Book Reviews

Silt Sand Slurry: Dredging, Sediment, and the Worlds We Are Making, by Rob Holmes, Brett Milligan, and Gena Wirth, 2023
This gritty, fact-filled tome is the final (for now) report from the Dredge Research Collaborative, which has held research field trip/symposium events called “DredgeFests” at some of the principal dredge hubs of the USA: New York City; the Great Lakes; the San Francisco Bay/Delta region; and the Mississippi River Delta, the mother of them all. Dredging, of course, is the mass movement of material from underwater, usually to help make channels navigable, and is likely the source of more earth moving globally than just about anything else, doubled by the fact that the dredged material has to go somewhere. Dredging, as a subject, too, is further evidence that the more boring something seems, the more interesting it is. 

The Lichen Museum, by A. Laurie Palmer, 2023
“The Lichen Museum surrounds you as soon as you step outside, and because it is massively distributed, you can enter it anywhere.” So begins chapter 4 of this sincere and intense book from the idea artist A. Laurie Palmer, once of Chicago, now teaching at UC Santa Cruz. This notion (central to the CLUI American Land Museum), is at home here, focusing on the micro-realm of the global lichen-scape. Lichens are everywhere, and overlooked all the time. They are like infinitely dense miniature models of planetary surfaces and ecologies, expressed by ephemeral forces, on rocks, sidewalks, signposts, and gravestones. Each is a unique microcosmic scab of texture and color that provide essays on beauty, tenacity, and adaptation, and signify a timescale beyond human existence in the past and the future.

Also On View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles, by Todd Lerew, 2024
This book contains descriptions and photographs of 64 of the more than 750 museums in the Los Angels region that the author counted and visited over the last few years, and locates on his website everymuseum.la, which is a valuable public service. As with all things of this sort, it’s about definitions and boundaries—what is a museum?; what is Los Angeles?—which, of course, is also the point—the book is an attempt to help answer these questions. Lerew is Director of Special Projects at the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, and a cultural curator of some renown. Published by Angel City Press, the book is about as thoroughly baked in Los Angeles as it gets.

Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), edited by Nancy Perloff and Michelle Kuo, 2024
The Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 Japan World Exposition was the site of some creative antics that might have been the apogee of nascent art and science collisions. The pavilion was a geodesic structure, enshrouded in fog. Inside it was a 90-foot diameter, 210-degree, inflated, reflective mylar dome, inside of which visitors experienced refracting programs of complexity and chaos, involving dance, kinetic light shows, interactive sounds, and radio transmissions. The designers and builders of this inverted expressive and experimental experience were a collection of artists (many, including the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, and David Tudor), and engineers from Bell Labs, Caltech, and MIT, working together under the monicker Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). This event was described evocatively in a 2024 exhibit at the Getty Research Institute, and in this book, with a reflective cover.

Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, by Douglas Kahn, 2013
Nearly every page of this scholarly book resonates with connections latent in our imaginations, like unconscious theories, made here, finely and finally for us, by the author. GIS-like layers of culture, contemporary art, and music, overlap with radio, magnetism, nuclearism, and space, across the electromagnetic spectrum, revealing structures and relationships in transformative and positive ways, suggesting that we might collectively be onto something.

Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology Along the Hudson River, edited by Annette Blaugrund, Betti-Sue Hertz, Elizabeth W. Hutchinson, and Dorothy M. Peteet, 2024
This is the catalog for the exhibit at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, which looks at looks along the river, from the late 1700s to today, mostly through paintings in ornate gilt frames. This is appropriate, since this is the progenerative place of American Landscape portraiture. The fact that the exhibit included a visual version of the CLUI project Up River: Points of Interest on the Hudson River, from the Battery to Troy feels like an honor, since our project was as much about Thomas Cole as it was about the Bechers. There are many lessons yet to be learned from the continuing flow of the Hudson River School.

Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, by Nicola Twilley, 2024
Cultivated from a collaborative project between Nicola Twilley and the CLUI that took shape as the exhibit Perishable: An Exploration of the Refrigerated Landscape of America, in 2013, her book, Frostbite, is finally out. Nothing has rotted or gone stale, of course, since the cold chain preserves things well, and in the meantime Twilley has honed the tale with her sharp observations, and expanded the reach of her research to cover more ground, like the origins of the truck-mounted Thermo King chillers, and visits to underground logistics hubs in Missouri. The book ends up, as many things seem to, with an epilogue in Svalbard, and a look into the future of global defrosting.

Dreamland: The Secret History of Area 51, by Peter W. Merlin, 2023
With 550 pages, and weighing in at 6.5 pounds, this is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the books about Area 51 (a few of which even share the title “Dreamland”). This book is also the impeccably researched definitive history of the place, written by Peter W. Merlin, the Indiana Jones of aerospace archeology.

Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley, by Brent Underwood, 2024
An account of the author’s ongoing adventures into reality after purchasing most of Cerro Gordo, a desiccated and unpopulated former mining town high up in the Inyo Mountains of eastern California, in 2018. Underwood’s book is able to convey modesty, sincerity, and good intentions in his efforts to come to terms with the place, which helps offset the influencer marketing savoir faire that circles his project, which is mostly known to the world through his videos on YouTube and TikTok.

Photography and Flight, by Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox, 2010
A concise and thoughtful history of aerial photography. The first aerial photographs came with the invention of hot air balloons and fixed image photography, both invented in France (in the late 1700s and early 1800s, respectively). In the early 1900s, aerial photography was perfected by people like Sherman Fairchild, who developed large format aerial cameras and specialty aircraft to conduct aerial surveys used to produce images and detailed maps. With the postwar Jet Age, the CIA built the highest-flying and fastest aircrafts ever made, that had no weapons, just cameras. Then came the Apollo pictures, Keyhole satellite-based film photography, and multispectral electronic imaging sensors, streaming content back to earth. At the end, the book spends some time on fine art photographers and contemporary artists working with aerial photography. The book was in production in 2008, when its co-author, Denis Cosgrove, the noted UCLA geographer, passed away. ♦