Surprisingly fascinating.
Comprehensive history of the 50 extravagant baubles created between 1885 and 1917 as Easter gifts for the Russian royal family.
It was a combination of luck and skill, writes Faber (Stradivari’s Genius, 2005, etc.), that enabled Carl Fabergé, one of many local artisans catering to the turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg aristocracy, to become “Jeweller to the Court” and creator of the elegant eggs synonymous with the prewar gilded era. In 1885, czarina Marie Fedorovna purchased Fabergé cufflinks at a jewelry expo; that same year, Alexander III commissioned the first Fabergé Easter egg for his wife. The czarina was delighted with the exquisite gift, which contained a golden yoke, a miniature imperial crown in diamonds and a ruby pendant. A tradition was born that two generations of czars would maintain for three decades. The eggs displayed astonishing craftsmanship and attention to detail, qualities that became Fabergé hallmarks and resulted in the family-owned firm becoming the largest jewelry supplier in the world. It was their connection to the Romanovs, though, that marked the 50 imperial eggs as tokens of history. The years in which they were given saw ever-increasing strife and tragedy. As Russia devolved into poverty and hurtled toward revolution, the czar’s regime displayed much pomp but little concern for the welfare of his people. The eggs became a symbol of ostentatious wealth with little utilitarian purpose; each year they grew more elaborate and personalized, thus providing a priceless glance into the lives of the doomed royal family. After the abdication of Nicholas II and the subsequent execution of the former czar, his wife and children in 1918, the eggs were seized and dispersed. By 1930, more than a dozen had emerged in the hands of private investors in the West; they have since been bought and sold by a variety of collectors, including Armand Hammer and Malcolm Forbes. In 2004, in a great show of nationalism, Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg purchased Forbes’s entire Fabergé collection for more than $90 million, reinforcing the Fabergé brand and its importance to Russian history.
Surprisingly fascinating.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6550-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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