by Judith Mackrell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2017
The book is well-written, but the sexual escapades and personality disorders of the principals take so much space that it...
Guardian dance critic Mackrell (Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation, 2014, etc.) connects the lives of three unique 20th-century women.
These exceptional women—Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse, and Peggy Guggenheim—found a freedom in Venice that was not available elsewhere in Europe or America. The city was welcoming to all sorts of strange and wonderful people. The construction of the Palazzo Venier began in the mid-18th century as a tribute to a powerful Venetian family, but financial difficulties and failure to produce an heir left a building only one story high and two rooms deep—hence, unfinished. Casati found the near ruin and saw it as a place of poetic mystery. She rented it in 1910 and, leaving the exterior derelict-looking, transformed the interior and garden into a showplace for her soirees and a home for her pets, which included a boa constrictor and cheetah, among others. She was always on show, daring but superficial. The author suggests that Casati may have had Asperger’s syndrome, explaining her idiosyncratic behavior, but she lived the aesthetic life, making her life a work of art to cover her inability to express herself. It was Casati who truly brought the palazzo to life; she had a great deal of money, which she spent easily. Not so her successor Castlerosse, who went from a shopgirl in London to a professional mistress. Her connection to the palazzo is relatively minor compared to Casati’s; Castlerosse’s friend bought it for her in 1938 and hosted only one ball before World War II interfered. Guggenheim is the most intriguing character in the narrative, which occasionally falls victim to bloat. Her love of Venice brought her to the palazzo in 1948 to house her modern art collection, making it one of the most-visited attractions in Venice.
The book is well-written, but the sexual escapades and personality disorders of the principals take so much space that it degenerates into a gossipy tell-all.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-500-51866-3
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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
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by Bonnie Tsui ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 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
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