Books by Victoria Brooks
Red Dream
Product description Book by Brooks, Victoria From Publishers Weekly In her apprentice novel, Brooks-the editor of www.GreatestEscapes.com-tries hard to combine her interest in history and her experience as a travel writer with a sexy and tortuous plot. Suitably but not passionately wed, Jade Tu Minh leaves her husband in Saigon in 1940 and goes to France to study languages. While there, Jade falls in love with medical student Jacques Duras and becomes pregnant. Jade goes into hiding to give birth and is told that her baby is born dead, but Jacques has spirited the infant away. In 1955, Jade learns from a surprise visitor that her baby lived, and she enlists the help of Chou Yang-shu, a devious attorney, to help her find "the half-caste daughter" of a "dear" dead friend. Meanwhile, Jade's daughter, known as Suzette, has been adopted by a Seattle family. Suzette takes up photography and in 1963 travels to Vietnam to photograph and to find her roots. She in turn falls in love. Given Vietnam's turmoil at that time, her love is as ill-fated as her mother's was for Jacques. Clearly Brooks has a passion for Vietnam and has researched her subject carefully. (She calls Karnow's Vietnam: A History her "Bible.") When she doesn't succumb to overwriting, Brooks can fashion a supple sentence, but as a fiction writer, she is a novice. The dialogue veers from false to corny, and while the characters and complex plot might be plausible, Brooks lacks the skills to make them believable. After enduring one too many passage of exposition thinly disguised as dialogue, readers will tire of straddling the exposed scaffolding that fails to support this ambitious story.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Victoria Brooks is the editor of Literary Trips 2: Following in the Footsteps of Fame, to which she contributed a story about Graham Greene's Vietnam. She is also the editor of the first Literary Trips, both volumes compilations of short stories about beloved literary figures and the destinations they made famous. Victoria has received excellent and high-profile media attention across North America, with reviews for her series appearing in the New York Times, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, and Publishers Weekly. Her short story and mood-style travel features appear in North American travel and lifestyle magazines and worldwide in Internet publications. She is currently the resident travel expert for Elle magazine on-line, answering questions from readers. She has recently appeared on syndicated radio programs across the U.S., including NPR's "Weekend Edition," and is an author and panelist at the 2001 Rocky Mountain Book Festival. She has served as USA Today's guest expert for an edition of their Ten Best series of travel articles. Victoria is the editor-in-chief of the popular travel webzine GreatestEscapes.com.
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Merce Cunningham: Common Time
by Victoria Brooks, Douglas Crimp, Kelly Kivland, Danielle Goldman, Benjamin Piekut, Hiroko Ikegami, Carlos Basualdo, Juliet Bellow, Philip Bither, Roger Copeland, Mary Coyne, Claudia La Rocco, Aram Moshayedi
How Cunningham transformed postwar culture through collaboration
Renowned as both choreographer and dancer, Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) also revolutionized dance through his partnerships with the many artists who created costumes, lighting, films and videos, and décor and sound for his choreographic works. Cunningham, together with partner John Cage, invited those artists to help him rethink what dance could mean, both on the stage and in site-responsive contexts. His notion that movement, sound and visual art could share a “common time” remains one of the most radical aesthetic models of the 20th century and yielded extraordinary works by dozens of artists and composers, including Charles Atlas, John Cage, Morris Graves, Jasper Johns, Rei Kawakubo, Robert Morris, Gordon Mumma, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, David Tudor, Stan VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol and La Monte Young, among many others. These collaborations bring to the fore Cunningham’s direct impact upon postwar artistic practice.
This 456-page volume, published in conjunction with the Walker Art Center and MCA Chicago’s exhibition, reconsiders the choreographer and his collaborators as an extraordinarily generative interdisciplinary network that preceded and predicted dramatic shifts in performance, including the development of site-specific dance, the use of technology as a choreographic tool and the radical separation of sound and movement in dance. It features ten new essays by curators and historians, as well as interviews with contemporary choreographers―Beth Gill, Maria Hassabi, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener―who address Cunningham’s continued influence. These are supplemented by rarely published archival photographs, reprints of texts by Cunningham, Cage and other key dancers, artists and scholars, several appendices and an extensive illustrated chronology placing Cunningham’s activities and those of his collaborators in the context of the 20th century, particularly the expanded arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s. This book is an essential volume for anyone interested in contemporary art, music and dance.
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