Review of Coltrane Story of a Sound
18 December 2007 | Philly Skyline
As much of the jazz world, he was a heroin addict. And heroin was about to wreck his career. Inside that house facing Fairmount Park he went cold turkey.
“Nadja”
27 November 2007
“It is not for me to ponder what is happening to ‘the shape of the city,’ even of the true city distracted and abstracted from the one I live in by the force of an element which is to my mind what air is supposed to be to life,” writes André Breton toward the end of Nadja.
“The Granite Garden”
20 November 2007
Spirn, who is a professor of landscape architecture and planning at MIT, is in many ways the godmother of the current green city-sustainability movement. She was one of the first to think of the city not as an aberration of nature but as its product, a point-of-view now being pursued across the world.
Review of Flow: The life and times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River
15 November 2007 | Context
In Flow, the National Book Award-nominated author Beth Kephart gives the Schuylkill a voice, a memory, a melancholic sensibility. She has given us a finely-tuned and moving work of art, an exquisite book of loss and wanting.
“Invisible Cities” (Le città invisibili)
13 November 2007
In this iconic lyrical fantasy, where space and time are contracted inside the human imagination, Marco Polo describes to the emperor Kublai Khan the cities of Khan’s great empire.