Wordtrade.com on
Lively Art

Recently Reviewed Titles

A to Z of American Women in the Performing Arts by Liz Sonneborn (Library of American History: Facts on File) Facts On File's compendium of biographies of 150 American female performers packs a wealth of data into compact form. Pleasingly presented in clean typeface and illustrated with a sprinkling of photos, the book is easy to use. Choice of entries is multicultural and multinational, including Latina dancer Rita Moreno, Osage ballerina Maria Tallchief, Canadian singer and actress Eva Tanguay, and Chinese American actress Anna May Wong. The selection of entries rightly includes foreign-born women like Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor who anchored their careers in the U.S. The book considers performing arts broadly, even reaching out to rodeo for famed Wild West shooter Annie Oakley. More

Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View by Law Kar, Frank Bren (Scarecrow Press) Our first blueprint for this book outlined a "complete" story of Hong Kong cinema from the beginning to the present, with a guess or two about the fu­ture and some background comments on sociopolitical history.

However, soon after we began on the text, the folly of this approach became self-evident. The many books on Hong Kong cinema already rolling from the presses condemned us to repeat many well-known facts, particularly about the last thirty years and especially about martial arts cinema. Besides, the "complete" approach smacked of a cartoon gallop through history, akin to performing Hamlet as a two-minute sketch. More

Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews by Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, Jennifer Bajorek (Translator) (Polity Press) (Paperback) In this volume of recorded interviews, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment,  the role of technology in modern societies. Our homes have always existed in the shadow of ‘the other' and inviting guests has always carried the threat of usurpation. In these interviews Derrida argues that today we are witnessing a new expropriation of our home by ‘teletechnologies', whose intrusion seriously endangers our ability to feel ‘at home' in the world. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of "live" recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that the so-called "natural" conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached? More

 

Wordtrade.com Mission

We review some trade books in popular sciences and humanities.

We concentrate on religious studies and philosophy

We focus on academic and scientific technical titles.

We specialize in most fields of the humanities, sciences and technology.

This includes many textbooks

Some scholarly monographs

Some special issue periodicals

WT Main | About WT | Review Links | Contact | Review Sources | Arts Bookstore | Search |