
MATT SUTHERLAND (August 26, 2016)
Calculated Risk
The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom
George Leopold
Purdue University Press
Hardcover $29.95 (300pp)
978-1-55753-745-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
During the 1960s, the Cold War was fought on many fronts and fields of battle—nuclear weapon technology, Cuba and other geopolitical hotspots, the Olympic Games, to name a few—but the race to space may have meant the most to Russian and American egos, and astronaut Gus Grissom played a leading role until his death by fire on a Cape Canaveral launch pad in 1967. An engineer and test pilot, Grissom fully understood the risks and complexity of space flight, and his expertise assured his involvement in all facets of the Gemini program, including the design decisions that cost his life. Through interviews with dozens of Grissom’s NASA coworkers, friends, and family, this highly recommended biography offers an astronaut’s-eye view of early spaceflight and Cold War intrigue.
MATT SUTHERLAND (August 26, 2016)
Matt Sutherland
