Book Reviews

‘Full of strokes and blows/ broken, pitifully wounded’, the man, naked, or almost so, stands full frontal, legs and arms parted, one limb sometimes slightly bent to signal the beginning of a movement. His body is punctured by lesions and wounds, with small depictions of their material causes attached almost as adornment – knives or weapons aimed at cutting and bruising, but also accidental instruments of damage to the skin such as thorns or nails or even living agents – a rabid puppy with sharp teeth. Scratches, buboes and insect bites are also visible. The image of the ‘Wound Man’ (or rather, images with variations) first emerges at the end

We all know that life is full of people who try to con us, often starting with a voice on the phone. ‘I’m speaking from the fraud department of your bank.’ ‘I’m your local BT engineer.’  No, you’re not from either my bank or BT. In all likelihood you are speaking from a scam farm somewhere in south-east Asia.  This book, however, deals with the serious con artists, the ones who infiltrate your life over a period of time, using psychological skills, imagination and often charm until they have finessed you into a position where you willingly hand them a large sum of money, often your life savings. Then whoosh!

It is more than 40 years since Tom Wolfe said to me, in a Chinese restaurant on Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue, that ‘Modern’ had become an historical style label. He meant it was not, as the high modernists believed, the inevitable conclusion to all artistic progress, but had a beginning and an end as nearly precise as, say, Baroque or Rococo. And I should write a book about it, he added. This was a brilliant suggestion which I flubbed. I wrote about design instead. But ‘modern’ and ‘design’ are inextricably linked. Franco Albini’s handrails for the Milan metro? Raymond Loewy’s Studebaker Avanti? Charles Eames’s chair, which he designed for Billy Wilder?

There were years when, like many others, I dreamed of crossing America coast to coast, riding the Greyhound bus. It was the thing to do – a rite of passage. For those who never made it, all is not lost: Joanna Pocock has done it for us. Twice.  In 2006, fending off depression after her third miscarriage and the death of her sister, Pocock took the Greyhound from Detroit to Los Angeles, ‘running away from loss’. Seventeen years later she has gone back, looking for the motels, diners, cities, suburbs and truck stops encountered on that first trip, and she is stunned by what she finds – stations closed or