A richly detailed journey through a palimpsest of the past.
The evolution of the Louvre reflects the political, intellectual, and aesthetic history of France.
“Before the Louvre was a museum,” writes art and literary critic Gardner (Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City, 2015, etc.), “it was a palace, and before that a fortress, and before that a plot of earth, much like any other.” Drawing on scholarly sources that include the recently published three-volume Histoire du Louvre, the author offers a vivid chronicle of strife, wars, rivalries, and aspirations culminating in the present grand architectural complex, comprising nearly 400,000 objects, “a vast, indiscriminate cocktail of princely collections purchased or purloined over the course of centuries.” Gardner focuses on several of France’s rulers whose embrace of the arts shaped the future of the museum—e.g., Francois I, who brought the Italian Renaissance across the Alps as a patron and collector of works by Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, and Leonardo, whom he lured from Italy. When Leonardo arrived in 1516, he had in his trunks three paintings, including the Mona Lisa, which has become the Louvre’s most coveted attraction. In addition to collecting art, Francois took up the challenge of modernizing the royal residence, beginning “the 350-year process that would result in the Louvre as we know it today.” The 17th-century monarch Louis XIII, though not particularly interested in art or architecture, assigned the renowned architect Jacques Lemercier to enact significant changes. As far as the art collection itself, Louis XIV, with “an unappeasable appetite for masterpieces,” filled the Louvre with priceless treasures as well as quadrupling its size. But when Louis decided to move the court to Versailles in 1682, the Louvre fell into disrepair. After the American Revolution, repayment of the Colonies’ debt to France funded considerable repair and reconstruction. A small portion of the palace opened as a public museum—the Musée Central des Arts—only in 1793, in the midst of the Reign of Terror. Gardner cites Napoleon III, who ruled France from 1848 to 1870, as decisive in transforming the Louvre into its modern iteration.
A richly detailed journey through a palimpsest of the past.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4877-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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