Newspapers, magazines and websites have been publishing their summer reading lists, heavy on fast-reads like Pat Conroy’s new South of Broad, due in August, and a quasi-memoir by Susie Boyt called My Judy Garland Life. Fine. But if you want to head for the
beach or the mountains with something arts-related, yet not too heavy, here’s a list of new and recent books that I made while perusing publishers’ ads, catalogues and websites (exhibition catalogues were excluded, as were most heavily illustrated books).
Preface: I didn’t see many new Girl-With-A-Pearl Earring-style novels — just one, possibly — though they may be out there (feel free to send them to me, and I will post them).
**Florence 1900: The Quest for Arcadia by Bernd Roeck, translated by Stewart Spencer (Yale University Press). Based on letters, diaries and notebooks of an art historian named Aby Warburg, the book chronicles the lives and times of Florence’s inhabitants and visitors (Wilde, Rilke, Degas, etc.) at the turn of the century, exploring the cafes, theaters, galleries and salons just as Renaissance Florence was about to enter the modern age.
**The Gargoyles of Notre Dame by Michael Camille (University of Chicago Press). Writing a comprehensive history of the monsters everyone loves to see, Camille details their construction in the 19th century and argues that they transformed the iconic thirteenth-century cathedral into a modern monument.
**Kander and Ebb by James Leve (Yale University Press). In this first study of the Broadway musical team, Leve draws on their personal papers to examine their artistic accomplishments, contributions to the American musical, and the nature of their collaboration.
**The Last Judgment: Michelangelo and the Death of the Renaissance by James A.
Connor
(Palgreve Macmillan). The author tells the history of the famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel, using it to explore the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the religious and political
upheavals about to occur.
**Arthur Miller by Christopher Bigsby (Harvard University Press). To quote Library Journal: [A]
multiperspective masterpiece, which surpasses all other Miller biographies, including his autobiography…gives…an intense and personal look at Miller’s life, from his birth in 1915 to moderately affluent Jewish American parents and his college years working at a newspaper to his intense attraction and eventual marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Part Two coming soon.