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Leonardo 34.3 (2001)280


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Book Review

The Swastika:
Symbol Beyond Redemption

The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption by Steven Heller. Allworth Press, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2000. ISBN: 1-58115-041-5.

Throughout world history, among all sorts of people--the Greeks, Celts, Chinese, Indians and Native Americans--the swastika has been employed as an inspirational symbol, a mark that has no connection at all to the Third Reich and the horrors of the Holocaust. In the July/August 2000 issue of PRINT, the newsstand graphic design magazine, Jewish author and New York Times art director Steven Heller discusses his interest since childhood in the swastika and explains why he thinks he is right to insist, as he argues in this book, that it should never be used in this culture "as anything other than an icon of evil."

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
2022 X Avenue, Dysart, IA 52224-9767, U.S.A.
E-mail: <ballast@netins.net>.



Roy R. Behrensis a professor of art at the University of Northern Iowa, where he teaches graphic design, illustration and design history. He is editor of Ballast Quarterly Review, art director of the North American Review, contributing editor of Print, and he serves on the board of advisors for Gestalt Theory. His published books include Life of Fiction (with Jerome Klinkowitz), Art and Camouflage, Design in the Visual Arts and Illustration as an Art. E-mail: <ballast@netins.net>.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, Autumn 2000.)

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