Word: penning
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...SAIL by Jan Adkins. 64 pages. Walker. $5.95. A few years back, Jan Adkins drew and wrote a book called The Art and Industry ofSandcas-tles, which cleverly combined designs for toddlers on the beach with a short history of fortification for older brothers and parents. This time, with pen, ink and wash pictures and accompanying text, he has produced a handsome small primer on sailing that is also a model of brevity, clarity and simplicity. Starting with the Bernoulli effect (which explains how sailboats move to windward), the book ends with anchoring, having passed through everything from knots...
Like Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch, Switzerland's Friedrich Duerrenmatt is one of those didactic dramatists who regard the theater as a classroom, the stage as a blackboard, the pen as a pointer and the playgoers as barely educable dolts. These playwrights take a dim view of man, dividing the species into two arbitrary categories: predators and prey, the fleecers and the fleeced. No one would deny that such characters are abundantly present in life, but to see the entire pattern of human behavior in these terms is one-eyed vision. As propounded in The Visit, currently being revived...
...academy-trained artist who grew up in Holland and migrated to the U.S. in 1952, is one of the finest creators of children's books alive. He researches historic subjects (The Erie Canal, London Bridge Is Falling Down) for months, then meticulously re-creates an era in delicate pen-and-ink with pale watercolor washes. This time, with his customary blend of beauty and utility (opposite page), Spier presents the 25-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry...
...Construction by David Macaulay. 80 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95. This marvelous book recreates the building of a French Gothic cathedral, from the hewing down of half a forest to the placement of the last sheet of lead on the spire. Macaulay, a young architect, uses voluminous knowledge and pen-and-ink sketches, accompanied by a brief, clear narrative. He shows how to design and build a flying buttress, cast a bell in bronze, use the mortise-and-tenon method on the roof beams. By changing his viewpoint, he also powerfully conveys the immense rook-filled heights of the cathedral...
...Calcutta, shot at the same time as the Phantom India series (now on tv, incidentally), is at the Central along with Jean Luc Godard's Le Gai Savoir. Two more different political films would be hard to imagine, yet both apply New Wave ideas of using the camera as pen. Malle treats the masses of Calcutta with touch of a journalist more interested in shocking than explaining. Godard's effort is billed as "an essay on language, film, and revolution"--somewhat heavier fare...