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Sebastian Smee
Rave The Washington Post Brings a fresh perspective ... Valuable ... With exquisite sensitivity.
Robert Darnton
Rave The New York Times Book Review The author of many important scholarly works on 18th-century French print culture, Darnton examines this development with not only erudition but writerly flair. He organizes his material into brief, chronologically ordered chapters with snappy titles ... Darnton concedes that these ripples are hard to trace and harder to quantify. (At its most compelling, his book provides concrete information about the print runs and sales rate of influential documents) ... He restricts himself instead to the apt — if more general — conclusion that in the run-up to the revolution, public opinion was \'a dangerous force, which could, under some circumstances, be turned against\' the established order.
Sally Bedell Smith
Rave The New York Times Book Review While the couple’s story has been told many times before, it assumes newfound freshness against the backdrop of today’s relentless press coverage of the Windsor dramas. Smith’s lively account reminds readers that at its finest hour — whatever the historic sins or abiding iniquities of the British Empire itself — the crown managed to stand for selfless leadership, resilience and compassion for its people.
Nancy Goldstone
Pan The New York Times Book Review \"... her new subjects have much to offer. Regrettably, her book does not. The problem starts with the \'selected genealogy\' that opens the book ... misleading statements are particularly troubling because they repeat the pattern of prurient \'fake news\' that destroyed Marie Antoinette in the first place ... Goldstone notes that the prosecution had evidently decided that the queen \'had to stand in on a visceral level for the corruption and depravity of the monarchy in general … This was done by building on the image presented\' of her in the pamphlets. This is correct. If only Goldstone had brought the same acumen to her own debatable suppositions about Marie Antoinette’s sex life. \
Philip Gefter
Positive The New York Times Book Review Avedon’s trajectory bears a notable resemblance to that of the writer he claimed as a defining influence: Marcel Proust, an interloper among swans who in mining their world for poetry produced a work of profound insight and enduring beauty. Although not drawn by Gefter, a former New York Times journalist and the author of several volumes on photography, this analogy squares with his stated “belief in Avedon as one of the most consequential artists of the 20th century.\' Accordingly, his aim in What Becomes a Legend Most is \'to make a case for Avedon’s place of achievement alongside his peers in the pantheon of 20th-century arts and letters.\' ... Read in the context of our own precarious political and ecological moment, this assessment alone argues eloquently for the abiding, even urgent relevance of Avedon’s imperfect Art.
Orlando Figes
Positive The New York Times Book Review In the age of Brexit and social media, the contemporary relevance of The Europeans is obvious. But Figes wisely leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions about the parallels between then and now. By the same token, he takes a position on the cosmopolitan ideal of Europe, which he casts in inspiring terms ... In relating this efflorescence, Figes does not acknowledge its kinship with another foundational moment in the history of Western cosmopolitanism: the humanist Renaissance of the 14th through the 16th centuries...Even a condensed discussion of this context would have been useful in a work of this scope ... That said, Figes is impressively thorough when it comes to cataloging the railway era’s many notable achievements.