Anything Smart

The international bestseller: E. H. Gombrich’s sweeping history of the world, for the curious of all ages “All stories begin with ‘Once upon a time.’ And that’s just what this story is all about: what happened, once upon a time.” So begins A Little History of the World, an engaging and lively book written for readers both young and old. Rather than focusing on dry facts and dates, E. H. Gombrich vividly brings the full span of human experience on Earth to life, from the stone age to the atomic age. He paints a colorful picture of wars and conquests; of grand works of art; of the advances and limitations of science; of remarkable people and remarkable events, from Confucius to Catherine the Great to Winston Churchill, and from the invention of art to the destruction of the Berlin Wall. For adults seeking a single-volume overview of world history, for students in search of a quick refresher course, or for families to read and learn from together, Gombrich’s Little History enchants and educates.

In a series of 50 accessible and lucidly written essays, Ben Dupre probes some of the most significant ideas in politics, philosophy, religion, economics, science and the arts. Some of these are unimpeachable (liberty, reason); others mind numbing (The Big Bang chaos); a few mysterious (fate, surrealism) or downright despicable (fascism, racism). What they have in common is that they all matter and have left a deep impression on human civilization. The full sweep of such ideas – from the beautiful and the wondrous to the ugly and the debased – is covered in this volume.

For this second book in an ongoing exploratory series, multifaceted artist Michael Stipe has collaborated with the writer and artist Douglas Coupland on an investigation of how analog imagery is crashing on the shores of our digital future. For Stipe the signature mark of this phenomenon is the moiré pattern. Culled from Stipe’s vast archive of personal images, the book is a contemplation on the tug-of-war between pixels and halftone, between past memory and new memory and their vagaries of representation. As an undergraduate studio art major at the University of Georgia, Michael Stipe (born 1960) studied photography and painting before leaving school upon the formation of R.E.M., the band for which he served as frontman and singer/songwriter until its dissolution in 2011. The sensibility that he began to develop during his time as an art student transferred to his spectrum of work for R.E.M., from art directing all graphic, video and stage design, to writing, composing and performance, and his iconoclastic personal style. Stipe’s visibility as a media figure in the popular culture of the 1980s and ’90s left an indelible mark on the aesthetic trends of the time, many of which have trickled down to contemporary culture.