Review | ZETEO

Thoreau Looms Up Bigger and Bigger

December 21, 2012 by William Eaton

Thoreau Looms Up Bigger and Bigger By William Eaton Review of Thoreau in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates, edited by Sandra Harbert Petrulionis (University of Iowa Press, 2012) This volume put together by Professor Petrulionis, a Thoreau scholar, offers plenty of justification and anecdote for those who would continue the beatification of Thoreau, and for those who would revel in the wonders of what […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Emerson, Thoreau, Walt Whitman

The Art of Scent, Diller, Scofidio & Renfro, Museum of Arts and Design in New York City (MAD)

Nothing to Sniff At

December 14, 2012 by William Eaton

Nothing to Sniff At By Jeffrey M. Barnes Review of The Art of Scent, an exhibit at The Museum of Arts & Design, Columbus Circle, New York City, November 20, 2012 to February 24, 2013. The Museum of Arts and Design in New York City (MAD) opened its first (and possibly the first) exhibit devoted to “The Art of Scent,” on November 20. With it Chandler Burr, MAD’s recently appointed “Curator of Olfactory Art,” confronted some formidable challenges. One […]

Categories: Review • Tags: perfume

We Are Also What We Eat With

December 11, 2012 by stewchef

By Claire Stewart A review of Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson (Basic Books, 2012) Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork is more than just a pretty book (and it is indeed a pretty book). It is more than just another one-topic text to be added to the book shelves of culinary geeks. This volume can happily settle in next to heavyweight culinary benchmarks such as Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking (1984), […]

Categories: Review • Tags: cooking

“The past is always fictional”

December 9, 2012 by Daniel Taub

“The past is always fictional” Crypto-Jews and the Search for Identity in El Iluminado By Daniel Taub A review of El Iluminado: A Graphic Novel by Ilan Stavans and Steve Sheinkin (Basic Books, 2012) “What interests me in all this is the way people create stories to survive, to affirm who they are, to make a stand,” Professor Ilan Stavans tells a police officer in El Iluminado: A Graphic Novel. “We’re constantly reshaping our own narratives.” Stavans is speaking of […]

Categories: Review • Tags: detective novel, graphic novel

The Worlds of the Ordinary

December 3, 2012 by Walter Cummins

The Worlds of the Ordinary By Walter Cummins Chris Arthur, in this new collection of essays, does not seek insights into himself or words that convey the essential drama of his life. Instead, the knowledge he pursues is a deeper understanding of the ordinary, of his quotidian experiences—a chestnut found in a coat pocket, a list of mammals he compiled at age five, a pencil taken from the ground near a school, a photo of a boy with his first […]

Categories: Review • Tags: essays, Wallace Stevens

From Impractical to Irreplaceable

November 7, 2012 by William Eaton

From Impractical to Irreplaceable By Bruce D. Rhodewalt The book covers a generous range of mathematics, including information theory, chaos theory, economics, quantum mechanics, and relativity. Although the average Instagram addict may have a vague feeling that math is somehow involved in digital photography, the curious reader will appreciate Stewart’s chapter on the Fourier transform, effortlessly evolving into a clear lesson on data compression, a technology that makes digital photography practical. A technically inclined adolescent might be prodded in any […]

Categories: Review • Tags: mathematics, quantum theory, wave equation

Reading Women Reading

October 24, 2012 by William Eaton

By Rachel M. Brownstein A review of The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack (Yale University Press, 2012) “We were always encouraged to read,” Elizabeth Bennet tells Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who has impertinently asked whether she and her sisters had a governess. Her remark begins to account for why so many women readers—J.K. Rowling among the latest—have admired the heroine of Pride and Prejudice: like us reading about her, this novel heroine is a reader. Where a governess might have […]

Categories: Review • Tags: feminism, Jane Austen, reading, women

Who’s Happy Now?

October 24, 2012 by William Eaton

Who’s Happy Now? By Victoria Ludas Orlofsky What makes people happy, on a large scale? Is happiness determined by what we have or by what we still hope to attain? If the medical, agricultural, and educational advances of the past two centuries has led to a world freer of illness, hunger, and ignorance, why aren’t we all happier? A review of Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Dilemmas of Progress in Modern Society by Peter N. Stearns (New York University Press, 2012) Excerpt The United […]

Categories: Review • Tags: happiness, Internet, modernity, satisfaction

Adorno Was Right?

October 19, 2012 by William Eaton

Adorno Was Right? (Consumer culture is “a medium of undreamed of psychological control”?) William Eaton Review of Daniel Horowitz’s Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) {Click for pdf} Daniel Horowitz’s Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World is not all that interested in consumption, consumer culture or the postwar world, and the many pleasures it indeed offers are entirely intellectual, stemming as they do from the writings […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Adorno, cultural criticism, Habermas, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Susan Sontag

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Zeteo (ζητέω): to challenge, question, dispute, explore the forgotten and ignored

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