The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Hockey History > Item 134
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The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects
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by Norman M. Klein and Norman Klein
Sales Rank: 283355
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List Price: $27.95
$21.80
At Amazon
on 9-17-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 506 pages
Published by: New Press March 25, 2004
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1565848039
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1565848030
Book Dimensions:
7.8 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
Weighs: 2.1 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
This vast and lavish study by Klein, a professor at the California Institute of the Arts, more than fulfills the promise of its title, but it is less a straightforwardly technical "history of special effects" Hollywood style than an account of history as special effect, as mediated spectacle and controlled illusion. There is almost no end to the ingenuity, Klein argues, with which the powerful have used every technical and aesthetic means at their disposal to stage-manage reality, from the court masques of Jacobean England to the Magic Kingdoms of Orange County. Klein (The History of Forgetting; Bleeding Through) offers the reader a panorama of deception and sleight-of-hand as richly detailed as one of the rococo wonderments he describes. In detailing the complex history of what he describes as "one's fondest desires and worst nightmares joined at the same instant," Klein eruditely decodes, with fluency and ease, everything from the hierarchies of mannerist architecture to the "entertainment baroque" of Las Vegas. The book's four sections (including 50 black and white and twenty color illustrations) weave such disparate matter as Poe's fictions, Piranesi's labyrinths, the geography of Oz and the ridiculous logic of "cartoon physics" into a narrative that, if not seamless, reveals our culture's "engines of erasure" in daring and frequently surprising ways. Much of the book's energy is frankly polemical: the presidential election of 2000 acts as the summation of Klein's story, the place where the manipulation of "false memories" reaches an apex of cynicism and effectiveness. Whether or not one agrees with this thesis, it gives the book an undeniable urgency. And it makes the occasionally rushed and overtelegraphed prose feel more like passionate intensity than carelessness.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Journal of American History
Norman Klein is full of ideas, brilliantly and gorgeously expressed.
Reader Reviews
Belles Lettres as they too rarely come. Vatican to Vegas is like a key to the secret history of our times. Klein is proving himself one of our finest, most demanding, readable and original writers. As a historian and cultural critic, Klein stands alone in his ability and will to cross academic categorizations. While his first two books constitute masterpieces within relatively close-focussed historical genres, Vatican to Vegas, in fact, categorizes itself as something larger, a book -- a ?Renaissance computer", able to link the odd, inter-disciplinary traces of its elusive but all-pervasive subject into the histories of technology, of the carnival, of art, of literature, of Western culture itself. It opens up the color and intensity of marginal histories, turning the 19th century novel of Zola and Balzac into the sort of book it never quite managed to form in the 20th. We encounter socialist industrial history, Freudian self-consciousness, pop culture, anecdotal reminiscence. We achieve rich and total immersion in what remains Klein's constant theme -- the relation of illusion to the real, and the power this dialectic generates in the real, political world. One of the best, most important books of the year.
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The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects
Available from Amazon
Price: $21.80
Updated on 9-17-2008.
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