Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead Review

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(More customer reviews)No one book can ever tell the entire tale of the Grateful Dead. Searching For The Sound by bassist and founding member Phil Lesh is the first book by a member of the band to focus on the band itself and Phil has a tale to tell and tells it well. The book starts with Lesh's birth and quickly moves on to his discovery of music. Then Lesh takes us through the embryonic San Francisco scene and on into the evolution of the Grateful Dead. The rest of the book focuses on Phil's intertwined life with the band, the band's extended family, and, ultimately, Phil's own family. It takes only the last dozen or so pages to cover the years since Jerry Garcia's death, but the subtitle of the book is My Life With The Grateful Dead and that name passed into history at the end of 1995. The drugs are there, but rather than glorifying them, a full reading of the book shows that, in the long run, the drugs took a heavy toll. Lesh's writing style is conversational and stream of consciousness and fits perfectly with the story he's narrating. Ultimately, it's a book about MUSIC, its creation, and its powers. In the spirit of the age of disclosure, I must admit to attending 27 Grateful Dead shows between Penn State '79 and Las Vegas '95 and have followed the band members in whatever incarnation since the death of Garcia. I don't think this makes me biased, but I thought you should know. I found the book to be an eye opener and it added context to a major part of my life during the last quarter of the 20th Century. A non-Deadhead should enjoy the book, especially anyone with a taste for biography and the history of rock. If you're looking for the description of one endless drug trip, stay away [or better yet, read the book with an open mind]. I enjoyed Searching For The Sound and would love to see Lesh give us another book sometime in the future.

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Phil Lesh first met Jerry Garcia in 1959 in the clubs of Palo Alto, California. At Garcia's suggestion, Lesh learned to play the electric bass and joined him in a new group that blended R&B, country, and rock 'n' roll with an experimental fervor never before heard.
In time for the Grateful Dead's 40th anniversary, Phil Lesh offers the first behind-the-scenes history of the Dead. Lesh chronicles how the Dead's signature sound emerged, flowed, and swelled to reach millions of devoted fans, from their first gigs at Frenchy's Bikini-A-Go-Go for an audience of three, to the legendary Acid Tests, to packed stadiums around the world.

In San Francisco during the Summer of Love, at Woodstock, Altamont, and the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Grateful Dead have been at the center of some of rock's defining moments. Phil Lesh recounts what it's been like to live at the heart of this whirlwind, impressing Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, sharing the stage with Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and the Rolling Stones. Lesh describes what it was like to storm heaven night after night, and the price he and others have paid. Bad management, drug addictions, depression, and insecurities persistently plagued the band members and would culminate with the most tragic blow of all, the death of Jerry Garcia.

Searching for the Sound is a ruthlessly honest look inside one of the greatest American bands.

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Design Anarchy Review

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(More customer reviews)Cynical artists disgrunted with society are certainly readers of Kalle Lasn's Adbuster magazines. They might have turned to buy this "Design Anarchy" design guide.
I found the provocative visual slideshow created by each page turn strong in message, but the bravado and ego in Kalle Lasn shows through by him stating that design anarchy, a term for a movement that he coined, is the next movement listed among art and design movements such as Bauhaus, Arts and Crafts Movement, and Post-Modernism. Anti-ads have been around for quite a while. Mad Magazine, which was going strong in the 1950's, is just one example of modern culture parody.
If you are a true anarchist, why do you want a given label such as that? Shouldn't you be just...doing...making noise, anti-art, protests, etc.?
Why not put together a book made of, say, stolen Prozac notepads from your local hospital? In all fairness, he preaches this kind of action, and probably on some level his book inspired me to think of this.
As another reviewer stated, if you look on the last page, you will see that the book is Printed in China. Mr. Lasn looked to find cheap labor to make the most money on this publication, with greedy business savvy just like a large corporation he loves to criticise.
Ah, the seduction of money. Now I'm really cynical.

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This radical new aesthetic vision from the founder of Adbusters Magazine looks unflinchingly at contemporary art and graphic design and implicates their seemingly innocuous practitioners in crimes against our culture and our planet. Design Anarchy pioneers a hybrid graphic/text language that is by turns intimate, anarchic, abstract and accusatory, to explore the responsibility of the visual designer and artist in the pollution and redemption of our mental and physical commons. It makes an urgent call for artists, graphic and industrial designers and architects to reengage with the world. And it includes work from some who have already heard that call: Jeff Wall, Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ryan McGinley, Gregory Crewdson and Barbara Kruger. Kalle Lasn is the founder of Adbusters Media Foundation, and as its head has launched international social marketing campaigns such as Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week, and has pioneered the spoof ads, billboard liberations and TV mind-melters featured here. In the battle for a new kind of meaning, Design Anarchy is a 400 page mind bomb without precedent.

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The Art of Choosing Review

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(More customer reviews)I had high expectations for this book. Sheena Iyengar's research on choice is well known and often quoted, and I was looking forward to this exposition of her ideas. The book is OK, and will be a worthwhile read for those with a deep interest in choice theory and decision making; however, I personally found the book to be less valuable than other books on this subject.
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On the positive side, the book is well researched and is particularly strong when discussing cultural differences regarding choice and decision making. It is loaded with a large number of anecdotes and research studies.
On the negative side, after having read the book, I had a hard time outlining the key points or recalling a handful of particularly powerful examples. Despite the author's frequent references to the importance of a "narrative," I struggled to find the narrative in the book.
In a nutshell, when reading this book I felt as though I would have learned a lot if I'd had the opportunity to spend a semester in one of the author's classes, benefitting from a rich give and take of ideas and arguing the interpretations of the various research findings and personal perspectives. However, not enough of that experience came through in the book -- the studies and examples were mostly ones I had read many times before, and the integrating "theory of the case" was not strongly presented.
For discussions of decision making as it relates to economic or business choices, I found "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely of Duke and "The Winner's Curse" by Richard Thaler of Princeton to be more valuable than "The Art of Choosing." For consumer choice research and issues, Barry Schwartz's "The Paradox of Choice" remains the standard. To swim in the evolution of decision theory as it struggled to integrate its joint heritage in psychology and economics, "Choices, Values, and Frames" by Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky is the place to look. On the subject of intuitive decsion making, Malcom Galdwell's "Blink" is exceptionally well written and a joy to read.

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Brandjam: Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design. Review

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(More customer reviews)Gobe can be very wordy and hard to read. Fortunately, he has little insights section at the end of every chapter and summarize the main points for you. It's an excellent book on how design affects marketing and consumer behavior.

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Brandjam, the follow-up to the groundbreaking best-seller Emotional Branding, presents a powerful new concept from renowned designer and business guru Mark Gobe. The Brandjam concept is about innovation, intuition, and risk. Gobe explains how design is the "instrument” companies can use for jazzing up a brand—how design puts the face on the brand and creates an irresistible message that connects buyers to the product in a visceral way. Using jazz as his metaphor, he shows how the instinctive nature of the creative process leads to unusual solutions that make people gravitate toward a brand and make brands resonate with people by bringing more joy into their lives. It explores how design represents the personality of a company and provides its window to the world. Brandjam is an inspiration for brands and people as it reveals the transforming impact brands have on their audience. •Follow-up to Emotional Branding—50,000 copies sold in nine languages•Insider's look at creating powerful, compelling brands and identities•Exciting new ideas for using design to drive consumers to embrace brands

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