Out of Town

I'll be out of town this week (yes, again), so I will only sporadically be posting and am not planning on checking my email. I will, however, be doing lots of reading!

Have a wonderful week!

Review: Richard Bangs' Adventures with Purpose

Richard Bangs’ Adventures with Purpose by Richard Bangs

The concept for this book is great and most of the adventures are amazing. The book is full of good stories and compelling personal journeys. Many of the places and stories in this book are fascinating. There were many highlights in this book for me –like the trip down the Neretva River in Bosnia or visiting an isolated village in Papua New Guinea. I found the last chapter of the book—a quick sketch of an African safari—to be touching.

At issue for me, unfortunately, is the writing. It took me over a month to read Adventures with Purpose and I struggled to finish it. Bangs is clearly a storyteller at heart and I imagine his wit comes across better in person than it does on the page. Bangs is a very casual writer and his writing doesn’t hang together very well. I think if the editing had been better it would have vaulted this book to the next level, because the bones of a great book are here.

After struggling to stay involved with the book, I asked my husband (who is also a voracious reader and is unlike me an outdoorsman) to read Adventures. He, too, found it difficult to get through and gave up about a quarter of the way through.

The first several chapters highlighted the plight of places/people in need of help. In the first chapter, for example, takes Bangs to the Nile, where he explores work to bring the crocodile back from the brink (see photo at top, from a NY Times article). In another, very interesting chapter, he visits the Moken people of Thailand’s Andaman Islands, who are struggling to recover from the devastating 2004 tsunami. There was a good mix in these chapters of both environmental/ecological and humanitarian concerns to which Bangs brings attention.

I was really disappointed, then, when the book lost this focus on helping. Richard Bangs’ definition of purpose is broader than I expected, but I thought that once the scope expanded to include stories of personal purpose, the book bogged down. The chapters on mountain climbing, in particular, were indulgent and out of place in this book—especially when there so much other material Bangs could have explored in more depth in some of the other chapters. Bangs, in my opinion, should have cut the number of chapters in half and put more energy and information into the remaining chapters.

In the end, I am torn about whether to recommend this book or not. There are so many good things to say about Adventures but the overall product is spotty. Adventures with Purpose is also a syndicated public television show; I would be interested in checking it out. Find out more about it and Richard Bangs at his website here.

I *heart* Book Bloggers

This is one of those real life gets in the way of blogging weeks, unfortunately. Unexpectedly, I have to go out of town this week, so I will probably not get the chance to post much, which is too bad for a couple of reasons. First off, I have several new books to review and I'm not going to get the chance to do so before I go. (In fact, I should be packing right now, not writing this post.) To wet your appetite, please see my previous "preview" posts here and here to find out more about what books I've been reading recently. Here are some ...

Adventures with Purpose by Richard Bangs
Mouse Guard Volume 1: Fall 1152 by David Peterson
Art Deco San Francisco: The Architecture of Timothy Pflueger by Therese Poletti

The second reason that I'm bummed that I won't be around this week is that its Book Blogger Appreciation Week! Start at My Friend Amy's for the fun, and enjoy getting to read lots of great bloggers and hear all about lots of wonderful books.

Have a wonderful week!

New Books

I recently got two new books that I am looking forward to reading and reviewing. The first is Art Deco San Francisco: The Architecture of Timothy Pflueger. Pflueger was a well-known turn of the (last) century architect in San Francisco who has been largely forgotten in recent years. But his work is getting a revival, as many of the fabulous movie theatres he designed are being restored. Luckily for me, one newly restored Pflueger theatre is the Alameda Theatre and Cineplex, which is just minutes from my house and a great place to see new movies.


The other new book I am really excited to read is Mouse Guard: Fall 1152. I had never heard of Mouse Guard, which is an Eisner-winning series of comics about a secret colony of mice. When I saw this book on the shelf (its actually a reprint, but is new in hardcover, I believe) and saw how cute the mice in it are, I just had to have it! Fortunately, my husband rocks and he got it for me. I've flipped through it and the story looks great, but haven't had the chance to sit down and read it yet. I'll let you know what I think when I do.

BBAW Giveaway

The kind folks at Bookroomreviewers's Weblog are doing an awesome giveaway to encourage readers to explore all the fantastic book blogs out there. Find the post here and enjoy! Oh, and the prizes? A chance to win one of three new books:

Sweet Life by Mia King
When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale
Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles

Good luck and let me know if you win!

Rem Koolhaas & Howard Roark

The Seattle Times has an interview with Rem Koolhaas, who designed the Seattle Public Library, which opened four years ago. Its a great building, but that's not why I am posting the interview. My favorite part of the interview is this exchange:

Q: It was a large project to undertake when you had so much skepticism.

A: Yes, but of course we were not alone. And I think that is kind of actually one of the difficult and distorting things at the current moment, is that basically some architects are seen as kind of almost bullfighters who somehow have to kill an animal, but you're part of a much larger enterprise.

Q: I think there's a reason for that: too many people have read "The Fountainhead" and it's ruined them for life.

A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think that's actually extremely inconvenient, because there was Deborah (L. Jacobs, former City Librarian), of course, and there was also a board, and we had a lot of bonding in the beginning. So it's definitely not an ego thing, you know, and it's definitely not where you kind of are looking for morons or ever think that somebody — you realize that some of the criticism is unfounded or naive or not particularly kind of ... benevolent, but it really comes with the territory and it's not something that you kind of respond to in egotistical terms.

Don't get me wrong -- The Fountainhead is a great book. But, as alluded in my review of Loving Frank, it is a very particular view of architects and the act of building. It is, also, a very incorrect view. If even Rem Koolhaas -- who is probably (with, maybe, Frank Gehry) the closest thing we have in this day to Frank Lloyd Wright or Howard Roark -- thinks the idea of the "hero-architect" is a fallacy, I assure you the rest of us think its total B.S. It is fun to read, though.

Architecture Book Buying

As you can imagine, with my love of books and my love of architecture, I really love architecture books. This is a big genre in of itself and can be broken down into many categories -- there are technical books, glossy picture books, theory books, books for the layman, idea books, etc.

Archinect has a good architecture book listing collection (find it here). Their architecture books categories include education, reference, firms (i.e. monographs), criticism/theory, fiction, history, interiors, landscape, planning/urban design, technology, and web design. They even have an entire collection for Los Angeles.

There are so many architecture books out there, I find it very hard to shop for them online. I always love shopping at bookstores, since I love the tactile nature of a book, but for architecture books, its much more practical than that. With all those books, there is a whole lot of crap and sometimes its hard to tell online the difference between a good looking book and a poorly printed one.

Fortunately for me, there are some really great architecture bookstores in California. When I lived in LA, I shopped at Hennessey + Ingalls. Unfortunately, at the time, I was a student and had no money to be spending on books. They have a fantastic sales, though, which is when I did most of my shopping there. For those of you who prefer buying online, they do have a web store, in addition to their great bricks-and-mortar store.

Now that I'm in the SF Bay Area, I shop at the Berkeley branch of Builder's Booksource (they also have a SF store). When I am on 4th Street, I love stopping by just to see what's new. In addition to their great selection of glossy and "fun" books, they are also the go-to place for building codes (blech) and reference books.

The photo above is a Medieval copy of Vitruvius' Ten Books on Architecture I found here. More recent printings are also available.