The Art of Scandal : The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner
Author: Douglass Shand-Tucci
List Price: $15.00
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ISBN: 0060929774
Publisher: Perennial (01 November, 1998)
Sales Rank: 134,012
Average Customer Rating: 1.65 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 3 out of 5
The incredibly messy portrait of a most remarkable woman
Isabella Stewart Gardner was a remarkable woman--a champion of the arts, a friend of the disenfranchised, an early feminist. She had the courage to combat racism and homophobia, as well as the vision to design and build one of the world's most unique museums. If only she had a better biographer. While Douglas Shand-Tucci should be commended for his research and enthusiasm, there's no denying that this is one of the most sloppily written, poorly edited books on the market. The New York Times Book Review called it "garrulous," but that doesn't begin to describe this 300-page mess littered with run-on sentences, intrusive asides, scatter-brained analogies, and so many exclamation marks that even Tom Wolfe would cringe. Shand-Tucci should hire a writing coach--and his editor should be shot.
Rating: 1 out of 5
why oh why?
when i set out to write a research paper about Isabella Stewart Gardner, i decided to read her biographies. i opted to read them in chronological order, starting with Morris Carter's published in 1925. i was having a ball learning about such an interesting woman, until i got to the Shand-Tucci biography. this book confused me so much, not only because of it's writing style, but also because of it's content. Mr. Shand-Tucci presents information completely opposite to the info in Morris Carter and Louise Hall Tharp's biographies. these differences were so extreme that i ended up writing my research paper about them. no joke. three thousand words later, and i still feel i could write more on the faults of this book. Just a side note, i talked to a friend who works at the Gardner Museum, and they stopped selling this biography in the museum shop because its allegations against Mrs. Gardner are so farfetched. if you want to read a good biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, i highly recommend "Mrs. Jack" by Louise Hall Tharp.
Rating: 1 out of 5
The sentences that never end...
I am an avid reader and I find the subject of Bella Gardner fascinating, and I was incredibly excited to find yet another book about her amazing life! Yet, little did I know that it would take me almost three weeks to slog through this terribly written piece! With little organization and darting from one thought to another, it is barely held together. But, dear reader, the worst is yet to come. Let me give you an example of just one of the "typical" sentences that make up the writing found within, and remember this is just one sentence: "Perhaps her most vivid counsel ever as muse and mentor, into which central venue of Isabella Gardner's life first James and then Crawford and now Sargent have conducted us, that advice reflects the fact that just as it has been argued of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's friendship with Arthur Hallam that although their relationship lasted a mere four years, those "four years probably [were] the equal in psychic importance to the other seventy-nine of Tennyson's life," so with act one of Gardner's and Crawford's affair, which lasted barely two years."
Now I realize how incredibly terrifying this is, and believe me, I have left punctuation, wording and phrasing exactly as they are found in the book. This is but one of three hundred pages of such dismal phrasing. Get the point...
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