Click Here To Purchase From Amazon Guess Who? (the many faces of Noma Bar)

Author/illustrator: Steven Heller, Noma Bar

Publisher: Mark Batty Publisher

ISBN-10: 0977985075:  ISBN-13: 978-0977985074

Noma Bar was born in Israel in 1973 and studied graphic design and typography at the Jerusalem Academy of Art & Design. Since 2001, Bar has been based in London and in 2003 received his first national magazine commission. Since this achievement, he has worked for many media clients, including the Guardian the BBC and also Random House. This book is a wonderful collection of Bar’s work with the introduction by Steven Heller.

Have you ever looked at an object and seen a famous face starring back at you? What does a question mark represent? Could it be William Shakespeare? What about a barcode? Could it be the moustache of the notorious Adolf Hitler? Bar with his skilled eye for capturing the likeness’ of a person by using simple design out of ordinary objects, has defined his gift to an art. This is one book that you cannot help but browse.

There are so many excellent pieces of Bar’s amazing, clever work inside. It is virtually impossible to find a favourite for his designs are so good.

We have the features of Albert Einstein designed from two molecules, bushy hair and the atomic symbol.

Another truly fantastic sketch is of leading theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking made up from a planet and a blackhole for an eye. It really captures what Hawking is about, making this a very ironic picture.

A bent spoon for facials and plastic milk bags for hair, makes another talented sketch of one of our cultural icons: Uri Geller. How startlingly realistic for Uri is this?!

Golf fanatic Tiger Woods and the successful character Harry Potter are also big names that people will instantly recognize within these drawings.

We move on to Hollywood Heads for the next section of this book and instantly we are hit with more of Bar’s weird but wonderful work. Like the excellent illustration of Woody Allen made up from London’s architectural landmarks, for instance the London Eye works extremely well as Allen’s eye with the Tate Modern as his eyebrow.

Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee and Charlie Chaplin are also characters that feature in this division.

A rather ironic illustration is one of Joan Rivers. Bar cleverly uses the fact that Rivers is more famous for having plastic surgery then anything else and uses scalpels to exemplify River’s eyes and mouth.  Spooky yes but clever.

Political Figures is yet another part to this compilation of Bar’s work. It features all our well known politicians and even our enemies such as Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

Yasser Arafat is another of Bar’s genius illustrations, mimicking this character so well.

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, comedian Ricky Gervais and soccer star David Beckham feature in the next to last section of Britpop Stars. All wonderful, yet again so hard to pick out a favourite.

Lastly we have The Musicians which include bat-biting rocker Ozzy Osbourne and rock and roll star Elvis Presley with a guitar that cleverly forms his legendry sunglasses.

Finally the end page shows an amusing illustration of Italian opera singer Pavarotti made up as a balloon. A picture that is just worth getting this book for if nothing else.

A truly amazing, incredible book with many famous faces and personas as well as cultural icons and political figures. This should appeal to any age and can guarantee moments of “oh yeah I know who that is!” in no time at all. Get this, you honestly can’t go wrong. People will love it - it is fantastic fun all the way!

The above review was contributed by: Jessica Roberts: Jessica has been a book reviewer for a newspaper and a national women's magazine and is working on a novel. To read more of Jessica's reviews CLICK HERE 

Click Here To Purchase From Amazon Guess Who? (the many faces of Noma Bar)

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