A beautifully produced exploration into the cultural history of the rose.
It's hard to imagine a 500-page book dedicated solely to roses that isn't comprised primarily of prints. British horticultural historian Potter (Strange Blooms, 2008, etc.) has dug deep into the roots of rose history and produced an admirable dissection of all that the rose signifies now and throughout history. Transporting readers around the world—from ancient Greece to Europe to China to the United States—the author attempts to answer a very complex question: "Why the rose?" Readers will find her answers as multilayered as the rose itself. The flower, she argues, has been around for a long time (we have rose fossils as evidence); it appears in a great variety of climates and locations; and it is, quite simply, beautiful. By studying works of art from Sappho to Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein—she even throws in references to contemporary American films—Potter unearths what the rose has meant to different cultures. Innocence, sex, politics and the afterlife—to name just a few associations the rose inspires—may explain the flower's continued popularity, she suggests. The glossy paper and superb prints make this book ideal for gift-giving, although its greatest appeal will be to serious rose aficionados and even art historians. Historically lush, detailed study of the world's favorite flower.
Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-84887-834-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Trafalgar Square
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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An engaging, casual history of librarians and libraries and a famous one that burned down.
In her latest, New Yorker staff writer Orlean (Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, 2011, etc.) seeks to “tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine.” It’s the story of the Los Angeles Public Library, poet Charles Bukowski’s “wondrous place,” and what happened to it on April 29, 1986: It burned down. The fire raged “for more than seven hours and reached temperatures of 2000 degrees…more than one million books were burned or damaged.” Though nobody was killed, 22 people were injured, and it took more than 3 million gallons of water to put it out. One of the firefighters on the scene said, “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell….It was surreal.” Besides telling the story of the historic library and its destruction, the author recounts the intense arson investigation and provides an in-depth biography of the troubled young man who was arrested for starting it, actor Harry Peak. Orlean reminds us that library fires have been around since the Library of Alexandria; during World War II, “the Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books.” She continues, “destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never happened.” The author also examines the library’s important role in the city since 1872 and the construction of the historic Goodhue Building in 1926. Orlean visited the current library and talked to many of the librarians, learning about their jobs and responsibilities, how libraries were a “solace in the Depression,” and the ongoing problems librarians face dealing with the homeless. The author speculates about Peak’s guilt but remains “confounded.” Maybe it was just an accident after all.
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4018-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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