Heidi Ardizzone
Auteur de An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege
A propos de l'auteur
Heidi Ardizzone is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame. (Bowker Author Biography)
Crédit image: Uncredited photo at W.W.Norton
Œuvres de Heidi Ardizzone
An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (2007) 166 exemplaires
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 2
- Membres
- 214
- Popularité
- #104,033
- Évaluation
- 3.7
- Critiques
- 6
- ISBN
- 6
Heidi Ardizzone is strong at showing how class, race, and gender intersected in the U.S. (and to a certain extent the western Europe) of the period, and at using the surviving letters which Greene wrote to her on-off lover, the art critic Bernard Berenson, to reconstruct something of her relationship. Ardizzone is less interested in—or perhaps limited by the surviving source material, it's difficult to tell—Greene's work as a medievalist and librarian, topics that I would have loved to know more about. As a medieval historian myself, I had heard of Greene and her legacy before I ever picked up this book, but I'm not sure based on what I read here that I quite have a handle on the arc of her career or why she became so influential—we get lots of quotations from Greene's love letters but nothing from, e.g. one of the manuscript catalogues she compiled which might have shown us something of her mastery of the field. On a prose level, this is also quite lumpy, with a lot of needless repetition that could have been cut to make for a stronger book. (Also, an eyebrow-raising number of typos in a professionally printed book—and I'm not just talking about the references to "Bell" Greene "per say.")
These quibbles aside, this is still an interesting look at the life of a woman who demanded notice even as she strove to remain elusive, and who seized the opportunities she could from a specific moment in U.S. history.… (plus d'informations)