Two New Book Reviews

I have two reviews of wildly different book reviews published this month. One is an academic work about Kubrick films, and the other is an international best-selling novel about going to museums. But they both involve ekphrasis, which is an excellent word meaning "writing about art."

Strangelove Country, D. Harlan Wilson

There are some prerequisites for enjoying this book. You'd have to have seen at least three of the four films Wilson writes about: Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange. He seems to understand that not as many people are familiar with A.I., which Kubrick handed off to Stephen Speilberg to direct just before Kubrick died, so Wilson has a lot more detailed description of that movie than the others. You also have to enjoy academic writing, since this is a book to engage and advance critical film studies. That said, it's not a difficult read, and it's even occasionally funny. Wilson admires Kubrick immensely, but he doesn't put him on an unassailable pedestal.

Nonfiction Review: Kristen Hall-Geisler Visits D. Harlan Wilson’s Kubrickian Filmind Strangelove Country

I was having dinner with a few friends, bookish cinephiles all, so I mentioned that I was reading D. Harlan Wilson’s Strangelove Country. I explained the very basic premise of the book: four of Sta…

Heavy Feather Review

Mona's Eyes, Thomas Schlesser

This book reads like it was engineered in a lab to be a global blockbuster. It centers on a young girl and her grandfather visiting museums in Paris every Wednesday for a year. They choose a work to contemplate and discuss, making the book a kind of syllabus for a DIY art history course. There's a framing plot--Mona's eyes are failing--and her parents and school friends appear at the opening of each chapter before she and Dadé head off to the Louvre. The plot is just this side of nonsense, if I'm begin honest, but the author is a professor of art history, so he really leans into his strengths. Bonus: if you buy this in hard cover, like the copy I received for the review, it has little images of all 52 works printed in the fold-out dust jacket. Neat.

“Mona’s Eyes” Offers a Survey of Art History for All Ages

A grandfather guides ten-year-old Mona on a journey through the history of art.

Reading in Translationsmilkova

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