Vanished Splendors A Memoir

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Vanished Splendors: A Memoir

Author : Balthus
Publisher : Ecco
ISBN 13 : 9780066212609
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (126 download)

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Book Synopsis Vanished Splendors: A Memoir by : Balthus

Download or read book Vanished Splendors: A Memoir written by Balthus and published by Ecco. This book was released on 2002-12-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The painter Balthus, whose tenacity and cultivated taste for secrecy have enveloped him in an aura of forbidding mystery, wrote this memoir at the end of his long life. A man who for decades opted to "give expression to the world" rather than to "express" himself speaks for the first and only time about his life, family, work, his theory of art and how it intersects with history, literature, and spirituality. Balthus was born Balthasar Klossowski in 1908 to Polish art historian Erich Klossowski and his wife, the painter Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro. The family lived in Germany, France, and Switzerland. In this memoir Balthus describes his childhood with his mother and her lover -- the poet Rainer Maria Rilke -- who became Balthus's own spiritual mentor. He evokes la vie de boheme in Paris during the 1920s, his friendships with Picasso, Derain, Artaud, Giacometti, Saint-Exupéry, René Char, Pierre Jean Jouve, and Albert Camus. He discusses his paintings, offers glimpses into his marriage, and expresses his passion for Chinese art and the Swiss chalets and Italian villas that he helped to restore. He recalls touching moments with his beloved daughter Harumi and the inspiration he drew from his cats. Also, in a kind of final lesson, Balthus shares his thoughts about painting and creation, denounces contemporary art as being illusory and deceitful, and talks candidly about his Catholic faith and how it inspired his work. "We are most charmed by the memoir's ease of expression, as if Balthus were confiding in us, as individuals," writes Joyce Carol Oates in her introduction to Vanished Splendors. "We are brought into a startling intimacy with genius."

Vanished Splendors

Author : Balthus
Publisher : Ecco Press
ISBN 13 : 9780060936839
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (368 download)

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Book Synopsis Vanished Splendors by : Balthus

Download or read book Vanished Splendors written by Balthus and published by Ecco Press. This book was released on 2004-08-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The painter Balthus, whose tenacity and cultivated taste for secrecy have enveloped him in an aura of mystery, wrote this memoir at the end of his long life. He speaks about his life, family, work, his theory of art and how it intersects with history, literature and spirituality.

Balthus

Author : Nicholas Fox Weber
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 038535276X
Total Pages : 1047 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (853 download)

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Book Synopsis Balthus by : Nicholas Fox Weber

Download or read book Balthus written by Nicholas Fox Weber and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-09-25 with total page 1047 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time -- the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola -- whose brilliantly rendered, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art. The story of Balthus's life has been shrouded by contradiction and hearsay, most of it his own invention; over the years he created for himself a persona of mystery, aristocracy, and glamour. Now, in Nicholas Fox Weber's superb biography, Balthus, the man and the artist, stands revealed as never before. He was born in Paris in 1908 to Polish parents. At age twelve he first stepped into the spotlight with the publication of forty of his drawings illustrating a story about a cat by Rainer Maria Rilke, who was then Balthus's mother's lover and a crucial influence on the young boy. From that moment, Balthus has never been out of the public eye. In 1934 his first exhibition, in Paris, stunned the art world. The seven canvases drew attention to his extraordinary technique -- a mix of tradition and imagination informed by the work of Piero della Francesca, Courbet, and Joseph Reinhardt, but unique to the twenty-six-year-old artist -- and to their provocative content; one of the paintings, The Guitar Lesson, was so powerful in its sadomasochistic imagery that it was deemed necessary to remove it from public display. Continuously since then, Balthus's work has provoked both great opprobrium and profound admiration -- as has the artist himself, whether collaborating with Antonin Artaud on his Theater of Cruelty, transforming the Villa Medici into the social center of Fellini's Rome in the 1950s, or competing for the artistic limelight with his friends Picasso and André Derain. The artist's complexities are clarified and his genius understood in a book that derives its particular immediacy from Weber's long and intense conversations with Balthus -- who never previously consented to discuss his life and work with a biographer -- as well as his interviews with the painter's closest friends, members of his family, and many of the subjects of his controversial canvases. Weber's critical and human grasp (he acutely analyzes the paintings in terms of both their aesthetic achievement and what they reveal of their maker's psyche), combined with his rich knowledge of Balthus's life and his insight into the ideas and forces that have helped to shape Balthus's work over the past seven decades, gives us a striking, illuminating portrait of one of the most admired and outrageous artists of our time.

Mornings on Horseback

Author : David McCullough
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0743218302
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (432 download)

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Book Synopsis Mornings on Horseback by : David McCullough

Download or read book Mornings on Horseback written by David McCullough and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-05-31 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award–winning biography that tells the story of how young Teddy Roosevelt transformed himself from a sickly boy into the vigorous man who would become a war hero and ultimately president of the United States, told by master historian David McCullough. Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as “a masterpiece” (John A. Gable, Newsday), it is the winner of the Los Angeles Times 1981 Book Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for Biography. Written by David McCullough, the author of Truman, this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised. The father is the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. The mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, is a Southerner and a celebrated beauty, but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There are sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR’s first love. All are brought to life to make “a beautifully told story, filled with fresh detail” (The New York Times Book Review). A book to be read on many levels, it is at once an enthralling story, a brilliant social history and a work of important scholarship which does away with several old myths and breaks entirely new ground. It is a book about life intensely lived, about family love and loyalty, about grief and courage, about “blessed” mornings on horseback beneath the wide blue skies of the Badlands.

Balthus

Author : Sabine Rewald
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300197012
Total Pages : 179 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Balthus by : Sabine Rewald

Download or read book Balthus written by Sabine Rewald and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the origins and permutations of Balthus's obsessions with adolescents and felines, addresses the crucial influence of such key figures as poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and provides the recollections and comments of the girl models.

Between the Woods and the Water

Author : Patrick Leigh Fermor
Publisher : John Murray
ISBN 13 : 184854524X
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (485 download)

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Book Synopsis Between the Woods and the Water by : Patrick Leigh Fermor

Download or read book Between the Woods and the Water written by Patrick Leigh Fermor and published by John Murray. This book was released on 2010-10-10 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey - as an 18-year-old - across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary. Picking up from the very spot on a bridge across the Danube where his readers last saw him, we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania. The trip was an exploration of a continent which was already showing signs of the holocaust which was to come. Although frequently praised for his lyrical writing, Fermor's account also provides a coherent understanding of the dramatic events then unfolding in Middle Europe. But the delight remains in travelling with him in his picaresque journey past remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges.

Balthus

Author : Mieke Bal
Publisher : Ediciones Polígrafa S.A.
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Balthus by : Mieke Bal

Download or read book Balthus written by Mieke Bal and published by Ediciones Polígrafa S.A.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mieke Bal analysis is focused in the eerie sense of very real and very unreal that the paintings emanate. She considers this the heart of Balthus work. It invites viewers in and repels them at the same time. We get access to a world all his own, but are not told what is there to see.Thus, the works labor against assumptions of representation and appropriation. The means of this labor figuration is indispensable for the effet.Although figurativity is supposedly the royal road to realism, in Balthus s case it is not at all. Bal argues that the paintings draw the viewer into a world we honw not to exist.This canny fictionality makes allegations of erotic appropriation naive and censoring.Reducing Balthus s work to the paintings of nude adolescent girls is, moreover, ignoring his many works that are not in the least focused on this theme. Color, space, genres or history are some of the key concepts that the author put in the center of Balthus work. 130 illustrations

Former People

Author : Douglas Smith
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466827750
Total Pages : 763 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (668 download)

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Book Synopsis Former People by : Douglas Smith

Download or read book Former People written by Douglas Smith and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 763 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heart-breaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin's Russia. Filled with chilling tales of looted palaces and burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding peasants and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution, it is the story of how a centuries'-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia. Yet Former People is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class—so-called "former people" and "class enemies"—overcame the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of their world and decades of repression as they struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile order of the Soviet Union. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families—the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns—it reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on. Told with sensitivity and nuance by acclaimed historian Douglas Smith, Former People is the dramatic portrait of two of Russia's most powerful aristocratic families, and a sweeping account of their homeland in violent transition.

Rowing to Latitude

Author : Jill Fredston
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1429931108
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis Rowing to Latitude by : Jill Fredston

Download or read book Rowing to Latitude written by Jill Fredston and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2002-10-10 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two by sea: a couple rows the wild coasts of the far north in Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic's Edge. Jill Fredston has traveled more than twenty thousand miles of the Arctic and sub-Arctic-backwards. With her ocean-going rowing shell and her husband, Doug Fesler, in a small boat of his own, she has disappeared every summer for years, exploring the rugged shorelines of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Spitsbergen, and Norway. Carrying what they need to be self-sufficient, the two of them have battled mountainous seas and hurricane-force winds, dragged their boats across jumbles of ice, fended off grizzlies and polar bears, been serenaded by humpback whales and scrutinized by puffins, and reveled in moments of calm. As Fredston writes, these trips are "neither a vacation nor an escape, they are a way of life." Rowing to Latitude is a lyrical, vivid celebration of these northern journeys and the insights they inspired. It is a passionate testimonial to the extraordinary grace and fragility of wild places, the power of companionship, the harsh but liberating reality of risk, the lure of discovery, and the challenges and joys of living an unconventional life.

Desire and Avoidance in Art

Author : Andrew Brink
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9780820497211
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (972 download)

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Book Synopsis Desire and Avoidance in Art by : Andrew Brink

Download or read book Desire and Avoidance in Art written by Andrew Brink and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Desire and Avoidance in Art argues that while early developmental traumas can produce life-long creative endeavors with striking aesthetic results, they may also, for the male artist, result in destructive relations with women. Brink introduces the scheme of personality formation - as found in the work on infant and child development of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Mary Main, Patricia Crittenden, Allen N. Schore, and others - to explore a new venture in psychobiography. He effectively uses the concept of «anxious attachment» to describe mother-infant/child relations and their sequelae. Using pertinent developmental data found in each artist's childhood, Andrew Brink accounts for the anxious-avoidant attachment style (or, in Crittenden's terminology, the Anxious/Controlling style) from which these artists suffered. He aims to explain why partnerships with women are sometimes hazardous and frequently tragic for male artists by referencing various feminist writers. Based on their viewpoints, Brink extracts psychodynamic explanations that are largely based on what the artists' imagery reveals. Furthermore, he explains how the attachment theory of attraction-avoidance is shown to supplement and enrich other ways of understanding chronically tense relations between the sexes. Brink focuses his attention on artists such as Picasso, Bellmer, Balthus, and Cornell, who are culturally powerful and often stimulate discussion about misogynic figures within a social context.

Mark Twain's Autobiography

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 398 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Mark Twain's Autobiography by : Mark Twain

Download or read book Mark Twain's Autobiography written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

My Ántonia

Author : Willa Cather
Publisher : Modernista
ISBN 13 : 9180944264
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (89 download)

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Book Synopsis My Ántonia by : Willa Cather

Download or read book My Ántonia written by Willa Cather and published by Modernista. This book was released on 2023-12-20 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 19th century, orphaned Jim Burden is sent to the wilderness in Nebraska to live with his grandparents. He arrives at the same time as the Shimerda family, including the eldest daughter Ántonia, who becomes his closest neighbors. Life in the American West is tough, especially for the impoverished Shimerda family, and pioneers must struggle for survival. A friendship blossoms between Jim and Ántonia as they explore nature and have adventures together, a friendship that will last a lifetime. My Ántonia became an immediate success when first published and is today considered Willa Cather's first masterpiece. It is praised for its depiction of the American West and its ability to highlight the aspirations of ordinary, poor people in a time when it was customary to write about the elite. WILLA CATHER [1873-1947] was an American author. After studying at the University of Nebraska, she worked as a teacher and journalist. Cather's novels often focus on settlers in the USA with a particular emphasis on female pioneers. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel One of Ours, and in 1943, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Song of a Captive Bird

Author : Jasmin Darznik
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0399182314
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (991 download)

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Book Synopsis Song of a Captive Bird by : Jasmin Darznik

Download or read book Song of a Captive Bird written by Jasmin Darznik and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spellbinding debut novel about the trailblazing Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, who defied society's expectations to find her voice and her destiny. "Remember the flight, for the bird is mortal." All through her childhood in Tehran, Forugh Farrokhzad is told that Persian daughters should be quiet and modest. She is taught only to obey, but she always finds ways to rebel, gossiping with her sister among the fragrant roses of her mother's walled garden, venturing to the forbidden rooftop to roughhouse with her three brothers, writing poems to impress her strict, disapproving father, and sneaking out to flirt with a teenage paramour over café glacé. During the summer of 1950, Forugh's passion for poetry takes flight, and tradition seeks to clip her wings. Forced into a suffocating marriage, Forugh runs away and falls into an affair that fuels her desire to write and to achieve freedom and independence. Forugh's poems are considered both scandalous and brilliant; she is heralded by some as a national treasure, vilified by others as a demon influenced by the West. She perseveres, finding love with a notorious filmmaker and living by her own rules, at enormous cost. But the power of her writing only grows stronger amid the upheaval of the Iranian revolution. Inspired by Forugh Farrokhzad's verse, letters, films, and interviews, and including original translations of her poems, this haunting novel uses the lens of fiction to capture the tenacity, spirit, and conflicting desires of a brave woman who represents the birth of feminism in Iran, and who continues to inspire generations of women around the world.--Amazon.

Parallel Lives

Author : Jeffrey Meyers
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807182702
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Parallel Lives by : Jeffrey Meyers

Download or read book Parallel Lives written by Jeffrey Meyers and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parallel Lives covers the century from the birth of Sigmund Freud in 1856 to the death of Sylvia Plath in 1963. Written by the esteemed biographer and literary critic Jeffrey Meyers, the book includes European, American, and Russian authors and artists, film directors and actors, children and soldiers, friends and lovers, rivals and enemies. Drawing on the bifocal principle of dual composition in Plutarch, these brief lives are arranged in pairs to interact with each other and illuminate their subjects’ similarities, characters, and friendships. The linked structure of Parallel Lives allows several major figures—Sigmund Freud, Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, and Seamus Heaney—to appear in multiple chapters. The most violent friendship ended when Verlaine shot Rimbaud and went to prison, and Rimbaud crawled back from Africa to die miserably in France. The most brilliant friendship broke up when Wilson attacked Nabokov’s edition of Alexander Pushkin. The most moving connection was Audrey Hepburn’s tender and sympathetic attachment to her soul-sister Anne Frank. Using mirror images reveals a new way to perceive these illustrious men and women. Each chapter shifts the focus back and forth between two subjects, comparing them, changing perspective, reevaluating similarities and contrasts. With vivid details and dramatic events, Meyers emphasizes the backgrounds, intellectual influences, and personality traits of his paired subjects. By examining the complex motives for irrational behavior ranging from deep affection to intense hostility, warm encouragement to bitter rivalry (sometimes together in the same chapter), Parallel Lives offers insights into the dynamics of complementary characters.

The Art of Looking

Author : Lance Esplund
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465094678
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (65 download)

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Book Synopsis The Art of Looking by : Lance Esplund

Download or read book The Art of Looking written by Lance Esplund and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A veteran art critic helps us make sense of modern and contemporary art The landscape of contemporary art has changed dramatically during the last hundred years: from Malevich's 1915 painting of a single black square and Duchamp's 1917 signed porcelain urinal to Jackson Pollock's midcentury "drip" paintings; Chris Burden's "Shoot" (1971), in which the artist was voluntarily shot in the arm with a rifle; Urs Fischer's "You" (2007), a giant hole dug in the floor of a New York gallery; and the conceptual and performance art of today's Ai Weiwei and Marina Abramovic. The shifts have left the art-viewing public (understandably) perplexed. In The Art of Looking, renowned art critic Lance Esplund demonstrates that works of modern and contemporary art are not as indecipherable as they might seem. With patience, insight, and wit, Esplund guides us through the last century of art and empowers us to approach and appreciate it with new eyes. Eager to democratize genres that can feel inaccessible, Esplund encourages viewers to trust their own taste, guts, and common sense. The Art of Looking will open the eyes of viewers who think that recent art is obtuse, nonsensical, and irrelevant, as well as the eyes of those who believe that the art of the past has nothing to say to our present.

Gun, With Occasional Music

Author : Jonathan Lethem
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780312858780
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (587 download)

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Book Synopsis Gun, With Occasional Music by : Jonathan Lethem

Download or read book Gun, With Occasional Music written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1995-01-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-first-century private detective Conrad Metcalf has a dead doctor on his hands, a monkey on his back, and a kangaroo in his waiting room in a first novel with a sharp-edged, funny vision of the future.

Red Virgin

Author : Louise Michel
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
ISBN 13 : 0817300635
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis Red Virgin by : Louise Michel

Download or read book Red Virgin written by Louise Michel and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louise Michel was born illegitimate in 1830 and became a schoolmistress in Paris. She was involved in radical activities during the twilight of France’s Second Empire, and during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the siege of Paris. She was a leading member of the revolutionary groups controlling Montmarte. Michel emerged as one of the leaders of the insurrection during the Paris Commune of March-May 1871; and French anarchists saw her as martyr and saint – The Red Virgin. When the Versailles government crushed the Commune in May 1871, Michel was sentenced to exile in New Caledonia, until the general amnesty of 1880, when she returned to France and great popular acclaim and support from the working people of the country. Michel was arrested again during a demonstration in Paris in 1883 and sentenced to six years in prison. Pardoned after three years, she continued her speeches and writing, although she spent the greater part of her time from 1890 until her death in 1905 in England in self-imposed exile. It was during her prison term from 1883 to 1886 that she compiled her Memoires, now available in English. These memoirs offer readers a view of the non-Marxist left and give an in-depth look into the development of the revolutionary spirit. The early chapters treat her childhood, the development of her revolutionary feelings, and her training as a schoolteacher. The next section describes her activities as a schoolteacher in the Haute-Marne and Paris and therefore contains much of interest on education in 19th-century Europe. Her chapters on the siege of Paris, the Commune, and her first trial show those events from the point of view of a major participant. Of particular interest is a chapter on women’s rights, which Michel saw as part of the search for the rights of all people, male and female, and not as a separate struggle. The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel will be useful to both scholars and students of 19th-century French history and women’s studies.