"In part a biography of Samuel Jean Pozzi, a celebrated French gynecologist and Don Juan who is the red-robed subject of John Singer Sargent's sumptuous full-length portrait, "Dr. Pozzi at Home," Barnes' book expands into an erudite, entertaining, and beautifully illustrated disquisition on the period between 1870 and 1914, which actually bears some interesting parallels with our own times." -- NPR

"Pozzi is the main character, but only intermittently, for Barnes’s achievement is to retrace the crossing and recrossing paths of dozens of individuals in a milieu that was once ostentatiously up-to-date...

The book is a pleasure to read in every way. Barnes writes with elegance and wit, probes motives with a novelist’s imagination but also a historian’s skepticism, plucking memorable formulations — enhanced by his own deft translations — from letters, journals and newspaper squibs....” Flaubert complains to George Sand that, according to a critic, “I pollute a stream by washing in it.” A pet tortoise expires after being painted gold and studded with jewels, and its carapace becomes “its metallic and gemmate tomb.”"

-- Leo Damrosch, New York Times

Topic: New Lebanon Book Group - December Zoom meeting

Time: Dec 6, 2020 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88052216895?pwd=LzNJQkVpQWt2VncvUTlYRUVtZmM0dz09