PositiveThe Observer (UK)If there was a dark side to Wedgwood, you won’t find it in Hunt’s book. He was certainly a tough competitor with his business rivals, and he sometimes had to muddy his hands in the corrupt politics of his day. Nor was he above playing on snobbery and class, gaining prestige for his wares by placing them in aristocratic and royal homes before selling them to wider markets. But he can hardly be blamed for pulling such levers as were available to him in the social machinery of the time ... Hunt’s is far from the first biography of Wedgwood, and the tone is sometimes a bit too placid – you might sometimes wish that these extraordinary characters leap more form the page – but he performs the important task of telling the great potter’s story clearly and accessibly. Hunt’s greatest passion is reserved for the epilogue, where he describes with justified fury the butchering of Wedgwood’s legacy, following a takeover in the fast-money financial markets of the 1980s ... Wedgwood the man should be as famous as Wedgwood the brand. That he is not might be due to his business – there are more heroic and glamorous trades than making pots – and to the national tendency to undervalue manufacturing. Hunt’s book should help to correct that imbalance.
Fiona MacCarthy
PositiveThe GuardianMacCarthy tells [Gropius\'s] dramas in plain and factual prose, its sentences short to the point of jerkiness, interweaving private life with the historically significant acts of Gropius as an architect ... MacCarthy’s book does justice to these achievements, detailing the ever-precarious financial and political circumstances in which this astonishing cultural supernova briefly flared. She demonstrates Gropius’s underappreciated skill in bringing together some of the greatest artists of the time, along with precocious unknowns such as the young designer-architect Marcel Breuer. She presents Gropius’s Bauhaus not as a rigid design factory but as a place of \'creative dissidence,\' ... MacCarthy’s book doesn’t claim to offer deep analysis of all of Gropius’s or the Bauhaus’s artistic output. But, as a way of bringing the human stories of this extraordinary phenomenon to life, it’s hard to beat.
Eric Klinenberg
MixedThe Guardian...Klinenberg, an optimist, tells heartwarming stories of abandoned lots in Englewood, Chicago, that have been converted to agriculture, of \'geriatric parks\' in Spain, complete with age-appropriate play equipment, of measures in Singapore to help people of different generations know one another ... infrastructure that would be useful and pleasurable at once ... What the book lacks is a desire to tackle the hard questions, such as: how much do things [communal facilities] like this cost and how are they paid for? How do you sell them to public authorities and voters in today’s hostile climate? It’s notable that many of the success stories are in the authoritarian state of Singapore—how can they be transferred to western democracies? The book would also benefit from a tougher edge when telling its feelgood stories. It would be more credible if it told more of what happened next, of what works and what doesn’t ... All of which means that the stories and insights come with a certain amount of mush.
