Customer Reviews

Life Through the Ages: A Commemorative Edition

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In my undergraduate days, vying for a Ford Foundation Fellowship against stiff competition, (which I won), I was mentored by the great Lothar Witteborg, then Chair of the Department of Exhibition of the Field Museum of Natural History, with complete carte Blanche to roam the museum at will, study and note behind the scenes activities. There, in the midst of a triple BA, in Architectural Exhibit Design, Painting and Anthropology, I was captivated by the huge murals Charles Robert Knight throughout the building.

I was expecting a book with full color reproductions of his murals. I should have read the details but I got it confused with the full color calendar, so I ordered the wrong item. This book, though the cover is in color is full of only black and white pencil/charcoal preliminary sketches of paintings to come. So, if that is what you are looking for, this is the book, but if you want color images, this is not.

Charles R. Knight was the man who brought dinosaurs to life through study, passion and patience. This book highlights his drawings and his insights into the prehistoric world at a time when scientists were truly making an effort to understand life in the primal days of earth's natural history. Charles Knight was originally a visualist and a stunning one at that. As his passion for the recreation of the prehistoric world grew so did his overwhelming efforts to understand his subjects and the worlds they inhabited. This book is work of love for those subjects but it is also a thoughtful work of scientific observation relying on all the evidence available at that time. Some may be disappointed in the art because it's presented in black and white as drawings or paintings reproduced without Knight's beautiful color pallete represented. Despite that, this book is a rarity and it's art is still a pleasure to see and well reproduced, and the written descriptions of life in those ancient days along with scientific information that is represented are still evocative and educational to the reader. Even the dated aspect of that information sheds light on the dedication and the hard work that went into compiling this book when it was first produced.
It's good to see this book brought back into print and it is a worthy contribution to the study of paleontology and the history of that scientific study.

This is a beautiful book that my fourth-grade son used for his report on Charles Knight. It's an excellent gift for anyone who is serious about the tpe of art Charles Knight produced for museums. It's also valuable for people who are interested in designing figures for animation.