en-US Tue, 03 Dec 2024 06:19:28 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 19353307 26 Zoe Waters Paul 0 to-read 2.00 2013
author: Zoe Waters
name: Paul
average rating: 2.00
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/03
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]]> 32525 1150 Fred S. Kleiner 0155050907 Paul 5 3.81 1926
author: Fred S. Kleiner
name: Paul
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1926
rating: 5
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date added: 2017/10/18
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]]> 10710392
But nothing is what it seems, and Glory's reality is not reality at all. In this stunningly moving novel told in photographs, pictures, and words, it's up to the reader to decide what is real, what is imagined, and what has been madness all along....]]> 272 Jessica Anthony 1595144358 Paul 5 3.83 2012
author: Jessica Anthony
name: Paul
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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date added: 2017/10/18
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]]> 10836810 A stunning story of love, sexual obsession, treachery, and tragedy, about an artist and her most famous muse in Paris between the World Wars.

Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka.

Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara's most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished—and coveted—works of art. A season as the painter's muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history's darkening tide.

Inspired by real events in de Lempicka's history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, The Last Nude is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret, and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance.]]> 320 Ellis Avery 1594488134 Paul 5 3.89 2012
author: Ellis Avery
name: Paul
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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date added: 2017/10/18
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]]> 7821828 The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who “burned like a comet” in nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox.

The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection.

The netsuke—drunken monks, almost-ripe plums, snarling tigers—were gathered by Charles Ephrussi at the height of the Parisian rage for all things Japanese. Charles had shunned the place set aside for him in the family business to make a study of art, and of beautiful living. An early supporter of the Impressionists, he appears, oddly formal in a top hat, in Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. Marcel Proust studied Charles closely enough to use him as a model for the aesthete and lover Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.

Charles gave the carvings as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor in Vienna; his children were allowed to play with one netsuke each while they watched their mother, the Baroness Emmy, dress for ball after ball. Her older daughter grew up to disdain fashionable society. Longing to write, she struck up a correspondence with Rilke, who encouraged her in her poetry.

The Anschluss changed their world beyond recognition. Ephrussi and his cosmopolitan family were imprisoned or scattered, and Hitler’s theorist on the “Jewish question” appropriated their magnificent palace on the Ringstrasse. A library of priceless books and a collection of Old Master paintings were confiscated by the Nazis. But the netsuke were smuggled away by a loyal maid, Anna, and hidden in her straw mattress. Years after the war, she would find a way to return them to the family she’d served even in their exile.

In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal unfolds the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century. Sweeping yet intimate, it is a highly original meditation on art, history, and family, as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves.

]]> 368 Edmund de Waal 0374105979 Paul 5 3.95 2010
author: Edmund de Waal
name: Paul
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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date added: 2017/10/18
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]]> 10505 History of Beauty, making this intellectual and philosophical journey with one of the world’s most acclaimed thinkers available in a more compact and affordable format.

From the Trade Paperback edition]]> 438 Umberto Eco 0847826465 Paul 5 3.83 2004
author: Umberto Eco
name: Paul
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2004
rating: 5
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date added: 2017/10/18
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]]> 1235368
Gabrielle/Sister Luke is stretched between her desire to be faithful to the rule of her congregation and her desire to be a nurse. As a nun she must remove all vestiges of "Gabrielle Van Der Mal" and sublimate herself into the devoted bride of Christ. As a nun there is no room for her personal desires and aspirations. Ultimately, the conflict between her devotion to the Church and the nursing profession, juxtaposed with her passionate Belgian patriotism and her love of her father (killed by Nazi fighter planes while treating wounded) bring her to an impasse, which serves as the dénouement of the novel.]]> 339 Kathryn Hulme 0316381357 Paul 0 to-read 4.20 1952
author: Kathryn Hulme
name: Paul
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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date added: 2017/10/18
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