****Minute Zero

Posted on by
Africa, Sunset

(photo: Andrew Moore, creative commons license)

By Todd Moss – If you missed Todd Moss’s dramatic 2013 debut with The Golden Hour, catch up with his protagonist Judd Ryker in his second thriller set in an unstable Africa, the recently released Minute Zero for more political chicanery, assassination, theft and corruption at the most brazen level.

Ryker is an academic working in the uneasy surroundings of the U.S. State Department. The careerists don’t trust him, his brief—as head of the department’s new Crisis Reaction Unit—puts him outside the bureaucracy’s normal chain of command, and in many ways he’s in over his head. What landed him there was his theory that in every international crisis there is a short period—the golden hour—in which events can be successfully directed toward a positive conclusion. Once a situation settles, that opportunity is lost.

This novel elaborates that idea, with the proposition that at times of extreme national disruption, there is an even briefer period of breakdown, when outcomes are uncertain and dramatic change is possible. For U.S. diplomats, Ryker counsels, that “zero minute” offers a unique opportunity.

Moss places this thriller in Zimbabwe, under the long-time leadership of fictional President Winston Tinotenda, a man in his 90s (clearly modeled on IRL president Robert Mugabe), aided by his considerably younger national security advisor, General Simba Chimurenga. This pair did not retain power for decades without a hefty dose of corruption, violence, and heavy-handed political tactics. Now the country faces an election pitting Tinotenda against a formidable challenger, a woman lawyer, Gugu Mutonga.

In this situation, U.S. goals are clear and limited, says the State Department’s Africa lead, Bill Rogerson: a safe, peaceful vote and stability into the post-election period, translated as “no bodies in the streets.” Tinotenda’s hold on the office look like a certainty, but Mutonga has strong support among the country’s youth and in its southern region, and Ryker isn’t so sure the president can hold on. Disruption is in the air.

The Secretary of State asks Ryker to fly to Zimbabwe and demonstrate definitively that his crisis reaction analytics can work. But Rogerson considers Ryker a thorn in his side and is anxious to expel him from the body diplomatique. To thwart Ryker’s efforts, Rogerson colludes with the U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe—a rather dim political appointee counting the minutes until he can take up a new posting in London. Ryker’s wife Jessica is an agronomist working on African water purification projects. She provides helpful counsel to him as he negotiates these treacherous bureaucratic waters. Only over time does the reader begin to suspect Jessica has her own dangerous agenda.

The political and diplomatic chess game Ryker undertakes to protect American interests and the integrity of the vote is just as cutthroat as an assassination and its outcome can be just as fatal (at least to careers).

Moss is uniquely qualified to write his thrillers, having been the deputy assistant secretary of state covering 16 countries in West Africa. Currently, he’s chief operating officer and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. He’s also the author of four nonfiction books on international economic affairs and has taught at Georgetown University and the London School of Economics. Luckily for his readers, in addition to his solid background and experience, he knows how to tell a compelling story!

****Career of Evil

Posted on by
package, box

(photo: Jonathan, creative commons license)

By Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling), narrated by Robert Glenister – Devotees of the heavy metal rock band Blue Öyster Cult will recognize that its allusive and sometimes violent lyrics give this book its title, chapter titles, and break headings. Chapter 1, for example, is “This Ain’t the Summer of Love.” Nor is it.

Former Army Special Investigator Cameron Strike runs a not-exactly-thriving London private detection business, aided by his attractive factotum Robin Ellacott. They have only two cases going when a delivery man shows up with a package addressed to Robin and containing the severed leg of a young girl. Strike can think of three people from his past with the misogynistic leanings, brutality, and sufficient grudge against him to make them suspects in such a crime and desirous to involve him in it. Sending a leg—instead of some other body part—seems a cruel reference to Strike’s own leg, lost in a land mine detonation in Afghanistan and replaced by a prosthesis.

Kinky theories also emerge, and Robin uncovers in their file of “nutter” letters one from a young woman who wanted to cut off her leg. Robin, a psychology major before leaving university, recognizes the syndrome. Her exploration of Internet sites for transabled people and Body Integrity Identity Disorder yields more leads.

Two of Strike’s suspects are people he encountered in the military. The third, Jeff Whittaker, is the much younger second husband of Strike’s mother. Strike is convinced Whittaker orchestrated her death from a heroin overdose, but he was acquitted. Strike and Robin reconstruct the decades-cold trails of their three suspects. They have plenty of time to do so, as publicity about the leg business has discouraged any other would-be clients. They are inevitably brought into conflict with the police, still smarting from previous cases in which Strike out-investigated them.

Meanwhile, Robin proceeds half-heartedly with her wedding plans, perpetually annoyed at fiancé Matthew’s repeated attempts to get her to quit her job and his apparent jealousy of Strike. Even her stalker can detect the chill between them. When Matthew reveals a secret of his own, she calls the wedding off. The book’s early action takes place around the time of the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and those festivities are a painful counterpoint to the couple’s unhappiness.

Galbraith has constructed a well paced, compelling narrative. She leaves a few clues on the table and could have had the main characters learn more about themselves, but few thrillers do that. It works well as an audiobook, narrated by Robert Glenister, because there is not an overabundance of characters and the pacing keeps the listener well engaged throughout its nearly 18 hours.

A slightly longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

I’d “Mutch Rather See Them”

Posted on by
Civil War, battlefield, cannon

Stones River National Battlefield (photo: wikipedia)

I spent Veterans’ Day yesterday deciphering four letters my great-great uncles wrote in 1863 and 1864 when serving in the U.S. Civil War. Men from my family served on both sides of that war, and the Tennessee ancestors on my grandfather’s side epitomize that truism about the border states, “it was brother against brother.” Those living in Wilson County, east of Nashville, fought for the South, while those who’d moved further west, to Carroll County, were Union men.

The war did not treat kindly the land of Wilson County and the Hurricane Creek area where my family lived. Just ten miles down the road in early 1863 raged the Battle of Stones River (also called the Battle of Murfreesboro). On the Union side, Gen. William Rosecrans led some 43,000 men of the Army of the Cumberland, while Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg brought 38,000 men from the Army of Tennessee. Although “tactically indecisive,” it was one of the war’s bloodiest battles, with an estimated 23,500 men killed or injured.

More than 80,000 men moving through an agricultural area does not leave much behind for the settlers. As a returning soldier wrote, “When I reached my grandfather’s farm, I saw something of what the home folks were enduring while we were away in the army: barns all gone, fine trees cut down in the front lot, stock all gone, everything in disarray.” Food and currency were scarce, and supplies were gone. “For two years there was no coffee, no sugar, no shoes.” The cotton crop of 1866 was meager, and an epidemic of cholera raged that summer, hitting Wilson County hard, only to be followed by smallpox in the fall. Thus the painted slogan “GTT” began appearing on the doors of people’s abandoned homes and farms—Gone To Texas.

Some family on my grandmother Smith’s side already lived in Texas and their sons were recruited into the Confederate forces. It is their letters I was working on, with the beautifully florid handwriting and many misspellings adding to their charm. These boys—John Ricerd (J.R.), about age 20, and George, 23—were two of eight sons of William and Elizabeth Smith, and they are intimately concerned about the fate of their younger brothers:

  • “Tell W. R. Smith if the war continues till he becomes 18 years old, tell him to go in Texas service, not to comb(come) out here. I hope though he will not have to Join the army.” (from J.R. Smith)
  • “William, you will try to beat me a(t) writing a letter the time, for you are going to School for some time as will be when this letter reaches to hand. You will apply your Self Closely and try to make a Smart man.” (from George Smith)
  • “I reckon I will never see home until this unholy war comes to a close and none but my Heavenly father knows when that will be.” (from George Smith)
  • “I want to here from you and Franklin and all the rest of my little Brothers. But mutch rather see them.” (from J.R. Smith)

You also get a sense of the conditions and concerns that plagued them as they fought in Arkansas and Louisiana in the Trans-Mississippi and Red River campaigns.

  • “I am anxious to here from Brother William. I expec that he has been in the fight. If so I hope that he came threw safe.” (from J.R. Smith)
  • “Father, I have been as wet as I could be for 2 days and a night and travailed (traveled) all one day. You will excuse my bad writing and my Short letter for I have travailed all day and am tired.” (from George Smith)
  • “The reson I don’t get letters regular is we have been running from place to place. The boys is all brokedown and need rest.” (from J.R. Smith)

America has had so many veterans of so many wars, and while the foes and armaments have changed, the human experience remains.

It’s Red Pen Time!

Posted on by
editing, red pen

(photo: Nic McPhee, creative commons license)

BookBub marketing expert Diana Urban has advice for writers—and that’s pretty much all of us, right?!—about words to excise in our prose. You have probably heard many times about the importance of some of these, but yet, when I read the drafts of new writers, not to mention people who should know better (like me!), they are persistent problems.

  • Avoid passive verbs—the classic example “Mistakes were made” illustrates the problem perfectly. Who made those mistakes? Passive constructions remove the “actor” from the “act.” “The keys were misplaced.” Yes, but who should be looking for them?! With the passive, you never know; responsibility diffuses in a miasma of vagueness.
  • In fact, avoid auxiliary verbs in general. “I was standing at the window, and I was gazing at the sheep” may have been an acceptable dozy writing style 150 years ago, but today’s readers want to get to the point: “I stood at the window and gazed at the sheep, including that black one.” (Hero of the rest of the story, no doubt.)
  • I once had to cut 40,000 words out of a 135,000-word manuscript and found having people simply go to the window and look at the sheep took a lot fewer words than saying they stood up first. Unless a character has problems standing, it isn’t necessary to have them stand, then go. Nor do they need to stand up, as Urban points out, or conversely, sit down. Sit.
  • Similarly, it isn’t usually necessary to say “I started to call the police,” “I began wondering whether . . .” As Nike would say, just do it! “I called the police”; “I wondered whether . . .” Only rarely do you need the pause created by “I started to call the police, but he pulled out a gun and pointed it at me, and I laid the phone gently on the desk.”
  • Intensifiers, like “very,” “really,” (really bad, that), when perhaps your prose would perk up with a jauntier verb. Either something’s bad or it isn’t. How much badder is very bad? Similarly, “totally, completely, absolutely, literally.” Careless writers include phrases like “completely destroyed.” Redundant. Totally.
  • Removing “just” or, in my case, “even” is a bit harder, but they are superfluous most of the time.

Urban’s list continues, including 43 words to jettison. And, she demonstrates a handy way to find these stumblers in your own writing. It’s hard to do, because some of them are so prevalent they slip under the radar. I do searches for them in my prose and find them in embarrassing profusion, so I’ve taught myself to recognize them.

Naturally, what is questionable in the narrative part of your work may be acceptable—and desirable—as part of dialog. People rarely speak as precisely as they write, and a character’s persona may appropriately employ certain verbal tics. What’s important is that the writer recognize them for what they are. Absolutely.

Labyrinth of Lies

Posted on by

Alexander Fehling, Labyrinth of LiesGermany’s submission (trailer) for Best Foreign Language Film at the upcoming Academy Awards puts viewers in a world of anti-Semitism, fear, denial, indifference and callous pragmatism. The movie, screened with subtitles, breathes life into the familiar storyline of a justice-seeking crusader. This one is not entirely alone, but the pervasive forces he’s battling are propagated not just by those in power but by the common folk as well.

Set in Frankfurt in 1958, the movie fictionalizes the effort to conduct the first German prosecutions of former Nazi officials. Many believed the Nuremberg trials conducted by the Allied forces had resolved that matter (or should have). At the same time, it was common knowledge that war criminals were everywhere, carrying on normal lives with impunity. Only after these ground-breaking trials did Germans finally confronted their wartime culpability.

Bringing ex-Nazis to justice required heroic effort. Making that journey in the film is young prosecutor Johann Radmann, played by Alexander Fehling in a widely praised performance. (Radmann is a composite of several real-life prosecutors.) He’s a junior one, handling traffic violations, but he’s ambitious. The screenplay deftly reveals this by showing him articulating the case for sentencing a murderer to the maximum penalty of life imprisonment, then we see he’s standing alone in front of a bathroom mirror.

Into this unfulfilled life comes a revelation from a journalist, Thomas Gnielka (André Szymanski). He tells prosecutors a member of the Waffen S.S. stationed at the Auschwitz concentration camp now works as a school teacher, in violation of federal law. Radmann wants the case, but he’s opposed by his boss and colleagues. He’s supported, however, then led by a shrewd, experienced Attorney General, Fritz Bauer, the real-life hero of the story, who has long harbored the ambition of bringing top ex-Nazis to justice. Played by the late Gert Voss, he exudes quiet power.

Labyrinth of Lies

Becht and Fehling in Labyrinth of Lies

Radmann is far less aggressive in his personal life than his professional one, but a convincing romantic involvement with a dressmaker, Marlene Wondrak (Friederike Becht), raises the stakes for him.

We feel the horrors of the camp through the emotions of survivors, primarily artist Simon Kirsch (Johannes Krisch), a friend of Gnielka, who lost his twin daughters to the horrific experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele. But the focus stays on the complicity of those who continue to ignore, deny, or cover up Nazi crimes. It’s not difficult to understand the disconnect between Radmann and the people trying to thwart him. He was too young to appreciate how so many of his countrymen came to be Nazis. If he can’t come to terms with his new knowledge, however, it will destroy him.

Some critics, such as The Boston Globe’s Peter Keough, have found the movie “formulaic and uninspired,” but most have a more positive view, such as that of Kate Taylor in The Globe and Mail of Toronto. She called it “a strong account of a lesser-known episode of post-Holocaust history raised above its obvious cinematic formula by Fehling’s anchoring performance and the film’s wise approach to the survivors’ horrific testimony.”

Rotten Tomatoes ratings are 78% from critics and 83% from viewers.

Guest review by fellow writing group member David Ludlum, a fan of tales of intrigue.

Related articles

Putting the Genes in Genealogy

Posted on by
Double helix

Double helix (from: Mehmet Pinarci, creative commons license)

Science has come to the aid—at least potentially—of people searching for their ancestors and far-flung family members. Genealogists now can draw on the insights provided by genetic testing resources, the two most prominent of which are 23andMe and Ancestry.com, when exploring their family tree. All that’s needed is to order a kit from these organizations, spit into the test tube they send, mail it back, and in six to eight weeks you’ll receive an email with a private link to the results: your own, unique genome described and codified.

Of course, some cash has to change hands too. 23andMe charges $199 for its testing, and Ancestry.com charges $99. There’s an important reason for that price differential. Ancestry’s only interest is in the genealogical significance of your genetic information. 23andMe—which I used for my genetic test several years ago—didn’t start out to do family ancestry testing at all. When I joined, the focus was on health and research. The health component comes in with helping you understand the implications of your genetic risks for various diseases and conditions.

The research focus was what interested me. You may know that new drugs and treatments ordinarily must be tested in time-consuming, expensive clinical trials. When it comes to designing a trial for a disease with a genetic component, researchers may need to know whether a new drug, has different effects in people with different genetic profiles. If so, they must find a large number of people with those specific profiles in order to run their tests. Finding these people can take literally years. Often, they never identify enough suitable people and, after great effort and expense, the trial must be abandoned. A core idea of 23andMe was that having a preexisting database containing people’s genetic profiles would help researchers find people with specific genetic characteristics more quickly. A proof of concept was achieved in the area of Parkinson’s disease. In addition, through questionnaires, they find out much more about people with specific genetic profiles, too. That’s why I joined 23andMe, because I thought that database sounded like such an invaluable resource.

Other organizations also offer genetic testing, but Ancestry.com and 23andMe both have made a substantial commitment to developing useful genealogical tools and have the size advantage of more than a million members each. You don’t want to be like the first person to buy a FAX machine. “Cute, but what do you do with it?” You want as many potential connections as possible.

My DNA relatives from 23andMe include four people identified by genetics as my second cousins. Three of them are strangers to me, but they come from the parts of the country that certain family members are from, and their profiles mention specific family surnames. The fourth person is my second cousin who lives in Denver, whom I know well. That known relationship shows the system is working! 23andMe makes it easy to contact the others, and I’m hoping one of them can help clear up a mystery involving our specific shared ancestors. (Since I wrote this, I’ve confirmed one of these strangers is a second cousin, once removed. Now I can dig into a little Alabama family history with him.)

What you most hope for in making these contacts is that one of them is a determined genealogist too. A couple of years ago a stranger from Washington State contacted me via 23andMe, and we did indeed turn out to be distant cousins. He introduced me to other cousins in his line who’d done some family research. It’s been both fun and enlightening to share information and questions—and some answers—with them.

The Martian

Posted on by

The Martian, Matt DamonRidley Scott’s movie (trailer) based on the runaway best-seller by debut author Andy Weir is a knockout. But then I’m a sucker for stories with a big component of “how to make things work.” The hero of this story, astronaut Mark Watney has to get a lot of things working very fast, when the crew of the ARES III Mission inadvertently strands him on Mars, “the first person to be alone on a whole planet.” Watney (played by Matt Damon) is left behind when a massive sandstorm threatens the entire crew. Flying debris damages his biotelemetry unit, which registers him as dead. And in the storm, they can’t find his body.

First, he must solve the problems of food and water, long-term, since it will take at least four years until another Mars mission could rescue him, even if NASA knows he’s still alive. Which he has no way of telling them. It’s a test of humanity to put a person in extreme circumstances, and you cannot get any more extreme than the surface of the Red Planet.

Back on Earth, though, eagle-eyed Mars-watchers notice movement on the planet surface and come to an obvious conclusion. The race is then on—against distance, bureaucracy, technological limitations, and the implacable elements of Mars. All I can say is I’m glad I’m not NASA Director Teddy Sanders’s (Jeff Daniels) or his media relations director (Kristen Wiig). Especially strong were the roles of Jet Propulsion Lab director Bruce Ng (played by Benedict Wong), and ARES III Mission Commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain). Matt Damon is terrific, as always, in the role of Watney. Just the right mix of angst and wit, supported by an excellent script from Drew Goddard. The Martian surface was filmed in Wadi Rum, Jordan.

I know there are people who believe they don’t like science fiction. To me, movies like this are less about the science and more about the human spirit and how it can engage with the creative mind. The science makes it read “real.” As The Atlantic critic Christopher Orr wrote, “Excellence in cinema is sometimes a singular achievement . . . On other occasions, it’s the result of extraordinary collaboration. The Martian is one of these.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 93%, viewer ratings: 93%.

Related articles

***Summer House with Swimming Pool

Posted on by
swimming pool, swimmer

(photo: alobos life, creative commons license)

By Herman Koch, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett – Having greatly admired Dutch writer Herman Koch’s European best-seller The Dinner, I was delighted to find this more recent novel. The two have much in common: a first-person narration by men who turn out to be not entirely reliable, an unfolding tragic event whose full scope is only gradually revealed; and the grounding of the story in the hyper-intense relationships of a nuclear family, where every secret evokes the possibility of catastrophe.

The narrator of The Dinner was quite likeable, at least at first, his chameleon colors revealed only bit by bit. In this novel, Koch’s narrator, Dutch general physician Marc Schlosser, shows his disgruntlement cards early on. Married with two preteen/early teen daughters, his feelings about women are entirely retrograde: “I looked at her (a just-met woman) the way every man looks at a woman who enters his field of vision for the first time. Could you do it with her? I asked myself, looking her deep in the eyes. Yes, was the response.” Or, “Any father would rather have a son than a daughter.” Or, “I laughed . . . the sooner you laugh during a conversation with a woman, the better. They’re not used to it, women, to making people laugh. They think they’re not funny. They’re right, usually.”

Ouch, ouch, and ouch.

Yet, Marc is not more charitable toward the men he encounters, truth be told, or toward any of his patients, whom he even fantasizes about killing. Why Marc is so dissatisfied is never quite clear. Is he just a curmudgeon in the wrong profession? Did he take too seriously the lectures of his amoral medical school professor?

A luckless new patient is the famous actor Ralph Meier, a past-middle-age womanizer attracted to Marc’s wife Caroline. Marc, in turn, is attracted to Ralph’s younger wife Judith, and his attention seems to be reciprocated. Entangling the families further are Marc’s daughters’ growing relationships with Ralph’s slightly older sons.

At a minor early summer social event the four members of each family come together in a powerful way, which leads to an invitation to visit the Meier family at their summer house in some unspecified seaside destination. Marc, his eye on Judith, shamelessly manipulates his family’s vacation itinerary, while denying his intent, to ensure the encounter happens. The conflicting personalities, the muddled motives of Marc, and the ingestion of too much alcohol create a decidedly unhappy holiday from which hardly anyone will emerge unscathed.

The novel contains a couple of critically weak plot points (which I won’t divulge) that mar its believability. I’m not the only reader to find that Summer House suffers by comparison with the diabolical genius of The Dinner, with New York Times reviewer Lionel Shriver calling this follow-up “inexplicably careless.” Read The Dinner instead.

A Comedy of Tenors

Posted on by
A Comedy of Tenors, Paris

Antoinette LaVecchia (Maria) and Bradley Dean (Tito)(photo: Roger Mastroianni. Courtesy, Cleveland Play House)

Ken Ludwig’s new play, A Comedy of Tenors is a good old-fashioned theatrical farce. “Three tenors. Three egos. One stage. What can possibly go wrong?” said the Cleveland Play House promotion. You may remember Ludwig’s big hit of 26 years ago—Lend Me a Tenor—and this one, too, involves amorous shenanigans with high-voltage opera stars, most of them the same characters who appeared in the earlier play.

A Comedy of Tenors premiered at the Cleveland Play House in September then moved to Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, which co-produced it and where it was on stage through November 1. The entire cast of seven moved with it, as did director Stephen Wadsworth, who has masterminded numerous notable McCarter plays over the past two decades. Wadsworth is well acquainted with the operatic temperament through his work with opera companies across Europe, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and as director of Opera Studies at the Julliard School. He doubtless has a natural affinity for this comedic material.

Set in 1930s Paris, the story centers on the final hours before a “three tenors”-style concert. But impresario Henry Saunders can’t seem to get his three singers in the same place at the same time. First, a Swedish tenor drops out altogether, but the biggest star of the bunch—Tito “Il Stupendo” Merelli—objects to the replacement Saunders is lucky to find. He’s a much younger man whose popularity is soaring, and Merelli is beginning to feel his age. Making matters worse are several romantic mixups that only a deft hand with comedy can carry off. The three singers finally come together, then fall apart again, and it appears the only man who can save Saunders’s concert is a bellhop with a golden voice.

The strikingly gorgeous set used in Cleveland—a luxury hotel suite—also made the trip to Princeton. As set designer Charlie Corcoran said in the program notes, “There’s one very specific need in all farces, and that is doors.” Doors to enter, doors to exit, and doors to slam. Lead actor Bradley Dean makes good use of those doors, as he plays both Merelli and the bellhop, and must exit the stage left door as Tito, dash around backstage (changing costume en route) and enter the door stage right as the bellhop. Watching him switch roles, costumes, and personae is one of the play’s great charms.

Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor is still playing all over the United States, and for theatergoers who love a romantic farce, his new play is something to watch for!

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

Posted on by
Peggy Guggenheim, Alexander Calder

Guggenheim with an Alexander Calder mobile (photo: JR, creative commons license)

The new documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (trailer) tells the story of Guggenheim’s remarkable role in preserving and presenting modern art. The niece of Solomon Guggenheim, whose New York City museum is a fixture in the contemporary art scene, she immersed herself in art while living in Paris and London in the 1920s and 1930s.

The film was directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland (interview), whose first award-winning film focused on another larger-than-life woman, Diana Vreeland. In Guggenheim, the filmmaker saw a woman who was courageous, strong, and had the “ability to believe in underdogs. These artists were not mainstream, yet she had the vision to believe in them and create a new place in history for them and for herself.”

In 1937, she opened the Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London, which showcased artists such as Jean Cocteau and Vasily Kandinsky. As World War II began in Europe, she purchased treasured works by artists such as Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí and Piet Mondrian, and as the war escalated, she arranged for over 150 paintings and sculpture to be shipped as “household goods” to New York, thereby saving seminal works from being confiscated or destroyed.

She conducted notorious love affairs with numerous artists, including Max Ernst, whom she married briefly after helping him leave Europe. Ernst has one of the best quips in the film saying, “I had a Guggenheim, and it wasn’t a fellowship!”

The documentary uses extensive interviews with art historians and curators to describe how Guggenheim became the protector and promoter of postwar art. As The Hollywood Reporter’s John Defore says, when she settled down in Venice, she would “throw great parties, tend to dozens of dogs, and watch the world grasp the scope of what she’d done.” Her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal is now home of The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, one of the most important showcases in Italy for the works of early 20th century American and European artists.

While the documentary has been making the film festival circuit, reportedly it will have a limited distribution in theaters beginning November 6.

UPDATE, 11/13: Los Angeles Times Credits Guggenheim’s perspicacity!

This review is by Tucson-based guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone, who writes the highly entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Piazza Venier dei Leoni, Venice

Piazza Venier dei Leoni (photo: wikipedia)

Related articles