For a young American boy in the 1950s, Fontainebleau was a sight both strange and majestic. A provincial town just south of Paris, it is home to France's greatest chateau where Thad Carhart's father was assigned as a military officer. With humor and heart, Carhart conveys a rich panoply of French life in the '50s: the discovery of a Paris still covered in centuries of black soot; the strange bewilderment of a classroom where wine bottles dispensed ink for penmanship lessons; the excitement of camping in nearby Italy and Spain. What emerges is an insider's view of a postwar Europe rarely seen or largely forgotten. Against this background of deep change for France stands the Chateau of Fontainebleau. Begun in 1137, fifty years before the Louvre and more than five hundred before Versailles, the Chateau was a royal residence for centuries. A string of illustrious queens and kings - Marie Antoinette, Francois I, the two Napoleons - added to its splendors without appreciably destroying the imprint of their predecessors. As a consequence, the Chateau is unique in France, a supreme repository of French style, taste, art, and architecture. Carhat tells us the rich and improbable stories of these monarchs and of their love affair with a place like no other.
Before I started blogging, I could have counted on one hand the amount of memoirs I had read in my life. Over the last seven years, I have had the opportunity to read/review quite a few memoirs, and I have absolutely fallen in love with a genre I never knew I would. Reading the lyrical beauty of Finding Fontainebleau has just added to that love affair.
Part memoir, part travelogue, and part history book, Finding Fontainebleau has given me a greater appreciation for France, and for the first time in my life, I want to book a ticket, and get my butt over there. Mr. Carhart, who is now one of my favorite contemporary writers, has a skill in storytelling that makes me green with envy. I could only hope to write half as well as he does, though I know that it will never come to be. He weaves his personal history with that of France and Fontainebleau, and instead of being a fragmented mess, he is able to tie the two stories together. The narrative undulates back and forth, but never feels out of control.
For the last few weeks, this was the book I would read once I was in bed. And like any good bedtime story, the melodious tenor of Mr. Carhart's written cadence sent me to dreamland night after night. What I'm reading rarely influences what I dream of, but I can still recall my leisurely stroll through the rooms of Fontainebleau. I can only hope that I will be able to visit those halls for myself, but if that never comes to pass, I will have Finding Fontainebleau waiting on my shelves.
I would like to thank Lisa of TLC Booktours for the opportunity to read and review this book. Please visit the tour page to read more reviews.
Ranging ambitiously across four continents and four hundred years, Worlds Elsewhere is an eye-opening account of how Shakespeare went global. Seizing inspiration from the playwright's own fascination with travel, foreignness, and distant worlds - worlds Shakespeare never himself explored - Andrew Dickson takes us on an extraordinary journey: from Hamlet performed by English actors tramping through the Baltic states in the early sixteen hundreds to the skyscrapers of twenty-first-century Beijing and Shanghai, where "Shashibiya" survived Mao's Cultural Revolution to become a revered Chinese author. En route, Dickson traces Nazi Germany's strange love affair with, and attempted nationalization of, the Bard, and delves deep into their history of Bollywood, where Shakespearian stories helped give birth to Indian cinema. In Johannesburg, we discover how Shakespeare was enlisted in the fight to end apartheid. In nineteenth-century California, we encounter shoestring performances of Richard III and Othello in the dusty mining camps and saloon bars of the Gold Rush. No other writer's work has been performed, translated, adapted, and altered in such a remarkable variety of cultures and languages. Both a cultural history and a literary travelogue, Worlds Elsewhere is an attempt to understand how Shakespeare has become the international phenomenon he is - and why.
I'm going to put this out there before we even get started, I'm not a huge Shakespeare fan. It's not that I don't like him, but I can't say I would ever go out of my way to read one of his plays. In college, I played Philostrate in a production of A Midsummer's Night Dream, set in feudal Japan. I've enjoyed a few movie versions of Much Ado About Nothing, and I love the movie version of Titus Andronicus that I've seen. And outside of mandatory reading in high school and college, that's the extent of my dabbling with Shakespeare So for you die hard fans, I'm sorry that I'm not in love with the Bard, at least not as much as you are.
That lack of exposure to Shakespeare, is why I agreed to review this book. I was intrigued by the concept; the author traveling the globe, learning how particular cultures absorbed and interpreted his works for their own. For the most part, I really enjoyed the journey that Andrew Dickson took me on. I do wish he would have been able to visit a few other countries, but I get that finances dictate how much global traveling you can really do. And while there were moments that felt bogged down in detailed minutiae, I appreciated the work he put into the book, and his love for the subject shines through on every page.
After finishing the Worlds Elsewhere, while I can't say that my interest in Shakespeare's work has been increased, I will admit to having a little more respect for him, and the influence he has had on a global scale. I don't think I truly had an appreciate, or understanding, of how popular he was across the globe, and how adaptable his works are to other cultures, at least not on the level I was exposed to in this book. For that alone, for gaining a new appreciate for an author who is globally loved, I'm grateful for reading this book.
I would like to thank the publisher, Henry Holt, for providing a copy of Worlds Elsewhere, in exchange for an honest review.
Today, April 23rd, 2016, marks William Shakespeare's 400th birthday! Incidentally, it's also the anniversary of his death. In celebration, I have a copy of Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe by Andrew Dickinson, provided by Henry Holt, to give away.
If you ever wanted to know how Shakespeare's fascination with travel, though he never went anywhere, influenced his work, this is the book for you. But it's more than that, it's also a journey through time as the world has embraced him and his works, of how different cultures have interpreted and assimilated his work into their societies. It's a fascinating book, and one that I'm still digging into. I will have a review coming up shortly, but for now, I'm hoping you guys are ready to find out how to get your own copy.
All you have to do is leave a comment, telling me a personal tidbit about your relationship with Shakespeare. It's open to interpretation, so I'm looking forward to reading your comments. Please leave an email address that I can contact you with, if you are the winner. Sadly, this is only open to U.S. Residents. The giveaway will run until 11:59 pm CST, on 5/7/2016. The winner will be selected by random draw, and I will contact the winner by email. The winner will then have 4 days to get in touch with me, before I draw a new winner.
So good luck, and if you want to read more about the book, please visit the website at: WorldsElsewhereBook.com
Pioneer. Congressman. Martyr of the Alamo. King of the Wild Frontier. As with all great legends, Davy Crockett's has been retold many times. Over the years, he has been repeatedly reinvented by historians and popular storytellers. In fact, one could argue that there are three distinct Crocketts: the real David as he was before he became famous; the celebrity politician whose backwoods image Crockett himself created, then lost control of; and the mythic Davy we know today. In the road-trip tradition of Sarah Vowell and Tony Horwitz, Bob Thompson follows Crockett's footsteps from his birthplace in east Tennessee; to Washington, where he served three terms in Congress; and on to Texas and the gates of the Alamo, seeking out those who know, love, and are still willing to fight over Davy's life and legacy.
I came to know and love Davy Crockett in about the same manner as everyone else my age, or even thirty years older than me. It was watching Fess Parker play Davy Crockett for Disney, that made me fall in love with the adventures he had, and the kind of man he was. Parker's Davy was daring, generous, fearless, and about every other positive adjective I can think of. I wanted to go on his adventures and grow into the man he was. He was almost godlike to me as a kid, and all I wanted was that damn coonskin cap. I don't think I ever got that hat, but I never lost that feeling of adventure and awe that Davy, through Parker, instilled in me.
I was such a huge fan that when I finally had enough points with the Disney Movie Rewards program, the very first thing I ordered was the Davy Crockett Two Movie Set on DVD. At that point in time, my son had never seen anything about or knew who Davy Crockett was. When we got it in the mail, we fired it up, and I introduced my son to one of my childhood heroes. There is just something so magical about the way Fess Parker played him, because it got my son hooked on him and he wanted to know all about Davy, Colonel Travis, Jim Bowie, and all the rest of the heroes who died in the Alamo. I actually had to explain to him that Davy, though he is single handily fighting off the Mexican soldiers at the end of the movie, died. My son though he lived and prevailed since the image faded to black. He couldn't believe that this man, who he had just met, could die. This was a few years ago, and while my son isn't as fascinated by him as he was then, he will occasionally put the movie in, and relive the adventures all over again.
For me, watching them with my son, it brought back all the magic. I fell in love all over again. Now my love for Davy has never made me go out and do my own research into his life. I did buy a few children's books for my son after we had watched the movies for the first time, but I was never compelled to go out and read about the man himself. I think part of me was scared that if I got to know the real Davy Crockett, that some of the magic would go away. Even as a kid, I understood that the Davy I knew, was more myth like than real. That he had been built up into some sort of a demigod; much like Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Johnny Appleseed, or John Henry. He was a creation of fact and fiction, and I was worried that some of the fact would overshadow that myth.
It's that separation that Bob Thompson was trying to do in his book, Born on a Mountaintop: One the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier. Much like myself, he first discovered Davy through Fess Parker and Disney and rediscovered him through his kids. Unlike myself, he was curious enough to set out on a journey to try and discover the real Davy Crockett, who the man was behind the myth. What he found out is that sometimes, it's very hard to figure that out.
Our history books are not only full of facts and dates, but they include a fair amount of guesswork, myth building, and a even a tiny bit of fiction. Those boundaries seem to be even further blurred when is comes to Davy Crockett. So much of what we know, or think we know, is myth and reality combined into a rather tangled skein, difficult to comb out. Thompson, through interviews, talking with Davy addicted historians, visiting site and landmarks important to the life of Davy Crockett, and investigation some of the source material himself, tries to do some combing on his own. Oftentimes he discovers enough to make a solid decision on whether something is fact, fiction, or a blending of the two. Other times, he is left with having to make an educated assumption, understanding he may have it wrong.
I'm not sure we will ever know the complete factual details of Davy Crockett's life, nor do I think we need to. We need our heroes, our demigods, almost as much as the Greeks and Romans did. We need men and women to elevate to a higher plane, people we can look up to and celebrate. I'm not sure how much can actually be accomplished if we were able to bring them back down to Earth. I think it's best they are left up in the stratosphere, it gives us, and future generations an example of how to live our lives.
Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier gives us some of those missing facts, dispels some of the myths, but keeps the magic intact. Bob Thompson was able to create this wonderful balancing act of finding out the truth, what he could anyway, and keeping the myth whole. He didn't hurt the legend of Davy Crockett through this book, he made it stronger and brought more color to it. He kept Davy Crockett magical for me, but gave me more information about who the man actually was.
The wonderful group at Crown Publishers have generously offered my readers the chance to win a hardcover copy of this book for themselves. The giveaway will last until 11:59 pm, CST, on 4/11/13. You must be a resident of the United States to enter, and all you have to do is leave me a comment with your email address.
