Sarah McCraw Crow

Nonfiction

Finding the beauty in language

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

As a lonely child in London, Daniel Tammet found language baffling; he “thought and felt and sometimes dreamed in a private language of numbers.” But once he learned to read, he found words fascinating and beautiful. (Tammet covered some of this material in his first book, Born on a Blue Day, which detailed his synesthesia and his diagnosis in his 20s of high-functioning autism.) And it is language that Tammet delves into in Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing. A sprightly combination of essays, profiles and reported pieces, the book explores words and language from a variety of angles.

An early chapter describes his attempts as a 19-year-old to teach English to Lithuanian women, ditching the textbook for poetry and wordplay. Other chapters look into nearly lost languages, like Mexico’s Nahuatl language, which a small number of Aztec descendants speak, and from which words like avocado, chocolate and tomato came. Tammet also visits the Isle of Man, an island in the Irish Sea, where a handful of inhabitants work to keep the Celtic Manx language alive. Tammet also weaves in the story of the invented language Esperanto and its creator, the Polish-born Ludwik Zamenhof, who invented the language as a means to simplify Europe’s languages and bring people together.

Tammet also profiles several writers and academics, including the Australian poet Les Murray, who explores Asperger’s syndrome in his poetry. A longtime fan of Murray’s poetry, Tammet translated a volume of Murray’s poetry into French, and he walks the reader through the steps of translating one of his poems.

A book about words and language might sound dry or lofty, but Tammet’s writing is lucid, thoughtful and often funny, drawing readers in and leaving us thinking a little differently about language.

As a lonely child in London, Daniel Tammet found language baffling; he “thought and felt and sometimes dreamed in a private language of numbers.” But once he learned to read, he found words fascinating and beautiful.
NonfictionLiterature

No woman is an island

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

When we think of the writing lives of iconic female authors Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, we imagine them going it alone, Austen at her tiny table, her sister and mother bustling around her, and Brontë stuck in her father’s spare parsonage, with siblings for company. But those images tell only part of the story, write Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, who detail the writerly friendships that sustained Austen and Brontë, as well as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, in A Secret Sisterhood.

Drawing on a wealth of letters, Midorikawa and Sweeney reveal long friendships that were glossed over or even suppressed by descendants and biographers. For Austen, that friend was Anne Sharp, governess to Austen’s niece and an amateur playwright. Brontë first encountered lifelong friends Mary Taylor (who later wrote a feminist novel) and Ellen Nussey in boarding school, creating a middle school friendship triangle. Later, Brontë and Taylor studied French in Belgium, a transformative experience. Eliot grew an epistolary friendship with blockbuster author Harriet Beecher Stowe; the two never met, but they corresponded intermittently for decades after Stowe wrote an admiring letter to Eliot. And as for Woolf, a friendship with short-story writer Katherine Mansfield was fraught, but lasted until Mansfield’s untimely death.

In their approachable style, Midorikawa and Sweeney illuminate these novelists as each struggles to write and publish in an era hostile to women and cope with both anonymity and fame. We also get a sense of the relationships among these four: Brontë complained about Austen to Eliot’s partner, while Eliot herself was a great admirer of Austen. Woolf, in turn, revered Eliot. A Secret Sisterhood is bookended by a lovely foreword from Margaret Atwood and an epilogue noting other female literary friendships.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When we think of the writing lives of iconic female authors Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, we imagine them going it alone, Austen at her tiny table, her sister and mother bustling around her, and Brontë stuck in her father’s spare parsonage, with siblings for company. But those images tell only part of the story, write Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, who detail the writerly friendships that sustained Austen and Brontë, as well as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, in A Secret Sisterhood.

NonfictionBiography

The lady rebel

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Lady Anne Barnard’s early life unfolded like a Jane Austen novel. Fatherless at 18 and a titled Scot with no fortune, Lady Anne was meant to marry early to bring some money into her family. But as chronicled by Stephen Taylor in Defiance, Lady Anne did no such thing, instead enjoying many flirtations and friendships and writing the ballad “Auld Robin Grey,” a giant hit of its day. On her own, Lady Anne managed to become a woman of property in London, as well as the confidant of the most powerful men of the age, including the Prince of Wales.

Drawing on Lady Anne’s own memoirs and family letters, Taylor follows Lady Anne from early childhood on, and at 400 pages, Defiance occasionally feels long. But the story finds its heart in Lady Anne’s late marriage: At 42, after turning down at least 20 other suitors, she married Andrew Barnard, 12 years her junior. Andrew was posted to Cape Town, South Africa, and she went with him. “Their happiness flourished in this bizarre, magnificent space because it offered freedom of a kind unavailable at home,” Taylor writes, recounting the couple’s long journey to the South African interior, Lady Anne’s diplomatic skills hosting British and Dutch colonists and native Africans, and her naturalist work collecting plants and animals.

On a later solo trip to South Africa, Andrew had a liaison with an African slave, fathering a child, Christina. After Andrew’s death, Lady Anne learned about Christina and brought the girl to London, raising her in her Berkeley Square mansion. Christina served as Anne’s amanuensis as Anne wrote her memoirs, and she later married a Wiltshire landowner and had seven children.

In Defiance, Lady Anne’s engaging voice comes through clearly, along with her unconventionality, her talents and her compassion.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Lady Anne Barnard’s early life unfolded like a Jane Austen novel. Fatherless at 18 and a titled Scot with no fortune, Lady Anne was meant to marry early to bring some money into her family.

NonfictionBiography

The man behind an American landmark

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

The titular engineer of Erica Wagner’s well-researched biography Chief Engineer is Washington Roebling, who saw the iconic Brooklyn Bridge through its construction. Overshadowed by his brilliant but abusive father, Washington came into his own after his father, John Roebling, died early in the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction. John Roebling was larger than life: a German immigrant who founded two towns, invented wire rope, masterminded the first American suspension bridges and made a fortune, he also beat his wife and children and superstitiously feared doctors.

Although his father’s life story intrudes on Washington’s, Washington still makes for a compelling subject. As a young man, he served in the Union Army during the Civil War, building bridges, tending the wounded and mapping battle sites from a hot-air balloon. The letters he wrote during this time give a vivid sense of the war’s horrors. Washington was an engaging writer in his own right, and Wagner quotes extensively from his letters and memoir.

The heart of Chief Engineer concerns Washington’s single-minded, intense work on the Brooklyn Bridge, which almost killed him: He labored underground in the bridge’s caissons, where compressed air was pumped in, which led to severe decompression sickness. Washington’s wife, Emily, filled in for her bedridden husband, serving almost as a chief engineer herself. Emily deserves her own biography, not only for her engineering work, but for her determination to study law, which she did through New York University’s women’s course. In her graduation lecture, she spoke on women’s rights.

Wagner quotes from a 1921 newspaper profile that described Washington as “a little old soldier of 84 . . . who has outlived his generation.” Washington, Wagner writes, was “a man born in the 1830s, who had fought in the Civil War, whose father had come to America in a sailing ship and who had lived to see the first airplane take flight—an airplane held together with the wire his company had made.” In Chief Engineer, Wagner has written a quintessentially American biography.

The titular engineer of Erica Wagner’s well-researched biography Chief Engineer is Washington Roebling, who saw the iconic Brooklyn Bridge through its construction. Overshadowed by his brilliant but abusive father, Washington came into his own after his father, John Roebling, died early in the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction. John Roebling was larger than life: a German immigrant who founded two towns, invented wire rope, masterminded the first American suspension bridges and made a fortune, he also beat his wife and children and superstitiously feared doctors.

NonfictionMemoir

A pioneer for women’s rights tells her story

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Manal al-Sharif’s memoir Daring to Drive opens with a chilling sentence: “The secret police came for me at two in the morning.” Al-Sharif is questioned for hours and then jailed in a filthy, overcrowded women’s prison. Her crime: driving her brother’s Hyundai, because in Saudi Arabia, women do not drive. Without a male guardian, Saudi women can’t rent an apartment, take out a loan, get an ID or register a child for school—and they can never drive, not even to take a sick child to the ER. Saudi religious police enforce a harsh array of laws and customs—women must cover their bodies completely, and unrelated men and women must never mix.

Al-Sharif gives a compelling account of her impoverished, sometimes violent upbringing in Mecca, and of her schooling, where teachers beat students for trivial infractions and religious studies were paramount. She describes the wave of fundamentalist fervor that swept through Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s, imposing increasing limits on women. It is within this rule-bound atmosphere that al-Sharif transforms from fundamentalist teen to a college student studying computer science. She then becomes the first woman in information security at Aramco, the Saudi oil company (originally an American consortium). At Aramco, she interacts with men and lives in Western-style housing. It is her work at Aramco, along with an exchange year in New Hampshire, where she learns to drive and befriends non-Muslims, that leads to her quest to drive in Saudi Arabia and eventually to her calling as a women’s rights activist.

Al-Sharif writes with simplicity, and despite its bleak moments, Daring to Drive moves along quickly. She shares some lovely moments, such as her childhood visits to her rural grandparents, whose lives seemed far freer than her own, and the sports she secretly played in college. She shares her hopeful motto—“the rain begins with a single drop”—which also describes a nation that’s moving forward by the tiniest of increments.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Manal al-Sharif’s memoir Daring to Drive opens with a chilling sentence: “The secret police came for me at two in the morning.” Al-Sharif is questioned for hours and then jailed in a filthy, overcrowded women’s prison. Her crime: driving her brother’s Hyundai, because in Saudi Arabia, women do not drive.

NonfictionMemoir

The life of the “Rebecca” author

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . . ” That evocative first sentence of Daphne du Maurier’s suspenseful novel Rebecca captured millions of readers, including the young Tatiana de Rosnay. A lifelong fan, de Rosnay set out to write a biography of du Maurier, calling it a “novel of a life.” Like du Maurier, de Rosnay has both French and British forebears and is a prolific, mega-bestselling novelist (her novel Sarah’s Key sold four million copies).

Manderley Forever divides du Maurier’s life into five sections, from her London childhood to her last years in Cornwall. While de Rosnay builds the biography from letters, journals and previous biographies, she opens each section by retracing du Maurier’s steps, especially in du Maurier’s beloved Cornwall, the rugged southwestern tip of England. De Rosnay attempts to visit Menabilly, the model for Manderley, the grand house at the heart of Rebecca. Du Maurier discovered the falling-down mansion as a young woman, and, fascinated, even obsessed, she talked the owners into letting her rent and renovate the house, which became her touchstone and muse. Throughout, de Rosnay shares details of du Maurier’s writing—the varied seeds of her novels, her daily writing routine and the way her writing projects grounded and consoled her.

De Rosnay aims for a novelistic style, writing in present tense, often from du Maurier’s point of view. Occasionally the voice and diction feel too modern for an Englishwoman born in 1907, although this may have to do with the French-to-English translation. Still, we get a full sense of the complex du Maurier: She was bold and glamorous yet reclusive and shy, she fell in love with other women but had an enduring marriage to a troubled war hero, and she was a world-famous novelist who yearned for a more literary standing.

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . . ” That evocative first sentence of Daphne du Maurier’s suspenseful novel Rebecca captured millions of readers, including the young Tatiana de Rosnay. A lifelong fan, de Rosnay set out to write a biography of du Maurier, calling it a “novel of a life.”
NonfictionFamily & Relationships

Back to the beginning

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Even if you don’t know much of the Bible, you know this story: Adam, Eve, the Garden of Eden, the serpent, the apple, banishment by God—familiar, yet so ancient as to be utterly strange. But the account from Genesis of Adam and Eve has much to tell the 21st-century reader about love, family and equality, writes Bruce Feiler.

In The First Love Story: Adam, Eve, and Us, Feiler aims to show why Adam and Eve still matter, diving into their story through a wide range of sources. As in his books Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths and Walking the Bible (and its companion PBS series), Feiler visits experts and pertinent sites on multiple continents, from the purported Garden of Eden in Iraq and Adam’s tomb in Jerusalem to the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel and John Milton’s cottage outside London. Feiler’s style is chatty, and he builds an argument by setting a surprising scene (now he’s in Mae West’s archive! What could that have to do with Adam and Eve?), dropping back to describe a particular aspect of Adam and Eve’s story, then returning to the more contemporary scene to reveal more. Some unexpected but compelling detours include visits with Mary Shelley, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, all of whom spun their own interpretations of Adam and Eve. One of Feiler’s key conclusions? Eve is Adam’s equal and partner, not his inferior.

The First Love Story serves as a kind of relationship book, too; each chapter illuminates an aspect of Adam and Eve’s experience, which Feiler then applies to modern relationships. He concludes with six principles, or “What Adam and Eve Taught Me About Relationships”—covenant, connectedness, counterbalance, constancy, care and co-narration. “This is what I took from Adam and Eve,” Feiler writes. “Love is a story we tell with another person. And as with them, the telling never ends.”

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Even if you don’t know much of the Bible, you know this story: Adam, Eve, the Garden of Eden, the serpent, the apple, banishment by God—familiar, yet so ancient as to be utterly strange. But the account from Genesis of Adam and Eve has much to tell the 21st-century reader about love, family and equality, writes Bruce Feiler.

NonfictionMemoir

Notes on depression and literature

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

By just about any measure, writer Yiyun Li has had a remarkable life. Born and raised in Beijing before China’s explosion of prosperity (her family had no phone until she was in college), Li had a talent in science that brought her to the U.S. for graduate studies in immunology, but she shifted her focus to writing and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. By age 37 she’d won multiple writing awards, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, and had a full life in California. Yet she recently spent two years in and out of hospitals for depression. She wrote Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, her first nonfiction work, during this difficult period.

This unconventional memoir tucks glimpses of Li’s youth in Beijing, her narcissistic mother, her quiet father and childhood friends into a variety of meditations on writing and writers. These eight essays consider essential questions: Why write? Why read? Why live? She considers the letters and journals of Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Philip Larkin, Ivan Turgenev and others, and she writes tenderly of her own friendship with the Irish writer William Trevor.

At times, this book feels like a quiet conversation with a wise friend who says confounding things. Still, Li’s writing is lovely, graceful yet plainspoken, and I underlined many passages, like this one: “Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one’s days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.” 

 

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

This unconventional memoir tucks glimpses of Li’s youth in Beijing, her narcissistic mother, her quiet father and childhood friends into a variety of meditations on writing and writers. These eight essays consider essential questions: Why write? Why read? Why live? She considers the letters and journals of Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Philip Larkin, Ivan Turgenev and others, and she writes tenderly of her own friendship with the Irish writer William Trevor.

NonfictionBusiness & Finance

The wild world of tech

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Imagine that you’re 19 years old and you’ve been offered $100,000 to drop out of college and build the tech start-up of your dreams. For the 20 students who win a Thiel Fellowship each year, with funding and mentoring provided by PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, this is reality. In Valley of the Gods, Wall Street Journal reporter Alexandra Wolfe (daughter of writer Tom Wolfe) profiles several members of the 2011 class of Thiel fellows, among them John Burnham, who aims to mine asteroids for platinum and gold; Laura Deming, who’s focused on extending human longevity; and Paul Gu, who wants to create a new method for loaning money. 

Wolfe follows this first class of Thiel fellows from the time when they’re still finalists, waiting to learn if they’ve won an award and undecided as to whether to put off college. She highlights their living spaces (like the communal house depicted in The Social Network, where Mark Zuckerberg and friends lived and worked before Facebook was the world’s highest-valued company), their social lives and their work struggles. Launching a successful tech start-up is incredibly difficult, even with a good idea, an unusual level of intelligence and monetary support, and Wolfe conveys the young entrepreneurs’ ups and downs well.

These stories are interspersed with a more general profile of Silicon Valley, its history, its connection to Stanford University and its oddities, like Cougar Night at the Rosewood Hotel, where “older” women hit on young techies. These asides make for fascinating reading, but they take us away from the Thiel Fellows and their struggles, so we care less about them than we otherwise might have. Still, readers seeking an inside view of this high-tech mecca will certainly find it in Valley of the Gods.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Imagine that you’re 19 years old and you’ve been offered $100,000 to drop out of college and build the tech start-up of your dreams. For the 20 students who win a Thiel Fellowship each year, with funding and mentoring provided by PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, this is reality.

Nonfiction

Keeping pace as the world moves faster

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Fans of Thomas Friedman will be happy to know that he’s back with another comprehensive look at the world’s trends and troubles. In Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Friedman, longtime New York Times columnist and author of six previous books, returns to the forces of globalization, climate change and technology. These are themes he’s covered before, but in this book he explains that we’re living in an age of simultaneous accelerations—ever-faster changes in climate, globalization and technology—that affect different parts of the world differently. These accelerations work together, Friedman argues, to create effects as disparate as an intelligent electrical grid that makes wind power viable, vast waves of migration out of overpopulated regions of Africa, and the political rise of Donald Trump.

Drawing on interviews with academics, CEOs, Silicon Valley innovators and other experts, as well as quotations from books, magazines and TV interviews, Friedman distills complicated concepts, using catchphrases and analogies to underscore his points; for instance, he refers to the amplifying effect of the computing cloud as “the supernova.” While the mix of sources and quoted passages can occasionally make for jumpy reading, Friedman’s informal style keeps the reader engaged.

The accelerations that Friedman describes are worrisome indeed, especially climate change and “the world of disorder,” his phrase for an increasing number of disintegrating nations. As to solutions, Friedman goes in two directions: He makes recommendations based on Mother Nature (be adaptive, embrace diversity, build ownership culture). He also returns to his hometown of St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb that produced an unusual number of writers, thinkers, and creatives, among them Joel and Ethan Coen, Al Franken and Norm Ornstein. He uncovers the factors that made his community successful, drawing lessons from its experience. Thank You for Being Late is vintage Friedman: clear-eyed on the world’s enormous problems, but optimistic about possible solutions.

Fans of Thomas Friedman will be happy to know that he’s back with another comprehensive look at the world’s trends and troubles. In Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Friedman returns to the forces of globalization, climate change and technology.
Nonfiction

Einstein’s imperfect theory

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Wait—Albert Einstein, whose equations revolutionized our understanding of the origins of the universe, made a mistake? That’s what science writer David Bodanis posits in Einstein’s Greatest Mistake. The personal qualities that allowed the young Einstein to make such enormous breakthroughs kept him from making similar advances in later years, Bodanis writes.

In this chatty account, Bodanis gives us Einstein the young man, trapped in his Bern Patent Office clerkship, struggling to find a teaching post and attached to Mileva Marić, a former mathematics student whom his parents couldn’t stand. Bodanis makes Einstein’s theories graspable, using analogies and illustrations to explain Einstein’s 1905 paper linking energy and mass (E = mc2), and his 1915 general relativity theory (G = T), which indicated that the universe was expanding. Contemporary astronomers saw the universe as static, and so Einstein revised his theory, a mistake that laid the groundwork for another mistake, in Bodanis’ view. Later, experimental scientists like Cambridge astronomer Arthur Eddington, Radcliffe graduate Henrietta Swan Leavitt and Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître proved that Einstein had been correct at the start: The universe was expanding.

Meanwhile, the state of subatomic physics changed too, as physicists Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger theorized that the tiniest particles don’t behave according to the expected laws of physics. Even as experimental evidence supporting this theory grew, Einstein disagreed, assuming future experiments would prove him right. Einstein’s stubborn refusal to accept this concept was his greatest mistake, Bodanis writes: “In his theory of 1915, [Einstein] had revealed the underlying structure of our universe, and he had been right when everyone else had been wrong. He wasn’t going to be misled again.” This refusal isolated him from the younger generation of scientists.

Bodanis’ biography offers a window onto Einstein’s achievements and missteps, as well as his life—his friendships, his complicated love life (two marriages, many affairs) and his isolation from other scientists at the end of his life.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Wait—Albert Einstein, whose equations revolutionized our understanding of the origins of the universe, made a mistake? That’s what science writer David -Bodanis posits in Einstein’s Greatest Mistake. The personal qualities that allowed the young Einstein to make such enormous breakthroughs kept him from making similar advances in later years, Bodanis writes.
NonfictionMemoir

Coming-of-age in colorful Queens

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Tara Clancy is only 36, but she manages to make her 1980s childhood feel like a long-lost era. In The Clancys of Queens, she gives us a coming-of-age memoir defined by the distinctive neighborhoods she grew up in: Broad Channel, Queens, a “bread crumb of an island” where her Irish-cop dad lived; Bellerose, her grandparents’ Italian-American enclave; and tony Bridgehampton, Long Island, where Clancy spent half her weekends with her mom and Mark, her mom’s well-to-do boyfriend.

A frequent contributor to “The Moth Radio Hour,” Clancy expanded her Moth stories for this memoir. She offers colorful character studies of the people who filled her young life, like cursing Grandma Rosalie (“Fahngool” was Rosalie’s “go-to, catchall punctuation”) and the barflies at Gregory’s bar—English Billy, Joey O’Dirt—where young Clancy and her dad were regulars, and where she had her first Communion party, with her large Irish clan that includes 21 first cousins in attendance.

An always-in-motion tomboy, Clancy loved her scrappy St. Gregory’s softball team and her best friend Esther, but not school. Unable to sit still in elementary school, she’d wander out of class to chat up any grown-ups she could find. The memoir follows her through her more difficult teen years, where she went from drinking and smoking pot daily to finding herself obsessed with Shakespeare and scraping together the money for college.

The oddities of Clancy’s upbringing make for some hilarious passages, but each chapter also forms a love letter—to her parents, Grandma Rosalie, Mark, her friends and lovers. Although she sometimes skates over darker material, like her dad’s drunk driving, her own teenage partying and a close friend’s abandoning her baby while in the grip of drugs, that’s a small complaint. Clancy has written a breezy, funny memoir with a wonderful cast of characters and a terrific sense of place.

Tara Clancy is only 36, but she manages to make her 1980s childhood feel like a long-lost era. In The Clancys of Queens, she gives us a coming-of-age memoir defined by the distinctive neighborhoods she grew up in: Broad Channel, Queens, a “bread crumb of an island” where her Irish-cop dad lived; Bellerose, her grandparents’ Italian-American enclave; and tony Bridgehampton, Long Island, where Clancy spent half her weekends with her mom and Mark, her mom’s well-to-do boyfriend.
NonfictionArts & CultureArt

Monet’s last works

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

If you imagined Claude Monet at work on his late masterpieces, the Water Lilies, you might picture him seated in his garden in Giverny, France, placidly dabbing blues and purples onto canvas, capturing watery impressions with ease. The portrait that Ross King offers in Mad Enchantment is far more complicated. In 1914, Monet was 73 and the world’s highest-paid artist. He’d already spent several years painting views of his pond, but now he envisioned a grouping of massive canvases that would evoke a “watery aquarium.” It took him the rest of his life.

King, the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and The Judgment of Paris, has done his research—the book contains 40 pages of endnotes—but he spins a readable narrative. Mad Enchantment tells the story of Monet’s efforts to bring his vision to reality, even as the Great War and all its privations interrupted. King details Monet’s struggles, how he approached technical concerns such as displaying the enormous canvases in an oval gallery, and how he coped as his “prodigious” eyes began to fail. And contrary to popular belief (and Monet’s claims), he didn’t just dash off his paintings en plein air—he reworked them at length in his studio, often adding layers of paint.

This is also the story of Monet’s enduring friendship with Georges Clemenceau, who led France in the Great War. It was Clemenceau who persuaded Monet to donate his unfinished Water Lilies to France and to complete them (and to stop being a pain in the behind about it, as Clemenceau termed it). King uses the lens of this friendship to show Monet’s often-cantankerous personality (“frightful old hedgehog,” Clemenceau called him) as well as his abiding love for his family and friends.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you imagined Claude Monet at work on his late masterpieces, the Water Lilies, you might picture him seated in his garden in Giverny, France, placidly dabbing blues and purples onto canvas, capturing watery impressions with ease. The portrait that Ross King offers in Mad Enchantment is far more complicated.

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