A review by sharone7
Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong by Steven Brower

3.0

This book is a collection of images of Louis' collages, scrapbooks, letters, and other documents. Like you might expect, the artwork is wonderful. Everything else in the book? Not so much. All my peeves have to do with trying to use the book for a research project (inadequate documentation of the images, for example, and a seeming presumption of a lack of readerly curiosity on the author's part). But the artwork is, after all, the point of the book. It's a great coffee table book and conversation piece, and the images themselves are worth the price, since most Armstrong fans will never get to the archives in Queens to see the originals. This book exposes readers to a new dimension of Armstrong's visual, linguistic, and musical creativity, and Brower at least deserves credit for putting these images out there.