wahistorian's reviews
488 reviews

A sprawling, Dickensian sort of book, Sea of Poppies did require a scorecard to keep track of the characters and plotlines. Ghosh explores the British seafaring culture supported by the Indian opium trade, and leveling effects it had on traditional beliefs and ways of living. Ironically, given the fact that many of his characteers are essentially slaves to opium trade and agriculture, it is an optimistic book. Its play with language is exciting, once you get used to not undersatdning every word.

Vollard's account of his life as an art dealer of Impressionists was challenging at first, but once I stopped waiting for a traditional memoir, I enjoyed his piling on of anecdotes about the dawn of the movement. It's never quite clear that M. Vollard was an art lover, per se; what motivates him is the development of connoisseurship, his own and that of others. His description of one customer is an example: "He felt bound to exhibit a taste for art... [He:] realised that the connoisseur who would not appear out of date, owed it to himself to take notice of the Impressionists. At the same time, if M. de Camondo was to consent to 'go in for' the art of the vanguard, it must be done without breaking with tradition." (103) Vollard writes fondly of such intimates as Degas, Cezanne, Manet, and many others now less well-known, and their work habits and peccadeilloes. (Henri Rousseau is always known as "Douanier Rousseau.") My favorite story was the one about the traditionalist who rejoiced on the eve of World War I that "This means that Cubism is done for!" (289) Of course it wasn't, but how delightful to have that historical insight into the nexus between art and life!

Calvin Tomkins' book The Bride and the Bachelors takes its name from Marcel Duchamp's collage on glass The Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, a work that was apparently well-known in 1965 when this book was first published. The book is very much a document of its time, in all the right ways: it captures the spirit of the avant garde movement, in the visual and performing arts, without getting bogged down in trivial gossip or personalities. The five artists profiled--Duchamp, sculptor Jean Tinguely, composer John Cage, artist Robert Rauschenberg, and choreographer Merce Cunningham--all did have outsized personalities, but here Tomkins focuses on what is important to their work. For example, he does reveal Duchamp's obsession with chess, to demonstrate the artist's versatility and logical mind, and he explores Cage's mycological interests as an insight into his openness to the world. "I became aware that if I approached mushrooms in the spirit of my chance operations I would die shortly.... So I decided that I would not approach them in this way," Tomkins quotes Cage. The most entertaining chapter is, without a doubt, the one on Tinguely, as the author describes his Rube Goldberg-like experiments with sculptures designed to destroy themselves. With the art market as overheated as it has been for the last 25 years or so, it is hard to imagine artists so committed to the working out of their ideas that the making becomes an end in itself.

Faceless Killers was the first of the Kurt Wallander series that I read; since then I've read several others when I'm in the mood for a mystery. I appreciate the bleak Scandinavian landscape and Wallander's bleak outlook on life, although he's never dismal enough to give up altogether, on his solitary life or on his cases. In this one an elderly couple is found in their home, the husband murdered and the wife near death. With no apparent motive for the attack and no leads, Wallander inherits a case seemingly destined for the "cold case" file, but his deductive mind goes to work.

This delightful collection of two short stories is a fascinating look at what our material posessions mean to us, how they define us, and burden us, and can ultimately become a burden for others. Bennett is a matter-of-fact stylist, but treats his characters with humanity and respect, especially the inexplicable ones!

John McPhee has an utterly unique topic here: Norton Dodge, a University of Maryland economics professor who spent nearly 30 years bringing out 9000 pieces of "unofficial" or "noncomformist" art by men and women living in the then-USSR. These artists were not officially sanctioned by the Kremlin and, as such, continued to paint in the 1950s through the 1980s in constant fear of incarceration in prisons or mental hospitals. This book could have benefited from better editing (I repeatedly found myself confused about which character represented the subject of a sentence), but that was a small distraction in the heroic tale of this intrepid collector and the indomitable artists he helped. And McPhee successfully got at Dodge's motivation for collecting, an elusive psychology to pinpoint. While this avocation fit into his overall packrat mentality, Dodge also sought to ensure the artists could continue to produce, even as he rescued an encyclopedic selection of their works, good, bad, and indifferent.

This book was a challenge for me. McPhee divided his exploration of Alaska into three sections--the first, stage-setting section on the northern tree line; the second, uses the search for an ideal site for a new state capital to explore urban Alaska; and the final section, on "the bush," really focuses on the motives and lifestyles of in-migrants to the state. I breezed through the first two parts; the relocation of the state capital (which never happened) in particular was literally a bird's eye view of Alaskan cities and their inhabitants. The third part, however, desperately needed editing: descriptions of grizzly dangers, gold-sluicing methods, and conflicts among resource-hungry and cabin-fevered Yukon inhabitants became monotonous and overly repetitive. McPhee clearly became enamored of the rugged individualists who chose to leave the Lower Forty-eight behind to build lives based on subsistence and skills-building. While his book does not gloss over their less admirable qualities--a tendency toward paranoia, chaos, alchoholism, and particularly misogyny--he comes down firmly for their willingness to pit themselves against nature. Surveying the environmental effects of one gold-mining team's efforts, he writes, "This pretty little stream is being disassembled in the name of gold.... Am I disgusted? Manifestly not.... This mine is a cork on the sea. Meanwhile (and, possibly more seriously), the relationship between this father and son is as attractive as anything I have seen in Alaska--both of them self-reliant beyond the usual reach of the term, the characteristic formed by this country." (410) This celebration of masculine triumph over nature is nothing new, and is disappointing from a writer who can be such a subtle thinker.