Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 1, 1977)
cA look at books for CfTristmag The Album Cover Album edited by Hipgnosis and Roger Dean ($10.95, A&W Visual, paper) ou who've been buying rock, jazz and pop records during the past 10 years will hardly be surprised at the concept of Album Covers As Art. What may surprise you is the number of goodies — sublime, raunchy, bizarre and otherwise — you've never seen. Designed by two big guns in the field, it is spare on text; a short history of the craft be fore. a concise essay on the business and techniques of the trade aft give ample space to That Inbetween — some 140 pages of fine graphics arranged both for visual flow and surprise. In short, a mass produced art book of mass produced art. Beautiful, rich and strange. One could wish for more full and half-page reproductions, and a few more of the more esoteric classical albums than of fered, but those are the closest things re sembling faults one can find here. If nothing else, you can get off on the colors ... The Changing Countryside Jorg Muller ($9.95, Atheneum, paper) F -■k- irstof irst of all, this is not a book, but there it was in the bookstore, impressive ... You can easily dub it a series of visual poems if you like. Even if you don’t, these seven large foldout paintings should grab you some where. Portrayed here is an anonymous, perhaps fictional landscape enduring the changes of 1953-1972, and those changes are very real and undeniable. Muller is good enough to take us through the seasons as well as the years, and anyone who has lived in the affluent rural parts of this country will find something familiar going on here. (There is an accompanying set, The Changing City, but this one is closer to home.) The much discussed accelerations of history, technol ogy and population are silently witnessed here. Neither cheerful or depressing, this is apt education for all of us. Field Guide to North American Birds The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Western Regions ($7.95, Alfred A. Knopf, cloth) T JLhis is one handful of pure delight. Clear color photos (with inset thumbprint silhouettes) of 627 birds, arranged by color and shape, fully precede a text arranged by habitat that is number-keyed to the photo graphs. The photos are beautiful and well chosen, the text concise and complete, and it has an index (both common and scientific names) that can serve as a record of birds you have seen already. Whether you tramp through woods and field, look out the window ! at the bird-feeder crowd, or just hang out at the duck pond (90 entries here on duck-like birds'), this book will serve you well, be you novice or accomplished watcher. The Second Ring of Power Carlos Castaneda ($8.95, Simon and Schuster, cloth) JL Ml flat, barren mountaintop on the western slopes of the Sierra Madre in central Mexico was the setting for my final meeting with don Juan and don Genaro and their other two apprentices, Pablito and Nestor... I was indeed seeing don Juan and don Genaro for the last time. Toward the end we all said goodbye to one another and then Pablito and I jumped together from the moun tain into an abyss." So begins yet another installment in Castaneda's tales of sorcery south of various borders, and if none of the above names mean anything to you, ask the person you give this book to, to loan you a copy of The Teachings of Don Juan and start from square one: you won't regret it. For those who do recognize the above, suffice it to say that Pablito's mother has become one powerful sorceress, transformed by don Juan for reasons unknown, and it is she who opposes Carlos further into regions unknown, and that’s only the first chapter. Fact or fiction or both, we are confronted here with a commun ity where don Juan s ways are the order of the day. where we are shown the arts of dreaming and stalking, further techniques in the sorcerer-warrior s way Those who have approached this or that abyss with Cas taneda thus far will need no encouragement towards this one Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country Compiled and edited by Jarold Ramsey ($14 95, Univ. of Washington Press, cloth) JLJ regin with the right setting. It is deep winter night along the Columbia River on the Oregon shore . . . There is little for The People to do but stay indoors and try to keep warm. It is the season of stones And this book is full of such stories, delight ful stones to be read aloud around the fire or the silenced TV set, by yourself before bed or on grey days. Dozens of stories about the many figures mythic and historical the In dians of this region wove around the land sea and sky. Central to them is Coyote, the Trick ster, the Transformer who is alternately amusing, annoying and occasionally obs cene, always at the task of establishing and ordering the world for human habitation. “The People are almost here," he whispers to the animals and spirits. The People came, and there are stories of them, and then the white folks came, and there are stories of that transformation, and then those of times long, long before when monsters, chaos and elemental nature ruled the land. Stories, all bound together by what ever unity Oregon as a place, a region can offer. Though a bit high-priced, it is a unique collection, a thorough and probably definitive document, and after all. it is the right time, the right setting .. X YV 88 An Ecofiction of the Future Christopher Swann and Chet Roaman ($7 95. Sierra Club, paper) JL echnology," Stew Brand once wrote, ‘ Goes either through you or over you ft's part of the flow that just won t go around you YV 88 is a book affirming this notion in a most interesting way Offered to us by the Sierra Club, it is dif ficult to evaluate It owes much to Stew Brand's work, as well as to Ernest Callenbach s Ecotopia and Richard Grossmger s lo. particularly the issue on Vermont One could hope for as professional and cohesive a work here, but that aside, what is it9 The authors: YV 88 is not necessarily what the Sierra Club envisions as the future of Yosemite Valley It is the authors vision of opportunities we may have to live more har moniously with our environment and to use technology to make this possible What we have here is a chromcfe of the 1988 maiden journey of a solar-powered train carrying people from Merced to Yose mite From this central fact radiates a profu sion of historical-technical-geographical ecological information about a given region Using the near future as a frame-of-reference from which to view our own present, it be comes a low-key, but extremely political scenario. It is a quiet, diffuse statement of possibilities that seem feasible and not that far away. “Machines," wrote Cocteau, “should not be our slaves or our masters Rather, we should collaborate with them Include wil derness or nature" in that and you have YV 88, one version of a common vision Paul Bocuse's French Cooking ($20.00, Random House, cloth) T his is possibly the best of the lot: a total book It would stand out anywhere There are those who think French cooking effete and decadent This book is not for those, nor is it for those who are not up to spending considerable time and care on food. Chef-author Bocuse may or may not be the world's best, as some contend, but he has provided those of us who love the art of cooking and eating (not to mention the art of cookbooks) a rare treat 1,150 recipes from the best of French cooking Oh my. But purist and elitist it is not, for Chef Bo cuse has adapted his work to utilize ingre dients easily available in the United States Each section, in addition, has a gracefully written general introduction on this or that sort of food preparation Each recipe in its turn is given to us in a similar nontechnical (but no less exact) manner He sees this book as a novel, to read for enjoyment and he has a good eye Visually, this book is also a pleasure Eleg antly and simply iaid-out. realized in browns and black, it winds up with the requisite breath-taking photos and an intelligently de tailed index Five hundred-plus pages of civilized endeavor, this is a book that won t be dated for some time to come A Sense of the Future Jacob Bronowski ($12.50, MIT, cloth) JKL n the best sense of that difficult word, science is a democratic method. That has been its strength, that and its confidence that nothing can be more important than what is true.” This is a voice that went away when Jacob Bronowski died in 1974, brought to us again in a new book of essays. The man who brought us The Ascent of Man was a rarity, and becomes even more so these days, his kind. Though he tends to castigate all manners of borderline methods, from astrology to parapsychology to Zen, in one category, his sense of science and re lated manners of creatively rational ways is acutely needed. As one writer put it, science is our culture's yoga, our central method by which to yoke together the disparate facts and facets of our experience. It is the open ness of science that Bronowski sees as its chief claim to such primacy. "To listen to everyone: to silence no one; to honor and promote those who are right — these have given science its power in our world, and its humanity. This from a man who chose, with other physicists and mathematicians, to move their work to the life sciences rather than work on atomic weaponry. Science, though, is not atomic bombs or power plants; it is the understand ing that makes such things possible For science is not a book, either of facts or rules; it is the creation of concepts which give unity and meaning to nature . .. created by the human mind for the human mind; they are not God-given ordinances." This book is a similar creation, and is an invitation to build our own civili7ed future. The Taster's Guide to Beer Michael A Weiner ($7 95. McMillan, paper) (And Malt does more than Milton can To /ustify God s ways to Man. A E Houseman) C ^^^^ubtitled Brews and Breweries of the World," this book is for anyone with more than a casual interest in beer drinking. Crammed with enough history, trivia and technical information to keep any contingent of drinking companions in animated conver sation well into the night, appended with a check-list evaluation a la Consumers Re ports of all the world's brews covered in the text, amply and wittily illustrated, this serious and delightful book is a gem. No way can you stay away from a glass while going through this. Written by an anthropologist-botanist who claims his chief qualification is the fact that he is “an avid beer-drinker," this is an even handed, unsnobbish work that could well have been otherwise. In answer to the ex pected, “Why read about beer?,” Weiner of fers the enigma of individual taste and its need for refinement and definiton. Aware of the suggestibility and even gullibility of human tastes, he thinks that one's own taste can better become one's own once identified and articulated. His book is presented to that end. From ingredients and nutritional break down to brewing and storage processes through the act of drinking, it's all here. Be come your own expert, and drink hearty! Music of the Whole Earth David Reck ($9 95, Scribners, paper) M V JKL usic lovers, listeners and makers — here's one for you: an eclectic, rather ec centric, extremely accessible introduction to the music of an entire planet. A clearly mystical musician, extensively trained in many aspects of Western and Eastern music — composing, performing, conducting and collecting — David Reck seeks here to enamor us with the many musics of this planet. For him, music is primarily an art of contact and fellowship, be it with the music itself, the music-makers, or the region and people from which the music has grown Just so, he shares what he knows — a good deal — with us. You say you can t read music? No obsta cle, for Reck has obliged us by utilizing sev eral non-standard notations (along with numerous rough-hand sketches, diagrams and maps) to clarify and exemplify the text s wealth of information. Also, he includes in these home-grown graphics instructions for constructing flutes, drums, banjos and zithers. Do it yourself! The construction and structure, though, of music itself is his real concern Getting at the how via the what is the tact he takes, and his discussions of comparative musical struc tures is possibly the most enlightening as pect of the book. Some of this may be at best speculation but, like all good fictions, is most helpful in finding your way through new territ ory. Not that this book doesn’t require some effort on the reader’s part. Participation is the goal here, and Tie provides a high-density package for it, with many inroads for all. Whether electronic-experimental or vocal/acoustic-traditional, however strange it seems, Reck feels it is all ours, and would help us to it. Here are your songs for the asking. IheBook The Book of Merlyn T.H. White ($9.95, Univ. of Texas Press, cloth) ^ ^Lrthur, Guinevere. Merlin, Lancelot, Mordred . . happily they never leave us. Ditto T.H. White. "I have suddenly discovered." wrote White in a world approaching World War II, 'that the central theme of Mode d Arthur is to find an anecdote to war." His reaction to Thomas Malory s version of Arthur and Camelot fused with his own reflections and with those on the modern world on whose fringes White reluc tantly lived, and became The Once and Fu ture King It was not published until 1958, and even then, the ending was omitted. This book is that ending, and more. White, you see, was a pacifist, an odd sort seldom in favor (save, one would hope, at Christmas time) and certainly not during the 40 s or 50 s or 60 s or... Well, here it is now, a cantankerous questioning human voice speaking to us through Merlyn, a man who can. among other things, make people be come animals. He also tells of the future, mainly because he ages in reverse: his direc tion is from the "future" — our time and then some — into the past — the present of Arthur and Camelot. An odd sort... The Book of Merlyn stands by itself, how ever, and will hopefully send a new flock of readers back to White’s other books and his peculiar view of the world. As were Swift and Twain in their latter days. White is a bit the curmudgeon here. Exasperated, yes; bitter, no. The ideas here are apt this time of year; would they were all other times. (Continued on Page 10B) The perfect gift for Mom and Dad Autographed copies of Bob Hope’s The Road to Hollywood are still available $12.50 TRADEB00K DEPARTMENT 13th & Kincaid 686-4331 MADE RESERVATIONS WITH THE AIRLINES? JOG BY & PICK UP YOUR TICKETS A Free Service for Your Convenience RIGHT ON CAMPUS EUGENE TRAVEL 831 E. 13th II 687-2823 r \ PSYCHIC Advises on business, love & personal direction Jamil PO Box 10154 Eugene. Oregon 97401 Phone anytime: 342 2210 484 2441 V J •IMPORTANT NOTICE! I S ( I'STOMS I .M in at Al ( ! l<>\ ('Icanime •>f Hmuhnailr PERSIAN & ORIENTAL RUGS AND RUNNERS Shipment ordered h\ telex to overseas warehouses 2 > hales arrived in \ev\ York Kx 11 *ss refused h\ importer W e ha\e heen commissioned to MCTK >N m sintfle pieces the excess 2 a hales avoid additional shipping and duty chafL'es NOTH FROM I UK Al’lTIONKKR: / hare examined fhe hales X- fni.1 the nets r. % •> s.gvr.» • • **i»r. \ design. ;n exee/Zent ■ .Si/« s range fn >• v > to IJ x l> y y Moil. Dee. ) K I’M El’CKNK HO I KK View 7 I’M 222 Kast llnmihv in Xurtioiieer: Col. I.eili Rosenblum Kugene Terms: ( ash or Cheek HOT SPECIALS EVERY DAY! ** from 1 HE FACULTY CLUB A New Choice For Lunch (Today's Hot Special^ Beef Stroganoff with salad and roll % % * * ♦ «* % 4* |L Students, Faculty, Public Welcome Across from the E.M.U. Fast Service! V $2.25 Soup of the Day Cream of Celery
