This is a goofy “ancient astronaut” stew. It’s fun for what it is, but repetitive. I lost track of how many times the floor of an Atlantean building (maybe many different structures – it gets confusing) opens up to alternately drown and swallow people. And I couldn’t try to count the myriads of bad guys the heroine kicks in the crotch.
Terry Falke
We want to think there is a West out there that’s still a wilderness. It’s a fantasy deeply rooted in Americans, or at least those of a certain gender and vintage. Terry Falke undermines that fantasy with large, beautiful color photos that don’t shy from portraying man’s presence – in the flesh or by way of his artifacts – in the Southwestern landscape. The crash of collapsing fantasy is lightened by Falke’s sense of humor; all of this is summed up rather well by the cover photo.
(To see a selection of photos from the book, go to Afterimage Gallery’s web site.)
The main character, an archer, is, literally, a bastard. His nemesis is a crazy, lecherous priest. These are patented Cornwell tropes and the first third of the book reads almost like a parody of a Cornwell novel. Fortunately, things get more interesting later on when our hero arrives in France for the siege of Harfleur. We’re treated to a vivid, detailed siege narrative followed by a action-filled account of the battle of Againcourt that’s pure vintage Cornwell.
(There’s an extensive and interesting author’s note at the end on the history behind the novel. Cornwell credits Juliet Barker’s Agincourt as a great source.)
Kathleen Norris
Modern people are familiar with the language of depression. Acedia, “a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one’s position or condition in the world” is like depression but is more a spiritual condition related to sloth than a psychological one. Or so Kathleen Norris argues in “Acedia & Me”. I think she’s right and that she performs a valuable service by resurrecting the concept of acedia. I only wish the book were less about her experiences of acedia and more about how one goes about the business of defeating it.
Much of the book is devoted to her husband’s death. I found those parts quite depressing (in the non-clinical sense), but that’s more a reflection of my taste in non-fiction than a comment on her book.
After reading “Third Views, Second Sights“, I was glad to discover this book so I could learn more about Mark Klett and his work. William L. Fox mixes a travelogue about the Third View rephotographic expedition, Klett’s artistic biography, and essays about landscape photography. I enjoyed the travelogue and it’s always interesting to learn about how an artist works.
The essays are the most substantive parts of the book. Chapter 4, “The Evolution of Landscape Photography” is especially good. In particular, it calls attention to the way Ansel Adams-era photographers strove to present the Western landscape as something to be preserved by framing their pictures to eliminate signs of man’s presence. In contrast, later photographers seek to show the man’s effects on a landscape strewn with human artifacts. Ironically, the “New Topographics” exhibition that gave its name to this later work occured in 1975 just as Adams’ work was reaching its peak popularity.
The 19th century expedition photographers whose work Klett rephotographs presented a pristine West ripe for exploitation. The ruins of that exploitation litter the Western landscape. Fox paraphrases Patricia Limerick, Klett’s collaborator on a photo essay titled “Haunted by Rhyolite: Learning from the Landscape of Failure”: “…once we had colonized the West and run out of places where we could outrun the effects of our history, there was nothing left to make out of our ruins but a ‘romance of failure’, which, in turn, became the economic capital out of which we could create tourism.”
Jonathan Barnes
What if a modern British bureaucrat discovered that the House of Windsor had made a pact with alien (and possibly supernatural) beings? And what if he were conscripted into a secret organization dedicated to destroying that pact? These are the questions Jonathan Barnes addresses in a novel that reads like H.P. Lovecraft meets Philip K. Dick. When the nature of “Leviathan” is revealed at the end of the book you realize that he’s also channeling Douglas Adams. This is a fun read.
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