Book Reviews, Spring 2023
Trusted Eye: Post-World War II Adventures of a Fearless Art Advocate by Claudia Fontaine Chidester
Reviewed by Peter Chametzky
"A fascinating book, rich in archivalia, anecdotes, and insight, Trusted Eye documents the life and career of Virginia Fontaine (né Hammersmith, 1915-1991), “one of the most important promotors of art among the members of the American occupation forces” in immediate post-Second World War Germany."
Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves by Jacob Smith
Reviewed by Nick Earhart
"Smith traces an overlapping history of ornithology and radio, transforming a whimsical observation about the sky into a persuasive and often entertaining case for thinking about media technologies ecologically, in relation to animals and earthly processes."
Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork by Whitney Trettien
Reviewed by Nora Epstein
"Using the concept of bookwork in conjunction with her well-chosen case studies, Trettien shows the entangled identities of consumers and creators in a world where print, manuscript, and decorative papers were dissected and reassembled into new works. Each section explores bookworkers or collectives of bookworkers who creatively blend the book culture of their time with their presses, scissors and paste, manipulating fragments of text and images and creating anachronic works that are best understood not as texts but “multidimensional media objects designed with meaning and purpose."
Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America by Reed Gochberg
Reviewed by Emma Hetrick
"In Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Reed Gochberg offers an engaging analysis of informational institutions during a period of change across the nineteenth-century."
Data Lives: How Data are Made and Shape our World by Rob Kitchin
Reviewed by Barbara Lazarotto
"In Data Lives, Rob Kitchin takes a novel approach to examine a complex topic that is data. Instead of choosing a traditional academic writing style, Kitchin blends fictional and personal stories to explain how data are produced, processed and interpreted, as well as the consequences of these actions."
Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan
Reviewed by Katy Nelson
"While the index is certainly a crucial piece of information technology, it is more than a mere tool; it is a site of comedy and controversy, of poetry and wit. Or so Dennis Duncan, a lecturer in English at University College London, argues in Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age."
A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture by Jason Lustig
Reviewed by Aliza Spicehandler
"What does it mean for the marginalized and the persecuted to control their data, and thus shape their destiny? In his book, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture, Jason Lustig explores this very twenty-first-century question through the lens of the history of twentieth-century Jewish archives."
