Book reviews

Book reviews Comments Culture In Focus

Aesthetic extremes

Birds have never looked so utterly strange, gorgeous and non-human as they do in Tim Flack’s “Birds”. Set against completely black or white backgrounds, they are photographed with a starkness that renders them beautiful but also uncanny.   Sean Sheehan   Flack says the simple backgrounds help to heighten our […]

Book reviews Comments Culture In Focus Visual Arts

An Uzbek trilogy    

The key to commercial success for authors writing mainstream fiction in the West often comes down to their craft in maintaining narrative traction involving psychologically interesting characters.   Sean Sheehan   Emotional empathy is often established with one or more central character or, in the case of villains and psychopaths, […]

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Paper graveyards

“Paper graveyards” is a collection of essays by Eduardo Cadava, a professor at Princeton, that sees photography as invested with a migratory potential, the ability to shift away from itself and form new relations with other media.   Sean Sheehan   Cadava’s approach could be regarded with suspicion, another postmodernist […]

Book reviews Comments Culture In Focus

Trains not planes

The gas emissions from flights make up 2.4% of the world’s total carbon emissions and even a flight of a few hundred miles produces up to 50 times more pollution than a high-speed electric train.   Sean Sheehan   When you consider that some 75% of the world’s population never […]