Category: Book Report

I’ve been reading DC comic books that I bought at the most recent Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. I was saddened to find that I spent more than a dollar each on the issues on half price day (because they were priced at over $2 each inside the front cover). So I read a disconnected set of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World (by John Byrne no less). Which was kind of a good primer for this graphic novel which collects six issues of recent Worlds’ Finest comics with Huntress and Power Girl.

Well. For those of us NOT keeping up: In the middle 1980s, DC consolidated its comic book universes in a limited series called Crisis on Infinite Earths. One of the net results of this was that some of the heroes from other versions of Earth were on our Earth. Or other Earths. Just not an infinite number now. Or something.

In this case, we have alternate Earth versions of The Huntress and Super Girl (Power Girl) who are looking for a way to return home. Within this set of comics, they investigate and fight the minions of a rival technology company who is supposed to be dead.

To be honest, it’s been a couple weeks since I finished this book, too, so that’s about all I remember. Except that the science minion of Darkseid makes an appearance from Apokolips. Who I recognized because I’ve been reading Fourth World.

So it’s not selling me on DC over my preferred Marvel. Of course, I didn’t really get into the X-men titles or Fantastic Four when they got to fiddling with the timeline and alternate versions of comic book heroes. I prefer simpler stories, which is why I read paperback men’s adventure novels. So there you have it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked up this trade paperback because I’m running out of good, smart-looking mass market paperbacks to be my carry book. As such, I could not stick it into my pocket for easy travel, but I guess I don’t need that as much as I thought, since most of my outside-the-home reading places have places for me to stow books when not in use.

I enjoyed this book, as you might guess by my posts quoting it (here and here). It’s styled as a psychology book, but Jung really gets more into philosophy than psychology. He discusses the role and experience of the individual relative to mass movements, both the State and the Church and discusses how the individual gets wrapped up in them and how they in turn enwrapture the individual to the individual’s detriment.

Of course, I agreed with the assessments of the individual versus the State. For people of a certain stripe, like me, trends have indicated the Federal government is creeping and sometimes bolting towards an omnipresent I didn’t agree with the assessment of the Church, though. Perhaps it’s because I attend a less centralized church than the Catholic church or because I’m up close and personal with the people who make up the church that I can see the atoms in the conceptual object, but I don’t see it as monolithic as the State. I guess one could say the State is likewise composed of well-meaning individuals who sometimes go astray in pursuit of well-meaning ends, but the State and the Church are different in that the Church has to operate through spiritual and moral suasion and the State has the military and law enforcement to compel its well-meaning urges. So they are very different indeed.

It’s been a while since I actually read this book (I finished it way back in July), but I’ve put off posting about it because I took a lot of notes on it and considered writing a really long, thoughtful post on it. In addition to the wisdom of posts linked above, I took some notes like this:

• P46 Jung contra Objectivism; he says the world would not exist without consciousness. Jung says:
  

  Without consciousness, there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously experienced by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

  Anyone who knows his or her Objectivism (and a bit of Existentialism) knows these hold the existence of an external reality precedes the consciousness that perceives/experiences it.

• P58 wisdom. I have no idea what I meant.
• P81 individual slipping into purely conceptual world. Does it contradict p46 above? Jung writes:
  

  Nothing estranges man more from the ground-plan of his instincts than his learning capacity which turns out to be a genuine drive for progressive transformation of human modes of behaviour. It, more than anything else, is responsible for the altered conditions of his existence and the need for new adaptations which civilization brings. It is also the ultimate source of those numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties which are occasioned by man’s progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious. The result is that modern man knows himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself – a capacity largely dependent on environmental conditions, knowledge and control of which necessitated or suggested certain modifications of his original instinctive tendencies. His consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him, and it is to the latter’s peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resources. This task is so exacting, and its fulfilment so profitable, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively take the place of reality.

  It highlights the dangers, but it does not contradict the assertion of consciousness preceding reality.

• P84 reiterates the primacy of the psyche. Jung writes:
  

  All the same, nobody can deny that without the psyche there would be no world at all, and still less a human world.

  So he’s all in on the consciousness first.

• P92 church attendance is an expression of faith, not the source. I think I was arguing against what he wrote on p91:
  

  In view of the general ignorance of and bias against psychology it must be accounted a misfortune that the one experience which makes sense of individual existence should seem to have its origin in a medium that is certain to catch everybody’s prejudices. Once more the doubt is heard: “What good can come out of Nazareth?” The unconscious, if not regarded. outright as a sort of refuse bin underneath the conscious mind, is at any rate supposed to be of “merely animal nature.” In reality, however, and by definition it is of uncertain extent and constitution, so that overvaluation or undervaluation of it is pointless and can be dismissed as mere prejudice. At all events, such judgments sound very queer in the mouths of Christians, whose Lord was himself born on the straw of a stable, among the domestic animals. It would have been more to the taste of the multitude if he had got himself born in a temple. In the same way, the worldly-minded mass man looks for the numinous experience in the mass meeting, which provides an infinitely more imposing background than the individual soul. Even Church Christians share this pernicious delusion.

  This doesn’t resonate with the experience I have in church attendance, where it’s more an expression of faith, a reinforcement of it, and a time for fellowship with others who believe similarly rather than a place for direct divine interjection. But I don’t go to a snake-handling or speaking-in-tongues church.

• p93 The Psychological Advantage of Communism. I think I refer to this passage:
  

  Communism has not overlooked the enormous importance of the ideological element and the universality of basic principles. The nations of the Far East share our ideological weakness and in this respect are just as vulnerable as we are.

  Aside: I confess I’m swiping text from this translation which differs from my text; in my text, nations of the Far East appears. In the online version, it’s coloured races. A quick reminder that this is, in fact, translated text subject to all the attendant risks.

• p107 defense of modern art. I have no idea what this means.

So where was I? Oh, yes, digressing and rambling. The notes are as far as I got into a thoughtful post.

At any rate, Jung comes at the questions as a psychologist, which means his entry point into the questions is the discrete experiences of individuals, and he conceptualizes and generalizes from their to his conclusions. So where I disagree with him on the greater meanings and movements of Modern Man, it’s from these faulty macro-level concepts and less on the experiences and recommendations made for individuals in the milieu. Well, I also reject a priori the idea that the whole of reality depends upon the psyche. No, the individual’s experience and the shared and transmitted experience relies on psyche, consciousness, and communication, but not the world itself.

So I feel smarter for having read the book even though I didn’t agree with some of it. What a difference between modern books; is it possible to read something written in the last twenty years that won’t insult people who disagree?

Books mentioned in this review:

Okay, John, I read this book outside of a football game, and I didn’t get much more out of it than if I’d read it during a football game. Mostly, it’s about looking at the pictures. Even when given the opportunity, I didn’t linger on the pictures or particularly study them. I assessed whether I liked them or not and whether I thought they were good or not, and then I moved onto the next or the text describing the artist’s life and relationship with his peers.

The goal is to get a better familiarity with the artist, and I did. So I can speak intelligently about Manet and his relationship with the Impressionists and whatnot. And I can say I like Manet not quite as much as Renoir, but better than Monet and Degas.

At any rate, Manet is the old man of the Impressionists; he preceded the movement and dabbled with it, but his relationship with the formal French art structure of the end of the 19th century (I almost said “Last century” and then I realized how old I am) differed from the young ones. He wanted acceptance and commercial success (and got some degree of it), but he also alienated the academy with some of his work, subjects, and treatments. He also provided support for the young Impressionists who would eventually surpass him.

So it’s worth a browse whether during a football game or not. If nothing else, browsing the book helped me comprehensively identify my favorite Manet painting (The Bar at the Folies-Bergère).

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, hang my britches and slap my hound, but this book is listed on Amazon for between $30 and $55. Whether it sells for that is a rather different matter. Still, I got it as part of a pack of similar books (Boogar Hollow’s Scraps of Wisdom, How To Talk Pure Ozark, and How To Speak Southern) for a buck from the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Book Sale this autumn for a buck. So I might be way out ahead here in the fictional money of Internet e-commerce.

At any rate, where the other books play it for laughs, this book plays it pretty straight. Its goal is not humor, but rather an actual account of the ways people speak. I guess it spoke to some people, as the copy I have is in the sixth printing from twelve years after the original.

So it’s a bit informative; I suppose it might be so if one has spent one’s life living in a semi-southern state. As I’ve discovered with the other books, some of these sayings are just part of my vernacular.

The book also includes some food-related words that identify some elements of Southern cooking, some portent-based sayings, and some general colorful sayings and idioms.

Not a bad thing to flip through; it’s a couple dozen pages of listicle in a chapbook form from an era when this is the way these cultural memes were transmitted. Well, as cultural memes. The actual content was conveyed orally amongst families, neighbors, and peers.

Books mentioned in this review:

I see a lot of this while reading art books on Sunday afternoons:

This article redeems him:

When Andrew Luck looks like the best quarterback in the NFL—as he often has in previous seasons—the Indianapolis Colts are a playoff team. When Luck throws interceptions and takes sacks—as he often has this season—the Colts are mediocre.

It’s possible no group of players in the league is more dependent on one individual than the other 52 members of the Indianapolis roster.

They’ve even come to depend on Luck when choosing what books to read.

“He’s always saying ‘I read this great book,’ ” said backup quarterback Matt Hasselbeck. “He’s recommended books on concrete architecture, Rob Lowe’s autobiography or ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains,’” a 2003 account of a doctor working to fight tuberculosis.
More on the NFL

In the same way that Oprah Winfrey has become known for vaulting books she likes to popularity across the country, Luck can make his favorite reads become the talk of the Colts locker room. Some of the books he recommends are for inspiration, players say, if a teammate is going through a tough time. Others are passed on simply because Luck enjoyed leafing through them. “He’s a voracious reader and he likes talking about it,” said center Khaled Holmes, a beneficiary of Luck’s penchant for recommending his favorite titles.

Now, he has to overcome the DirecTV commercial.

This book is a cross between the southern language dictionaries I’ve been reading of late How To Talk Pure Ozark and How To Speak Southern) and Poor Richard’s Almanack: Benjamin Franklin’s Best Sayings which I read earlier this year. As such, it’s a pithy collection of observations about life and advice.

A couple of the items made me chuckle, a couple made me want to quote them (minus the vernacular spelling), and one led indirectly to a tweet. So it was worth browsing for sure. It’s make a better gift than the aforementioned Southern dictionaries, although a Southern dictionary with a Southern variant of aforementioned might be interesting. For one definition.

The book itself is in chapbook form, which is what I think when I think cardstock cover over photocopied and saddle-stapled booklets. Instead of typewriting them or using Microsoft Word on them (which Dan Rather insists is truthy for the time period), someone hand-lettered the pages and hand-drew the graphics and images therein. That’s a lot more work than we have to go through in 2015 to do professional quality work, my friends.

Apparently, this was one of a series of Boogar Hollow books; the front material lists several titles in the series. I hope the couple that put these together about the time of my birth broke even at least on them. At the very least, I’ll bet they had fun.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is very similar to How To Speak Southern. It was written by a newspaperman (in this instance, a Springfield newspaper editor) based on some columns or essays, and this one dates back to 1961. It did not get nationwide distribution, though: this is a chapbook and was probably only locally distributed and not for very long.

It also collects phonetically spelled Ozark accent words in a dictionary form; however, this one had thinner, less humorous definitions, so it was a bit less enjoyable to go through. It has a lot of overlap with the later collection (not directly–nobody’s plagiarizing here), but enough so that it was not fresh. Sometimes I had to read the words a couple of times because in some instances, instead of giving a definition, the word would include a sample of it in an Ozarks sentence. Which was full of other Ozarks words, so I had to read it a couple of times to figure out what word it was supposed to be. You know, having to work for the punch line doesn’t make humor more rewarding.

As in the previous book, this one includes something I didn’t think was a particular Southernism: The word mull meaning “to think over.” Of course, in this instance, it only identifies the definition of the word and not its etimology, so I have no idea why this is particularly Southern.

So I didn’t really learn anything from the book, and I’m not sure how true-to-life it is 50+ years after it was written. Much of the Pure Ozark sounds a lot like South City Hoosier. Of course, the line of my family that lived in Lemay a long time and pronounced the French invisible R in toilet and wash originated in the Ozarks anyway. So there I go.

Books mentioned in this review:

You’re forgiven if you think I’ve read this book before–after all, the immediately post-Pendleton Executioner books have a single plot with different locations and, if you’ll pardon the pun, different execution by the different house authors. But, no, I was remembering that I’d read a book called The Libyan Contract. Which was written about eight years before this book (and I read it five years ago, if we’re really into historical records). It shares a certain element of plot that I’ll get to in a moment.

At any rate, it has a similar complaint to the others I’ve read this year: The plot is basically the same. Bolan has to go somewhere exotic to rescue someone and defeat some terrorist plot in the midst. In this case, he’s going to Libya to track down a Puerto Rican agent he’s worked with along with a military shipment of a biological weapon. As in The Libyan Connection, the American agent helps to preserve Khaddafi as the ruler as Bolan thwarts a Soviet-backed coup in the process.

As I read these forty-year-old thrillers, I can’t help but wonder: What if there’s a conspiracy amongst thriller writers to keep the world in an agitated state of turmoil which is why the same places keep boiling up time and again? It’s either that, or history marches at a pace of decades, which means it’s too long for myopic modern audiences to understand or to support when it comes to cultural and military conflict. But, sadly, that’s a very reality-centric view that gets no truck from modern American consumers.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book does not appear to have been a library book; however, it is of the time period (1966-1968) of the last few books I read. So there’s that.

Like the 1959 booklet Ernest Hemingway, it’s a short pamphlet, targeted to college students perhaps, that discusses the work of Ernest Hemingway. This book is from a series called Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective, so it has a little bit of that going on.

There’s a short bio that captures the highlights of Hemingway: A child who liked the outdoors, a veteran(ish) of World War I, a newspaperman who lived in Paris and began his writing career there, and the time frame of his major works. Then this author describes a couple threads in Hemingway’s work, the ethics of the man living up to an ideal, the piety, the belief in the healing powers and almost sacred nature of, erm, nature. Then the author goes onto a little rant about people who find fault with Christians finding Christian themes in books that are not found in the Christian fiction section of the book store (well, that’s a contemporary thing, but you get the idea).

Overall this author approves of the work of Hemingway, as do I. So I’m going to start saving up for those complete collections of Hemingway that cost thousands of dollars. All I need to do is forego book sales for the next two hundred years.

Books mentioned in this review:

No, it’s not a typo: The word in the title is really massage.

This book is an ex-library book from El Camino Real High School. There’s not an El Camino Real High School nearby; as a matter of fact, the only one I found on the Internet is in Los Angeles. There might be another one in Arkansas or something (let’s face it, the Spanish Camino Real was akin to highway numbering/designation–in St. Louis, it’s known as Kingshighway still and encompassed part of Lemay Ferry Road).

So, what do we have here? We have a mixed media style presentation where McLuhan continues to develop his theory of cognition and his errant philosophy of life in the digital age. As he spins his theory of how electronic media circa 1967 are altering brains and freeing the youth from the old, square ways of thinking, we get visual elements like like a series of close-ups of a foot with toenails zooming out throughout the book, repeated words making the prose into a concrete poem, and approximately six visible womens’ breasts in various images. Counting them makes me feel prudish, but this was a high school library book, and I’m hearkened back to a local controversy vis-a-vis Slaughterhouse Five.

At any rate, I thought McLuhan gets some of his prognostications correct in how immersive electronic media would become (remember, he’s writing this before home computers, smart phones, and the Internet). He does understand a bit of how that will alter the thinking of youth–fifty years later, it has continued, but not beyond his imagination. Kids have the ability to do greater and greater mash-ups. But.

Unfortunately, he suffers from a big bunch of Platonic thought in that he thinks the concepts described in electronic media are primary and more important than the things being described and conceptualized and seems to indicate that everything that happens (happenings, he calls them, in that sixties way) are instantiations of something else.

But that’s not the case, and the freedom he loves about electronic media is unmooring youth from the concrete aspects of the world so that electronic media and the people who learn cognition from it seem to be all idea and little attachment or understanding of the underpining reality of concrete things that drive that world of ideas.

Maybe the reprinted advertisement for developing a powerful memory on page 115 or the picture of a face stretched horizontally across the top 56-57 where the text is printed upside down in the book refute me on this.

It’s an interesting, thought-provoking essay in a history-of-philosophy sort of way that calls the youth of the Boomer era to some inchoate protest and to open the doors of perception or something. Unfortunately, the essay is couched in a collage of images, goofy printing and design tricks that must have seemed paradigm-shattering at the time (and perhaps reinforced the message, again, at the time) that detract from the staying power of the volume.

How did it do as a library book?

Either nobody borrowed it, the book was remaindered after a card had been filled up and before anyone else borrowed it, or the book was immediately stolen by a teenaged boy.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book was written by a Palm Beach Post columnist and illustrated by a cartoonist at the same. It’s funny, but you don’t tend to think of Florida as the south probably because it was really not much but swamp and heat throughout much of our nation’s history and because it was not a big part of the Civil War (although, undoubtedly, there are Florida Civil War buffs who will testify that it really was–as many Missourians will tell you about all the firsts of the Battle of Wilson’s Creek just up on that hill over there). Although the author himself is from North Carolina, which is the most north you can be in the south.

At any rate, the small book is mildly amusing; it’s written in glossary style from Ah to Zat. If you liked Jeff Foxworthy twenty years later, you’ll like this book. A lot of his schtick and even a bit of his about how Southerners talk mirror its content, but I guess that would have to be the case with Southern comedians with accents. You never hear about comedians from Wisconsin and Minnesota doing bits about the northern accent, do you? I don’t.

The book was a bit educational, too, as it explains the etimology of the phrase spittin’ image, which is a corruption, pardon me, Southerners, correction of “spirit and image.” I see, that makes sense.

At any rate, I got this as part of a bundle I bought last Thursday, and I was so eager to look through the titles within that I put on a meaningless football game just so I could flip through books during it.

So it’s not a bad waste of 30 minutes unlike some of the things I flip through.

Books mentioned in this review:

I received this book as a gift at my mother-in-law’s birthday party. She was giving away things which came with a request; in this case, I got this book and information about the George Washingont Carver National Monument just south of Joplin, Missouri, and a request that I take my children there this summer. So I started reading this book in the beginning of August, and I took my children to the historical site as requested, but the book sort of fell to the bottom of the stack on my side table.

The book itself is a young adult faith-based biography of the plant doctor. As such, its chapters are short and punchy and it features a lot of Carver talking to God or reflecting on scripture. As Carver was a devout Christian and often lead prayer groups in his various colleges, it’s probably not out of place, but I’m sure there are plenty of 21st century readers who would take issue with it. If you’re such, this is not the biography for you. But as a young adult book, it’s probably a good starter and high level overview.

I won’t recount the fascinating life of the fellow who was born a slave, lived in southwest Missouri during the aftermath of the Civil War, and became an artist before going to school for biology and agriculture. I will, however, note that he walked all over Missouri and Kansas to find a better life for himself and to take advantage of various opportunities and that he did all this and homesteaded for a couple of years in Kansas before going to the university. He did a lot before he was thirty and then his life and fame took off.

That is what fascinates me: how self-reliant young people were in the ninteenth century. I can even tell tales about my father hopping a train with a gun at thirteen to go hunting in northern Wisconsin, but it’s so far from my late twentieth century urban childhood that I cannot imagine that sort of thing without reading about people who actually did it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I remember this book being mentioned explicitly (well, not that explicitly) in George Carlin’s comedy routine in his album What Am I Doing In New Jersey?. The bit is the driver behind him has his high beams on, and Carlin says that’s great because he just happens to have his copy of this book with him. At any rate, it’s taken me a long time since listening to that bit over and over on my monthly trips back from Missouri to Milwaukee right after I graduated the university, but I finally read this book (although, in my defense, I only got it last year).

The book is the story of a son of one of the few remaining Saxons in post-Norman Conquest England returning home from the Crusades. His father has disinherited him for supporting the Norman king (Richard II). He helps a Jewish moneylender and merchant and, as a reward, gets armor and a horse so he can enter a tournament, wherein he beats the best of the Normans along with the Black Knight. A Templar is smitten with the daughter of the money lender, and…. Well, there are some nefarious plots afoot, and it involves Prince John and Richard II. Of course, if the story takes place during the time of Robin Hood, one expects Robin Hood to appear. So he does, but he remains a secondary figure.

As I was reading, I confused Sir Walter Scott with Sir Walter Raleigh, so I thought the book was written 200 years before it was; as such, I was very impressed with the treatment of the Jews within the text. Although the characters curse the Jews, they’re treated well by others and are not the villains of the piece; the Normans and some of the clergy are. A bit of post-reading research (I read the Wikipedia entry) put the book in its proper historical context.

Still, in the 21st century, I can see collegiate English papers beginning with the thesis that the book is anti-Semitic (at least until the researcher gets to the Wikipedia entry). Or maybe not.

At any rate, it’s not a bad read. It’s in relatively modern English, although the style is a little more florid than modern readers expect (see also Frankenstein). However, it’s still only 212 pages. How do modern thrillers get three times that large without florid prose? I’d tell you, but I don’t read much modern stuff.

And the edition: This is a 1982 Legendary Classics edition, which means someone grabbed the public domain copy, introduced a couple of typos to protect their copyright, and printed this cheaply. The book identifies a number of others in the series (of which I’ve read only a few). But this edition is blessedly free of introductory essays explaining what you’re about to read (and throwing in spoilers) before you get to the actual novel. My goodness, the middle-of-the-twentieth-century editions of classics are worth more than the modern Penguin editions just for the freedom from interruption and pretension of telling you what you should think about what you haven’t even read yet.

So if medieval romances are your thing, this might be the book for you. I certainly recommend the edition.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a quick little sampler of Impressionist and sort-of impressionist paintings. It gives a bit of text describing the history of the Impressionist movement and then goes to the images. The book covers painters like Monet and Renoir, but also other people who exhibited with them, including van Gogh, Vuillard, Morisot, Cassatt, Gaugin, Gonzales, Sisley, Cezanne, Bazille, and others. As a matter of fact, the book gives a little more weight to the other painters as opposed to Monet and Renoir.

It shows a lot of breadth and variation in the school–and the nearby styles–so it’s a touch more educational than some of the other Impressionist picture books I’ve looked through (see also Treasures of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and The Impressionists).

But I still like Renoir the best, although my beautiful wife might someday convince me to decorate our home in something other than Renoir prints.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is pretty much what you would expect from the title: toilet humor.

It’s a collection of cartoons featuring toilets and bathrooms for the punchlines.

Heaven help me for buying it, but I did; not only that, but I chuckled at some of them because some of them are more clever than modern sitcoms.

Even my beautiful wife, who does not like scatalogical humor at all, snickered at one or two of the cleaner jokes amongst them.

So this is worth the price, which in my case was probably a quarter.

And no doubt it will keep my boys entertained for a far longer time than an adult would enjoy the book.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book was published by some arm of the Presbyterian church at the end of history (which was right after communism fell in the Soviet Union, for those of you children too young to remember, before history clawed its way out of the grave and began shambling around and moaning again).

This is not supposed to be a pure poetry collection; instead, it’s said (in its introduction) to be a sourcebook for musing about interacting with the world, other cultures, and other faiths. So it includes some doggerel thoughts about different cultures, a lot of indictment of personal comfort and wealth while there are so many poor in the world, and, dare I say it, a lot more equivalence between the religions than I would expect from a book published by a Protestant church. The very first bit is about how Christians, Muslims, and Indians are all holy or something. Perhaps it’s meaningful to remember that all people are people, but if you’re going to be a church, I should expect if not an overt pitch as to why one’s particular flavor is the best then at least an implicit understanding that not all paths are the same.

But that sort of thinking probably explains why Presbyterian numbers are declining and little schisms are happening.

Ah, well. The book didn’t make me much more thoughtful about the poor. But it did have some colorful photographs.

Undoubtedly, I got this in a collection of chapbooks and whatnot from the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. Which is coming up next week just in case you missed my "Good Book Hunting" posts.

This book is a bit thicker on content than many of the photo-centric books I spend my Sunday afternoons with. The book contains a pretty good history of the Shaker movement, from their leaders being expelled from the Quaker movement to the different communities established in New England and the east to the eventual thinning and dying out of the sect–after all, they were not allowed to reproduce, only to convert to the religion.

As to the photos, they’re professional and whatnot. They highlight the design of Shaker furniture and crafts as well as some of the buildings in the various communities. Many of those communities, as they declined, effected transfers from the Shakers to nonprofit organizations that transitioned them into museums, sometimes while a few elderly Shakers remained in residence.

At any rate, a good enough coffee table book to flip through and to learn something.

Books mentioned in this review: