book review on Art as Culture
Art as culture : an introduction to the anthropology of art by Evelyn Payne Hatcher
The book gives an overview of the cross-cultural study of art from an anthropological perspective by tackling the diversity of human nature. Exploring the ins and outs of ideas about art and its relationship to other things that people do, the author presents the impact of the vast changes in the world on art in all societies while giving focus on the rise of folk, tourist, and export art. According to Hatcher, art can be best studied by studying the where, how, who, why, what, when of art on the local level, then moving to understand the significance of patterns or systems that have yielded insights in the past. In this book, her cultural studies of native peoples in North America, Oceania, and Africa show how art is a locally specific and extremely significant feature of culture.
Dumbing Down of America
A few weeks ago, I ordered something from a 16 year old from a delivery place. It was the same thing that I always ordered, with the same address and the same price. They showed up with the wrong drink, the wrong food and had a hard time finding my address….not to mention the extra money that was tagged onto the order. Funny thing was, it was the same person that took my order last time.
I was a little annoyed at the problem, but it wasn’t just that problem that was getting me. It was the fact that everywhere I went, from the grocery store to the bank to the store, the kids just didn’t seem to be cognizant of what went on.
So, I started doing a little research.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, you have to read the academic books on The Dumbing Down of America. The books you want to look into are:
1. ‘The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America - A Chronological Paper Trail” by Charlotte Thompson
2. “Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write or Add” by Charles Sykes
3. “Dumbing Down: Culture Politics and the Mass Media” by Ivo Mosley
4. “Death By Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America” by Nancy Deville
Start with those, and continue looking into the research that has been done. You will be as a amazed as I am. At this point we’ve lost close to two generations of children who are not being taught how to think, how to be logical or how to reason for themselves. If you have as many experiences with the places that you go as I do, than this will help you to understand why.
For anyone living in America who is concerned about the way things are going, nailing this educational problem is the beginning to understanding what is happening in the world of academia as well as in the work force and in our lives in general. This isn’t something to try to nail the parents in a certain place, because it’s based around the cultural and educational systems; however, if we want to start getting some kids that can think… it has to start with understanding what is happening to begin with.
Web Development & Design Foundations with Xhtml
Terry Felke-Morris’s book on Web Design with Html is a great book to have if you’re a beginning web designer. Technically it is a textbook for a college level class, but it has been so helpful I figured I would recommend it here.
The book starts with the normal history of web design and Html coding and then proceeds to go over very basic Xhtml coding. It covers the elementary topics of text formatting, list types, color, etc. It then moves into working with frame and iframe with great hands on examples that help you to understand exactly what you’re doing.
The middle sections give you a solid background in CSS design and format. Column design as well as the box model of design is covered in the CSS section. I actually found this section so helpful that I ended up doing the largest part of my site in CSS as opposed to tables and frames.
Later chapters in the book cover Java scripting. It really gives just a basic overview of java scripting and some basic designs to help you become familiar with working with premade scripts as well as creating very basic java scripts. The final chapters cover Ecommerce and Web Promotion. The back of the book has a lot of helpful reference tables that act as a quick guide to a lot of basic and advanced Xhtml coding.
While the book reads in most cases like a typical textbook, the thing that really stands out for me in this book is the hands on examples in the chapters. There are excellent examples of working code that help you learn Xhtml in a practical environment. If you’re someone that wants to learn Xhtml and most manuals are too technical for you, this book will be a great resource.
Bill Bryson - The Mother Tongue
This is my first time reading Bryson, and I quite liked the humoristic tone he uses. I’m not sure if this book will teach anything to anyone else than a complete layman in terms of linguistics.; in any case, it still taught me, a French reader, quite a few things regarding proper nouns, pronunciation, or the fact that some archaic English verb forms are still used in the USA, but not in the United Kingdom (and the contrary).
However, I managed to find out a few mistakes here and there when it came to comparing a language to another one (mostly I noticed that with French, Alsatian and Japanese languages). For instance, he mentions some words that aren’t supposed to exist anymore in French, while this is not true (I still happen to hear them in everyday conversations); as another example, the use of hiragana in Japanese isn’t only as furigana, but also as grammatical words or verb endings. This does not tell me if there were mistakes regarding English language–I assume it is easier to make some in other languages than one’s own–but it makes some things worth double-checking.
Nevertheless, I liked the book all the same; it is an interesting read for a person who wishes to get an initiation to the subtleties and history of English.
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