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250 Books typescripts has not produced the proceedings rapidly, nor cheaply. The book contains no index but does have numerous typographical errors. Holography.M. Franqon. Trans. from French by Grace Marmor Spruch. Academic Press, New York, 1974.143 pp.. illus. $1 1.00. Reviewed by Anait A. Stephens* As an artist who has utilized lasers for light environments and reflection holograms, my review of this book is based on my practical knowledgeof the medium.The book wasfirstpublished in France in 1969.The English translation was printed in 1974. The final result is a compilation of the many aspects of holography. The author carries out a logical thought development, although there is some unevennessin the degree of extensiveness overall. One very good chapter is done on computer holography. The many good references to original research would be better placed at the end of each chapter rather than at the back of the book. The diagrams are visually difficult to comprehend due to the complex notation used. There are other holography books I find better diagramed for artists, such as Optical Holography by R. J. Collier, et al. (New York: Academic Press, 1971).Also there isan absence of photographic material. All in all, the format of the book falls somewhere between a journal and an advanced text. It is suitable for use as an intermediate college text in science. For artists who have no sciencebackground, this book will not suffice;but being used as class reading to back up the step-by-step process of making a hologram, the book would be useful. TheAestheticAnimal:Man, the Art-Created Art Creator. Robert Joyce. Exposition Press, Hicksville, N.Y.. 1975. 143 pp.. illus. $7.50. Reviewed by Desmond Morris** This is a refreshingly unusual book on the subject of aesthetics, containing one huge, and previously under-stressed, truth, and one large, and curiously naive, distortion. First, the author’s great ‘truth’: it is that human beings, by their very nature, are artistic animals; that the arts are part and parcel of their biological inheritence. For so many people, the arts are seenas merely the froth on the beer oflife, rather than the beer itself. This is a dangerous, post-industrial attitude that the author vigorously attacks, asserting that human cultures, everywhere, and in every epoch, have indulged in song, dance, decoration. construction and design. He goes even further. stating: ‘We have taken it for granted that the human arts could not have appeared without the human beings who produced them. But the converse-that human beings could not have appeared without their arts-does not seem to have been considered.’ He sees the arts as playing a vital role in the growth of the human brain: ‘They . . . unlocked his mind, and gave him his “open sesame” to the world of culture.’ He points out that other animals may use tools, but that tool-using for them has not been associated with great progress in brain-power: ‘Art can account for the mentality behind man’s consistent employment of tools, whereas the use of tools by animals that do not have the adaptive arts has not noticeably enlarged their mental capacities’. Some students of evolution will not, perhaps, be too happy about taking the aesthetic factor as far as Joyce seems determined to push it, but there is no doubt that the human brain does have some very fundamental aesthetic urges and responses. In my book The Biology of’ Art (London: Methuen, 1962). I demonstrated that, even at the level of the chimpanzee, there is a powerful motivation to produce, organize and vary. simplenonfigurative patterns, and that the apes might scream with rage if prevented from completing one of their pictures, just as if they were having food removed from reach whilst still hungry. At the human level, the aesthetic urge generally becomes so intensive that, even under social conditions of gross technological crudity and simplicity, there has been aesthetic ritual and display, *I685 Fernald Point Lane, Santa Barbara, CA 93100, U.S.A. **Wolfson College, Oxford. England. personal decoration and adornment, complex singing and dancing, and elaborate painting and sculpture. Life in a tribal mud hut (when the struggle for physical survival is not...

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