Reader’s Diary

Giles Whittell

On a bridge near Berlin in 1962 the United States exchanged Soviet spy “Rudolf Abel” for downed U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and an American graduate student who had been held as a spy in East Germany.   “Bridge of Spies” is the story of these three men.  The author reveals the “Abel” was actually a British-born KGB agent name William Fisher.  He suggests that Fisher wasn’t nearly as effective a spy as the FBI claimed he was and that Powers’ capture was the result of ineptitude the the CIA chain of command.

Bill Barich

Bill Barich is an American living in Ireland.  Despite his expat status, he doesn’t hesitate to judge various Irish pubs’ “authenticiy”.  An “authentic” pub seems to be one that is the way he imagined it would be, or perhaps the way it might have been a few decades ago.   While his laments about the lack of authenticity get tiresome after a while (do Irishmen come here and expect every Friday’s to be like “Cheers”?), his tales of his pub crawling are entertaining even if he’s a rather sober pub patron.

The book is implicitly about globalization.  There’s an industry building Irish pubs to order for the world, and the changes in the world’s economy mean the native Irish pub has changed.  Me, I go to several “Irish” pubs here in Minnesota, and they’re pleasant enough places, whether the pass the Barich authenticity standards or not.

John Margolies, Phil Patton, C. Ford Peatross

This is a great, big book that showcases John Margolies’ decades of photographing the American roadside.  The informative text doesn’t beat the reader over the head with Kerouac and Walker Evans comparisons, rather it focuses on the photographer’s history and practice (for example, he gets up early for the clean air and clear view that contribute to the pristine quality of his photographs).  The photos themselves – about 400 of them are reproduced in the book – are not self-conscious “art” so much as “pure documents” (an art form in its own right) comparable to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher but with an American exuberance.

I especially appreciated the Woodcraft Hobby sign in Minneapolis (see this photo – which is not a Margolies picture), since it’s a hobby store I enjoyed shopping at for many years.  Like many of the books’ subjects, it’s long gone but can still be  enjoyed thanks to John Margolies’ life-long project.

Robert K. Wittman and John Shiffman

The author is a former FBI agent who went undercover to recover stolen art treasures and apprehend art thieves.  The book is sketchy and episodic and contains some of the expected pre-retirement shots at the FBI bureaucracy.  The most interesting part is his story of his attempt to retrieve the stolen Gardner paintings and its failure, a failure he attributes to FBI incompetency.

Jonathan Bender

This is an enjoyable tour of the world of  “adult Lego enthusiasts”.  Bender plays builds as well as observes, and it’s entertaining to read about his failures and successes.

Banksy

I really enjoyed this book by the anonymous street artist Banksy.  It’s filled with photos of his work and some short commentary.  His comment on the appeal of his anonymity?  “Nobody paid any attention to me till they didn’t know who I was.”   It was a good book to read during the week I saw his documentary (which might itself  be a hoax), “Exit Through the Gift Shop“.