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The Ultimate Album Cover Album, Roger Dean...

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The Ultimate Album Cover Album, Roger Dean and David Howells (Prentice Hall: $19.95). Lured either by the dearth of lucrative jobs in visual art or by the challenge of creating evocative images to match the emotional power of music, many of today’s best artists design album covers. Unfortunately, the sparse text accompanying this collection of rock and jazz jackets is written for artists on the inside groove, focusing too much on technical design to truly interest fans and art connoisseurs. Still, the cover designs themselves, while not exactly high art, are fascinating for what they reveal about dreams, pretensions and anxieties during different periods in pop culture. Santana’s 1970 album is blaringly psychedelic, for instance, reflecting the heart of the hallucinogenic 1960s; their 1976 cover, still bright but more focused and sleek, reflects a more peaceful, though still surreal, Eden.

In the 1980s, computer-age confusion is mirrored on the cover of Brian Eno and David Byrne’s “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” which shows square human forms blurred by a TV screen. Covers that consciously try to be revelatory, on the other hand, are often hard to decipher. One album, for example, shows a young teen-age girl looking quizzically at a space-age plane; innocence meets war, some of us might conclude. But the artists say it represents “the tree of life” confronting knowledge. While this “album” would have benefited from interviews with record designers (Why have women been so readily exploited on the covers?), it will be appreciated by culture-watchers who can bring historical perspective to this evocative, relatively new form of art.

Our Common Future: The World Commission on Environment and Development (Oxford: $9.95). This jarring United Nations report inevitably will be ignored by many of the leaders with the power to make a difference. None of these leaders, however, can deny the gravity of the problems it addresses: Since the commission first met in October, 1984, the drought-triggered crisis in Africa peaked, killing perhaps a million people; a leak from a pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, killed over 2,000 people and blinded and injured over 200,000 more; the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion sent nuclear fallout across Europe; and an estimated 60 million people died of diseases related to unsafe drinking water and malnutrition (most of the victims were children). What will be criticized, unfortunately, is this report’s assumption that the First World has a solemn obligation toward the Third.

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The West has faced up to Bhopal, and the East to Chernobyl, of course, but our planet’s long-term livelihood only will be assured if leaders of industrially advanced cultures recall the astronaut’s pictures of the delicate Earth, perceive our common future and begin emphasizing planning over profit, global interdependence and shared obligation over national interest. This is a fine polemic in favor of this holistic approach, emphasizing past accomplishments and pointing the way to possible future improvements in international economy, population, food security, industry, species and ecosystems and energy. A quibble: The editors might have reached American conservatives more effectively by pointing out that one of the best ways to protect democracy is to discourage developing countries from equating capitalism with exploitation.

The American Idea of Success, Richard M. Huber (Pushcart Press: $19.95). It’s paradoxical, but the best way to overview a society is to begin by focusing narrowly on one of its traits. Studies that survey vast terrain from the start invariably end up wandering without direction or imposing an artificial typology on the environment. The trick, of course, is to find a particularly telling trait, as Richard Huber has done in this truly exceptional book, first released (and overlooked, says the publisher) in 1971. Our conviction that the pursuit of salary and celebrity will bring happiness has given our country a restless energy unique in the Western world. But we’ve paid a price for our narrow, albeit productive quest, Huber observes: “Success increases feelings of guilt and humiliation in failure, intensifying forces for unhappiness, and encouraging a vulgar grasping for status as a testimony to one’s worth.”

When this book was first published, Huber notes, “hippies were blowing marijuana smoke in the face of the middle class dream of success.” Perhaps this explains the book’s cool reception in 1971: People didn’t need Huber to illustrate the pitfalls in the “bitch goddess success.” No one needed yet another person to point out that they “had the experience but missed the meaning,” to paraphrase T. S. Eliot in the “Four Quartets.” Now that a new generation is in danger of making the same mistake, however, there is wisdom in turning to Huber, for his history of seasoned ideas about success, from Ben Franklin (industry and frugality now, leisure later) to Dale Carnegie (“a smiling corruption of human relations”), and for the homespun advice he leaves with us at book’s end: “If we disdain what we desire, the only thing as sad as not realizing our dreams is to have them come true.”

Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, Barbara Castle (Penguin: $4.95). The lives of these sisters were rocked by rivalry, jealousy and love, but passions are only hinted at in this responsible, if not penetrating, biography. Instead, Barbara Castle highlights politics, a relevant focus, for Sylvia and Christabel, along with mother Emmeline and father Richard, were among the greatest campaigners for women’s suffrage, and yet a focus that makes the sisters’ motivations more mysterious than necessary. Castle has produced a work that is clearer and more involving than some of the other (apparently hurriedly written) installments in the publisher’s “Lives of Modern Women” series. Yet, in remaining faithful to the series’ emphasis on actions rather than emotions (an earnest attempt to avoid chauvinistic portrayals), Castle only outlines characters that, in the hands of a novelist or even a psycho-biographer, could glow colorfully.

Why did Sylvia suddenly adopt the Bolshevik Revolution with a fervor that embarrassed Lenin himself, alienating her mother and sister, whose attention and approval she so fervently sought? Castle only offers the inadequate explanation that “Sylvia too had the Pankhurst willfulness,” accepting Sylvia’s dubious assertions--”I loved Christabel too much to be jealous of her”--at face value. Similarly unexamined is Christabel’s transformation from pragmatic, courageous suffragette to a believer in Satanic forces that would prevent a new or ideal order until the return of the Divine King.

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