This is a good example of a well marketed product. It seem like every "modern" person got to have his copy of this book, called sometimes "the bible of style". I think is more a "pastiche" of interesting things, sometimes good things, but pointless and looong. And my version (uk) is so bad printed it makes me wonder for what have I paid 40 pounds on it.
Just like the other "S,M,L,XL" with the also overrated work of the overrated "modern" architect Rem Koolhaas, this is just a beautiful object. But hey, I wanted a book!

Whenever you may have thought of the world as image, as customer economy, as something that you probably may have to digest visually, this is the book which will give you an idea of the weight of the image.
We're exposed and there's no shelter. If we want to survive sanely, we better learn to differentiate between the sublime and the ridiculous.
What BMD does, is serious. They know what they're doing and, most probably, they are among the very best in visual/conceptual design in the world. This book is a huge pleasure to go through, just peeping at the pages. But then, once you start reading, it becomes clear that this is not Disney or any sort of escapism - rather, it's anti-consumer, in the sense that the text URGES you to reconsider your comfortable stance of the by-looker and go out and get real about the stuff that goes into your head by way of your eyes.
We have to become active in creating a more responsible graphic/architectural/sensual surrounding; otherwise we'll all be homoequals soon.
Thank you, Bruce - and team, of course, for an insightful tome of words and pictures and simply great design which I'll never forget.

Working as a management consultant I'm often turned off by the staleness of much of the current management literature. The design community is a much more sensitive antenna as to what is happening in the world today.

Bruce Mau's Life Style is an imaginative survey of how the world is being transformed under the inexorable impetus of global capitalism. It is not a dispassionate account: basically Mau is trying to show us how he is dealing with a very fundamental existential dilemma. Because, as a successful designer, Mau is part of the system - developing and spreading the lingua franca of a global economy. At the same time he is rebelling against the pervasive homogenisation of our image culture: "We should not forget that the com after the dot is short for commercial. Must we define every gesture and possibility within this envelope? Is it not our role to imagine new futures more rich and complex and wild in their style than any single framework can accomodate?"

Yhe book is a captivating mix of artwork and short insightful essays. Sanford Kwinter's introductory three-page essay alone is worth the price of the book. I gather this book will be very influential in the years to come.

Like most books of its like, Beclouded Visions brings together a wide range of art and images related to how we percieve the atomic experience. Unfortunately, the author seems to spend too much time anylizing, where he should have stuck to introduction and development. His ideas on the evolution of the idea of the witness starts out interesting, and then devolves towards the end of the book into something that allows for anything to be included in the definition of "witnessed". As an introduction to a ton of interesting art and film, this is a good starting point, and also includes good information on the start of Atomic Education (namely, how we came to see the bomb and relate to it, starting from US war propaganda to the blackout campain during the US occupation of Japan), but will only be worth the buy for that (which was good enough for me...).