1 comments about Marilyn Monroe: A Concise Biography (Pocket Biography Series).

1. this biography like so many others just researches movie magazines and gossip colums the only real story is through the marilyn monroe foundation and the play here i am mother by nancy miracle a member of the dramatists guild

5 comments about George Eliot: The Last Victorian.

1. I have started to read a lot of biographies, and somehow most of the authors manage to extinguish my passionate interest in the lives of the greats by a tedious writing style. Kathryn Hughes' book George Eliot: The Last Victorian is innocent of such charges. In fact, the book is both eruditely scholarly and reads like an exciting novel. I hope Kathryn Hughes writes more biographies.



2. Whata complex person was George Eliot (1819-1880). Mary Ann
   was born in the English midlands in a rural, conservative and
   evangelical society. She became an agnostic, free thinker whose
   brilliant early works were translations of German scholarship dealing with a critical examination of the life of Jesus.
   Eliot had a succesion of love affairs which such literary types as John Chapman editor of the Westminster Review and the
   brillian but cold Herbert Spencer. Her true love was George
   Henry Lewes a literary man who never divorced his unfaithful wife Agnes continuing to support her and his children through the long years he spent living with Eliot.
   With the encouragement, nurturing care and support of Lewes the fragile, tempermental, moody and gloomy plain girl from the Midlands became the leading light in the intellectual-literary world of mid 19th century London.
   Eliot is in the first rank of Victorian novelists. Her classics include "Adam Bede"; "The Mill on the Floss"; "Silas
   Marner"; "Felix Holt the Radical': "The Spanish Gypsy"; "Romola"
   "Middlemarch" and "Daniel Deronda.:
   Eliot was a brilliant woman who all of her life was concerned about her plain appearance. She married young John Cross in 1880
   dying only eight months into the marriage.
   Hughes gives a plainly written account of Mary Ann's life from the provincial girl to the grand old lady of English letters.
   Her life was sad since her brother Isaac and family refused to accept her arrangement of living with a married man. She was
   scorned as a fallen woman by polite society but found a modicum of happiness with Lewes.
   Huges provides short adequate summaries of all the novels and poems by Eliot. Some readers may find the infighting among family members and literary people in London tedious.
   Hughes had done her homework producing a solid biography.



3. Though the book was overall a bit biased toward Eliot's needy side, and didn't include quite enough literary criticism for my taste, I still found this a great and very informative read, especially for those with not a lot of background on the subject of this major Victorian writer.



4. Hughes' life of Eliot is solid, comprehensive, and given its dazzling subject, remarkably tedious. The book provides an ample chronicle of Eliot's documented life without ever bringing Marian Evans or her marvelous writings to life.

   Hughes is much better at piling on the details of Victorian intellectual life than working her way inside the creative processes that created Middlemarch, Adam Bede, and Daniel Deronda. The first half of the book, covering Evans' family life and difficult early adulthood, reads well, the impressive accumulation of research making up for lack of narrative.

   But when Evans creates Eliot and the first of her fictions, the book should snap to life. It instead deflates, dutifully cranking out novel synopses and recounting scandals without ever getting at why Eliot's fiction was so beloved in her day, and remains so today.

   A novelist of uncanny power and tremendous influence, Eliot deserves a biography at the level of Peter Ackroyd's spectacular life of Dickens. We're still waiting...




5. George Eliot: The Last Victorian is an intimate biography of noted author Mary Ann Evans, who is perhaps better known by the pen name of George Eliot (1819-1880). Some of Ms. Evans' most famous works include the novels Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede. This informative biography focuses quite closely on Evans' life, including her friendships with Dickens and Trollope, and the controversial scandal of her relationship to a married writer George Henry Lewes. Biographer Kathryn Hughes also scrutinizes the Victorian society that Mary Evans lived in and wrote so much about. Even Queen Victoria enjoyed books by George Eliot, but you don't need royal blood to enjoy this intriguing and meticulously presented biography.

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5 comments about Picasso: Creator and Destroyer.

1. Fine reading;the best biographical work on Picasso. Fair review of his multi-facetted life and personality. A portrait written with great psychological depth, flair, knowledge of the arts and fascinating insights and comments from those who knew him.
   Ariana Stassinopoulos' balanced story of both his weaknesses and strengths is a ''must read''.



2. "Picasso" by Arianna Huffington is a very thorough book that can probably be skipped, except possibly by those with an intense interest in Picasso's personal life. For the rest of us it is sufficient to know that Picasso had no friends or family, just groupies (many of whom were family) throughout his life, and, to a person, he treated them despicably. For example, he usually had several women at a time who each worshiped him. He would play them off against each other, often openly and in public, seemingly in an attempt to provoke jealous rage, murder, depression, or suicide (he succeeded grandly at all except for murder, but his best friend took care of that one for him). He found ways to treat the male groupies with equal misery. But, soap operas should last thirty minutes at most. This book goes relentlessly on and on for 500 pages determined to prove that Picasso did not take one decent breath in his whole entire long life.At a certain point the reader begins to wonder that "thou dost protest too much." So then how did he come to be hailed as the genius of the 20th Century; as the man who showed us what our world really was or at least what it really looked like? The answer to this question is somewhat complex. The easiest part of it is that he was like a human camera. He could paint exactly what he saw as if he were a camera, and, he could paint any impression of what he saw, better than any human being alive. He was half way home on that talent alone, meaningless though it may have been. After all, if you can throw a ball better than anyone you are halfway home too. But Picasso's subject was, seemingly, important; one that intellectuals were interested in. Hence if he could capture their imaginations and somehow add their imprimatur to his painting talent the world would be at his feet, where he always felt it belonged.
   Picasso hung out in Paris with many of the world's leading intellectuals. He even wrote a play called "Desire Caught By the Tail" directed by Albert Camus in which Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir acted. The play was about 10 pages long and nothing more than a series of bizarre scenes similar to what might have appeared in his painting. When Picasso commented about literature he said "it seems many writers want to be painters" apparently not knowing that the descriptions of visual objects in literature are often mere back drops for the infinitely larger conceptual themes with which language artists deal. He really didn't seem to understand that there was more in the world than pictures. His friend Sartre, a legitimate genius, set the record straight about the essential triviality of pictures in "What is Literature" when he said, "even when Picasso attempted to approach the real world with "Guernica" does anyone think he changed even a single mind with that painting"? And this was before the visual world was forever trivialized by, affordable travel, cameras, video cameras, TV, and film. We don't need a great painter anymore to create "The Last Supper" and by his choices tell us about the true nature of Jesus.
   It did turn out though that the tyrannical and confused little painter did have something in common with the leading existentialist avant guard intellectuals of his day, namely, they all wanted us to see the world differently. The intellectuals because the world of physics had correctly foreshadowed today's confused world of string theory and because philosophy had foreshadowed the concomitant shift from the certain, well defined world of God to the confused existential world of man. Picasso too wanted us to see the world differently not because he was a physicist or philosopher but because 1) he was so hopelessly neurotic that he did see the world differently as any sick person does and 2) he realized he had to paint differently to develop a reputation as a different and great painter. The intellectuals were happy to use Picasso because his technically ingenious but neurotically confusing paintings did help loosen our grip on old realities. Picasso in turn was happy to use their imprimatur of change to normalize his neurosis and to falsely give philosophical meaning to his immense skill at meaningless painting. That he encouraged us toward misogyny and/or other of his gruel narcissistic indulgences did not matter; it was change, and that was what the intellectuals wanted most. The public really had no idea what was going on as Picasso's legend grew and grew to newer and newer heights of irrationality. Today, Picasso's reputation seems mostly in the hands of art owners, museums, and curators all of whom profit in Picasso's on going and growing legend. This summer's hugely successful Picasso/Matisse exhibit at MOMA , for example, drew 100s of thousands of adoring fans. Curators raved at the point, counter point genius of the two artists; everyone made money, had fun, and wished they too could free their troubled souls and enlighten the world by creating great art, but not a word was ever said about the emperor having no clothes.
   Norman Mailer, who was taken seriously as the greatest living writer and thinker, is a great fan of Picasso and has written adoringly and extensively about him; so perhaps his view is worth comparing to Huffington's? He and Picasso had things in common: both were diminutive technical genius who gained public adoration and hugely deformed egos at a very early age. Mailer stabbed one of his early wives and clearly behaved a lot like Picasso, and perhaps for many of the same reasons, although he matured as he aged whereas Picasso did not. His portrait of Picasso as a young man tends to be purely forgiving. The idea that internal struggle, suffering, depression, angst, turmoil, and general soap opera leads to great, honest, revolutionary art apparently still lives in Mailer's soul. After all, what can an artist create if not the manifestation of tremendous inner turmoil and growth?
   Mailer forgives Picasso for everything because it was all to produce "great art." Sadly, the idea that the traditional, formulaic, hypocritical, country club Republican mentality would be replaced by the existential soap opera playing out in the communist souls of Picasso, Mailer, and French intellectuals seems more a joke today than anything else. So in the end, Huffington is quite right about Picasso, although she doesn't address the meaning of Picasso's art at all, except in so far as she ruthlessly cuts his foundation away.



3. this book is totally Anti-Picasso, she hardly touches his Art her only concern is ripping him apart.



4. I've read quite a bit on Picasso and I was quite aware of his abuses to his lovers and his friends. I also like Arianna Huffington. However, this book quickly degrades in what seems like a personal statement or act of retribution against Picasso. While the writing regarding his major works and career highlights is understated with light cast only on the negative aspects of each, his transgressions and shortcomings in both art and his social life are focused on far too much. The result is an unbalanced book that seems wholly predjudiced. One gets the overall feeling that Arianna was one of Picasso's spurned or mistreated lovers and is out for revenge. I prefer more evenly written objective material on historical characters rather then the polarized point of view offerred here. Overall, I would suggest something by John Richardson who I feel is better informed (via his personal relationship with Picasso) and able to cast objective light on one of mankind's great artists and characters.



5. The " modernism " Picasso launched was basically the conception of the artist's oeuvre as a diary, albeit he probably, along with most qf the art establishment, would be outraged by this point of view. That was his most significant first; his development of form, merely a bi - product of his auto - biographical method. This book enables us to see clearly the connection between the man and the works, instead of the usual european way of clouding the timid author's confusion about a complex artist with politically correct aestheticism. Whether Picasso's works are all, they're hyped up to be, when considered as individual paintings, is for the individual to decide; this book is about the man Picasso, his life, and as such most refreshing.

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5 comments about Tyrannosaurus Sue.

1. If you love paleontology, this book is not about that. It is about a legal battle over dinosaur bones. Not science. I was surprised, to say the least, to see the difference between the title of the book and its contents.



2. Tyrannosaurus Sue is a great book about the discovery of the largest T-rex fossil ever excavated. Sue Hendrickson and Peter Larson, commercial fossil hunters, found the giant in South Dakota. When her Cretaceous remains were unearthed, all parties involved were under the impression that the find had been made on private property and the property owner was duly paid for the fossil.
   
   The situation quickly turned greatly political. The Sioux, the Federal Government and professional paleontological societies got involved. The bones were seized from the Larson institute and impounded by the Feds. It took years of confusing court proceedings to settle the issue.
   
   This is a great story of how science is often politicized, especially when money is involved (the remains are worth a fortune). Sue wasn't simply discovered and studied by scientists and enjoyed by curious members of the public. She was fought over, transported, stored, etc. The tale of her journey is very intriguing. As a scientist in another field, I found it very interesting to gain insight into the operations of another field. Yikes, sometimes controversy is just inevitable.
   
   Check it out, it's a great read (I intentionally left Sue's fate out of the review in case you're not aware of her whereabouts).



3. Although "Tyrannosaurus Sue" takes a while to get rolling, eventually author Steve Fiffer does get into the trial over the bones, and, as a lawyer, he does an excellent job of clarifying that mess.
   
   In a foreward, dinosaur researcher Robert Bakker says, "There's a lot of Roshomon in Sue's story." By that I take it he means that there is a shortage of certainty about who the villains are, although Bakker and Fiffer are sympathetic to Peter Larson and his friends, who dug up Sue.
   
   The fossil equivalents of Yankee tinkerers, the Larsons were self-taught and entrepreneurial. As such, predictably, they raised the hackles of academic researchers.
   
   One complaint by the academics against the Larsons can be disposed of: that commercial bone collecting interferes with proper study of fossils. Surely the information to be gleaned from the bones is more valuable than the money people (or the Field Museum) will pay for the bones -- millions -- so interference with proper study is a serious matter.
   
   However, although Fiffer does not go into it, the record of academic bone hunters in the western states has frequently been scandalous, with illegal collecting, faked documentation, slovenly curation and failure to publish.
   
   As a good businessman, Larson was, at least, not inclined to the last two of those.
   
   While some of the academic critics may have been sincere and even have had legitimate concerns, the leading lights come off very poorly in "Tyrannosaurus Sue."
   
   Part of the reason Fiffer's book starts slowly is his evident intent to build up suspense -- generally, as here, an irritating approach -- but he also has the more reasonable goal and task of setting the finding of Sue in context. This means going back to the Bone Wars of the 19th century. Much of this is already plowed ground, but Fiffer's explanation of a legitimate (as it seems to have been) commercial pale ontological enterprise was new and interesting to me.
   
   Once all that is finally taken care of, "Tyrannosaurus Sue" races to an exciting conclusion, with a lively courtroom drama, a tense auction, some corporate struggles and a not entirely satisfactory (to me) outcome.
   
   It's a complex story, made even more so by a factor I have not mentioned so far: the fact that Sue was found on Indian land that was under lease to an Indian rancher. That added extra layers of legal uncertainty to an already uncertain story.
   
   Fiffer also explores, without suggesting much in the way of remedy, the national government's confused, confusing and probably self-defeating legislation concerning fossils on public lands.



4. Steve Fiffer's "Tyrannosaurus Sue" is an interesting tale of the discovery of the most complete T-Rex skeleton found up to that point, and the bizarre battle that ensued over the ownership of the find. The book provides some insight into the world of paleontology (especially the pitfalls of searching on property where boundary lines aren't clear), and details a rather maddening tale of government intervention. I would have enjoyed more discussion of paleontology, but I understand that that wasn't the purpose of this particular work. Fiffer's writing style is straightforward to the point of being a bit dry at points, but it's well suited to describing the legal and political manipulations of the story. An interesting book that will spur interest in reading more about its subject matter.



5. One of the greatest dinosaur finds in history - perhaps THE greatest - was caught up in politics, money and jealousy. It is just pathetic what the government did to this scientist and makes one wonder question the rationality of "officials" who would commit such deeds.

   All the ins and outs of scientific rivalry, government bumbling and misplaced priorities are thoroughly described. The story is fascinating and will hold your attention for days. Our view of T-rex and dinosaurs in general changed following this discovery. Good book, guaranteed to make you furious.

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