Wordwatch is Fourth Door Review’s book reviews pages. We highlight the original, the lesser known, the singular and the unexpected. Reviews are in-depth and engaged, with variations on length, from long, to less long, even less long and almost short.
Reread is FDR’s invitation to renew acquaintanceship with an older, long-time published book, seen through a fresh eyes, and is found as part of Wordwatch in most editions.
You’ll also find occasional features on small publications and magazines in the Middleground/Makeshift section.
Sounds Wild and Broken by David George Haskell
Death By Landscape by Elvia Wilk
On Slowness by Lutz Koepnik
Timesong by Julia Blackburn
Earth & Utopia: Hassan Fathy - Earth builder
Building with Fire – ceramicist Ray Meeker’s fired buildings
Folk Chronicles - Brian Hinton reviews Rob Young's Electric Eden and Jeanette Leach's Season's they Change
The fibre, felt and other weak materials Art revolution - String, Felt, Thread by Eliza Auther – reviewed by Lesley Millar
Cultures of the Copy- In Praise of Copying by Marcus Boon
A Final Phase Transition? - Dark Ages America, By Morris Berman - review by Tom Zengotita
Nanoculture and the Imagination - Nanoculture edited by N Katherine Hayles, The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson, Prey, Michael Crichton, The Nanotech Quartet, by Kathleen Goonan
Reread – Lewis Hyde's well-known defence of Creativity revisited – The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde - reviewed by Heidi Watts
Art, consciousness and the deep past - The Mind in the Cave by David Williams – reviewed by Julian Bell
Medicine tree from the Tropics - The Miraculous Fever Tree by Fiametta Rocco – reviewed by Renee Lertzmann
Water and music synergies - Water Music Marjorie Ryerson's photography
Two tomes on Seventies Avant cultures and their contrasts - Earthworks by Suzaan Boettger and Avant Rock by Bill Martin
Creatures of the slow lane- Oliver Rathmill on Tortoise by Peter Young
Heroes of reconciliation - Armless Heroes - reviewed by Heidi Watts
Reread – On blindness and whole body seeing - Touching the Rock, by John Hull
The architecture's of ecological emergence - Taking Shape by Susannah Hagan
Reread – Re-evaluating Morris Berman's cultural evolution trilogy - Wandering God, Coming to Our Senses and The Re-Enchantment of the World
Same as the old boss? - East of Eden: New Age Capitalism by Kimberley Lau
Paradigm Man - Jerome Ravetz on Thomas Kuhn, the man who invented paradigm thinking Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History For Our Times, by Steve Fuller and The Road Since Structure by Thomas Kuhn
The I Ching in Cyberspace! - The Multimedia I Ching - review by Malcolm Learmonth
Siberian cultures of clothing - Spirit of Siberia by Rick Riewe and Jill Oakes
Placing the hand at the heart of our evolutionary make-up - The Hand by Frank Wilson and Abstracting Craft: the digital practiced hand by Malcolm McCullogh
Essays reconciling ecology and post modernism - Reinventing Nature Edited by Michael Soules - reviewed by Michael Zimmerman
On the anthropology of time - Carol J Greenhouse's A Moments Notice: On the Anthropology of Time
Reread - In the Shade of the Speaking Tree the leading Indianologist Richard Lannoy, reassesses his 1973 The Speaking Tree.
Ethnic and world clothing - World Dress by Frances Kennett.
How Video art could reconnect us to the Bioregion and Watershed - Video Mind, Earth Mind by Paul Ryan
20th century Art as a Shaman's story - Dreaming With Open Eyes by Michael Tucker