Today's Titles

Following the inexplicable dictates of my soul, a little after 10 AM I dressed myself against the morning chill and walked down the street a few blocks to our public library. There I spent a leg-numbing session raking through the little used bookstore on its premises, even though I have plenty of new material to read already. I left with two books for the expenditure of $4 and an extra buck going into the “Friends of the Library” jar, and was home a little before noon, my spirit at rest. This is what I bought.

“Frank Lloyd Wright was renowned during his life not only as an architectural genius but also as a subject of controversy—from his radical design innovations to his turbulent private life, including a notorious mass murder that occurred at his Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, in 1914. But the estate also gave rise to one of the most fascinating and provocative experiments in American cultural history: the Taliesin Fellowship, an extraordinary architectural colony where Wright trained hundreds of devoted apprentices and where all of his late masterpieces—Fallingwater, Johnson Wax, the Guggenheim Museum—were born.

"Drawing on hundreds of new and unpublished interviews and countless unseen documents from the Wright archives, The Fellowship is an unforgettable story of genius and ego, sex and violence, mysticism and utopianism. Epic in scope yet intimate in its detail, it is a stunning true account of how an idealistic community devolved into a kind of fiefdom where young apprentices were both inspired and manipulated, often at a staggering personal cost, by the architect and his imperious wife, Olgivanna Hinzenberg, along with her spiritual master, the legendary Greek-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff. A magisterial work of biography, it will forever change how we think about Frank Lloyd Wright and his world.” – Amazon.

I also got this new copy of Burr by Gore Vidal. It’s nice to the hand, pleasing to the eye, will save wear and tear on my old hardback, and could be useful as a lending copy. And it was only a dollar! This reminds me that I used to have an old paperback copy as well.