Review by New York Times Review
BETTER LIVING THROUGH CRITICISM: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, by A. O. Scott. (Penguin, $17.) The author, a co-chief film critic for The New York Times, reconsiders the relationship between criticism and the art it assesses; rather than art's antithesis, such evaluations are part and parcel of the creative process. "Criticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood," Scott writes. DREAM CITIES: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World, by Wade Graham. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) Graham chronicles the familiar institutions around which the world's cities are organized - including shopping malls, monuments and suburbs - and profiles the designers and planners who imagined them. Cities, in his view, are best seen as "expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live." A MOTHER'S RECKONING: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, by Sue Klebold. (Broadway, $16.) Klebold, the mother of one of the teenagers who killed 13 other people and themselves at Columbine High School in 1999, approaches her book gingerly: Aware that the project could draw ire or claims of insensitivity, she uses it to warn about mental illness and consider what could have been done to prevent the tragedy. THE BRICKS THAT BUILT THE HOUSES, by Kate Tempest. (Bloomsbury, $16.) Tempest, a spoken-word poet and a rapper, reprises characters from earlier work in this, her debut novel. Harry is socking away money for the future by dealing cocaine to the wealthy, while Becky, an aspiring dancer, works as a masseuse. Tempest turns her ear for language to their love story, as well as the characters that surround them. "The cumulative effect is deeply affecting: cinematic in scope; touching in its empathic humanity," our reviewer, Sam Byers, wrote. ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR, by Elizabeth Brundage. (Vintage, $15.95.) How much tragedy can one farmhouse hold? When Catherine Clare, a college professor's wife in small-town New York, is murdered in her bed, it recalls an earlier trauma at the house: an incident that left three brothers orphaned. Brundage unspools stories of the Clares' marriage and their home in this masterly thriller. ONLY THE ANIMALS: Stories, by Ceridwen Dovey. (Picador, $18.) Dovey's narrators are the souls of animals linked to artists and writers, including a dolphin with an affinity for Ted Hughes. In these "tragic but knowing" tales, "the wronged do not howl at their executioners as much as hold their actions in the light, and accept their place in history," our reviewer, Megan Mayhew Bergman, wrote. ?
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
New York Times film critic Scott peppers his brainy parsing of the practice and significance of criticism with dialogues, droll, self-conducted, and self-critical Q&As, beginning with What is criticism? And what is it good for? These exchanges anchor us to the essentials, while Scott's ruminative, eclectic, and exciting mix of analysis and reflection zips back-and-forth between films, books, art, music, anecdotes, aesthetics, and the in-flux state of journalism. Drawing on Hollywood blockbusters and the films of French director Jean-Luc Godard, Oscar Wilde and Immanuel Kant, rock 'n' roll and performance art, Scott reaches to the very core of criticism the innate urge, the need, to share our delight in aesthetic experiences. He then illuminates the commitment and effort required for transforming simple assertions into eloquent, ideally artistic arguments. Does professional criticism have a place in our astonishing and unprecedented cultural abundance and cacophony of instant digital opinions? Can we still fall into rapture over a painting, a poem? Scott's passionate and felicitous inquiry brings eternal questions about the symbiosis between art and criticism fully into the digital age.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This stunning treatise on criticism from New York Times film critic Scott is a complete success, comprehensively demonstrating the value of his art. His first major assertion is that criticism is indeed an art, and that "a work of art is itself a piece of criticism." From here he moves swiftly, with humor and insight, to show how art works hand in hand with critics' "activity of loving demystification." Scott ties criticism to philosophy, most compellingly citing Immanuel Kant's The Critique of Judgment, which asserts that "the judgment of taste... cannot be other than subjective." He is equally comfortable discussing Rainer Maria Rilke's sonnet "Archaic Torso of Apollo" and Marina Abramovic's performance art piece The Artist Is Present. His most striking observations come in a chapter entitled "How to Be Wrong," which Scott calls "the one job [critics] can actually, reliably, do." He states that "choosing is the primal and inevitable mistake of criticism" as well as "the gesture that calls it into being." Included are four "dialogues" in which Scott interviews himself, examining his assumptions and clarifying difficult points. This is a necessary work that may enter the canon of great criticism. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary Associates. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Scott (film critic, New York Times) offers this volume as a justification for his existence. Through a series of imagined "dialogues" between himself and a theoretical nonsympathetic interlocutor, he sets out to rationalize his career choice, and the existence of criticism in general, by showing how analytical thinking is at the center of life itself-this very centrality making it impossible not to approach art seriously. Coming on the heels of Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique, which strove to bring recognition to critiques' noncentrality-and amid popular reactions against theory throughout the culture wars of the last three decades-Scott has a nice open field to play in here and makes elegant use of the entire terrain, drawing strongly on Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. He beautifully reveals criticism as a valid art form in its own right, pointing to virtuoso achievements in the genre by master poets such as T.S. Eliot and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. VERDICT Whether or not readers who are most likely to question the value of criticism will be the ones to pick up this title, fans of literature and film will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 8/17/15.]-Jenny Brewer, Helen Hall Lib., League City, TX © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An exploration of criticism, which "is not an enemy from which art must be defended, but rather another namethe proper namefor the defense of art itself." New York Times film critic Scott delivers an impassioned and deeply thoughtful defense of his vocation in this unusual tome"unusual" in the sense that the author offers not a history of arts criticism, an account of his own evolution as a critic, or practical advice for aspiring critics, but rather an examination of the sources and functions of criticism itself. It's perhaps a bit abstract and theoretical for the general film fan looking for pithy insights into the film reviewing game, but Scott is after something more rarified here. His position from the outset is defensive, as he acknowledges the antipathy many seem to feel toward critics, an attitude built on assumptions that critics hate pleasure, are motivated by artistic jealousy, and bring intellectual faculties to bear on material that doesn't warrant such fussy academic attention. Criticism is often seen as an essentially parasitic endeavor, a vulturelike scavenging on the remains of someone else's talent and effort. Scott arguespersuasively, bolstered by rigorous logic and observations about the work of such titanic figures as Aeschylus, Rilke, Kant, and Keatsthat criticism not only works symbiotically with art, but is necessary for art to even exist and have meaning in the first place. Scott lays out a taxonomy of meaningful thought (and the meaning of thought itself), and if he occasionally ventures too far into dense theoretical thickets or indulges borderline-irritating gimmickse.g., a series of interviews conducted with himself is an overdone trope and too cute by halfhis disciplined reasoning, impressive erudition, and deep commitment to his art (as he defines it) are never less than provocative and elegantly articulated. A zealous and well-considered work of advocacy for an art too often unappreciated and misunderstood. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
