The fifth and concluding volume in Gay's reexamination of the 19th-century middle classes, this one focusing—with the author's customary grace and intelligence—on their attitudes toward the arts. The taste of the Victorian bourgeoisie is frequently disdained as conventional and sentimental, their involvement in activities like collecting paintings and attending concerts dismissed as efforts to enhance their status. Gay, emeritus professor of history at Yale, amply demonstrates that this is a gross oversimplification. ``Avant gardes could not have made their way without massive bourgeois patronage,'' he reminds us, profiling pioneering collectors like Russian merchant and Matisse patron Sergei Schukin, and French customs clerk Victor Chocquet, who championed CÇzanne. In chapters on the development of local symphonies, the rise of criticism as a profession, the differing blends of private enterprise and aristocratic patronage that financed arts institutions in various European and American cities, Gay does not deny that status-seeking played a part, nor that some bourgeois liked safe, insipid art. He simply wants his readers to recognize ``the rich diversity of bourgeois experience in the pleasure wars roiling the Victorian and post-Victorian arts,'' just as he asked them to reconsider the clichÇ of all Victorians as sexually repressed in The Education of the Senses (1984), this series' first volume. Like its predecessors, Pleasure Wars is plausibly arranged rather than coherently organized, and Gay has a habit of announcing some obvious points as if they were revolutionary insights. But he is never less than readable, and he astutely weaves individual stories into a rich, complex tapestry. Sensitively depicting his 19th-century burghers grappling with the increasingly democratic nature of culture—and its funding—he reminds us that these issues are still contentious today. An appealing close to an unfailingly stimulating series that has more than fulfilled Gay's professed aim: ``to rise above melodrama to the far subtler drama that is history.''
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04570-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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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