Filled with beauty, passion, greed, and evil, Collinsworth’s search is a spirited art history yarn.
Chasing down the mysterious history of a priceless painting.
Collinsworth unwinds a thoroughly captivating story about a single painting. She begins “some 530 years ago” in Milan with Ludovico, a powerful, wealthy duke who commissioned a portrait of his young lover, “most probably Cecilia Gallerani.” Barely two feet by a foot and a half, it was meticulously conceived and presented by a young Leonardo da Vinci. Known simply as Lady With an Ermine, it was one of only four known portraits of women he painted. Da Vinci, writes the author, “made Cecilia so palpably real with paint that we are able to imagine the faint pulse at the base of her throat and can almost hear her breath, but what he achieved is more than artistic precision. The portrait is not just a visual transmission of what she looked like; it’s also a psychological narrative.” Collinsworth goes into lush detail chronicling the colorful, often violent times when the work was created and reveals some fascinating biographical elements about da Vinci. When Ludovico married a 15-year-old named Beatrice, the painting hung in his private apartments while Cecilia and her son resided in the same building. When forced out by Beatrice, she took the painting with her. After Beatrice died, her conniving, art-collecting sister Isabella secured the painting from Cecilia—or did she? For the next 250 years, despite rumors, the painting’s location was unknown until 1800, when a roving Polish nobleman purchased it in Italy from an unknown seller as a gift for his mother in Russia, where it was subsequently misidentified and Cecilia’s “very essence” was lost. Collinsworth meticulously charts the painting’s circuitous path throughout Europe during political unrest and two world wars to a German governor-general who was busy creating “a systematic campaign to eradicate Polish culture.” Finally transferred to the National Museum in Kraków, the painting has since been exhibited around the world.
Filled with beauty, passion, greed, and evil, Collinsworth’s search is a spirited art history yarn.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54611-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fond remembrance of a glamorous, bygone era.
A follow-up to the bestselling Mrs. Kennedy and Me.
Teaming up again with his co-author (now wife) on previous books, Hill, a distinguished former Secret Service agent, remembers his days traveling the world as Jacqueline Kennedy’s trusted bodyguard. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Hill received a medal for valor in protecting the president and his wife, Jackie, from Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets. Later, the medal vanished along with photos of the author's travels with Mrs. Kennedy as a Secret Service bodyguard. Hill recounts how his search for an old award he never wanted yielded an even greater treasure: forgotten images of his globe-trotting adventures with the first lady. The photographs—some in color, some in black and white—immediately transported the bewitched author back to the glittering heyday of Camelot. Images of Jackie in Paris brought memories of the president’s first major state excursion to France, in 1961, where the otherwise very private first lady was “the center of all attention.” Numerous other diplomatic trips followed—to England, Greece, India, Pakistan, and across South America. Everything Jackie did, from visiting ruined temples to having lunch with Queen Elizabeth, was headline news. Hill dutifully protected her from gawkers and paparazzi not only on public occasions, but also more private ones such as family retreats to the Amalfi Coast and the Kennedys’ country home in Middleburg, Virginia. In three short years, the never-romantic bond between the two deepened to a place “beyond friendship” in which “we could communicate with each other with a look or a nod….She knew that I would do whatever she asked—whether it was part of my job as a Secret Service agent or not.” Replete with unseen private photos and anecdotes of a singular relationship, the book will appeal mostly to American historians but also anyone interested in the private world inhabited by one of the most beguiling but enigmatic first ladies in American history.
A fond remembrance of a glamorous, bygone era.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982181-11-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This rewarding literary Baedeker will inspire readers to discover new places.
A modern-day Phileas Fogg circumnavigates the globe in books.
Damrosch, chair of the department of comparative literature at Harvard and founder of its Institute for World Literature, mimics Jules Verne’s ambitious itinerary of world travel from east to west as he delves into 16 geographical groups of five books “that have responded to times of crises and deep memories of trauma,” navigating “our world’s turbulent water with the aid of literature’s map of imaginary times and places.” As he moves along, delving into plots, characters, and themes, and both prose and poetry, over centuries, he creates a vast, fascinating latticework of books within books. He begins in London, with “one of the most local of novels” and “one of the most worldly books ever written,” Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which depicts a city that “bears more than a passing reference to Conrad’s heart of darkness.” Paris and Krakow are followed by “Venice–Florence,” with the old (Marco Polo, Dante, and Boccaccio) and the modern, Italo Calvino’s “magical, unclassifiable” Invisible Cities. Just like Damrosch’s own book, Calvino’s work views “the modern world through multiple lenses of worlds elsewhere.” Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red is “a vibrant hybrid that re-creates a vanished Ottoman past for present purposes,” while Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies “portrays life in a fully globalized Oman.” Traveling along at a brisk pace, Damrosch takes us to the Congo, Israel/Palestine, Calcutta and “Shanghai–Beijing,” before arriving in Tokyo, where he examines Japan’s “greatest, and strangest” writer, Yukio Mishima, and the “incommensurability of ancient and modern eras, Asian and European traditions, that fuels” his work. Brazil is home to one of the “most worldly of local writers,” Clarice Lispector, whose “remarkable short story collection,” Family Ties, the author admires. In Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine, Damrosch fondly revisits a book he enjoyed as a child. Other writers serving as stops on his international tour include Joyce, Atwood, Voltaire, Rushdie, and Soyinka.
This rewarding literary Baedeker will inspire readers to discover new places.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-29988-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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