Front Table - 12/8/19

On our Front Table this week, find (and wrap, and gift) new collections from modern icons of art, literature, design, and architecture. Also explore the unintended consequences of the democratization of credit, and the historical constitution of "natural" food.

Mark Rothko: The Exhibitions at Pace (Callaway)
Arne Glimcher

Mark Rothko at Pace is a historical monograph on one of the greatest abstract painters of the twentieth-century. This volume encompasses an extraordinary retrospective of paintings presented at Pace Gallery, which illustrates Rothko's contributions to early American modernism, his unprecedented transition into abstraction, and his groundbreaking mature work. Pace Gallery founder, Arne Glimcher's influence in analyzing the progression of Rothko's career is embodied in this definitive publication, including original essays from esteemed art historians and exquisite color reproductions. Featuring an illuminating reminiscence by Glimcher, Mark Rothko at Pace faithfully preserves the artist's legacy while also extending his artistic achievements to old and new audiences alike.


Me & Other Writing (Dorothy Project)
Marguerite Duras

In her nonfiction as well as her fiction, Marguerite Duras’s curiosity was endless, her intellect voracious. Within a single essay she might roam from Flaubert to the “scattering of desire” to the Holocaust; within the body of her essays overall, style is always evolving, subject matter shifting, as her mind pushes beyond the obvious toward ever-original ground. Me & Other Writing, a new collection of Duras’s essays, translated into English for the first time, is a guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras’s nonfiction. From the stunning one-page “Me” to the sprawling 70-page “Summer 80,” there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.


Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exile (Blank Forms)
Joseph Jarman

Joseph Jarman (1937-2019) was a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist, best known as a founding member of the trailblazing avant-garde jazz group, Art Ensemble of Chicago. In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman’s Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exile, a collection of writing conceived across America and Europe between 1960 and 1975. Comprised largely of Jarman’s flowing, fiery free verse, the book also features a manifesto for “GREAT BLACK MUSIC,” notated songs, concert program notes, and Jarman’s photos. Jarman writes with compassionate urgency of the struggles of growing up on Chicago’s South Side, of racist police brutality and profound urban alienation, and of the responsibility he feels as a creative artist to nurture beauty and community through the heliocentric music that he considers the healing force of the universe. With cosmic breath as its leitmotif, his poetry both encourages and embodies a complete relinquishing of ego.


Lectures on Dostoevsky (Princeton University Press)
Joseph Frank

Joseph Frank (1918-2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky biographer, scholar, and critic of his time. His never-before-published Stanford lectures on the Russian novelist's major works provide an unparalleled and accessible introduction to some of literature's greatest masterpieces. Presented here for the first time, these illuminating lectures begin with an introduction to Dostoevsky's life and literary influences and go on to explore the breadth of his career—from Poor Folk, The Double, and The House of the Dead, to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Written in a conversational style that combines literary analysis and cultural history, Lectures on Dostoevsky places in rich context the novels and their key characters and scenes. Bringing Joseph Frank's unmatched knowledge and understanding of Dostoevsky's life and writings to a new generation of readers, this remarkable book will appeal to anyone seeking to understand Dostoevsky and his times.
 

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (University of North Carolina Press)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. However, Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. New policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation’s first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.


Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food
(University of Chicago Press)
Benjamin R. Cohen

In the latter nineteenth century, extraordinary changes in food and agriculture gave rise to new tensions in the ways people understood, obtained, trusted, and ate their food. This was the Era of Adulteration, and its concerns have carried forward to today: How could you tell the food you bought was the food you thought you bought? Could something manufactured still be pure? In Pure Adulteration, Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades to provide a captivating window into the origins of manufactured foods. Cohen follows farmers, manufacturers, grocers, hucksters, housewives, politicians, and scientific analysts as they struggled to demarcate the border between purity and adulteration while the very notion of a pure food changed. In the end, there is (and was) no natural, prehuman distinction between pure and adulterated to uncover and enforce; we have to decide. 


R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern-Thinking (Lars Muller Publishers)
Daniel López-Pérez

The work of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) is among the most extraordinary and inventive in 20th-century design and architecture, not least for its incorporation of a range of intellectual and technical disciplines. Fuller described himself as an "engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer and choreographer.'' R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern-Thinking is a major reassessment of Fuller's legacy in the context of design, examining his singular vision of new conceptual models for design and architecture, alongside his ideas on their potentially world-altering consequences. Drawing extensively on his archive and with over 300 images, the book follows Fuller's explorations of geometry, language and intellectual property in their relation to design principles and pedagogy, organizing its survey of Fuller's work through parallel conceptual threads rather than in a linear chronology of his career.