From mind, heart, and hand

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John Hatcher

This is the first critical biography of Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), one of the most remarkable scholar-artists in British cultural history. Binyon is best remembered today for his 1914 Great War elegy 'For the Fallen', carved on countless war graves and recited annually at Remembrance Sunday services, but his importance extends well beyond this one famous poem. In fact, Binyon was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, and critic, whose influence in a wide range of fields is only now beginning to be recognized. During his forty-year career at the British Museum, he built a world reputation as a pioneering scholar and interpreter of Eastern art, one of the first to challenge the West's myopic assumption that it held a monopoly on beauty and truth. Revealing the subtle continuities between the poet and East West mediator, this fascinating study of his life and work restores Binyon to his rightful place in British cultural history, as one of the most benign and quietly influential voices of the early twentieth century.

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Stefan Sharff

One of the most popular thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock's middle years, Rear Window is now also recognized as one of the most brilliant demonstrations of the director's cinematic wizardry. Starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, with Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr in memorable supporting roles, the film centers on a photographer confined to a wheelchair in his apartment who, using binoculars, spies on his courtyard neighbors and witnesses a possible murder. This was not the first time Hitchcock challenged himself to build suspense when plot limited action to a small area, but it was the only time when the director's art in creating through a lens is so dramatically reflected in the very story he tells. The voyeur-hero is there to see for us, and the images he chooses to observe become the language of the movie, which is almost thirty-five percent silent. Stefan Sharff, professor emeritus of Columbia University's film department, shows us how Hitchcock achieved the mounting excitement and fear that mark this film. The author first provides a detailed overview of the director's skill in developing the story from intriguing start to shattering climax. In the second part of the book, he goes on to a shot-by-shot analysis; using the film's continuity as his text, he describes how hitchcock's technique accomplished its magic. Illustrated throughout with stills from the film, The Art of Looking is a unique appreciation of the art of Alfred Hitchcock, made even more valuable by the first publication in any form of the full dialogue of a screen masterpiece.

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Josephine Lee, Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa

Asks readers to reconsider who represents Asian America and what its history constitutes. Defining the early period as spanning the nineteenth century and the 1960s, the essays address the Asian American individuals and communities that have been omitted from "official" histories; trace the roots of persistent racial stereotypes and myths; and retrieve artistic production that raises questions of what counts as "art" or as Asian American. By reconsidering the political, cultural, and material history written in the past three decades, contributes to a new understanding of Asian America's past and relationship to the present.

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Margarita Martínez del Sobral

The author raises the hypothesis, verified by the rigor of the corresponding research and analysis, that there was in Egypt and Mesoamerica an identical design system based on astronomical numerology, which allowed the sizing of architecture and art. It is shown in the studied works that both peoples followed precise astronomical and mathematical charges in search of the representation and correspondence of their works with astronomical and/or calendarical cycles. In these pages the reader will find mathematical calculations of the surfaces and volumes of monuments and important objects typical of those cultures that indicate cosmogonies and similar cultures that coincide in the explanation of their world despite the geographical and temporal distance that separates them. It is shown that no work of Art or Egyptian or Mesoamerican architecture was performed at random or left to improvisation, but following strict purposes of astronomical communication, mathematics, numerological and sacred, which could be summed up in the obsessive intention of both peoples to achieve life after death.