The Art of African Textiles

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Great photos, well researched, unstuffy, accessible, respectful and more or less contemporary. The notes on futhur reading could have been expanded and an index would have been helpful.

Rating:
Summary: Good Introductory Book on African textiles.
Review: This is a very interesting and informative book on this subject. It makes one appreciate the workmanship and artistic style of these fabrics. This book, first, describes the main materials and techniques of African cloth production and decoration and, then, explores in detail a few of the more popular of the African textiles. These include Raffia cloths of Zaire, Kente(Royal Cloth of the Ashanti), Bogolan (Mud-Dyed Cloth of Mali),Aso Oke (Ceremonial Cloth of the Yoruba), and African Wax -Printed Cloths. Detailed descriptions and full-color photographs not onlly glorifies the art but makes one understand the real African textiles from the African influenced copies.

Rating:
Summary: Good Introductory Book on African textiles.
Review: This is a very interesting and informative book on this subject. It makes one appreciate the workmanship and artistic style of these fabrics. This book, first, describes the main materials and techniques of African cloth production and decoration and, then, explores in detail a few of the more popular of the African textiles. These include Raffia cloths of Zaire, Kente(Royal Cloth of the Ashanti), Bogolan (Mud-Dyed Cloth of Mali),Aso Oke (Ceremonial Cloth of the Yoruba), and African Wax -Printed Cloths. Detailed descriptions and full-color photographs not onlly glorifies the art but makes one understand the real African textiles from the African influenced copies.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing design and layout
Review: While the content of this book is, for the most part, informative and interesting (although limited in its geographical reach within Africa), the production side leaves a lot to be desired. The bold, heavy typeface is ugly and hard to read and rivers of white space running down the columns give the typesetting an unprofessional look - this is the kind of basic typesetting error one expects in a cheap flyer, not in a glossy coffee table book. There are several typing errors, which are annoying, and the book could also have done with a good edit. For example, the author declines to explain various weaving processes because they are apparently too technical, but stating this at least three times in one book suggests that either the author doesn't understand the processes himself, or he has a rather low opinion of his readers' capacity to understand them. Either way, a good edit could have ironed out the repetition of this problem, or found a way to explain these technical processes - for example, simple line illustrations could have been used to show graphically what the author was not able to put into words. While the photos are generally good and make one really want to see the textiles in the flesh, as it were, those that are meant to show more detail are often not sufficiently close up to really provide much more information. They come across as repetition or as gap-fillers rather than serving any more useful function. There are several examples in the section on raffia cloths of Zaire, and a glaring example on pages 68/69. A more successful example is on pages 76/77, where the detail does in fact show more detail.