PositiveThe Wall Street JournalA wide-ranging work of cultural history with a dual focus. Though Mr. Smee gives a rather standard account of the political and social upheaval that led to the Commune and its suppression, his chronicle gains sinew as he recounts the deprivations and terrors of various artists and their families during the Prussian bombardment and the Communards’ revolt.
Guy P. Raffa
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Raffa has a deep acquaintance with Italian antiquarian lore, supported by immaculate prose craftsmanship. He also appears to honor the old maxim that if one wants to know anything about something one wants to know everything. This story, however, is full of much more than most of us might ever want to know about Dante’s skull, his digits, a much-prized handful of his bodily dust and other mortuary oddments. Declining to contribute to our understanding of Dante’s work, the author yet shines a searching light on human absurdity when he turns to the social uses of the bard’s reconstructed or reimagined image.
Amir Alexander
MixedThe Wall Street Journal... always clear and lively prose ... Though all this is rather winning, one can’t help wondering what Euclidean geometry, the discipline of it, really had to do with laying out a garden. Mr. Alexander has a notable facility for drawing together three disparate realms of experience: the personal circumstances of his main characters; the political tensions of their times; and the designs they commissioned, especially garden layouts and urban street plans. Yet readers may find his principal argument enveloped in a haze of perplexities. He offers no support for the contention that Euclidean reasoning was enlisted in garden design or city planning (though such evidence, if it exists, would be interesting). After all, ancient Persian gardens were devised on geometrical plans long before Euclid, and this type of garden later became standard all over the Islamic world, from India to Andalusia ... And in what sense was the Euclidean demand for proof, a word that provides the title of Mr. Alexander’s book, necessary at all for garden design? What, logically speaking, was to be proved? Weren’t the pretty roses a sort of Q.E.D. in themselves? ... just as he conflates the clean visual syntax of geometrical design with the mathematical authority of Euclid, so he confuses design as an emblem of political power with the notion of design as a positive legitimating factor.
Orlando Figes
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThis running ledger, this constant transmutation of artistic endeavor into unabashed bookkeeping, forms the backbone of Mr. Figes’s work. That he has managed to accomplish it so lucidly and entertainingly is a remarkable feat in itself, but it also illuminates much about the very nature of art and society in 19th-century Europe ... His monumental work is the product of thorough and extensive research, largely in archival sources and in several languages. The author has a remarkable capacity to keep a huge quantity of factual material present in mind, and to bind it moreover into a coherent story. Woven through the biographical narrative is a detailed account of the transformations in technology, mores and law that created the new cosmopolitanism ... Mr. Figes’s magisterial work will surely come as a welcome vivification of a splendid if vanished way of life.
Robert Zaretsky
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMoving ... The two clearly charmed each other but were not fated to agree, and the story of their falling-out, a sort of intellectual désamour, is generously and poignantly treated by Mr. Zaretsky.
Andrew S. Curran
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalThe Encyclopédie [Diderot\'s chief project] was not explicitly radical or anticlerical, but as Mr. Curran points out, it slyly knocked religion from its pedestal by treating entries on matters of faith on a parity with entries on glass-blowing or letterpress printing ... This publication history is elegantly untangled by Mr. Curran, whose clear style and interest in the psychology of it all transforms it into a lively narrative ... The Diderot who emerges from Mr. Curran’s [book] is...a person dedicated above all to fostering an adversarial culture. One is left mulling over Mr. Curran’s phrase \'the art of thinking freely.\' The cultivation of such fearless open-mindedness was indeed an art, not a form of political evangelization, and whether or not you agree with anything Diderot ever said, you are bound to be exhilarated by his creativity.
Iris Origo, Trans. by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalBorn in 1902 into circumstances of almost unimaginable privilege, Iris Origo, née Cutting, grew up in Fiesole and Florence, the daughter of an Anglo-Irish noblewoman and an American millionaire. But the shy, warmhearted young woman eschewed high society and decided early on to devote herself to writing, especially to the art of biography ... she is now best known for the diary titled War in Val d’Orcia, which she composed in 1943-44 during the Allied invasion of Italy and the fierce Nazi resistance to it. The manuscript, not originally intended for publication, Origo buried in a tin box in her garden for fear of its discovery by the Germans. After the war, when it was published, it received an enthusiastic response from readers ... Iris Origo died in 1988, but it has long been known that she kept another journal, this one about the run-up to World War II. Only recently published, as A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940, it is couched in a similar unselfconscious style.
James Stourton
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Stourton is a very companionable biographer, learned, eloquent, sympathetic to his subject but no groupie ... a good part of his biography is concerned with the institutional and media features of Clark’s lifework, especially his influence in the television world.
