Hardcover: 466 pages
Publisher: Basic Books 2008
"Survival kits of the 1860s, packed in wooden barrels and deposited on tropical islands for use by the shipwrecked on their way to New Zealand, contained, as well as the predictably useful knife, matches, rope, and fish-hooks, a three-piece tweed suit - presumably to allow any latter-day Robinson Crusoe to welcome his rescuers with appropriate decorum." p. 24
Philip Blom's book is near perfect. The Vertigo Years is an elegant yet robust narrative of the turbulent pre WW I years, an era traditionally described as the belle epoque. Blom pays witness to beauty - in the sentimental, intentional lapses of memory - beauty only to those who wished to stay blind in the face of the modernizing and rapidly changing, increasingly austere world. This was a time when social, moral and economic fundamentals were overturn - time of people visioning "society as a great collective dream designed to force people into being useful instead of enjoying themselves"... and where "man was nothing but a mass of highly unstable perceptions creating the impression of personality"... Epoch of 1904-1914 made peoples head spin - everyone was forced to realize that "there was, in fact, nothing stationary in the world at all"... (Quotes from pp. 55, 59, 79)
"Indeed, there seemed to be no end to the beneficial properties of this new, mysterious substance. Soon the cosmetics industry seized on the public interest and produced balms and creams containing traces of thorium and radium, such as Tho-Radia, a supposedly miraculous cream produced in France. 'Stay ugly if you want to!' trumpeted the slogan of the manufacturer, whose products were wont to lend altogether new meaning to the idea of radiant beauty." p. 87
Second Opinion: Juliet Nicolson / The Guardian
¶ 11/24/2008 03:54:00 ip.
