Book Review

by Amedeo Quondam Donzelli, 347 pp., € 28.00 CECELIA OLIVERIO “Would you care to bestow the grace of your dancing upon the gathered company?” asks the perfect courtier to his advisee. “Why, most absolutely not, my dear friend,” a slightly less than...

by Francesco Erspamer Donzelli, 169 pp., € 16.00 JOHN WELSH - The Invention of Culture It is a conversation all too familiar for anyone involved in the humanities. It happens most frequently in situations of involuntary socialization—parties, receptions...

by John Varriano University of California Press, 282 pp., $19.50 PETER LIEBERMAN In 1505 the Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto, at a banquet held by the artistic and gastronomic confraternity known as ‘the Company of the Cauldron,’ presented a scale...

by Franco Mormando University of Chicago Press, 456 pp., € 35.00 JULIANNE VANWAGENEN In a Gian Lorenzo Bernini stream-of-consciousness word-association game one might come up with Rome, marble fountain, St. Peter’s, baroque, post-Reformation Catholicism...

by Raymond Jonas Harvard University Press, 413 pp., $29.95 JOHN WELSH - Empire defeated Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army marched a remarkable 135 miles from Chancellorsville, Virginia to the battle of Gettysburg. Napoleon’s Russian Campaign, an arduous...

by Jeffrey Schnapp and Adam Michaels Princeton Architectural Press, 216 pp., $19.95 JULIANNE VANWAGENEN What do The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Electric Information Age Book have in common? They both have Tom Wolfe, the Grateful Dead, Allen...

by Benedetta Palmieri Feltrinelli, 140 pp., € 14.00 ELENA CAMPANI Abituati a vedere artisti e scrittori trattare il tema della morte in maniere piuttosto estreme, dal pulp allo spiritualismo olistico passando per gli psicodrammi stucchevoli, questo libro...

di Bruno Pischedda Bollati Boringhieri, 338 pp., € 18.50 DALILA COLUCCI- La scommessa dell'impegno “Lo scrittore è ‘in situazione’ nella sua epoca: ogni parola ha i suoi echi. Ogni silenzio anche”: è una suggestione di natura sartriana quella che si...

by Christian Caliandro and Pier Luigi Sacco Il Mulino, 146 pp., 13.50 € JULIANNE VANWAGENEN - Culture as investment In the book’s premise, authors Christian Caliandro and Pier Luigi Sacco clearly state their goals for the work: (1) distinguish between...

a cura di Sergio Luzzatto e Gabriele Pedullà (vol. II a cura di Erminia Irace) Einaudi, 946 pp., ill., 85.00 € MARCO ARESU - Tra geografia e storia “Prometto di non scrivere nessuna storia letteraria, nessun capitolo di storia letteraria, prima di avere...