Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee tells the fascinating story of four pairs of artists - Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon - whose fraught, competitive friendships spurred them to new creative heights. Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary - one who was equally ambitious but possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses. Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas were close associates whose personal bond frayed after Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso swapped paintings, ideas, and influences as they jostled for the support of collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein and vied for the leadership of a new avant-garde. Jackson Pollock's uninhibited style of "action painting" triggered a breakthrough in the work of his older rival, Willem de Kooning. After Pollock's sudden death in a car crash, de Kooning assumed Pollock's mantle and became romantically involved with his late friend's mistress. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon met in the early 1950s, when Bacon was being hailed as Britain's most exciting new painter and Freud was working in relative obscurity. Their intense but asymmetrical friendship came to a head when Freud painted a portrait of Bacon, which was later stolen. Each of these relationships culminated in an early flashpoint, a rupture in a budding intimacy that was both a betrayal and a trigger for great innovation. Writing with the same exuberant wit and psychological insight that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, Sebastian Smee explores here the way that coming into one's own as an artist - finding one's voice - almost always involves willfully breaking away from some intimate's expectations of who you are or ought to be.Advance praise for The Art of Rivalry"The keynotes of Sebastian Smee's criticism have always included a fine feeling for the what of art - he knows how to evoke the way pictures really strike the eye - and an equal sense of the how of art: how art emerges from the background of social history. To these he now adds a remarkable capacity for getting down the who of art - the enigma of artists' personalities, and the way that, two at a time, they can often intersect to reshape each in the other's image. With these gifts all on the page together, The Art of Rivalry gives us a remarkable and engrossing book on pretty much the whole of art." - Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon and The Table Comes First "This is a magnificent book on the relationships at the roots of artistic genius. Smee offers a gripping tale of the fine line between friendship and competition, tracing how the ties that torment us most are often the ones that inspire us most." - Adam Grant, Wharton professor and New York Timesbestselling author of Originals and Give and Take"Beautifully written . . . This ambitious and impressive work is an utterly absorbing read about four important relationships in modern art." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Random House
|
9780812994803
|
Print book
Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give
By Calhoun, Ada
Poignant and witty essays on the beautiful complexity of marriage.Inspired by her wildly popular New York Times essay "The Wedding Toast I'll Never Give," Ada Calhoun provides a funny (but not flip) , smart (but not smug) take on the institution of marriage. Weaving intimate moments from her own married life with frank insight from experts, clergy, and friends, she upends expectations of total marital bliss to present a realistic -- but ultimately optimistic -- portrait of what marriage is really like. There will be fights, there will be existential angst, there may even be affairs; sometimes you'll look at the person you love and feel nothing but rage. Despite it all, Calhoun contends, staying married is easy: just don't get divorced.Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give offers bracing straight talk to the newly married and honors those who have weathered the storm. This exploration of modern marriage is at once wise and entertaining, a work of unexpected candor and literary grace.
W. W. Norton & Company
|
9780393254792
|
Hardcover
Rogue Heroes
By Macintyre, Ben
The incredible untold story of WWII's greatest secret fighting force, as told by our great modern master of wartime intrigue Britain's Special Air Service - or SAS - was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II's African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel's desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war material. Paired with his constitutional opposite, the disciplined martinet Jock Lewes, Stirling assembled a revolutionary fighting force that would upend not just the balance of the war, but the nature of combat itself. He faced no little resistance from those who found his tactics ungentlemanly or beyond the pale, but in the SAS's remarkable exploits facing the Nazis in the Africa and then on the Continent can be found the seeds of nearly all special forces units that would follow. Bringing his keen eye for psychological detail to a riveting wartime narrative, Ben Macintyre uses his unprecedented access to SAS archives to shine a light inside a legendary unit long shrouded in secrecy. The result is not just a tremendous war story, but a fascinating group portrait of men of whom history and country asked the most.
Crown
|
9781101904169
|
Print book
Gathering Blossoms Under Fire
By Alice, Walker,
ATRIA
|
9781476773155
|
A Splendid Savage
By Kemper, Steve
A life of adventure and military daring on violent frontiers across the American West, Africa, Mexico, and the Klondike.Frederick Russell Burnham's (1861-1947) amazing story resembles a newsreel fused with a Saturday matinee thriller. One of the few people who could turn his garrulous friend Theodore Roosevelt into a listener, Burnham was once world-famous as "the American scout." His expertise in woodcraft, learned from frontiersmen and Indians, helped inspire another friend, Robert Baden-Powell, to found the Boy Scouts. His adventures encompassed Apache wars and range feuds, booms and busts in mining camps around the globe, explorations in remote regions of Africa, and death-defying military feats that brought him renown and high honors.
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
|
9780393239270
|
Hardcover
Grinnell
By Taliaferro, John
Before Rachel Carson, there was George Bird Grinnell -- the man whose prophetic vision did nothing less than launch American conservation. Hailed by the New York Times as "the father of American conservation," George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938) , the Brooklyn-born son of a banker, looked beyond a burgeoning cityscape and saw a brighter future for the whole country. In Grinnell, John Taliaferro traces the naturalist's expansive trajectory from his time at Yale through his dozens of expeditions out west, riding alongside General Custer in the Black Hills before Little Bighorn, to the adventures that continued even after he became editor-in-chief of Forest & Stream. Drawing on no less than 40,000 pages of Grinnell's correspondence and dozens of travel notebooks, Taliaferro highlights a century of critical campaigns, from the protection of the vanishing buffalo and the creation of national parks that defined Theodore Roosevelt's administration to sensitive ethnographies of Plains Indian tribes and the founding of the Audubon Society and the Boone and Crockett Club. The result is an enthralling portrait of a man whose influence still guides the imperiled future of our national treasures. 16 pages of black and white illustrations
Liveright
|
9781631490132
|
Hardcover
Ambition and Desire
By Williams, Kate
From CNN’s official royal historian, a highly praised young author with a doctorate from Oxford University, comes the extraordinary rags-to-riches story of the woman who conquered Napoleon’s heart—and with it, an empire. Their love was legendary, their ambition flagrant and unashamed. Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife, Josephine, came to power during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of France. The story of the Corsican soldier’s incredible rise has been well documented. Now, in this spellbinding, luminous account, Kate Williams draws back the curtain on the woman who beguiled him: her humble origins, her exorbitant appetites, and the tragic turn of events that led to her undoing. Born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de La Pagerie on the Caribbean island of Martinique, the woman Napoleon would later call Josephine was the ultimate survivor.
Ballantine Books
|
9780345522832
|
Hardcover
The Last Days of John Lennon
By Patterson, James
By the end of 1980, the Beatles had been broken up for a decade -- a decade John Lennon had spent in search of his true identity: singer, songwriter, activist, burn out. "It's the perfect time to be coming back," he declared. Except that Lennon was a marked man. As early as the Beatles' controversial 1966 American tour, the band had feared for their safety. "You might as well put a target on me," Lennon said, and the Nixon administration complied by opening an FBI file. If only the agents hadn't been so intently focused on the star himself, they might have detected Mark David Chapman's powerful, ever-growing obsession with his onetime idol. Chapman, himself a tragic nowhere man, ultimately achieved the notoriety he craved by actualizing the target on Lennon -- single-handedly wounding the spirit of a generation.
Little, Brown and Company
|
9780316429061
|
Hardcover
WHAM!, George Michael, and Me
By Ridgeley, Andrew
For the first time, Andrew Ridgeley - one half of one of the most famous bands in the world - tells the inside story of Wham!, his lifelong friendship with George Michael, and the formation of a band that changed the shape of the music scene in the early eighties. In 1975 Andrew took a shy new boy at school under his wing. They instantly hit it off, and their boyhood escapades at Bushy Meads School built a bond that was never broken. The duo found themselves riding an astonishing roller coaster of success, taking them all over the world. They made and broke iconic records, they were treated like gods, but they stayed true to their friendship and ultimately to themselves. It was a party that seemed as if it would never end. And then it did, in front of tens of thousands of tearful fans at Wembley Stadium in 1986. Andrew's memoir covers in wonderful detail those years, up until that last iconic concert: the scrapes, the laughs, the relationships, the good, and the bad. It's a unique and one-and-only time to remember that era, that band, and those boys.
Dutton
|
9781524745318
|
Hardcover
Mama's Boy
By Black, Dustin Lance
From the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and political activist, a candid, vivid, powerfully resonant memoir about growing up as a gay Mormon in Texas that is, as well, a moving tribute to the mother who taught him about surviving against all oddsDustin Lance Black wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Milk and helped overturn California's anti-gay marriage Proposition 8, but as an LGBTQ+ activist he has unlikely origins. Raised in a military, Mormon household outside San Antonio, Texas, Black always found inspiration in his plucky, determined mother. Having contracted polio as a small girl, she endured leg braces and iron lungs, and was repeatedly told that she could never have children or live a normal life. Defying expectations, she raised Black and his two brothers, built a career, escaped two abusive husbands, and eventually moved the family to a new life in Northern California. While Black struggled to come to terms with his sexuality--something antithetical to his mother's religious views--she remained his source of strength and his guiding light. Later, she would stand by his side when he helped bring the historic gay marriage case to the U.S. Supreme Court.Mama's Boy is a stirring celebration of the connections between mother and son, Red states and Blue, and the spirit of optimism and perseverance that can create positive change in the world.
The art of rivalry
By Smee, Sebastian
Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee tells the fascinating story of four pairs of artists - Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon - whose fraught, competitive friendships spurred them to new creative heights. Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary - one who was equally ambitious but possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses. Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas were close associates whose personal bond frayed after Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso swapped paintings, ideas, and influences as they jostled for the support of collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein and vied for the leadership of a new avant-garde. Jackson Pollock's uninhibited style of "action painting" triggered a breakthrough in the work of his older rival, Willem de Kooning. After Pollock's sudden death in a car crash, de Kooning assumed Pollock's mantle and became romantically involved with his late friend's mistress. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon met in the early 1950s, when Bacon was being hailed as Britain's most exciting new painter and Freud was working in relative obscurity. Their intense but asymmetrical friendship came to a head when Freud painted a portrait of Bacon, which was later stolen. Each of these relationships culminated in an early flashpoint, a rupture in a budding intimacy that was both a betrayal and a trigger for great innovation. Writing with the same exuberant wit and psychological insight that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, Sebastian Smee explores here the way that coming into one's own as an artist - finding one's voice - almost always involves willfully breaking away from some intimate's expectations of who you are or ought to be.Advance praise for The Art of Rivalry"The keynotes of Sebastian Smee's criticism have always included a fine feeling for the what of art - he knows how to evoke the way pictures really strike the eye - and an equal sense of the how of art: how art emerges from the background of social history. To these he now adds a remarkable capacity for getting down the who of art - the enigma of artists' personalities, and the way that, two at a time, they can often intersect to reshape each in the other's image. With these gifts all on the page together, The Art of Rivalry gives us a remarkable and engrossing book on pretty much the whole of art." - Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon and The Table Comes First "This is a magnificent book on the relationships at the roots of artistic genius. Smee offers a gripping tale of the fine line between friendship and competition, tracing how the ties that torment us most are often the ones that inspire us most." - Adam Grant, Wharton professor and New York Timesbestselling author of Originals and Give and Take"Beautifully written . . . This ambitious and impressive work is an utterly absorbing read about four important relationships in modern art." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give
By Calhoun, Ada
Poignant and witty essays on the beautiful complexity of marriage.Inspired by her wildly popular New York Times essay "The Wedding Toast I'll Never Give," Ada Calhoun provides a funny (but not flip) , smart (but not smug) take on the institution of marriage. Weaving intimate moments from her own married life with frank insight from experts, clergy, and friends, she upends expectations of total marital bliss to present a realistic -- but ultimately optimistic -- portrait of what marriage is really like. There will be fights, there will be existential angst, there may even be affairs; sometimes you'll look at the person you love and feel nothing but rage. Despite it all, Calhoun contends, staying married is easy: just don't get divorced.Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give offers bracing straight talk to the newly married and honors those who have weathered the storm. This exploration of modern marriage is at once wise and entertaining, a work of unexpected candor and literary grace.
Rogue Heroes
By Macintyre, Ben
The incredible untold story of WWII's greatest secret fighting force, as told by our great modern master of wartime intrigue Britain's Special Air Service - or SAS - was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II's African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel's desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war material. Paired with his constitutional opposite, the disciplined martinet Jock Lewes, Stirling assembled a revolutionary fighting force that would upend not just the balance of the war, but the nature of combat itself. He faced no little resistance from those who found his tactics ungentlemanly or beyond the pale, but in the SAS's remarkable exploits facing the Nazis in the Africa and then on the Continent can be found the seeds of nearly all special forces units that would follow. Bringing his keen eye for psychological detail to a riveting wartime narrative, Ben Macintyre uses his unprecedented access to SAS archives to shine a light inside a legendary unit long shrouded in secrecy. The result is not just a tremendous war story, but a fascinating group portrait of men of whom history and country asked the most.
Gathering Blossoms Under Fire
By Alice, Walker,
A Splendid Savage
By Kemper, Steve
A life of adventure and military daring on violent frontiers across the American West, Africa, Mexico, and the Klondike.Frederick Russell Burnham's (1861-1947) amazing story resembles a newsreel fused with a Saturday matinee thriller. One of the few people who could turn his garrulous friend Theodore Roosevelt into a listener, Burnham was once world-famous as "the American scout." His expertise in woodcraft, learned from frontiersmen and Indians, helped inspire another friend, Robert Baden-Powell, to found the Boy Scouts. His adventures encompassed Apache wars and range feuds, booms and busts in mining camps around the globe, explorations in remote regions of Africa, and death-defying military feats that brought him renown and high honors.
Grinnell
By Taliaferro, John
Before Rachel Carson, there was George Bird Grinnell -- the man whose prophetic vision did nothing less than launch American conservation. Hailed by the New York Times as "the father of American conservation," George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938) , the Brooklyn-born son of a banker, looked beyond a burgeoning cityscape and saw a brighter future for the whole country. In Grinnell, John Taliaferro traces the naturalist's expansive trajectory from his time at Yale through his dozens of expeditions out west, riding alongside General Custer in the Black Hills before Little Bighorn, to the adventures that continued even after he became editor-in-chief of Forest & Stream. Drawing on no less than 40,000 pages of Grinnell's correspondence and dozens of travel notebooks, Taliaferro highlights a century of critical campaigns, from the protection of the vanishing buffalo and the creation of national parks that defined Theodore Roosevelt's administration to sensitive ethnographies of Plains Indian tribes and the founding of the Audubon Society and the Boone and Crockett Club. The result is an enthralling portrait of a man whose influence still guides the imperiled future of our national treasures. 16 pages of black and white illustrations
Ambition and Desire
By Williams, Kate
From CNN’s official royal historian, a highly praised young author with a doctorate from Oxford University, comes the extraordinary rags-to-riches story of the woman who conquered Napoleon’s heart—and with it, an empire. Their love was legendary, their ambition flagrant and unashamed. Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife, Josephine, came to power during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of France. The story of the Corsican soldier’s incredible rise has been well documented. Now, in this spellbinding, luminous account, Kate Williams draws back the curtain on the woman who beguiled him: her humble origins, her exorbitant appetites, and the tragic turn of events that led to her undoing. Born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de La Pagerie on the Caribbean island of Martinique, the woman Napoleon would later call Josephine was the ultimate survivor.
The Last Days of John Lennon
By Patterson, James
By the end of 1980, the Beatles had been broken up for a decade -- a decade John Lennon had spent in search of his true identity: singer, songwriter, activist, burn out. "It's the perfect time to be coming back," he declared. Except that Lennon was a marked man. As early as the Beatles' controversial 1966 American tour, the band had feared for their safety. "You might as well put a target on me," Lennon said, and the Nixon administration complied by opening an FBI file. If only the agents hadn't been so intently focused on the star himself, they might have detected Mark David Chapman's powerful, ever-growing obsession with his onetime idol. Chapman, himself a tragic nowhere man, ultimately achieved the notoriety he craved by actualizing the target on Lennon -- single-handedly wounding the spirit of a generation.
WHAM!, George Michael, and Me
By Ridgeley, Andrew
For the first time, Andrew Ridgeley - one half of one of the most famous bands in the world - tells the inside story of Wham!, his lifelong friendship with George Michael, and the formation of a band that changed the shape of the music scene in the early eighties. In 1975 Andrew took a shy new boy at school under his wing. They instantly hit it off, and their boyhood escapades at Bushy Meads School built a bond that was never broken. The duo found themselves riding an astonishing roller coaster of success, taking them all over the world. They made and broke iconic records, they were treated like gods, but they stayed true to their friendship and ultimately to themselves. It was a party that seemed as if it would never end. And then it did, in front of tens of thousands of tearful fans at Wembley Stadium in 1986. Andrew's memoir covers in wonderful detail those years, up until that last iconic concert: the scrapes, the laughs, the relationships, the good, and the bad. It's a unique and one-and-only time to remember that era, that band, and those boys.
Mama's Boy
By Black, Dustin Lance
From the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and political activist, a candid, vivid, powerfully resonant memoir about growing up as a gay Mormon in Texas that is, as well, a moving tribute to the mother who taught him about surviving against all oddsDustin Lance Black wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Milk and helped overturn California's anti-gay marriage Proposition 8, but as an LGBTQ+ activist he has unlikely origins. Raised in a military, Mormon household outside San Antonio, Texas, Black always found inspiration in his plucky, determined mother. Having contracted polio as a small girl, she endured leg braces and iron lungs, and was repeatedly told that she could never have children or live a normal life. Defying expectations, she raised Black and his two brothers, built a career, escaped two abusive husbands, and eventually moved the family to a new life in Northern California. While Black struggled to come to terms with his sexuality--something antithetical to his mother's religious views--she remained his source of strength and his guiding light. Later, she would stand by his side when he helped bring the historic gay marriage case to the U.S. Supreme Court.Mama's Boy is a stirring celebration of the connections between mother and son, Red states and Blue, and the spirit of optimism and perseverance that can create positive change in the world.