Rybczynski is totally engaging in this smoothly flowing, sharp, witty narrative—another winner from a top-notch writer on...
The acclaimed popularizer and purveyor of all things architectural scrutinizes a “tool for sitting.”
A man of boundless curiosity, Rybczynski (Emeritus, Architecture/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays, 2015, etc.) turns his roving eye to something found in every home: the common yet paradoxical chair, which “endures, even as it never ceases to change.” But this isn’t a mere design history; it’s also a “chronicle of human behavior.” The author is fascinated with chairs because they “address both physiology and fashion.” They try to balance artistry, status, gravity, construction, and comfort. As he notes, chairs “are inanimate objects, but they speak to us.” Rybczynski is particularly taken by the ancient Greek klismos chair, “considered by many to be the most graceful chair ever made.” It was a beautifully proportioned chair for everyday use, a “sitting tool distilled to its essence….It’s perfect.” Accompanying the description is one of the author’s delicate, hand-drawn illustrations, which appear throughout the book. His succinct discussion of why the ancient Chinese switched from sitting on the floor to chairs is marvelous. The “quintessential” American chair, the rocker, probably appeared in the early 1700s. By the 1820s, it was a “national fad.” The “Henry Ford of chairs” is the “landmark figure” Michael Thonet. Not only did he invent a new technique for making chairs in the 19th century, he also created a way to mass-produce them. The Adirondack chair emerged in 1903, while the fold-up aluminum chair popped up in 1947 at the same time as the “stately” BarcaLounger. In the 1940s and ’50s, the Eames brothers’ shell chairs were the rage. Now, “the most common chair on the planet” is the “furniture equivalent of rubber flip-flops.” It’s the plastic, monobloc chair, which has literally littered our planet.
Rybczynski is totally engaging in this smoothly flowing, sharp, witty narrative—another winner from a top-notch writer on design.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-22321-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
An expert blend of musical and social history, illuminating one of the cultural cores of America's ``Gilded Age.'' In the 1880s, as accurately depicted in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, the upper echelons of New York society flocked to Faust (a scene carefully retained in Martin Scorsese's recent film version). But by the 1890s, Wagner fever had overtaken America's most ardent opera patrons, and not in New York alone. This is the world that Horowitz (The Ivory Trade, 1990, etc.) reveals in his fascinating, gracefully written study of American Wagnerism. Currently executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, formerly a New York Times music critic, and a long-time student of the interplay between musical art and national culture, Horowitz orders his narrative around the parallel careers of the conductor Anton Seidl and the New York Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel. He evokes an era when issues of aesthetics and musical philosophy were the common currency of middle-class discussion. From the viewpoint of today's world, in which the column inches devoted to serious arts criticism in the daily papers have shrunk to virtually nothing, fin-de-siäcle America was, musically and intellectually, an enviably lively place. Wagner's works dominated the stage, and his music and ``ideas'' were the subject of passionate debate. To this extent, Horowitz proves his thesis that the ``Gay '90s'' were not the crass, lowbrow scene its detractors have claimed. One fascinating recurrent theme in this study is the positive impact of Wagnerism on emerging feminism at the turn of the century. It appears that a majority of American Wagnerites were women, and the idea of Brunnhilde (as well as the regal dramatic sopranos who portrayed her) fit neatly with the notion of the ``New Woman'' then sweeping the nation. A work of engrossing scholarship about an important, unjustly ignored slice of our artistic past.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08394-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
As is to be expected from Lessing (The Real Thing; 1992, etc.), whose clear and always intelligent no-nonsense writing has explored subjects that transcend the commonplace, this first volume of her autobiography reflects all her remarkable strengths. The year of her birth, 1919, was auspicious neither for her parents in particular nor for the world in general. The ill-matched Taylers had married not out of love but out of a mutual need to expunge the horror of the recently ended world war, which had maimed Lessing's father both physically and mentally — he'd lost a leg in battle, but more important, be was embittered by what he considered Britain's poor treatment of her soldiers. Her mother, an able nurse, had lost a fiancÉ, and marriage now seemed to offer only the consolation of children. These disappointments, exacerbated by the harsh life in rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where her family settled after a stint in Persia, would indelibly shape Lessing. She quarreled frequently with her mother, whose well-meaning strictures she resented; observed her father's despair and his failures as a settler-farmer; and resolved that she would not live like them — "I will not, I will not!" — even if it meant defying convention. Which she did, as she left her first husband and their two children for another man — Gottried Lessing; joined the local Communist Party in the midst of WW II "because of the spirit of the times, because of the Zeitgeist"; and then moved in 1949 permanently to London. Like so many bright and alienated provincials, Lessing found an escape in voracious reading. Though determined to be a writer, the consuming distractions of motherhood, wartime society, and political activities frustrated this ambition for a long time. Refreshingly, not a self-indulgent mea culpa, but a brutally frank examination of how Lessing became what she is — a distinguished writer, a woman who has lived life to the full, and a constant critic of cant.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017150-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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