Simon SchamaKirja-arvosteluja

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Read April 2014.

wasn't sure my appetite for pandemic information would remain after the whole covid experience, but it does. Schama takes a tour through history ( Even Prehistory) and does a Jared Diamond light exploration of how mankind has been effected by viruses and bacteria . It is interesting and well paced, with bits of color and humor. It is sometimes heavy handed in it's condemnation of the ignorant behavior of the colonizers of old.

Chapter 4 The Time of the Nightingale Ch 12 Poh-Lin Ch13 Americans Ch 13 Turning Point
Should I learn to photograph pages? $18:99 Apple’s “Books”
Amsterdam, Spinoza.

Sat Extra 22:07:23
Current history of the pandemic and causal factors

Late Night Live 27:07:23 An early book written while teaching Environment History Now Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University.

While the future of America does get some mention in The American Future: A History. The book definitely spends more time on the past. Wars and the founding fathers played a large part, but the topics which most interested me were the fascinatingly detailed and very specific depictions of the horrible atrocities white America committed against the Native Americans, The Chinese, Latin Americans, and The Slaves. This came as no surprise to me, but some of the details were shocking !

Compulsively readable. Erudite yet clear. Vivid, entertaining, chilling, and accessible. One of the best works of history I've ever read.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-face-of-britain-by-simon-schama/

This book is about pictures in the UK’s National Portrait Gallery, attached to a BBC series which I didn’t see. I have come to appreciating art rather late in life, and perhaps as a result I really enjoyed this look at the history and culture of portraiture. Every chapter is a nicely shaped story about a particular artist or group of artists, or occasionally about their subjects – the section on Emma Hamilton is a real eye-opener if all you know about her is her romance with Nelson. It’s a big book – 600 pages before you get the the end notes – but well illustrated and well worth it.

It’s always great to find new artists to enjoy, and my particular discoveries here were Gwen John, who I had at least heard of before, and Laura Knight, who I’m ashamed to say was a new name to me. This in itself says something about my previous encounters with art – she is not a minor figure, and lived to be 93, and I see that the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester has 13 of her works but I failed to notice any of them when I was there. Her Self-Portrait with Nude is absolutely stunning.

I learned a lot from this very entertaining book.

Dead Certainties is a bit of a strange book. Simon Schama combines two stories within it: one called The Many Deaths of General Wolfe recounts Wolfe"s demise in battle, and then looks at the mythologising that followed it, in the forms of Benjamin West's famous painting, and the history of Francis Parkman.

The second story, called Death of a Harvard Man, occupies most of the book. It concerns the disappearance and murder of noted Boston capitalist George Parkman (an antecedent of Francis Parkman's) and the subsequent sensational trial of Harvard Professor John Webster for the crime. Schama's somewhat fictionalised account is an engrossing retelling of a quite gruesone and scandalous affair.

I found it a struggle to grasp the point that Schama was trying to make in combining these two stories. Despite both a Foreword and an Afterword where Schama tries to explain his idea, I can only see the most tenuous connection between the two, and would have enjoyed the book just as much - if not more - if Schama focused solely on the story of the Webster trial, and left Wolfe out of it.

Have to admit I stopped reading a quarter in to watch the documentary instead. Watch the series first—the visual medium is so much more suited for art (in my opinion) and is much richer than just text, no matter how vibrant Schama's writing is. It's all on YouTube... no excuses!!

1000-page book that can be overdone at times, but also can be tremendously eye-opening in its discussion of the culture prior to the killings. Somehow no history class I ever took didn’t basically condense the French Revolution into the taking of the Bastille and the killing of the royals. This book blows that apart and gives a wonderful background to all the various moves amongst all the various players that went on for years. I never knew that the King was considered by the populace for quite a while to be an essential part of the Revolution.

The hysterical hatred for the Queen prior to her killing (pamphlets were voraciously consumed across the nation that portrayed ‘the Austrian Bitch’ being constantly engaged in orgies and sexual depravities of all kinds, sometimes including her own children) mimics the current hysterical hatred for Trump now. Smears ran rampant, with no concern for whether they were true or not.

“This is not to imply however that nothing of consequence changed as a direct result of the first phase of the French Revolution. The liberties enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man for the protection of free speech
publication and assembly had brought forth a political culture in which the liberation of disrespect literally knew no bounds. It was by far the most dramatic creation of the Revolution.”½

Was very easy to read and follow the outline of events in the history of Britain. More a general history and help in clarifying what part of British history I may be interested in reading next after these 3 volumes.

Covers the French Revolution from preconditions to the death of Robespierre. The subject is practically custom-made for this reader-friendly narrative format: a series of key plot points with spectacular imagery including the Tennis Court Oath, the Bastille, various marches and riots, the guillotine, the fate of the royal family, Marat in his bath, etc. Schama layers in several asides that add flavour and a strong sense of the period such as Jean Jacob, a spectacularly old man being hailed as the spirit of the nation, and Theroigne de Mericourt dressed in flamboyant red, marshalling the women's march. Eight hundred pages makes for a long saga but it is never stale, and the many inserted images (paintings, portraits, propaganda) help break things up.

In high school I'd imagined the Revolution as the act of a united people claiming their rights and freedoms, a designed and concerted effort to establish something new and modern - a mirror image of the American Revolution from a decade earlier. Now I see a monarchy overthrown almost haphazardly when it didn't deliver on promises that it didn't realize it was making; first by a nobility grown heady on Rousseau with visions of a utopian society, and second by population that perceived themselves the victims of royalist conspiracy - a designed-to-be-poor economy that starved them, backed with inconsistent taxation policies inconsistently applied.

When the new government - almost entirely composed of the upper classes - tried to right these wrongs, only then did they perceive the difficulties involved. Their solutions were more drastic than anything the king had tried, leading to finger pointing and recriminations among themselves as foreign powers threatened and the economy only worsened. The population remained restless, swayed by whoever accused loudest. One at a time weaker opponents were eliminated in the Revolution's name - royalists first, then moderates - until only those extremists were left who were willing to create a police state that at last harnessed violence. Eventually the monster ate itself, and it only remained for a man like Napoleon Bonaparte to pick up the pieces.

Schama wears his opinions on his sleeve, sometimes in flat assertions that he boldly states run counter to prevailing views, sometimes in amusing sarcasm when noting strategic errors: "If [the king] had wanted to invent reasons for journalists to accuse him of considering the rights of foreign dynasts over French patriots, he could hardly have done a better job." Being a bit too demanding for an introduction to the subject, my highschool memories provided just enough background. Where those lessons offered the bare bones, this book is the muscle.

Full of fascinating historical tidibits paired with travel across the United States. The book ends on the optimistic note of Obama's election as President, seems quaint these days.

“’Why don’t you just stick to history?’ the trolls yell when they take exception to something I might have tweeted, or written in the pages of the Financial Times about Brexit or the giddy black comedy that is the Trump presidency.” (Simon Schama, Wordy, p. 261)

But perhaps some brief non-trollish criticism is in order anyway:

1) Back-to-back essays in this collection are about the horrors of Trump’s America and are uncharacteristically repetitive.

2) Shortly thereafter the reader is whiplashed by hagiographies of Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger.

3) When Schama writes about the contemporary art scene, he seems to spend a lot of time celebrating that which is not in fact praiseworthy.

4) Is there anybody but another foody that is interested in the writings of Simon the Foody?

Yes, Schama is an immensely talented writer, and reading roughly 7000 pages of his has left me wanting more. But his historical writings, where he forgets himself and focuses on the past, are the ones to be treasured.

If Rembrandt’s career had a high-point, it was probably the Spring of 1642. Thirty-six years old and the most successful painter in Amsterdam, he was head of a busy workshop attracting paying students from all over the Netherlands and beyond. It was also the year of The Night Watch, his most prestigious and lucrative commission. And yet, even during this period our knowledge of him is sketchy; he wrote few letters and never kept a diary or journal.
   Simon Schama’s solution is to suggest a picture of the man himself by telling us (at some length) about everything else; so, a bit like Tristram Shandy, we’re beyond page 200 before we even get to Rembrandt’s birth. Those first two hundred pages, in fact, are a biography of Peter-Paul Rubens, the painter at that time and who the young Rembrandt (perhaps) aspired to out-paint. Besides being a great artist himself, Rubens was also a diplomat: for decades he acted as an envoy to the Netherlands when his native Flanders was a Spanish colony—so Schama gives us the political and historical background to all that. Rembrandt by contrast, son of a miller, grew up in the conservative, ultra-Calvinist, town of Leiden—so we get plenty of background about Leiden, Calvinism and flour-milling. Later he moved to Amsterdam, so we get chapters about its founding, subsequent history, layout, geography…hydrographics…background backing up even further into its own background, and so on. It is one way of going about this, but for me didn’t quite come off—at times I felt I was reading the film version of The Invisible Man: doors opening mysteriously, furniture moving about on its own, but no Man himself.
   When talking about Rembrandt’s art, though, now there Schama is superb: ‘The painting here is barely recognisable as brushwork at all…From zone to zone it varies radically in feel and texture where Rembrandt was evidently experimenting with different rates of drying and layering. In some passages, the paint seems first thickly laid on and then thinned out, by scouring, scraping, or combing, giving the upper layer a fibrous, stringily matted feel. In other areas, the paint is muddily coagulate, puddled, dripped, and caked; in other spots, more granular and abraded…the paint itself made more pasty and opaquely solid, often with the addition of gritty material like crushed quartz and silica…’
   So what do we learn about Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (like Raphael and Michelangelo, one of that select band known by their first names)? Well, while he wasn’t a reader and owned few books, he was an insatiable collector of curiosities and his house was crammed with everything from antique weapons and musical instruments, fossils, shells and lumps of coral, to a stuffed (and legless) Bird of Paradise. His intelligence is obvious from the sheer amount of thought that went into his paintings, but the death of his wife Saskia (of tuberculosis, also in 1642 not long after the completed Night Watch was handed over) changed his art and, surely, helped produce the character which Schama summarises as, ‘rather cantankerous, compulsively avaricious…a cranky and disagreeably eccentric figure, short-fused and obdurate…’ His later troubles (and they were many) were mostly self-inflicted.
   He was also undeniably a genius, the drawings at least as good as the paintings and this book does them justice—perfect reproductions throughout. Schama also gets across just how far ahead of his time Rembrandt was. Even by the mid-seventeenth century the majority of Amsterdam’s money was still in the hands of the Church and the aristocracy, so to make a living as a painter largely meant doing Bible-scenes and formal portraits. Both had extremely strict rules about what did, and what did not, make an acceptable painting, and Rembrandt could do these better than most. But he also had a mind of his own, the mind of a true artistic explorer; and after the lukewarm reception which greeted Night Watch, then the death of Saskia, increasingly went his own way. He began to probe beyond the edges of the artistic map, leaving behind the photographic realism then in fashion and experimenting with ways of painting which would today be called ‘impressionistic’ and wouldn’t be explored as seriously again for another two hundred years. The reaction was predictable: to his contemporaries these ‘rougher’ pictures looked unfinished and received the same baffled stares and outright hooting the likes of Turner, Degas and Monet would all be subjected to in England and Paris two centuries later.
   One thing we do know well about Rembrandt is what he looked like, because he painted plenty of self-portraits and at every stage of his career. I lived in London for thirty years and often used to hike up Highgate Hill just to stand in front of the one in Kenwood House: there he sits, looking back at us from almost four centuries ago as if he’s just this second put his brush down, the paint still wet. And that steady, unruffled, expression on his face: approaching sixty now, his life has been pretty much a disaster; he’s alone, virtually penniless and much of his work derided. But the best of it, particularly those ‘unfinished’ ones like this very self-portrait, will light up the future history of art. And he knows.

É uma história como nenhuma outra: uma epopeia de resistência contra a destruição, de criatividade sob a opressão, de alegria contra o desgosto e uma afirmação de vida contra as mais difíceis possibilidades.
Esta obra abrange milénios e continentes. Leva o leitor a locais nunca imaginados: a um reino judaico nas montanhas do Sul da Arábia, a uma sinagoga síria, às palmeiras sob as quais jazem os judeus mortos nas catacumbas romanas. E as suas vozes fazem-se ouvir com toda a clareza, dos rigores e dos êxtases dos autores da Bíblia aos poemas de amor num jardim da Espanha muçulmana. E uma grande história desenrola-se. Não a história de uma cultura à parte - como muitas vezes se imagina - mas de um mundo judaico imerso no meio dos outros povos no meio dos quais viveram e que os marcaram. O que faz da história dos judeus também a história de todos nós.

I couldn’t put it down. One of the most compelling introductions to any subject I’ve ever read. Now, in museums, in classes, in my room surfin’ the net, I find myself remembering the sordid, passionate lives of Caravaggio and Van Gogh and Rothko and David. And Schama portrays each one in such vividly articulated descriptions, from their life to their artwork.

I must say, though, that I despise the Rothko chapter—maybe because I can’t stand his art, either. Who gives a shit about red lines on a canvas. And sure, no, I’m not one to criticize modern art—although after reading this book, you’ll feel prepared.

If I can choose one thing about this book, it’s the way Schama constantly attempts to propel emotions into us, to drive them in like darts, describing each painting as if it was a world within its own, our world, our reality, as if it was burnt onto our eyelids, as if we were blind and needed to know exactly how to feel, how to understand.

Incredible.

A história dos Judeus é sobre, e para, toda a humanidade. E na nossa época de chegadas ansiosas e partidas forçadas, a memória da procura de um lar pelos Judeus tem uma importância sem precedentes.
Esta obra é uma história cultural extraordinária, palpitante de energia e cor, que se estende por séculos e continentes: partindo da expulsão dos Judeus de Espanha em 1492, navega por milagres e massacres, deambulações, discriminação, harmonia e tolerância até aos alvores do século XX, que parecia trazer uma esperança profunda para todos.
CRÍTICAS DE IMPRENSA
«Uma melodia rica faz-se ouvir acima do ruído do preconceito e da perseguição […] Schama tornou-se o maior divulgador da história do nosso tempo. Este segundo volume da trilogia é uma profissão de fé na narrativa grandiosa […] O seu tom familiar e informal evidencia a missão assumida por Schama: que o seu papel na história dos Judeus seja dar vida a essa mesma história […] Uma obra preciosa.» Daniel Johnson,
The Times
«Simon Schama é um tesouro internacional [...] Como se fosse um pintor, transmite cor, textura, forma, contexto, luz e sombra, e estimula-nos os sentidos […] É imaginativo, mordaz e intrépido […] um cicerone efervescente que ensina e diverte em igual medida.»
Bernard Wasserstein, Spectator
«Uma extraordinária viagem cultural, cheia de personagens coloridos e extravagantes […] Schama conduz-nos num périplo soberbo e cativante, tão inspirador como trágico.»
Simon SebagMontefiore, Mail on Sunday
«Rico, complexo e fascinante […] Schama capta a nossa atenção com a vivacidade da escrita e o talento para desencantar personagens cativantes, cheias de contradições humanas. E é graças a esta imersão impressionante nos dramas que o retrato de cada época se desenha lentamente perante os nossos olhos.» Andrew Anthony, Observer
Uma proeza magnífica […] um desfile de gente que exsuda vitalidade [...] pintada em cores luminosas […] Com o seu elenco de personagens vibrantes, Schama desafia várias asserções estabelecidas, e mesmo estereótipos, sobre a história judaica e os próprios Judeus […] Ainda que grande parte da história dos Judeus possa ser vista como uma caminhada mortal através de catástrofes, epidemias e pogrom, o livro de Schama palpita de vida.»
Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian
«Magistral [...] a obra de um historiador de classe mundial no auge dos seus poderes criativos […] riquíssima, intensamente evocativa e sensorial. Com um alcance assombroso e um poder de síntese extraordinário, Schama capta o drama da história dos Judeus.»
Financial Times

This monumental study of Rembrandt, the product of what the author describes as “the attentiveness of an engaged beholder,” uses the recoverable facts of the artist’s life and close readings of his rich body of work in an act of mutual illumination. Both are set against a detailed description of the turbulent times: the war of independence from Spain and the decades of Amsterdam’s sway as the Venice of the North. By the time I finished, I was convinced that Rembrandt was indeed, as I suspected, the premier artist of the 17th century.
Rembrandt’s life followed an arc appropriate for such a towering artist: talent recognized early, spotted by an advisor to the Dutch court, the years of fame and lucrative commissions, the death of his wife, years of bankruptcy and scandal, and the masterpieces of the late years, scorned at the time since they were out of step with changing fashion.
He didn’t arise in a vacuum, any more than any artist does. In particular, he was inspired (and to a certain degree oppressed) by the example of his older contemporary on the other side of the new divide in the Spanish Netherlands, Rubens in Antwerp. Schama terms Rubens Rembrandt’s “paragon” in the full sense of the word, including both emulation and competition. To document this, Schama even includes a book within a book: a roughly two-hundred-page biography of Rubens.
Recurrent themes—physical blindness and spiritual insight, for instance—run through Rembrandt’s lifelong output. One feels his quest was not only artistic but also spiritual. In a time and place torn by confessional strife, Rembrandt remained the outsider. No record of his baptism has been found. He numbered among friends and clients Catholics, Mennonites, and Jews, as well as representatives of both sides of the quarrel over predestination and free will among the Protestants in the land. Schama calls him one of nature’s ecumenicals. Although not a church member, many of his best works have biblical themes. Among the thirteen canvases found in his studio in various stages of completion when he died are a pair, “The Return of the Prodigal Son” and “Simeon in the Temple with the Christ Child,” that, taken together, seems a final confession and absolution.
Rembrandt’s entire life and career took place after the Dutch, inspired by the Reformation, banished all images from their churches, influenced by the command to make no graven images. Yet Rembrandt created what Schama calls Protestant icons. I think he is correct. When I first visited the Rijksmuseum, fifty-five years ago, one of the reproductions I bought, mounted on beaverboard, was “Peter’s Denial of Christ,” despite my Puritan fervor at the time that convinced me it was wrong to have depictions of God or Christ. Nevertheless, that print has traveled with me through every move and has hung in every one of a succession of home offices.
Be careful when you read this book: it is large and heavy. You might avoid aching wrists if you place it on a stand when you read it. Other than that, the only quibble I have is that sometimes the writing is too fine. In particular, Scham enjoys opening a new section circuitously, novelistically. This was disorienting at times. Aside from that, this book is a remarkable achievement, worthy of its subject.

The second volume of the author's wide and detailed history of the Jews, his one covering the medieval to the modern periods up to the end of the 19th century. The history itself is a searing one, with a continual oppression and physical assault on the Jews and their settlements across the western and Muslim worlds. Unexpectedly, the Muslim states have proven to be less unrelenting in this than the more highly "civilised" Christian societies; these latter have held all Jews to be still answerable for the martyring of Jesus, and have fomented popular revulsion by repeating various calumnies, e.g. that Jews needed the blood of human sacrifices for their rituals. The present volume stops at the brink of a revival of a Jewish state in Palestine, and also does not cover the most horrifying of the atrocities against Jews, the Nazi genocide in mid-20th century. The account is all the more searing by eschewing any self-pity or emotionalism, reflecting the philosophical resignation to the will of God adopted historically by most of the Jews themselves. The author does not seem to be proferring any theories to explain this disproportionate propensity to violence and blood-lust in a civilisation based on a religion of forgiveness and compassion (Christianity), perhaps because of the tendency of many commentators to suggest deficiencies in the Judaic system and people themselves (which would amount to blaming the victim). Thus this volume at least does not seem to be offering us any guide to the future of the Jews, or to the directions in which the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) should develop in the future if these deep fractures in world civilisation are to be bridged.

Finally, a bit about the style: this is not a straight chronological narrative, but is more of a literary effort. The style is dense with unfamiliar Hebrew terms, names of persons and locations, and allusions to Biblical and classical sources. As such, it appears to presume a basic familiarity with these, perhaps not unreasonable among Westerners, but a bit of an obstacle to the average reader from other parts of the world. It is also a massive work, with perhaps more details than can be absorbed at a first reading. Much of the time, the average reader may not be very clear what the author is saying or implying. However, all this does not detract from the significance and weightiness of this book, which should probably be read by anyone willing to try and understand the world today.½

There is such a massive amount of content covered that you can't completely fault Schama for sounding a bit exhausted. In fact, he is so fatigued that he is assured, at times, that you must be as well. He takes a complete pass of the War of the Roses and the associated monarchs with the notion that you either love this kind of thing or it's all an historical blur of tedious royal machinations and intrigue. And it's not as if we're in disagreement here. It's just the tone that seems off. If you're decided to take a go at being the teller of Britannia's tales then have at it.

As an American, there are also bits missing. The "we all know this guy" trend runs throughout the book. By this point in my waddle through English history I'm better off than the average Yank, but that isn't saying much.

Schama is hugely talented. This just doesn't feel like his book. His voice bubbles up occasionally when he brings in the stories that color in the detail. When he's present and interested the reader is sucked in and finds that the heavy book is worth the holding. All too often though it reads roughly like one of my 3rd grade history reports "this happened... and then they did this... and this guy fought with this guy... and this guy died but he had kids... then there his kids fought with each other... and there was some church stuff."

I'm going to give the second book a go, despite this first outing. I always liked Godfather 2 better anyway. To the mattresses!

A highly engaging account of the history of the Jews during the medieval period. This volume does not cover the trauma of World War II and the holocaust of the German killing camps, so any reaction or assessment of the book may be relieved of the awful moral responsibility for that horror. However, it seems that the author assumes a certain familiarity with the foundation myths of the Jewish religion at the beginning of the book, such as the exile to Egypt and the return to Israel under the leadership of Moses, the commandments received from God, the awful sacrifice (of his own son, and not in an allegorical fashion) that God demanded of Abraham, the special covenant that God made with the Jews, and so on. For a reader not born or brought up in the so-called Abrahamic religious milieu, these fairly dire happenings invoke a puzzled wonder. In succeeding chapters, the book goes on to describe the almost unrelenting onslaught of the Christian and later the Moslem world on these unfortunate people, which is all the more puzzling to us outsiders, as all these so-called universal faiths evidently arose from that very Abrahamic covenant, and claim to be worshiping the very same universal and singular Lord of the Universe. So far, this history reinforces one's relief at being born into a culture and religion that assures us that though the Truth (or God) is one, there are many paths to reach it (or It). The author himself seems to be approving of the relatively more syncretist, multi-cultural life of the Jewish outposts in Pharaonic Egypt (at the start of the book), and perhaps is hinting at the need to make the faith more relaxed. The other great message that I would draw is that Eastern and traditional cultures and religions based on such a universalist, tolerant belief system should hang on to their basically open and welcoming values, and refrain from hardening their systems and boundaries just because the monotheists have been taunting them for all these hundreds of years of being idolatrous, unmanly, vain, sinful, or other calumnies of a similar nature.

Popolo dalle origini millenarie, gli Ebrei sono protagonisti della serie al via martedì 31 luglio su Sky Arte. Condotta da Simon Schama, saggista e storico dell’arte, la serie accende i riflettori sulla storia della cultura ebraica, posta in dialogo con il resto del mondo. (fonte: Sky)