Ah, St. Patrick’s Day is upon us, when Chicago turns its river green for the day and New York closes down Fifth Avenue and parade-watchers wear Kiss Me, I’m Irish buttons. It is easy to forget the terrible tragedy that first brought so many Irish to America in the mid–19th century, when, in 1845, a fungus-like water mold devastated potato crops across Europe. But nowhere was the destruction so severe as it was in Ireland, where millions relied on potatoes both as the main staple of their diet and as a source of income. In a brilliant and engaging analysis, Padraic X. Scanlan places the Great Famine, which killed at least a million people and caused millions more to flee the country, firmly in the context of British imperialism and London’s badly conceived plan to use the crisis as a way to turn an agrarian society into a capitalist one.
There are valuable lessons here not just about the past but for the future as well, as the world copes with poorly treated farm laborers and ecological disasters. It is too strong to say that the United Kingdom treated some of their subjects as if they wore Starve Me, I’m Irish buttons, but it is undeniable that the shameful behavior by the English back then became a trauma that dramatically shaped the Irish. Rot is narrative history at its best.
Michael Manfredi
The authors, two architects much lauded for incorporating nature into their work in public spaces, not only offer a superb record of their own portfolio but explain why the work of others is to be studied and emulated. So, for example, they illustrate the challenges of redesigning the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, in Los Angeles, such as linking the indoor and outdoor exhibits with a triple-loop walkway, and later pay tribute to the architects of the Sydney Opera House, who took into consideration the water’s edge, “from which the signature billowing roof shells mystically emerge.”
Especially illuminating is their chapter on designing the visitor center at New York’s Brooklyn Botanical Garden, a truly engaging work with its glazed breezeway and curved glass walls. The building is a perfect entryway into the world of trees and flowers, a partnership between architecture and nature that makes the sum so much greater than its parts. The book itself is a work of both art and scholarship, with essays from a score of contributors and edited by Eric Bellin. A first-class job.
John Singer Sargent is one of the greatest portrait painters of all time, famous for his depictions of British aristocrats and Boston Brahmins, so Jean Strouse was surprised when she happened upon an exhibition of his paintings at the Seattle Art Museum in 2001. Here were a dozen portraits he had painted of a London family called the Wertheimers, whose patriarch had been an art dealer and who had become both a patron and a friend of the artist. This inspired Strouse, who had already written acclaimed biographies of J. P. Morgan and Alice Adams, to delve into the relationship between the American-born Sargent and the Wertheimers, whose Jewish roots made them slight outcasts in Victorian and Edwardian England.
She tracked down descendants, letters, and an unpublished memoir, and the result is a beautifully written group portrait not just of Sargent and the extended Wertheimer family but of their friends—Monet, Picasso, and Diaghilev among them—and the social milieu they inhabited. Family Romance captures wonderfully what Strouse says Sargent himself captured in his paintings: a time of “fading grandeur and fresh energies, the colors and shadows, the dazzle and unease of a world in flux.”
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIl
