[[Category:New Reviews|Art]] [[Category:Art|*]] __NOTOC__ <!-- remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Catherine Hewitt
|summary=I'm a sucker for dogs: I can't walk past one in the street without stopping and having a conversation, sometimes without bothering to speak to the owners, so a book of pictures of dogs was going to be right up my street. The wildly popular @dogs_of_instagram, run by Ahmed El Shourbagy and his wife Ashley and launched just four years ago gives us this book of over four hundred photographs of dogs. Originally I had ''no'' intention of reviewing it: in fact I wasn't even intending to read the book, just to have a quick flick through, but within five minutes I was showing other people in the office the picture of the Weimaraner riding a bicycle.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1452151970</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Catherine Hickley
|title=The Munich Art Hoard: Hitler's Dealer and His Secret Legacy
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=One of the most newsworthy events in modern art history happened seemingly by chance. When tax police raided the house of an aged man in Munich it was because they assumed he had been moving too much money about and paying no tax – this six months after he was seen on the train between Bavaria and Switzerland with 'nearly too much' cash. The investigators had no case, but he had something much more complex and rich – a massive legacy of 20th Century German and European art. But that collection had to have an origin – one of dubious and at times nefarious beginnings, and one that could have quite a rich and convoluted background. Hickley, in these pages, gives us much in the way of context as well as ironing out those convolutions, so this story is both of interest to Nazi historians and art scholars – as well as to those larger numbers who just like a good story told well.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0500292574</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Wade Graham
|title=Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World
|rating=4.5
|genre= History
|summary=Between 1950 and 2014 the world's urban population increased from 746 million to 3.9 billion. The urbanising trend is set to continue with the United Nations predicting that by the middle of the century 66% of us will be city dwellers, a massive six billion people. How have city planners and architects tried to cope with the recent surge? How can they avoid repeating mistakes from the past? Both of those questions are considered in Dream Cities – Seven Urban Ideas That Shape The World, Wade Graham's excellent field guide to the modern world.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1445659735</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul Jarvis
|title=Mapping the Airways
|rating=4.5
|genre=Art
|summary=Before I start, there is nothing wrong with being an anally retentive trainspottery type. Having said that, do you see what on the front cover of this first edition marks this book out as being completely and utterly for the trainspottery type? It is the fact that the foreword is both credited, and dated. Yes, unless a major change was imminent and the Executive Chairman of BA was going to be someone else within weeks, this book gladly states that March 2016 was when he put finger to laptop and came up with his page-long contribution. Have you ever known such attention to detail? I guess it's to be expected, when the book concerns such a singular entity as the visual history of charts and maps as used by the airlines that became British Airways.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1445654644</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Matt Sewell
|title=Penguins and Other Sea Birds
|rating=4.5
|genre=Animals and Wildlife
|summary=I've always been fascinated by Penguins: I think it's because they look so ''smart'' and striking, yet survive in extreme conditions, so the opportunity to review a book which contains fifty penguins and other seabirds was too good to miss. Just the pictures would have been enough - the minimalist watercolours of street artist and ornithologist Matt Sewell - but Sewell's whimsical wit and ability to teach without being preachy makes this a book to treasure.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1785032224</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David P Colley
|title=Seeing the War: The Stories Behind the Famous Photographs from World War II
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=As anybody could tell, a still photograph is only part of the truth, if that. There is a beforehand we don't see, and an after we can only fantasise about unless we know otherwise. Take the famous image of wartime grunts pushing the flag pole upright – an icon of the War in the Pacific for the US soldiers, and the films made about Iwo Jima since. But other images of the war have been just as long-lasting, and the people in the photos don't always have movies made of their full story arc. This book is a collection of the images, and a corrective to that narrative lack, giving much more of a full biography with which to pay tribute.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1611687268</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Isabel Sanchez Vegara and Eng Gee Fan
|title=Little People, Big Dreams: Frida Kahlo
|rating=4
|genre=Emerging Readers
|summary=Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico. When she was a young schoolgirl she contracted polio and was left with a leg which was ''skinny as a rake'', but she bore the problem stoically and in some ways delighted in being different. Then one day Frida was in a bus which crashed into a car. She was badly injured and even when she was over the worst she still had to rest in bed and filled the time by drawing pictures, including a self portrait. Eventually she showed her pictures to a famous artist - Diego Rivera - who liked the pictures, ''and'' Frida. They married and Rivera encouraged Frida's painting. She exhibited, eventually in New York, to great acclaim.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847807704</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Jackie Morris
|title= The Wild Swans
|rating= 5
|genre= Confident Readers
|summary= The most well known version of the wild swans is probably the one penned by Hans Andersen. This extended retelling by Jackie Morris adds depth, emotional resonance and a number of new twists to the tale. As in most versions, Eliza and her brothers live a happy and privileged life until their father's remarriage brings jealousy, mistrust and trouble in its wake. The brothers are magically changed into wild swans and it is up to brave Eliza to rescue them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847805361</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Stephen Hickman
|title= The Art of Stephen Hickman
|rating= 4
|genre= Fantasy
|summary= Stephen Hickman has been a well known artist in the Fantasy and Science Fiction worlds for a number of years now, having created covers for authors such as Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, Anne McCaffrey, and Larry Niven. His paintings are vibrant, kinetic, sometimes scary, often sensual, traditional, and yet modern. ''The Art of Stephen Hickman'' collects hundreds of these paintings, and the artist himself provides an intriguing commentary alongside which offers a fascinating glimpse into the artistic process.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1783298456</amazonuk>
}}
