A magic-carpet conducted by a genial, learned host.
Details in the noted Dutch artist’s paintings lead readers through doorways into the period when the world was becoming increasingly interconnected.
Brook (Chinese Studies/Oxford Univ.; Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China, 2005, etc.) begins several decades ago, when he crashed his bicycle near Delft. This happy accident led to his initial viewing of Vermeer’s grave in a local church, and eventually to this book. The author’s narrative strategy is effective and illuminating. He first discusses Vermeer’s View of Delft, directing attention to the roofline of the Dutch East India Company—from which Brook advances the interesting story of the company’s history and its major role in early globalization. The eponymous chapter, perhaps the book’s strongest, uses Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl to describe and analyze the North American beaver trade. The officer sports a large hat made of felt, which was manufactured from the beaver’s underfur. Brook enriches the scene with background material on relations between indigenous North Americans and the rapacious invaders, which inevitably led to bloodshed. (A graphic description of a ritual torture makes rough reading.) Subsequent chapters range over vast geographical and cultural terrain, examining objects and people in paintings by Vermeer and a few contemporaries, stressing throughout their global implications. In such fashion, we learn much—occasionally too much—about Chinese porcelain, Delft pottery, globes, Jesuits and Dominicans in China, the differences between Chinese and European soups, the tobacco and opium trades, African slavery, the emergence of silver as the most desired metal and the spread of prized objects around the shrinking globe.
A magic-carpet conducted by a genial, learned host.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-444-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
At times slow-going, but the riveting period detail and dramatic flair eventually render this tale an animated history...
A murder that transfixed the world and the invention that made possible the chase for its perpetrator combine in this fitfully thrilling real-life mystery.
Using the same formula that propelled Devil in the White City (2003), Larson pairs the story of a groundbreaking advance with a pulpy murder drama to limn the sociological particulars of its pre-WWI setting. While White City featured the Chicago World’s Fair and America’s first serial killer, this combines the fascinating case of Dr. Hawley Crippen with the much less gripping tale of Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of radio. (Larson draws out the twin narratives for a long while before showing how they intersect.) Undeniably brilliant, Marconi came to fame at a young age, during a time when scientific discoveries held mass appeal and were demonstrated before awed crowds with circus-like theatricality. Marconi’s radio sets, with their accompanying explosions of light and noise, were tailor-made for such showcases. By the early-20th century, however, the Italian was fighting with rival wireless companies to maintain his competitive edge. The event that would bring his invention back into the limelight was the first great crime story of the century. A mild-mannered doctor from Michigan who had married a tempestuously demanding actress and moved to London, Crippen became the eye of a media storm in 1910 when, after his wife’s “disappearance” (he had buried her body in the basement), he set off with a younger woman on an ocean-liner bound for America. The ship’s captain, who soon discerned the couple’s identity, updated Scotland Yard (and the world) on the ship’s progress—by wireless. The chase that ends this story makes up for some tedious early stretches regarding Marconi’s business struggles.
At times slow-going, but the riveting period detail and dramatic flair eventually render this tale an animated history lesson.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-8066-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
Demonstrates how very thin is the gilt on the Golden State.
With humor, history, nostalgia, and acerbity, Didion (Political Fictions, 2001, etc.) considers the conundrums of California, her beloved home state.
Pieces of this remarkable memoir have appeared in the writer’s usual venues (e.g., the New York Review of Books), but she has crafted the connections among them so artfully that the work acquires a surprising cumulative power. Didion tells a number of stories that would not in lesser hands appear to be related: the arrival in California of her pioneer ancestors, the nasty 1993 episode involving randy adolescents who called themselves the “Spur Posse,” the fall of the aerospace industry in the 1990s, her 1948 eighth-grade graduation speech (“Our California Heritage”), the history of the state, and the death of her parents. Along the way she deals with some California novels from earlier days, Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon and Frank Norris’s The Octopus, and explores the community histories of Hollister, Irvine, and Lakewood (home of the Posse). She sees fundamental contradictions in the California dream. For one, older generations resented the arrival of the “newcomers,” who in their minds were spoiling the view. But as Didion points out, the old-timers had once done the same. More profound is her recognition that Californians, many of whom embrace the ideal of rugged individualism and reject “government interference,” nonetheless have accepted from the feds sums of money vast enough to mesmerize Midas. Water-management programs have been especially costly, but tax breaks for all sorts of other industries and enterprises have greatly enriched some in the state (railroad magnates, housing developers, defense contractors) while most everyone else battles for scraps beneath the table. Most affecting are her horrifying portrait of Lakewood as a community devoted to high-school sports at the expense of scholarship and her wrenching accounts of the deaths of her father and mother.
Demonstrates how very thin is the gilt on the Golden State.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-43332-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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