jelly
This book started very well, with a badger cleaning the forest and teaching the reader about ecology and how to maintain your environment clean. Then it went wild and lost any logic. How come an animal would destroy his own home, close access to his shelter and unroot thousands of trees because they look weird without leaves? What about the scary consequences to his environment and his friends?
At the end, things get better and he is able to fix his mistakes thanks to his friends. The book seems to teach that we can fix our mistakes, but this one was such an unlikely one from an animal that it was hard to follow through.
The title of the book made me expect a constructive lesson about cleaning after yourself and not tossing trash in the forest. What if instead of destroying the forest, the badger would have realized that leaves can be fun to play with his friends? What if he would have explained how to recycle? What if he would have inspired others to clean like him? There could have been so many other ways to teach about being tidy.
I am disappointed because this kind of book is important and I feel like the book lost its message on the way.
This is a wonderful story about being friends and being different, about asking for help when needed, about realizing that we don't all have the same needs, and that we can let others help us and give us advice, and that it's ok to not always have the answers. It's also about putting your own self-care first. A wonderful gem.
Read and reviewed 2018-08-12
A high-quality monograph of Alessandro Botticelli, which includes 49 colored paintings with individual analysis, 23 full-page details, a 40-page essay by Chiara Basta and Carlo Bo, a 7-page extract of the “Lives” by Vasari, a chronological table, and a geographical table of the paintings.
Pleasant book to read, high-quality print. I wish some larger paintings could have been printed on a single page, instead of being cut in the middle.
His Life and Art
Alessandro Botticelli was born in 1445 in Florence. His father, Mariano Filipepi, was a rich tanner. Vasari explained that his nickname Botticelli comes from his presence at the workshop of a goldsmith known as “Botticello”. It might also come from his brother, goldsmith battigello himself. In Florence, many artists started their apprenticeship this way to learn definition and attention to details.
In the early 1460's, he is sent to learn with Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the most famous painter of his time, who receives important commissions from the Medici family. He is greatly influenced by Madonna and Child with Angels, 1465 by Lippi. Important commission in 1470: Piero del Pollaiuolo is late to deliver the seven paintings for La Sala Tribunale della Mercanzia. Thanks to Antonio Vespucci, Botticelli paints Fortitude, a tournant in his work. He has fully created his language and is now ready to develop a new sense of space and scenic presence.
The period between 1470 and 1481, in Rome, is marked by the prestigious commissions by the Medici family and their network of influence.
Cosimo the Elder created the Academia Neoplatonica, a place where intellectuals could read, study and translate Greek and Latin texts and meet to discuss them. The leader was Marsilio Ficino, specialized in Plato's theology. They discussed the immortality of the soul and its inclination toward God propelled by the strength of Love. Thus, earthly beauty was considered one of the most powerful means for accessing the contemplation of divine beauty, which is God. A link between earthly beauty and divine beauty is communicated via symbols and allegory. Art becomes useful both for stimulating sensations tied to the world of the Beautiful, and for carrying knowledge to a higher level, through the interpretation of symbols. This is how the The Allegory of Spring / The birth of Venus is read.
Botticelli became its official painter, via Lorenzo the Magnificent.
In 1481, Botticello is called to Rome to the service of Pope Sixtus IV, with Ghirlandaio, Perugino and Cosimo Rosselli to the Sistine Chapel.
Giovanni carried out his mercantile and financial activities in London, but we know that in 1483 he returned to Florence to acquire a chapel in the church of Santa Spirito.
The last years of the century in Florence, particularly after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492, were scarred by internal political problem caused by discontentment with the Medici management of power, problems with international policies, and the defense of the boundaries menaced by Charles VIII, who invaded Italy two years later. The ideals of government and civil development enter a crisis, with a revival into mystic and prophetic themes. At the end of his life, Botticelli and his prestigious workshop focus on simplified and immediate devotional features. He dies in Florence in 1510.
My favorites:
- Fortitude, 1470
- Stories of Judith (diptych), 1470-1472
- Portrait of Giuliano de' Medici, c. 1478
- Saint Augustine, 1480
- Madonna and Child with Five Angels, 1481
- Annunciation, 1489
- Lamentations over the Dead Christ, with Saints Jerome, Paul and Peter, 1492
- Virgin and Child and Infant Saint John, c. 1490-1495
- Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1495
Fortitude, 1470:
Stories of Judith (diptych), 1470-1472:
Portrait of Giuliano de' Medici, c. 1478:
Saint Augustine, 1480 (detail):
Madonna and Child with Five Angels, 1481:
Annunciation, 1489:
Lamentations over the Dead Christ, with Saints Jerome, Paul and Peter, 1492:
Virgin and Child and Infant Saint John, c. 1490-1495
Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1495:
Wonderful monograph of Vincent Van Gogh containing a seven-page biography, 50 colored reproductions and 25 details. Each painting is primary explained by quotes from Van Gogh himself in his letters to Theo. A clear, minimalist and straightforward book.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890)
“The painter of the future will be a colorist such as has never yet existed.” VVG
“The pictures which must be made so that painting should be wholly itself and should raise itself to a heigh equivalent to the severe summits which the Greek sculptors, the German musicians, the writers of the French novel reach, are far beyond the powers of an isolated individual.” VVG
Biography
Van Gogh was born in 1853 in Brabant, at the border of Netherlands and Belgium. His father was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church ; his mother, the daughter of a bookseller and bookbinder. Two of his uncles were art dealers. Van Gogh's early attempts to find a career embraced each of these professions: he was an art dealer, a book dealer and a trainee candidate for the Church of England.
In 1869, at the age of 16, he began to work at La Hague for Goupil and Co., an international firm of art specialized in contemporary French art and photographic reproductions. In 1873, he was transfered in London. Inspired by the novelists George Eliot and Charles Dickens. In 1875, transfered to Goupil in Paris.
“When I entered the hall of the Hôtel Drouot, where they were exhibiting Millet, I felt like saying, ‘Take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”
Brief periods in London, Holland, Amsterdam and finally Belgium where he became a lay preacher. In 1880, he decides to become a graphic artist and studies at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, then moved to La Hague.
He lives with Clasina Hoornik, a prostitute and her two children. After pressure from his family, he breaks up with her and moves to Holland.
“It is necessary to thoroughly feel the link between nature and pictures in general. I have had to renew that in myself.” He now begins to paint in oil and commits to be a peasant painter. He studies plaster casts and live model for several months at Antwerp.
In 1886, he moves to Paris, where his brother Theo lives. He meets Fernand Cormon, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Emile Bernard. He also admired Signac and Seurat. Strong interest in Japanese woodcuts.
“One can hardly be said to belong to one's time if one has paid no attention to it.”
In 1888, he moves to Arles. “I kept looking out of the window to see if it was beginning to look like Japan.” Friendship with Gauguin. Short stay at the asylum of Saint-Rémy.
He spends the last months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, North of Paris. He committed suicide in July 1890, and his brother Theo died six months later.
_
My favorites:
Sorrow, 1882
The State Lottery Office, 1882
Women Miners, 1882
Weaver, 1884
Peasant Woman Gleaning, 1885
Wheatfields with Sheaves, 1888
The Old Peasant (Patience Escalier), 1888
Memory of the Garden at Etten, 1888
Wheatfields with Cypresses, 1889
Self-portrait, 1889
Midday, 1889-1890
Sorrow, 1882
The starting point for this drawing was a woodcut by Millet: “Last Summer, when you showed me The Sheperdess, I thougth, ‘how much can be done with a single contour?'” He includes the lines from Michelet's La Femme, ‘How can it be that a woman is left alone, anywhere on earth'. In a letter to Teo: I wanted to express the struggle for life in both that white, slender figure of the woman, and those angry, gnarled black roots.The State Lottery Office, The Hague, 1882: Women Miners, 1882:Weaver, 1884:Peasant Women Gleaning, 1885:Wheatfields with Sheaves, 1888The Old Peasant (Patience Escalier), 1888:Memory of the Garden at Etten, 1888:It was not Van Gogh's habit to paint from his imagination, but Gauguin encouraged him to do so. Van Gogh wrote to his sister: “there is not the least vulgar and fatuous ressemblance, yet the deliberate choice of the color, the sombre violet with the blotch of violent citron yellow of the dahlias suggest Mother's personality to me. The figure in the scotch plaid... against the sombre green of the cypress... further accentuated by the red parasol... gives me an impression of you like those in Dicken's novels.”Wheatfields with Cypresses, 1889Self-portrait, 1889:Midday, 1888-1889:L'Arlésienne: Madame Ginoux, 1889
The strength of her first poems is outstanding. Many favorites: “Parable”, “An adventure”, “The past”, “Faithful and virtuous night”, “Visitors from abroad”, “Utopia”, “Cornwall”, “The open window”, “A foreshortened journey”.
And then, there are “The Melancholy Assistant” and “The White Series” who could have been so much better, if only she would have stopped earlier, when the poem reached its natural conclusion... Instead, she added a few more verses, ending with a question, and the poem lost its unity.
I wanted to give it five stars but many poems on the last third lacked the splendor of the firsts.
A conversation to herself filled with rambling melancholy, grief, and bitterness. Invocations of Orpheus and colorless recollection of her dreams. I tried to find a single poem that I like, but I couldn't.
Reading it felt like I would be swallowed by her own emotions, but at the same time it left me completely distant, tired of the too much of her rambling. It is rare that I feel so pushed back by a collection of poetry, but this one did have this strong effect on me.
A very pleasant collection of poems. A complete discovery.
My favorites:
- What we don't know about each other
- A Crow
- What the dead know
- Beauty
- Learning how to write
- Minor Painter, Paris, 1954
- The Bad Muse
- What he thought about the party
- The house on the borderland
- The uses of nostalgia
- The other world
- Happiness
- Since you asked
- Old Times
- The weeping willows at home
- What I forgot to mention
- The Secret Life
- I did not finished this book. *
An extremely detailed biography of Harriett Tubman.
I - Introduction
“Tubman took her own liberty in the late fall of 1849. She tapped into an underground organization that was already functioning well on the Eastern Shore. Traveling by night, using the North Star and instructions from black and white helpers, she found her way in Philadelphia.
Over the next 11 years Tubman returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland approximately 13 times; in all, she personally brought away about 70 former slaves, including her brothers and other family and friends. She also gave instructions to approximately 50 more slaves who found their way to freedom independently.
Tubman's remarkable ability to travel undetected in slave territory piqued the interest of John Brown, a radical abolitionist and fiery freedom fighter. Tubman helped Brown plan for his ultimately flawed attack on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Her commitment led her to South Carolina during the Civil War, where she alternated roles as nurse and scoot, cook and spy, in the service of the Union army. Eventually, she became the first American woman ever to lead an armed raid into enemy territory.
Settling in Fleming, New York, outside the city of Auburn, after the Civil War, Tubman became an active member of the local African American community. She welcomed scores of orphaned children, destitute and sick former slaves, and others in need into her home.
She remained an active presence in the woman suffrage movement and continued her campaign for civil rights until her death in 1913.”
Chapter I - Life on the Chesapeake
“In Maryland, citizens from the Eastern Shore petitioned the House of Delegates in 1785 for the abolition of slavery. Abolitionist voices throughout Maryland became more influential, so much so that increasing numbers of slaves initiated successful lawsuits against their masters for their freedom. The slaveholders forced the Maryland state legislature to impose sanctions against the Maryland Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, effectively dismantling it by mid-1790's.
By the 1740s enslaved Africans had become the dominant labor resource for the expanding agricultural and timber economy of the Chesapeake. After banning slave imports in 1783, Maryland relied more and more on intraregional trading, smuggling and the natural growth of the slave community to increase its slave labor force.
Meanwhile, the state's free black population grew from 1,800 in 1755 to 8,000 in 1790 and 34,000 by 1810. As the free black population increased, whites became alarmed and quickly enacted new laws and code to restrict free blacks' political rights. By 1796 free blacks could no longer testify in court. Though some were given the right to vote if they have been free before 1783 and owned property, by 1802 all free blacks were stripped of voting rights, just as landless whites were gaining access to the vote.
During the War of 1812 British forces established a base on Tangier Island in the mouth of Chesapeake, where they made numerous successful attempts to entice slaves away from their owners to join the ranks of the British military, as the ‘Colonial Marines'.
Chapter 2 - The Changing world of the Eastern Shore
Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and runaway slave: “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time.”
Outlawed in 1793, the building of slave ships became a clandestine operation; it would take another twenty-five years before the penalties were serious enough to drive most Americans out of direct participation in the trade.
The American Colonization Society, founded in 1817 by prominent slaveholders, antislavery activists and non-slaveholders alike, sough to establish a colony in Africa to resettle free blacks. Faced with one the largest free black populations among the slave states, Maryland eventually established its own colonization society to expedite settlement to Cape Palmas in Liberia.
The transformation of cash-crop agriculture on the Eastern Shore had dramatically affected the nature of slavery by the beginning of the 19th century. Soil depletion, expansion into the Deep South, production of corn, wheat, and timber harvesting drastically reduced the need for a large slave labor force in Maryland. Meanwhile, there was a growing demand for labor on the rapidly expanding cotton and sugar plantations in the South. Professional slave traders became more common, so as the sight of slave coffles, groups of slaves chained together for their journey south.
Patriarcal, almost feudal attitudes toward inheritance from the 17th to the 19th centuries encourages intrafamily marriages that kept white family assets intact, including groups of slaves. This, in turn, ensured the stability of slave families within the region.
Gradual emancipation reduced the slave owners' obligation to provide board and care for aged slaves, and the children born of enslaved women would provide slave labor into perpetuity. From the point of view of the master, having family-oriented slaves kept them closer to the plantation and less likely to run away.”
Extracts from the first 10% of the book.
Mérimée, a well-known architect, travels to Spain in the company of a local guide. He soon befriends Jose Navarro, a famous criminal. In Cordoba, he meets Carmen, a free-spirit woman who tries to trap him, before being stopped by Jose Navarro himself. Mérimée gets himself together and goes back to the road. Months later, back to Cordoba, he visits Jose in jail, soon to be executed. The two men exchange a cigar, and soon begins the confession of a noble man who became bandit, of his life on the road, of his decisive meeting with the strong and mysterious Carmen.
Prosper Mérimée knows how to depict lively and multi-dimensional character who stays with you long after the book has been closed.
Read in French by Juliette via Audiocité.
A group of friends rented a house for vacations on the French Riviera. One day, a French tourist join them. The next day, Madame Henriette is gone. She left a note: she run away with the French man, leaving her husband and her kids behind. After the shock of the news, the group of friends gather, exchange opinions, and then quietly go back to their respective rooms. An old women, then, feels the need to confess a story that happened to her two decades ago: the story of 24 hours of the life of a woman.
I absolutely adored this novella. I was even refraining myself from not just just spending my full day listening to it. Stephan Zweig has such a incredible talent to describe life: the animation of hands, the micro-expressions of faces, the burst of a new emotion...
My first book from Stefan Zweig. Definitively not my last one.
Audiobook read in French by Isabelle Carré via Librivox.
What a brilliant first half of the book. I would have given it 5 stars. Everything is fluid, everything is so well written. And then there is this plot twist and everything changes. Everything had to change, but here the story looses itself. I no longer recognize the characters, all their behaviors and words feel fake or exaggerated, the events are narrated one after the other like a distant enumeration. People grow old, ‘this is what happens to x, this is what happens to y'. Lenú's daughters plot feels rushed, stereotypical or simply not interesting. It feels like the rushed summary of each character's lives is only there to please the ready or to delay the moment when the writer will have to end the book. Starts chapters of descriptions of the city's monuments, Lenú older talking about the plot of this exact same book, more of Lenú rambling and describing her daily routine...The last quarter of the book feels completely unedited and ends with a somehow feel-good moment, so different from the previous style of the book.
In the end, I love this full series, but the ending of each book disappointed me deeply and often made me forget the brilliance of the rest of it. Then I remember why those books are part of my classics, and I let their brillo comfort and change me.
On a very hot day, this poor dog is asking for help to cool down and no one is helping him, until finally someone helps him...
I understand the idea but it made me sad to see all those people and animals reject this poor baby dog. I don't like the concept, and it wouldn't feel right to me to read it to a kid.
Read and reviewed: 2018-08-12
Let's state some facts here, omitted from the book:
- Hera refused to be with Zeus, so he raped her and forced her to marry him.
- Zeus' first wife didn't just disappeared, he ate her.
- Hera did choose to live a life of revenge, killing, poisoning and cursing Zeus' mistress and offsprings.
- Hera threw a curse on Hercules that made him go insane and kill his wife and children.
- To ‘repent' from killing his family, Hera forced Heracles to achieve the 12 works.
- ... ... ...
I opened this graphic novel to learn more about the greek mythology. I would have given it 4 stars, but after talking about it with P, I realised that the book was full of omissions and lies, which completely plummeted its rating. I understand that the author wanted to make the myth “accessible”, but distorting that much the truth is serving no one. No need either to make Hera or Heracles “look good” by removing key points of their stories. They are nor absolutely good, nor absolutely bad. They are very complex and often crazy gods and humans. And that's it.
Sharp and beautiful artwork. Thin and clear storyline. Great composition. Visually violent. The book portraits the Apache Wars from the point of view of Native Americans. It examines well crucial events, people's complex motives, and the dynamism of people's hopes and grief. I lack knowledge in the subject, which made it harder for me to follow through and immediately understand complex events. Still, I didn't feel lost. Great storytelling. Great artwork. Great format.
I really enjoyed this one. I loved that there were more adventures and it felt more ‘dangerous'. There were some very funny parts like the theater moment. We discover a different face of Nightmare Knight, who slightly starts to help the heroes' team. The art work is still remarkable. But omg the music monster's scenes were soooooo visually oversaturated and painful! I know it was part of its power but wow, I was relieved that it didn't last for too long. Also enjoyed having a glimpse of the Nightmare Knight's superpowers. Excited about #4
The story of Pearl who runs away from her abusive dad and finds refuge with hobos during the Great Depression. She befriends an older man, R., who teaches her some streetwise life skills and helps her regain confidence. After months of travel, she slowly heals her grief and sets a new direction for her life. The ending made me feel uneasy. I enjoyed the drawing and the beautiful variations of watercolor. Overall a too simplified and romantized depiction of life in the streets, and a serious issue with the ending. I would not recommend it.