by Jane Kamensky ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2016
There may never be a better biography of Copley than this sumptuous, exquisitely told story of a man and his time.
A majestic portrait of the American painter.
Kamensky (History/Harvard Univ.; The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse, 2008, etc.) delivers a masterful portrayal of John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), a “cautious man in a rash age,” his story “peculiarly American: hard-edged, uncloaked, impolite.” The author beautifully merges biography with history to tell the story of one of America’s earliest and finest portrait painters. Along the way, she provides insightful profiles of many of Copley’s key contemporaries, including Benjamin West and Joshua Reynolds. Born into a poor Boston household, Copley seemed destined to draw and paint. When his mother married a second time, to a portrait painter, Copley was able to take advantage of his new father’s skills and materials to teach himself to paint. It was his calling, and his business as a supremely gifted portrait painter of local businessmen and British officers took off. In the 1750s, his craft improved, with “fabrics that shimmered, almost rustled; eyes that seemed to have mind, even spirit behind them.” By 1764, he was experimenting with full-scale portraits. He painted the impressive A Boy with a Flying Squirrel in 1765, with his brother as the model. His portrait of John Hancock followed, and in 1768, he painted an iconic masterpiece, Paul Revere. At the time, Britain was relentlessly taxing items, including “painters colours,” and passing repressive acts. As a loyalist, Copley kept his politics quiet, but after the Boston Tea Party in 1773, he feared for his family. He sailed to England in 1774, never to return. He began painting large historical paintings, but, as Kamensky writes, “his insight diminished.” After signing the Treaty of Paris, John Adams sat for Copley in London for a portrait. Shortly after, Copley died “beneath a mountain of debts.” An ocean away, the painter’s halting rebirth began.
There may never be a better biography of Copley than this sumptuous, exquisitely told story of a man and his time.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24001-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Joan Didion ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 19, 2005
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
Awards & Accolades
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
National Book Award Winner
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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