Reviews
< What is the doll smiling about anyway? Cool, suggestive, strange, Your Action World: Winners are Losers with a New Attitude satirizes those odious "personal power" manuals and every other variety of get-ahead, improve-yourself tract with deadpan accuracy. As was often the case with his lyrics for the Talking Heads, David Byrne's images are ironic on the surface, disconcerting in their lurking emotional undertones. Deceptively packaged, this book presents itself as one of those finds beloved of historians--the untouched trunk in the attic full of journals, letters, and souvenirs. It is, in fact, a work of the imagination, pretending to cover th4e memories of six generations of women on an Indiana homestead. Here's the concept: Marianne, a French aristocrat, marries pioneer Joshua Metcalfe in 1835 and happily departs for the Indiana wilderness to chop wood, draw water, tend chickens, clean, and cook. She also sets the scene for a family Christmas whose traditions will continue to the present. Another tradition: an end-of-year journal summing up annual events and picked up by succeeding generations, usually daughters-in-law of different ethnic background--German, Irish, English, Swedish--who can add cultural variations to the Christmas celebrations and reflect in their annual summations the progress of civilization at the farm: indoor plumbing, electricity, automobiles, computers. Beautifully published, with each woman's entries in a different handwriting and authentic-looking photographs and memorabilia reproduced, here's a charming reconstruction of the flow of history as it affects one particular family. -- -, < What is the doll smiling about anyway? Cool, suggestive, strange, Your Action World: Winners are Losers with a New Attitude satirizes those odious "personal power" manuals and every other variety of get-ahead, improve-yourself tract with deadpan accuracy. As was often the case with his lyrics for the Talking Heads, David Byrne's images are ironic on the surface, disconcerting in their lurking emotional undertones., < What is the doll smiling about anyway?Cool, suggestive, strange, Your Action World: Winners are Losers with a New Attitude satirizes those odious "personal power" manuals and every other variety of get-ahead, improve-yourself tract with deadpan accuracy. As was often the case with his lyrics for the Talking Heads, David Byrne's images are ironic on the surface, disconcerting in their lurking emotional undertones.
