ebooks Sting - The Best of 25 Years (Piano/Vocal/Guitar) by Sting in Arts-Photography

Review

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Insufferable Pretentious GarbageBy Ryan WitteThis is one of the most horribly written books I have ever had the displeasure to read. Thoroughly unenjoyable from the first page to the last; I could not wait to be done with it. Its repetitive and redundant: Ive never read so many sentences in a row that go around and around in circles and arrive absolutely nowhere. Its infuriatingly obtuse: Monk needs to put down the Nietzsche; the Hegel; and the d@mned thesaurus for five minutes and just get to a point that makes some sense. Its choking and claustrophobic: Monk never departs from practically a single moment in time in the life of a single building; so theres no cause and effect for his ideas to develop into anything useful. Its clumsy and cumbersome: literally half of the entire book is dedicated to footnotes; and since the footnote type is smaller; it means that theres actually more text in the notes than in the actual body of the book. To get the full story (and most of the notes are better written; by other authors); one has to be continually flipping back and forth; back and forth to the second half of the book. I needed two bookmarks; obnoxious. And whats more; the explanatory notes are not separated from the source citations; so youre often flipping pages for information you didnt particularly need right at that moment. Obviously the notes werent added to the bottom of the individual pages as they shouldve been because it wouldve been so much clearer how ridiculous it is; more footnotes than original writing. Most importantly; it barely even touches on architecture; and furthermore; the closer it approaches the subject of physically constructed buildings; the more muddied; confused; and garbled the concepts become. Dont waste your time or your money on this unless you hope to care less than you already do about the subjects it claims to discuss.0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Five StarsBy FernandoGreat book4 of 5 people found the following review helpful. A Fresh Perpsective on the Palestine ConflictBy Stephen WassermanIn light of the deteriorating situation in the Middle East; Monks An Aesthetic Occupation offers an enlightening perspective on the tired discourse of recrimination and counter-recrimination that has guided the Palestine conflict for over a hundred years. Monks analysis of architecture as the focus of the accusations fired from both sides does not recreate the rhetoric of the historical actors he engages. Rather; as Monk himself would put it; his book is a history of the history of how architecture has been deployed in the conflict. And as such; the book both gets at the very emptiness of the ideologies that drive this conflict; and demonstrates the eternal return of that emptiness as both sides re-invoke architecture as the epicenter of historical ethnic claims on the land. In this; we need only remind ourselves that the current violence was sparked by Ariel Sharons visit to the Temple Mount in the autumn of 2000; in a blatant disregard (and repetition) of a history of ideological discourse about architecture and ownership of place that goes back at least to General Charles Gordon; the nineteenth-century British imperialist with whom Monk begins his study.In short; this is an excellent book; excellent because it is able to articulate and theorize the discursive and aesthetic apparatus in which Middle Eastern politics of the conflict have been caught. Monk does not offer explicit solutions out of that morass; but one is still forced to believe that enlightenment and analysis are the first step toward a solution. It is here that Monks book offers something for the present and for the future.