A lively, splendid history that captures the times with insight, acumen, and a juggler’s finesse.
How American art inspired a young country.
This is an impressive, ambitious undertaking, to tell the stories of five painters—Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, Benjamin West, and Gilbert Stuart—while simultaneously showing how they were all interrelated and doing this against the complex history of the American Revolution. Staiti (Fine Arts/Mount Holyoke Coll.; Samuel F.B. Morse, 1990, etc.) begins his intricate narrative in January 1779. While the war waged, the Continental Congress approved funds to have Peale create a life-size portrait of “His Excellency General” George Washington. They felt strongly that art was “capable of arousing potent emotions in times of intense political change.” Staiti shows how these painters’ works “illuminated the era” when the population was in desperate need of inspiring images, rituals, and myths. Peele would go on to paint more than 100 more portraits. Copley, the “greatest painter in colonial America” and a loyalist, made many such contributions as well, until he felt he had to flee to London to protect himself and his family. West, known in England as the “American Raphael,” was born in Pennsylvania and served for more than a decade as King George III’s court painter. Peale and other Americans were students of his. He had to wait until he could express his patriotic sentiments in paintings, and his “luscious” painting of the Paris peace treaty signing was never completed. Trumbull, nearly blind in his left eye, served as Washington’s aide-de-camp and painted memorable battle scenes. His magnum opus is the majestic Declaration of Independence. Impulsive, witty, profane, and manic, Stuart, writes the author, was the “most talented of them all.” His numerous portraits of the Founders were conceived with a “brilliant talent never before seen in America.” Throughout, Staiti provides insightful, in-depth discussions of many key paintings, and the book is lavishly illustrated with illustrations and color plates.
A lively, splendid history that captures the times with insight, acumen, and a juggler’s finesse.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-465-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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