Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 -

Cooke (Yale) sees the Boston of 1680-1720 as exceptional and distinctive in terms of American decorative arts. Connected to the world, particularly London, Bostonians made objects with new interpretations through their selections and choices. They created a new and notable material culture, which the author divides into brick (architecture), slate (tombstones), wood (furniture and building), textiles, ceramics, and silver. Cooke explores each in great depth, providing careful examinations of craftspeople. Boston's material culture resulted in a new identity with locally made and imported goods. The prototype of Boston's "hybridization" of ideas and products from many sources was basically British, but it created new forms for production, reception, consumption, and circulation in the area around Boston. Patterns of trade are emphasized as traders influenced the Boston style by what they imported. Technical throughout, the volume is based on detailed, up-to-date research, particularly from primary sources (documented in extensive notes). The volume is superb in its presentation of outstanding color plates, black-and-white pictures, and 19th-century photographs of architecture, maps, and diagrams. Cooke brings together many influences to explore the process of transforming material culture into a Boston style. This is a valuable addition to the literature on American decorative arts.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In recent decades New York has been the focus of many books devoted to the built environment. So at first glance skeptics might question the need for another. But in fact New York Rising makes a substantial contribution to this already rich field. The book includes photographs, prints, maps, postcards, brochures, and other ephemera collected over 40 years by real estate developer and philanthropist Seymour Durst (1913-95) and now housed at Columbia University. Ascher and Mellins have organized the book as a catalogue, and they include their own thematic introductions along with concise but substantive and insightful commentary on selected components of the collection by ten distinguished scholars. The book is full of fresh material. Most of the images--and many of the subjects they represent--are ones that even many specialists will be discovering for the first time. The book is handsomely designed, and the images are superbly reproduced. This book is required reading for anyone interested in New York's physical development from the mid-17th century onward.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.