Books by Lawrence Weschler

A beautifully illustrated, accessible volume about one of the Getty Center's best-loved sites.

From Pulitzer Prize nominee Lawrence Weschler, a fascinating profile of Walter Murch, a film legend and amateur astrophysicist whose investigations could reshape our understanding of the universe.For film aficionados, Walter Murch is legendary--a three-time Academy Award winner, arguably the most admired sound and film editor in the world for his work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather trilogy, The English Patient, and many others. Outside of the studio, his mind is wide-ranging; his passion, pursued for several decades, has been astrophysics, in particular the rehabilitation of Titius-Bode, a long-discredited 18th century theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe. Though as a consummate outsider he's had a hard time attracting any sort of comprehensive hearing from professional astrophysicists, Murch has made advances that even some of them find intriguing, including a connection between Titius Bode and earlier notions--going back past Kepler and Pythagorus--of musical harmony in the heavens. Unfazed by rejection, ever probing, Murch perseveres in the highest traditions of outsider science.Lawrence Weschler brings Murch's quest alive in all its seemingly quixotic, yet still plausible, splendor, probing the basis for how we know what we know, and who gets to say. "The wholesale rejection of alternative theories has repeatedly held back the progress of vital science," Weschler observes, citing early twentieth-century German amateur Alfred Wegener, whose speculations about continental drift were ridiculed at first, only to be accepted as fact decades later. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin says "It is controversy that brings science alive"--and Murch's quest does that in spades. His fascination with the way the planets and their moons are arranged opens up the field of celestial mechanics for general readers, sparking an awareness of the vast and (to us) invisible forces constantly at play in the universe.

An issue facing transitional democracies around the world has been what to do with the security apparatuses left over from the old regime. This text explores this using true stories of torture victims in Brazil and Uruguay who, faced with the paralysis of the new regime, settled their own accounts.

Presents a collection of essays on people; how a teacher of English decides that his destiny is to promote the paintings of an obscure American abstract expressionist; a poker player invents a more exciting version of chess; and more. This book includes summaries that derive their character from digressions and details, cadence and tone.

For seven years, photographer and artist Lena Herzog followed the evolution of a new kinetic species. Intricate as insects but with bursts of equine energy, the "Strandbeests," or "beach creatures," are the creation of Dutch artist Theo Jansen, who has been working for nearly two decades to generate these new life-forms that move, and even...

Chronicles David Hockney's protean production and speculations, including his scenic designs for opera, his homemade xerographic prints, his exploration of physics in relation to Chinese landscape painting, his investigations into optical devices, his taking up of watercolor - and then his return to oil painting, around 2005.

This work chronicles the antics of J.S.G. Boggs, a young artist whose consuming passion is money, or more precisely value. What Boggs likes to do is to draw money - paper notes in the denominations of currencies from all over the world - and then to go out and try to spend those drawings.