Where to Go, What Do Do, When You Are Bern Porter: A Personal Biography

by James Schevill

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0884481255
• ISBN13: 9780884481256
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Tilbury House Publishers
• Length: 339 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Ace of Waste

Bern Porter led a big American life: Maine potato farmer turned Ivy League physicist, unwitting worker on A-Bomb, then TV and Saturn capsule researcher, achievements debouched into footlong security file, an Iliad of mid-century American repression and fears. Porter turned his wasted career into a searching aesthetics of waste--Mail Art, "Sciart" (Science + Art), and a remarkable series of "Founds," tight Cornell-boxy collages of ads, data tables, and sly consumerist come-ons that ensure his place as one of America's Yankee secrets, jeremiads bright as fireflies. Schevill's got the only bio in town, but read this and change that. We can't afford to lose our Berns.

Biographies on an underappreciated eccentric

The value of biographies on the more illustrious eccentrics is that the ideas, insights, and accomplishments of their lives can be taken out of the sometimes confusing even frustrating daily context and presented as a meaningful whole, where the importance of their voices in society can be evaluated and appreciated. This personal biography adds to this value the pleasure of being a good read.