A thinking person’s guidebook, well supported by illustrations, maps and rich perspectives.
District-by-district guide to the ancient city’s profusion of art, architecture and artifacts integrated with its essential history and dominant cultural themes.
Ardent, art-loving travelers aiming to follow McGregor page by page through Venice will need not only resources but plenty of time. As with his take on Rome (Rome from the Ground Up, 2005), the author spares little effort here in presenting Venice’s amazing collection of wonders in full context of the theology, politics and mercantilism that molded the former Republic over the centuries. Founded in the sixth century as a water-bounded sanctuary for locals fleeing barbarian invasions, Venice evolved as a uniquely independent entity with vested theocratic clout following the a.d. 829 purloining by a party of Venetian merchants of the corpse of Saint Mark from its sepulcher in Egypt. This and a robust navy not only kept medieval robber-barons at bay, but served to prevent its own rulers from waxing despotic. “Finding a common artistic formula that expressed this unusual situation,” McGregor writes, “was a great triumph for Venetian political art.” While in fulsome praise of such landmarks as St. Mark’s Basilica and the Palazzo Ducale, the author points out the illusory results of a common restoration process known as “repristinization”—the attempt to strip away components of a structure that do not relate to its exact period of origin. Collapsing hundreds of years of a building’s history into “a single entirely fictive moment,” McGregor warns, too often manifests “a creature of the process rather than a historical reality.” With the city still perceptibly sinking, its lagoon hopelessly polluted, its population dwindling, its treasured structures slowly crumbling, the author observes that Venice seems constantly under threat of becoming a government-run theme park, yet in the face of such dire predictions, Venetians still manage to “carry on with beauty, energy and purpose.”
A thinking person’s guidebook, well supported by illustrations, maps and rich perspectives.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-674-02333-1
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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