Author: D. A. Hosek
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Dewey Decimal Project: 760 GRE The Artists of Terezin
Nestled in the 760s, “Printmaking and Prints,” I found this book which talked about the background of the artists of Terezin as well as showing their work. Terezin was a former fortress city which the Nazis took over to use as a “model ghetto.” Living conditions were as awful as in other Jewish ghettos under…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 759.054 RUB How to Read Impressionism: Ways of Looking
Growing up in Chicago, I’ve had the good fortune of easy access to what’s arguably the best collection of impressionist artwork in the work at the Art Institute (I remember visiting the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and realizing that they had fewer pieces than the Art Institute and many of the best pieces of the…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 741.59 CHU Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere
Comics are covered in the Dewey Decimal system under “Graphic arts & decorative arts.” There was little chance that I would read anything else when I got to this part of the Dewey Decimals, but I had originally thought I’d read some collection of newspaper strips. With the wealth of options available, I ended up deciding…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 731.42 HOL Polymer Clay for the first time®
I’ve always wanted to learn to sculpt. The whole concept of creating three-dimensional art has always fascinated me. So when I got to the 730s, “Sculpture, ceramics & metalwork” I was sure this was going to be my chance to finally learn this skill. Nope. I picked up this book hoping it would be about sculpting…
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Wait, What?
I’ve grown accustomed to odd things popping up in my Goodreads recommendations, but this is a weird one: Because I’ve begun reading Stephanie (Stephen at the time of publication) Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense, Goodreads has recommended not one, but two books about Jeffrey Dahmer. There’s no index in the book, but a glimpse over the…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 720.483 MAR Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision
Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City has always been a fixture of my perception of downtown Chicago. As a child I attended a broadcast of the local children’s television program, BJ and Dirty Dragon from the Marina City TV studios (now the House of Blues), saw Steve McQueen chase the bad guys through the parking garage until they crashed…
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Rush Limbaugh is dead. Good.
There are few people whose death would make me happy. Limbaugh is one of them. He was a poison in American culture. The only sad thing about his death is that it didn’t come thirty years earlier.
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Dewey Decimal Project: 711.4 SMI The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City
Had I gone to public school in the city of Chicago instead of just outside it, a mandated part of my education would have been learning about Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. Since that’s a counterfactual, I only learned about the plan in dribs and drabs, a lot of retailed by my father and…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 700.19 LAI The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
And now I enter the 700s: Arts & recreation. In the generic category of “Arts” I decided to got with The Lonely City Olivia Laing’s book which is a mix of memoir and examination of the works of artists who treated on the topic of solitude. The mixture of genres within this book worked extraordinarily well and…