Deft, vibrant cultural history.
Art from chaos.
Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Smee draws on a wealth of historical and biographical sources to examine the birth of impressionism during a time of ferocious political and social upheaval in France. Smee focuses closely on three artists—Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas—who, unlike many of their contemporaries, stayed in Paris during the “military and civic catastrophes of 1870-71,” which Victor Hugo called “The Terrible Year.” A siege by the Prussian army took down Napoleon III and left the city’s population starving, its buildings burned to ruins. Isolated, Parisians depended on hot-air balloons to deliver mail to the rest of the country. Although Napoleon’s scandalous monarchy had ended, France’s Third Republic itself was assailed: the Paris Commune, “a hastily improvised urban government,” was composed of rebels who wanted “to dismantle any structures of power—governmental, financial, religious, military—that held people back.” They were quashed in a bloody rout that left the city reduced to rubble. Smee vividly conveys the terror of the times, the tense military standoffs and plotting, and the inflamed passions. The aftermath of the terrible year left the nation deeply unsettled. For the artists Smee portrays, the future seemed bleak, portending “the imminent death of the republic, the likely restoration of a monarchy, and a conservative Catholic revival.” Impressionism, he argues, was the aesthetic response to their heightened perception of the “existential fragility” of life. The paintings in the first impressionist exhibition of 1874 “idealized transitions and contingency, even as it attempted to dispel grief.” Despite being illustrated with color plates, Smee’s work devotes less space to the history of artistic creation than to war, but his depiction of impressionists’ works is discerning, as is his sensitivity to the complicated relationships among the artists.
Deft, vibrant cultural history.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781324006954
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
