Reviews
"Tibn takes us almost shockingly close to the mystery of art itself. A remarkable, utterly original book." -- Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, "A deep, lovely, and enthralling book that engages with the disquiet and drama of a famous writing life." -- Shirley Hazzard, author of T he Great Fire, "Tóibín takes us almost shockingly close to the mystery of art itself. A remarkable, utterly original book." -- Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, "The work of a first-rate novelist artful, moving and very beautiful."--The New York Times Book Review, "Toibin takes us almost shockingly close to the mystery of art itself. A remarkable, utterly original book." -- Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, "A gorgeous portrait of a complex and passionate man."-- Azar Nafisi, author ofReading Lolita in Tehran, "A gorgeous portrait of a complex and passionate man." -- Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, "A deep, lovely, and enthralling book that engages with the disquiet and drama of a famous writing life." -- Shirley Hazzard, author of The Great Fire, "The work of a first-rate novelist artful, moving and very beautiful." -- The New York Times Book Review, "Toibin takes us almost shockingly close to the mystery of art itself. A remarkable, utterly original book."-- Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
Synopsis
This book addresses the question of what world history looks like when the family is at the center of the story. People have always lived in families, but what that means has varied dramatically over time and across cultures. The family is not a "natural" phenomenon'e"it has a history. And family life is not limited to the realm of the private or the strictly personal; the family is a force of history. Gender and generational differences affect how individual family members relateto each other and how the family operates in changing historical times. For example, youth rebellion against repressive elders fed into choices about conversion to Christianity in colonial Kenya in the early twentieth century and also into the May Fourth rebellion against traditional rule in China in1919.These are the sorts of examples that drive the narrative of The Family: A World History. Maynes and Waltner begin their story more than 10,000 years ago with various projects of domestication around the globe - different ways of inventing human settlement and explaining and attempting to control the natural world. The authors then examine how family systems and family practices help to account for the historical fate of different world regions in the era of growing world trade, colonization, and religious warfare and conversions between 1450 and 1750. They make connections betweeneconomic, political, and cultural modernity and the transformation of family and gender relationships between 1750 and 1920. Finally, they demonstrate that the struggle over family relations was central to fascist and colonial regimes, Cold War era ideological and economic confrontations, andpost-World-War II antagonisms between 'developed' and 'underdeveloped' nations, and, more recently, between the global North and the global South. The narrative concludes with such contemporary realities as transcontinental family life, state programs of genocide, and innovative reproductive technologies. Taking a long and broad view of the family as a force of history brings to light processes of human development and patterns of social life that are missed by narrower investigations. This book on the family is thus also engaged in a larger conversation about what it means to be human, and how a very expansive temporal and geographic frame of history brings new insights into the human past and present. Maynes and Waltner draw on a wide range of historical sources including legal codes, censusrecords, memoirs, art, and oral history., "Colm T ib n's beautiful, subtle illumination of Henry James's inner life" ( The New York Times ) captures the loneliness and hope of a master of psychological subtlety whose forays into intimacy inevitably fail those he tried to love. Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America's first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers. With stunningly resonant prose, "The Master is unquestionably the work of a first-rate novelist: artful, moving, and very beautiful" ( The New York Times Book Review ). The emotional intensity of this portrait is riveting., "Colm Tóibín's beautiful, subtle illumination of Henry James's inner life" ( The New York Times ) captures the loneliness and hope of a master of psychological subtlety whose forays into intimacy inevitably fail those he tried to love. Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America's first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers. The emotional intensity of Tóibín's portrait of James is riveting. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart and incapable of reconciling his dreams of passion with his own fragility. With stunningly resonant prose, "The Master is unquestionably the work of a first-rate novelist: artful, moving, and very beautiful" ( The New York Times Book Review ).
