by:
Manguel, Alberto

Publisher:
Random House
Published:September, 1901
ISBN:0375503021
Format:Hardcover
Pages:352

Description: From Publishers Weekly
After an international success with his prize-winning A History of Reading, writer, novelist, translator and editor Manguel, a Buenos Aires ex-pat now living in Canada, returns with a series of meditations on why great art moves us. Twelve chapters focus individually on painters from Caravaggio to Picasso and Joan Mitchell, the photographer Tina Modotti and architect Peter Eisenman an intellectually ambitious range supported by an impressive section of notes at the back of the book suggesting familiarity with a vast array of scholarly books. Yet the book's subtitle and frequent use of the first person betray the fact that this is less a work of art history than a catalogue of reactions, many of which are triggered by excruciatingly banal questions: "But can every picture be read? Or at least, can we create a reading?" leads to the assertion that "[the] attempt not to communicate is at least as complex as the attempt to communicate, and undoubtedly as old." The chapter "Pablo Picasso: the Image as Violence" contains this observation: "most men in Western art suffer stoically." The wandering style that worked so well in History is less masterful here, and the lack of sustained thought throughout makes it hard to imagine most readers (of either gender) stoically getting to the end. (Sept.)Forecast: Many buyers of A History of Reading, which was translated into 22 languages, will pick up this book by association, as will readers looking for the next How Proust Will Change Your Life. The result will be better than average sales, but not a History-style breakout.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Description:

This profoundly illuminating, entertaining book could well change the way we "read" the visual world around us, and certainly help open our eyes and minds to its astonishing riches. The language in which we speak about art has become steadily more abstruse, a jargon that only art critics and con-artists can understand, though for thousands of years this was not the case. Today, we live in a kaleidoscopic new world of images: Is there a vocabulary we can learn in order to read these images? Is there something we can do so as not to remain passive when we flip through an illustrated book, or download images on a screen? Are there ways in which we can "read" the stories within paintings, monuments, buildings and sculptures? We say "every picture tells a story" - but does it?

Taking a handful of extraordinary images - photographed, painted, built, sculpted - Alberto Manguel explores how each one attempts to tell a story that we, the viewer, must decipher or invent. A History of Love and Hate is not about art history or theory - it is about the astonishing pleasures and surprises of stories.