An interesting idea for a photo book but I wasn't sure what photos in the title were private work by individual photographers and what were commissions. There is a difference between the two. I've commissioned plenty of photographers for publication articles and many cases they can involve quite tight briefs. Take this person with plenty of sky, where the heading will go, or against a dark background on the right for the heading and text. At the other extreme photographers can just be commissioned to go and capture someone or something on any particular day.

Most of the work in the book I feel belongs to non-commissioned work. As such the work of the forty-six featured photographers included are personal statements and it's quite fascinating to see other work from assignments where one image has become well known.

Some of work maybe just too personal. Adam Jeppesen's eight shots of snow taken in the headlights of his car seem extremely dull but no doubt very meaningful to him. On the other hand the four from Dorothea Lange are masterpieces and Carl De Keyzer's 1994 shots of a Soviet labor camp saw-mill are equally extraordinary. I think one of strengths of the book is the very wide range of work, though they are mostly all of people with no still-life studio.

The book is pleasingly designed and in four languages. Tough on French, German and Spanish readers because their text is tiny and printed in grey! The matt art paper is ideal to reproduce the 175 screen printing.

The Fiell's have written plenty of books on design and I often wondered, while looking through the few I have, how wonderful it would be if I could buy this or that design. Now it's possible because this book has an interesting editorial remit of only showing design that is available (and as Dieter Ram's Braun calculator isn't included I guess it's not made anymore) so every product has a web address, though that is not to say every thing is available worldwide.

The ten chapters: kitchenware; tableware; furniture; lighting; office, bathroom; maintenance; children; garden and one called `other' (with a selection of door handles, amazingly fourteen included, wall clocks, CD racks etcetera) show one product a page and I was pleased to see that a lot of the old favourites are still being made. Timo Sarpaneva's cooking pot (1960) and wonderful Rosenthal Suomi dinnerware (1976) Max Bill's wall clock (1956) Henning Koppel's pitcher (1952) and fish dish (1954) Egmont Aren's kitchen mixer (1937) and of course Charles Eames lounger (1956) which will always be available.

Some of the kitchenware objects, though you might consider them mundane, still retain good simple looks. The Sherman Kelly ice-cream scoop (1933) Rosle Design Team whisk (1978) Smart Design pastry brush (2006) and the incredibly simple and obvious cheese slicer designed by Norwegian Thor Bjorklund in 1925. Perhaps, predictably, the majority of products in the book are European and nicely many are Scandinavian. The Fiell's 'Scandinavian design' (ISBN 382285882x) is a remarkable visual look at the timeless design that has come out of these four countries over the decades.

I thought 'Tools for living' (incidentally, a handsome looking book with everything in colour) the ideal guide to help you fill your home with products that work and also look good.

A fantastic flash back in time for all those fans who staggered around with ultra heavy sonic boomboxes in their hands and to live life to the full you had to a battery junkie too. Lyle Owerko has produced a wonderful look back at the machines that were so essential to music in the eighties.

The five chapters blend the machines and the music but it's the in-you-face spread-wide photos of the radios that grabbed me. Pages eight and nine feature the Conion C100F, thirty-one inches long and sixteen high, a monster which, as the book says: `designed not just to catch the eyes, but to hold them hostage'. How about the Sharp GF-777 with four giant speakers or the Panasonic RX-A5 with eight speakers. Both machines were capable of pumping out an industrial strength bass that made them essential parts of street culture. Chapter four: Fast Forward has photos of fifty radios, several one to a spread and they look like they're bursting out of the book. Others are one, two or four to a page. Great photos, too as they are all straight on shots floating on the pages because they have no backgrounds.

Other chapters, with long quotes from fifty-four contributors, cover DJ and the MC, rap, break dancing and hip-hop. Street scene photos from a variety of photographers give all these pages a lift.

The book has a contemporary graffiti design look that I thought worked well with the static radio shots that run throughout the pages. Everything hangs together beautifully though an index for the radios would have been useful.

The book celebrates that special decade of the walking boom box and it's a visual treat.

It's not often that you'll come across a book that can be opened at any page and be grabbed by what you see. These pages are crammed with student work inspired by Kevin O'Callaghan who teaches 3-D design at New York's School of Visual Arts. His course seems to be a think-outside-the-box approach to design where he gives students cast-off anything and they have to create something new. The results are really quite amazing.

The 120 assault rifles featured in the chapter called `Disarm' were given to sixty-five students and they came up with a: tricycle; kitchen blender; casual table; baby buggy; teddy bear; violin. Forty students given seventy-five obsolete typewriters in `The next best...Ding!' created a waffle iron; vacuum cleaner; hot-air hand dryer; miniature ice hockey rink; plate cup and place setting for one and a bubble gum machine amongst other items. All these items become more intriguing because there is a time element, both these exercises had to be created in three weeks.

The book kicks off with probably O'Callaghan's most ambitious and famous exercise: what thirty-two students could do with thirty-nine out of time Yugo cars. Twenty-one are featured, mostly still as cars but turned into something else. Perhaps the most flamboyant is James Korpai's New York subway carriage; this has to be seen to be believed (pages thirty-six and seven)

The book is nicely produced with a few hundred colour photos and fortunately presented in a straightforward way because the images are interesting enough without the need for flashy page graphics and as I said earlier you can look at any page and be grabbed by what you'll see.

Pittsburgh is well served by having two remarkable photo books covering the same period. This one and Eugene Smith's `Dream Street' (ISBN 0393044084). Both portray Pittsburgh as a vibrant city in the Fifties with wonderful photos.

Of the two books I prefer 'Witness...' as it has a slight edge in being a superior production and editorially features the work of several photographers. Smith's book is more a personal photographic statement about how he saw the city and is selected from seventeen thousand images he took of Pittsburgh over twelve months.

Schultz and Plattner's book is based on Roy Stryker's photo library that the city planners commissioned him to create in 1949. He was the perfect choice having been in charge of America's greatest photo endeavour: the FSA collection from the Depression years. The eleven photographers he chose turned in some of the best reportage work you'll ever see. There are no duds here, each photo tells a story, whether it's the construction of a modern downtown, folks on the street, at work or at home. Fortunately this is more than just a book of well printed photos. They are divided into loose themes and each gets a short essay putting the images into the context of a growing city. The front of the book has an excellent twenty-six page essay about Stryker's Pittsburgh Photographic Library.

Great photos need a great book and this is the perfect example of that. Photos are one to a page with generous margins and a caption, the printing is on a silky matt art with a 300 screen. So many of these photos are saturated with detail and texture that they require quality printing. A beautiful Russell Lee photo (plate 59) of a street scene with several shops allows you read the signs in the windows or a Clyde Hare shot (plate 20) of downtown looking along Penn Avenue to the partially build Gateway Center is in pin-sharp detail.

This square format book with its beautiful editorial content and production can be regarded as a sort of template for what a documentary photo book should look like.

By any criteria this has to be considered a monumental study and because of its thoroughness it will surely become the standard reference on LA modernism up to 1970. This year wasn't just chosen as an arbitrary cut-off point but as the author explains in his Epilogue: it coincided with the conclusion of the Case Study Houses program. CSH, least as far as housing went, was the culmination of all the modernism that preceded it; it was the year Richard Neutra died (also Welton Becket died in 1969); around 1970, according architectural critic Reyner Banham, modernism ceased to be a major worldwide architectural influence.

The thirteen chapters provide an in-depth look at the architects who created such wonderful houses and in later decade's commercial buildings in the Los Angeles area. The craft style of Green & Green in the first years of the last century kicks off the survey and by 1910 Irving Gill was designing clearly modernist structures and the style was on its way. Southern California with its wealth, climate and a group of progressive architects, in more than four decades, became the world center of the style.

I found the chapters on Irving Gill and Richard Neutra fascinating, both were heavyweight contributors to modernism in LA and get extensive coverage (the author has written books about both) also the Case Study Program as a potential solution to the housing problem of the times is explained in reasonable detail. An intriguing and worthwhile design concept instigated by John Entenza, the editor of Arts & Architecture magazine. I always thought it looked a rather amateurish publication yet it nourished this amazing program of contemporary housing.

The book itself is big, chunky and well printed on a matt art with a 175 screen for the hundreds of photos. Julius Shulman's wonderful work gets a good showing though the author is responsible for the most throughout the book; unfortunately these are no match for the professional Shulman. The title's layout is rather austere with plenty of empty page space (so many photos could have been larger) which could well have been used for the sixteen pages of footnotes in the back pages, using these involves an awful of page turning. One thing I definitely think there should have been more of: floor plans. A thing that characterises modernist houses is the fluid use of space and a floor plan is probably the best way to appreciate this. Some are included but mostly they appear too small.

As I said earlier this will probably become the standard book on the subject but this no dry purely academic study. Fortunately the author frequently reveals the background to these architects lives and society at the time. This certainly made the book come alive for me.

Joe deal in his short essay about this assignment says: 'It was always my intention to interpret not Richard Meier's work, but the construction of culture in a unique site'. As such I think he has succeeded admirably with these wonderful photos.

The 116 photos of the portfolio section are divided into: Site; Position; Occasion and Place which show the building emerging from the prepared site. For some reason Deal declined to photograph the finished building. This reluctance to show the Getty from start to finish is in a way reflected in the editorial of the book. The photos are presented as images on the page with no reference as to their significance. This is not a title for the trade showing off the work of a world famous architect.

Because the photos do show technical aspects of building some sort of captioning is essential but to keep the photos just as that: photos, the captions are all at the back of the book. I've never understood the thinking behind denying the readers an explanation of what they are looking at and asking them to constantly flip backwards and forwards from a photo to a back of book caption listing. How does a line of type discreetly placed under a photo detract for its integrity?

The book is a pleasant production with attractive endpapers, good paper and printing. The photos, mostly one to a page, have generous margins and the first few pages of text from the four contributors are in a very readable format. The book continues the work of Joe Deal in the New Topographics genre.

Jane Livingston, in her excellent book 'The New York School', suggests that many photographers regard the medium of the photo book as something to aim for and in the section dealing with Bruce Davidson she quotes him: `My work is about being bodies of work. You have to see the whole thing to see each part'. Steidl, with these remarkable three volumes of 944 pages and 834 photos, now make this possible.

A couple of Davidson's photo books are now very expensive so it could be that these three books are about as close as you'll get to see some of his great photos but it's worth saying that the original East 100 Street' book with 123 photos has ninety-one here and `Brooklyn Gang' with seventy in the original has fifty-one here. Other books with extensive coverage in these pages include: Circus 1958, sixty-three; England/Scotland 1960, sixty-five; New York Subway 1980, nineteen; Central Park 1992-1995 eighty-three.

Book one, 1954-1961 with fifteen sections gets off to a beautiful start with photos of John and Kate Wall who Davidson met by chance in 1955 while on military service in Arizona. John was ninety-four and Kate seventy-nine and in just thirteen superb photos Davidson reveals the depth of love between these two. One photo on page thirty has an extraordinary close-up of their holding hands. Another essay in this first book that grabbed me was England/Scotland 1960 which captured the tiredness of the country after years of austerity and before the Swinging England of the Sixties.

Book two, 1961-1966 with twenty-three sections has some powerful photos of the Freedom Riders 1961, South 1962, Freedom March 1963, Birmingham, Alabama 1963, March to Washington and the Selma to Montgomery March 1965. In all 109 reportage photos covering the politics of the era. The Chicago Loop 1963 with just seven photos reveals Davidson's ability to capture vibrant street imagery.

Book three, 1966-2009 with fourteen sections which vary enormously. Eight deal with various aspects of New York (including the extensive East 100 Street and Central Park essays). Others cover the Oklahoma City bombing victims and survivors from 1992, Senator Max Cleland 1999, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam which Davidson photographed for Esquire magazine and two short essays, with thirty-eight photos on trees and plants in Paris 2005-2006 and Los Angeles 2008-2009.

Steidl have turned out their usual impeccable product with the 834 photos printed as 175 screen tritones on matt art. The page design is simple and straightforward: one photo a page with generous margins and the books come in a sturdy slipcase. The only downside, in my view, is the placing, in each book, of Davidson's thoughtful notes and observations in the back pages instead of placing these short pieces on the virtually empty title pages that kick-off each photo essay.

The fifty-two essays in these books are as wide ranging as possible yet they all show Davidson's unique ability to capture the essence of the subject and reveal it in page after page of remarkable photos. Looking through these books at a photographic life is a rare treat.

I've always loved this little book. Just by looking at a one tiny slither of commercial architecture it turns out to be a deliciously big bite of Americana. Though the book is essentially a company visual record of their buildings, each photo does its job so well. These are now fascinating historical records of retail units in the suburban landscape.

The first twenty-four pages cover the architectural history of White Tower and a nice touch was using thumbnail photos with the text. The remaining 163 pages reproduce the thumbnails as large one to a page images, both interior and exterior. Milwaukee #1 in 1926 kicks off the companies start as a fast food seller. Each subsequent outlet kept the exterior simple and white, though within this format changes were made. Chicago #1 in 1928 was an experimental shift to a checkerboard exterior which turned out to be far too stylish.

By 1935 the company had 130 towers and I think they reached the pinnacle in 1936 with Camden #5, a gem of a building completely in the streamline style. A lovely porcelain box with a central tower and two huge windows wrapping round the front and sides. The curves on the tower and the two windows either side of the entrance are pure streamline and look just right. The interior carried on with the streamline theme: white tiles; seats on chrome tubular supports; glass food display cabinets and a general feel of simplicity and therefore cleanliness.

Looking through the pages one thing that the White Tower just didn't seem to get right, least to me, was the exterior lighting. In building after building the lighting was supplied by ugly poles with a reflector and bulb on the end. These were fixed at right-angles at the top of each wall. Page 118 shows the 1938 Washington #4 with seventeen sticking out from the front and side. No doubt they worked a treat at night making White Towers look like friendly places to eat but during the day I think these lights looked an eye-sore.

The White Tower chain enjoyed post-war prosperity with 230 units by the mid-fifties. The chain's slow decline (or should that be change) was caused by increasing competition, especially from McDonald's, changing social patterns of the companies customer base and what would be considered the slightly old fashioned look of the buildings. On the west coast Googie style outlets were slowly dictating the future look of fast food outlets nationwide. Eventually `White Tower' became white tower; the company changed ownership and (as of 1979) became a fast food franchise operator itself.

Hirshorn and Izenour have edited a lovely looking book about a company that had a vision, decades ago, to sell inexpensive food in unique premises that set them apart from the competition. Perhaps the book doesn't have the intellectual rigor of `Learning from Las Vegas' but I still think it is an important contribution to understanding pop commercial architecture.

I found building the 8043 great fun and definitely time well spent. I must say that actually playing with (or should that be using) it was a bit of an anticlimax after the building challenge. The model will probably be kept on display until my grandson will be able to appreciate it but I could take it all apart and make the tracked loader (pictured on the back of the box and still numbered as 8043) with the instructions available as PDF downloads.

The 216 pages of instructions (in three A4 books) will give you an idea about how complex, but not too difficult, the machine is to construct. Each of the 1123 pieces are shown in various colours with their exact location in step-by-step instructions. I frequently thought, while joining four, five or six pieces together just what will these do. I did find that care is required with the gears because there are eight sizes and unfortunately the pages don't have a life-size silhouette of the right one to use at any particular stage of construction. There is, though, a life-size key to the right Lego strips to be used.

Here are my tips for a successful build:
* Get some small plastic containers (yog pots would be ideal) to put all the same pieces in.
* I found a pair of long-nose pliers useful to carefully pull apart my mistakes, the legendary Lego precision means that very small pieces can't easily be pulled apart with fingers.
* Take care when installing the four motors and infra-red units. The excellent instructions fell a bit short here because the few inches of cabling don't have exact positions within the model's engine area.

I was very impressed with the way the gears worked and I assume there is some standardisation between various motorised Technic models. They all use the same gears but in different formats like the 8421 mobile crane.

This is one toy that adults can legitimately get away with making. A final thought: why is there no little Lego operator to sit in the cab?