Issue 13 · Winter 2008
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The Lowdown
Two new books feature the work of award-winning National Geographic photographer Michael Yamashita ’71. In Zheng He (White Star, 2006), Yamashita pays tribute to Admiral Zheng He, who sailed from Ming Dynasty China and made seven voyages in 28 years (1405–1433), visiting 30 countries. Before the expeditions of Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan, Zheng He traveled with a fleet of massive junks from Southeast Asia to Africa and from India to the Middle East. But when the Ming Dynasty’s power collapsed, his accomplishments were forgotten.
Yamashita traces each of Zheng He’s journeys, recreating his voyages in hundreds of stunning photographs, capturing landscapes, waterways, various peoples, and religious rituals and traditions as he travels to such diverse locales as Vietnam, India, Iran, and Somalia.
New York Flying High (White Star, 2007) contains more than 550 vibrant aerial photographs by Yamashita with accompanying text by his wife, Elizabeth Bibb.
Carol Cooper ’77, MALS ’79 has written a provocative and perceptive new collection of journalistic essays, Pop Culture Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race: Selected Critical Essays 1979–2001 (Nega Fula Books). The book offers a cultural snapshot of the end of the 20th century and features reviews and essays published over a 20-year period. The collection contains movie, book, music, “new tech” and nightlife reviews culled from various newspapers and magazines ranging from The New York Times to Wired.
Cooper writes passionately about many subjects including the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Bob Marley, Tori Amos, Otis Redding, Spike Lee, Brazilian literature, Latin hiphop, Broadway musicals, and more.
In The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory (Lexington Books, 2007) Diego A. von Vacano ’93 closely studies the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli and examines how the 15thcentury thinker established a new, aesthetic perspective on political life. The author offers an extensive analysis of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to those of Machiavelli, and the similarities between the two thinkers’ political theories and perspectives. Von Vacano explores the implications of their common way of viewing the human condition and political practice, and considers the phenomenon of the persistence of aesthetic, sensory cognition as fundamental to human experience, particularly in political life. He then places the aesthetic political theory in the context of modern political thought.