Book Review
Title: Much Ado About Me
Author: Fred Allen
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Date: 1956
Fred Allen’s autobiographical Much Ado About Me serves up a smorgasbord of early-twentieth-century images and idioms that will satisfy anyone interested in the period, regardless of special interest in Vaudeville or not. Allen spent is life in Show Business, beginning with a teenage performance at a public-library-employee talent show. Continue reading
Book Review
Title: No Applause—Just Throw Money
Author: Trav S.D.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date: October 31, 2006
No Applause—Just Throw Money blends the best of compelling storytelling with thorough, rigorous research. Author Trav S.D. (Donald Travis Stewart) traces the ancestry of Vaudeville-style entertainment from Antiquity, touching on the Middle Ages, the 17th and 18th centuries; and quickly into 19th-century America leading up to the official beginning of Vaudeville around 1880 (lasting from roughly the early 1880s to late 1920s). But it’s not a dry history text by any means. Quite the opposite, this story is a blaze of glory in American history that too few people know about. Continue reading
Book Review
Title: Moose: Chapters From My Life
Author: Robert B. Sherman
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Date: November 27, 2013
Chapters from My Life is a compelling page-turner to say the least. Sherman was born in 1925, a member of the “Greatest Generation.” He grew up during the depression, charging a few pennies for neighborhood kids to watch his and his brother’s performances in their garage. He fought in WWII, saw intense action in Europe. He was among the first of the allied forces to encounter Dachau prison camp in person. He was awarded the Purple Heart and used a cane the rest of his life due to a shrapnel injury to his knee. After the war he went to college, then gradually progressed into his career as a song writer. Continue reading
Book Review
Title: The Sonification Handbook
Author: Thomas Hermann (Author/Editor), Andy Hunt (Editor), John G Neuhoff (Editor)
Publisher: Logos Verlag
Date: January 26, 2011
This book is an advanced exploration into sonification perception, the interdisciplinary investigation of understanding data, including visual data, via non-speech sound only. It involves the sensory, aesthetic, and intellectual processing of audio non-speech data to perceptualize the information. The audio data conveyed must be meaningful and useful. Continue reading
Book Review
Title: My Life in Pieces
Author: Simon Callow
Publisher: Nick Hern Books
Date: May 17, 2011
Simon Callow’s “Alternative Autobiography” My Life in Pieces was one of the most exciting books I’ve read in a long time. Hearing stories from behind the curtain about the 1960s–1970s London theater scene was intriguing and delightful. Callow was lucky to get a job at theaters long before his acting career, which gave him both insight and inspiration into the real world of acting. The book is rich with anecdotes encountering theater royalty, and many younger actors who later became household names. The story grows in interest as he moves from observer to dramatic artist, sharing his fascinating experiences as he rises in his own brilliant acting career. Continue reading
Book Review
Title: My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business
Author: Dick Van Dyke
Publisher: Three Rivers Press (May 15, 2012)
Dick Van Dyke’s autobiography My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business provides a delightful retrospective of the charmed life of a brilliant talent. Van Dyke takes us through his struggling years, through early breaks, rise to the top, and his enduring successes throughout his life. During his story we meet a lot of other brilliant talents, as he worked with many of the greatest actors and comedians in the industry. Continue reading
Book Review
Title: The Death of Expertise
Author: Tom Nichols
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (March 1, 2017)
Tom Nichols’ Death of Expertise reminds us of a time when we took expert opinion seriously. Not that we followed blindly because the expert had a PhD, but because we were more thoughtful. We realized a PhD and twenty years’ experience in a scientific field probably indicates greater knowledge in that field than I possess from my Google searches. That has changed. More and more people, apparently almost everyone, deems their Google-search education equal to or greater than the expert’s knowledge. Continue reading
Book Review
Title: The Motivation Myth
Author: Jeff Haden
Publisher: Portfolio (January 9, 2018)
Jeff Haden’s Motivation Myth reveals the secret of true motivation, the uncomfortable truth that we have to go through the pain of getting started WITHOUT motivation. We have to force ourselves to perform, to do the thing we’ve “always wanted to do.” Only after that, after some small wins, after a measure of accomplishment, then those accomplishments create motivation for us to do more. Continue reading
Book Review
Title: Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World
Author: Simon Callow
Published: Vintage 2012
Perhaps no one alive today has done more to shine a light on Charles Dickens, the man and his works, than Simon Callow (Charles Dickens 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870). Callow has achieved a most delightful and compelling biography.
Callow himself performs one-man shows of Dickens life, along with adaptations of selected novel scenes for the stage. This is appropriate because Dickens often thrilled audiences by acting out scenes from his novels when his public readings burst into dramatic performances. Callow carries on the tradition, becoming much more than a scholarly biographer, but a dramatic virtuoso who breathes new life into the 19th-century author and his creative genius. Continue reading
Book Review
Title: The Leopard
Author: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Publisher: Pantheon Books (Paperback), New York (1960)
ISBN-13: 978-0-679-73121-4
Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard follows the life of Sicilian Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, around the time of Garibaldi, mainly 1860–1862. Garibaldi led a minor revolution which the novel portrays as a superficial non-event, except that it served to create an image of change. Don Fabrizio highlights the façade of change in the line “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” (28). Continue reading
Book Review
Title: The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal
Author: Mikhail Tal
Publisher: Everyman Chess (London)
Date: 1997, 2015
Mikhail Tal’s autobiography is in the form of an interview, Continue reading
Book Review
Title: A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters and Times of the Rev. Patrick Brontë 1777–1861, 566 pages
Authors: John Lock and Canon W. T. Dixon
Publisher: Ian Hodgkins & Co. LTD, London (1979)
ISBN-13: 978-0906460047
Patrick Brontë was born in Ireland in 1777 and educated at Cambridge where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1806. Later he married Mary Branwell, and had six children. Three of their children became the famous Victorian Authors Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), Anne Brontë (Tenant of Wildfell Hall), and Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights). Continue reading
Book Recommendation
Title: Kant and Critique: New Essays in Honor of W.H. Werkmeister
Author: R.M. Dancy, W.H. Werkmeister, et al.
Publisher: Springer; 1993
Kant and Critique: New Essays in Honor of W.H. Werkmeister is a wonderful book! I attended the conference that is commemorated in this volume, where these essays were originally presented. It was Professor Werkmeister’s “90th birthday celebration” and conference on April 5, 6, 1991, at Florida State University (I was a grad student in the FSU philosophy dept., and the director of publishing for FSU publications, at the time).
I highly recommend this book with such talent coming together in one place — exciting for its philosophical and historical interest.
For me it brings back fond memories of Professor Werkmeister and the culture of philosophy at Florida State University in the 1980s and 1990s. I studied under Dr. Werkmeister starting in 1981, as well as under the editor of this volume, Professor Russel Dancy, and under the Synthese managing editor Professor Jaakko Hintikka.
It was a precious phase of life because of discovery and camaraderie with great minds and good people. The three dominant figures in the philosophy department at the time (Werkmeister, Dancy, Hintikka) were three men I thoroughly enjoyed studying under, conversing with, and learning from, every day for many years. All three played key roles in the 90th Birthday Celebration, the Conference, and putting this book together. The conference April 5, 6, 1991, occurred in the middle of my graduate student years, and has become one of those rare moments of brilliance captured in time, where all the stars came out, and has become legend.
My Related Book Reviews:
Hintikkas’ Investigation of Wittgenstein
Georg Henrik von Wright on Wittgenstein
Plato’s Phaedo and Its Theory of Forms: Conversations and Language Games
Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians
My philosophy book:
Abstract Objects, Ideal Forms, and Works of Art: An Epistemic and Aesthetic Analysis
Book Review
Title: Wittgenstein
Author: Georg Henrik von Wright
Published: University of Minnesota Press 1982
Ludwig Wittgenstein was G. H. von Wright’s professor, mentor, and friend. After Wittgenstein died in 1951, Wright became literary executor and spent thirty years collecting, compiling, editing, and publishing the works. Wittgenstein wrote a lot, but published very little during his lifetime, so the task of the literary executor was long and painstaking. Upon publishing the complete works in various editions from 1951 to 1981, Wright wrote the present book as a tribute to his friend and mentor. Continue reading
