BRHADISVARA TEMPLE

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

Throwing light on Big Temple

A. SRIVATHSAN

“The architecture and sculptural layout are manifestations of liturgical ideas”

BRHADISVARA TEMPLE-Form and meaning: By R. Nagaswamy, Published by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Janpath, New Delhi and Aryan Books International, Pooja Apartments, 4B, Ansari Road, New Delhi-110002. Price Rs. 3000.

Almost two decades ago, the Government of India funded-IGNCA launched an elaborate project to study the Brihadisvara temple at Thanjavur. It planned to bring out a series of publications, including a multilingual bibliography and a compendium of epigraphs, to disseminate the findings of the study. However, only one comprehensive publication saw the light of day. Pierre Pichard's excellent work on the temple architecture was the first book to be published, and that was in 1995. Nagaswamy's book under review is the second one in the promised series. The millennium celebrations of the Brihadisvara temple probably provided the impetus.

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From : The Chronicle
Photo :http://chronicle.com

Warrior Nation

Larry Towell, Magnum Photos

By Michael Nelson

"Endless War" is how The New York Times headlined its review of the Boston University historian Andrew J. Bacevich's new book, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War. It's a headline that will work just as well if the Times decides to review Reasons to Kill: Why Americans Choose War by Richard E. Rubenstein, a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University. In fact, either Bacevich or Rubenstein could accurately have chosen "Endless War" as his own book's title.

The occasion for both books, as well as for the City University of New York journalism and political-science professor Peter Beinart's recent The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, is the start of the 10th year of continuous (and at least seemingly endless) war by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and—factoring in what the Times estimates is "roughly a dozen" secret military campaigns against terrorist groups based in other countries—around the world . Add those to the list of previous wars and military operations during the past 30 years: Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

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The Worst of the Madness

From : The New York Review of Books
Photo : www.nybooks.com

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
by Timothy Snyder
Basic Books, 524 pages, $29.95

Stalin’s Genocides
by Norman M. Naimark
Princeton University Press, 163 pp., $26.95

Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Art Library

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, center, arriving in Berlin to meet with Adolf Hitler, November 12, 1940. At front left are German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Once, in an attempt to explain the history of his country to outsiders, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described the impact of war, occupation, and the Holocaust on ordinary morality. Mass violence, he explained, could shatter a man’s sense of natural justice. In normal times,

had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police. A crowd would have gathered, and much talk and comment would have ensued. Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary question


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• 5.A Web Pioneer Profiles Users by Name

The Man who sold America

From : The Reason
Photo : http://reason.com

The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (But True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century, by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz, Harvard Business Press, 415 pages, $27.95

Americans are great at rattling off Nike slogans and reciting the lyrics to the Big Mac theme song. But ask them to name the man often described as the father of modern advertising, and you might as well ask them to name the U.S vice president in 1853. That so few people have ever heard of Vice President William Rufus DeVane King is understandable: He died after just 45 days in office as second-in-command to Franklin Pierce. That so few people have ever heard of the man who convinced America to brush its teeth every day and made it fashionable for women to smoke in public is downright unpatriotic.

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1	Delete This at Your Peril 4.99
2	London Labour and the London Poor Henry Mayhew
3	Just My Type Simon Garfield
4	Eyewitness Decade Roger Tooth
5	Whoops! John Lanchester
6	Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain Owen Hatherley
7	Tender Pack (Nigel Slater)
8	Map of a Nation Rachel Hewitt
9	Dispatches From the Dark Side Gareth Peirce
10	Corrections Jonathan Franzen

The Gun

From : The National Interest
Photo :http://nationalinterest.org

The Gun C. J. Chivers, The Gun (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 496 pp., $28.00.

IT IS not always easy to understand what makes a particular weapon iconic, or whether such an icon is really something worth having. The twentieth century has few obvious contenders. The Spitfire is perhaps the most famous because so much hung on achieving victory in the Battle of Britain. The surviving myth of the Allied David pitted against the German Goliath has an enduring, if sentimental, attraction. The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is perhaps a modern-day equivalent, its awesome power and menace balanced by the aesthetic fascination of seeing the broad, black batwing fighter in flight.

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1. The State of Liberalism
2. The State of Conservatism
3. Critic’s Notebook: Paris Review Editor Frees Menagerie of Wordsmiths
4. In the Eyes of Others
5. On the Mend
6. Sol Steinmetz, an Expert on Language, Dies at 80
7. A Wayward Son Checks in With Mother Russia
8. Essay: The Myth of Consensus Politics
9. Just Win
10. Slither Room

The Moral Landscape

From : Review
Photo : http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com

The Moral Landscape

By SAM HARRIS

Reviewed by Troy Jollimore

It used to be a given that religion was the source of all important knowledge. Both the "how" of the universe—what it is like, and how it works—and the "why"—why it exists at all, and why human life has a place in it—were to be answered by referring to religious stories and authorities. With the rise of modernity questions of the first sort were removed from religion's purview: we think of them now as scientific questions, to be answered by empirical investigation. But many defenders of religion cling to the idea that, while science is the proper venue for "how" questions, we must still turn to religion to find answers to questions of meaning and purpose, of the value of human life, and of moral behavior.

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THE WTO AND INDIA

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

WTO and Indian economy

U. SANKAR

A lucid account of the developing countries' perspectives, negotiating options and strategies

THE WTO AND INDIA - Issues and Negotiating Strategies: Edited by Alokesh Barua and Robert M. Stern; Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd., 3-6-752, Himayatnagar, Hyderabad-500029. Price not stated.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) was created on January 1, 1995 to promote world trade. The multilateral trade agreements include the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 1994 and its related agreements; the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS); and the Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). In addition to these agreements, Annexures 1 and 2 cover the dispute settlement mechanism and Annexure 3 the trade policy mechanism. A noteworthy feature is that these three Annexures are part of a “single undertaking” approach. The fundamental principles of the regime are: most favoured-nation (treating all countries equally); national treatment (treating foreigners and locals equally); and freer trade (reductions in tariffs and removal of non-tariff barriers).

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Ethiopia Since Live Aid

From : New Republic
Photo : http://www.tnr.com

Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid
By Peter Gill
(Oxford University Press, 280 pp., $27.95)

In the fall of 1994, James P. Grant, the executive director of UNICEF, sent a message in the name of his agency to the upcoming Cairo conference on population and development, in which he declared that the world had within its grasp the means to solve “the problems of poverty, population, and environmental degradation that feed off of one another in a downward spiral [bringing] instability and strife in its wake.” Grant was a great man, a giant of the development world. He was among the first senior figures within the U.N. system, not to mention national governments in either the poor world or the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to take on board the fundamental insight that development is inextricably bound up with the emancipation, education, and empowerment of women.


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The Civil War at 150

From : The Chronicle
Photo : The Granger Collection

Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 precipitated secession, which led to the Civil War. The sesquicentennial of that event, on November 6, marks a period of commemoration, with a cavalcade of new books on the topic.

By Louis P. Masur

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War (1861-65) is nearly upon us. Lincoln's bicentennial, in February 2009, generated scores of celebrations and dozens of books. But that was only a single day. It is safe to say that for the next four years, we will be inundated with reflections and publications.

Two new books and a exhibition offer the opening salvo in what will be a continuing barrage. From 2011 to 2015, major battles and events will be commemorated: Fort Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, the Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Lincoln's re-election, Appomattox. No list is complete. What about the abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C., in 1862, or the battles of Grant's Overland Campaign in Virginia during 1864? Such is the history of the Civil War that small moments gather attention and accrue meaning: three cigars wrapped in Lee's battle orders discovered in 1862 by Union soldiers in a field in Maryland; the great locomotive chase, or military raid, in Georgia that same year; a riot over food shortages in Richmond in 1864. Of course, events will be memorialized differently North and South. In that way, memories of the war will serve to perpetuate the crisis.

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The Noël Coward Reader

From : The Wal Street Journal

Photo : Evverett Collection

The Noël Coward Reader

By Barry Day

Knopf, 596 pages, $39.95

Oscar Wilde famously said that he had merely put his talent into his work—he saved his genius for his life. In Noël Coward's lifetime, it seems that he, too, relished dancing along the divide between his life and his art, appearing content to pour much of his inspiration into maintaining a certain style. He crafted what became a familiar vision of the wry sophisticate, kitted out in smoking jacket or tuxedo, with Gertrude Lawrence on his arm, cigarette holder in hand, a bon mot on his lips. He loved to point out the songs that he knocked off between tea and cocktails, and the plays that he wrote in three days.

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2. Before He Was Experienced
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6. Never Grow Old
7. The Professor Goes to Washington
8. A Novelist’s Voice, Both Exotic and Midwestern
9. Children’s Books: iRead
10. Under God . . . or Not

The German Genius

From : The Guardian
Photo : Fiona Hanson/PA Archive/Press Association Ima

The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson – review

James Buchan enjoys an encyclopedic account of Germany's 'idealism with efficiency'

For a while in the 1980s, I used to spend my Sundays in the Old Cemetery in the town of Bonn in the Rhineland. Wandering amid the provincial tombs, I was forever coming across some stupendous intellectual celebrity. Here were Beethoven's mother and Schiller's wife; Clara and Robert Schumann; August Wilhelm Schlegel; Mathilde Wesendonck, for whom Wagner wrote his most beautiful music; FWA Argelander, who mapped three hundred thousand stars. These Sunday excursions were for me an exercise in mental recuperation. Bored by the Third Reich and its uptight little successor republics in West and East Germany, I sought an afternoon's peace in an older and, as I thought, more German Germany.


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5. 5. Stieg Larsson 'spent year training Eritrean guerrillas'

Jet Age

From : The Wall Street Journal

Photo : Hulton archives /getty images

By Sam Howe Verhovek
Avery, 248 pages, $27

A jetliner—no matter how uncomfortable—is arguably the closest humans have come to having a time machine. Board one in New York, go to sleep, and wake up Africa. Pretty cool, no?

So it's ironic that the term "jet age" today sounds almost quaint, suggesting a time of black-and-white televisions, men in hats and women in gloves. The jet engine is a truly amazing invention that remains at the cutting edge of many technologies, including software, aerodynamics and synthetic materials.

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The Call to Service

From : The BOOK

Tokyo geisha, circa 1870

Butterfly’s Sisters: The Geisha in Western Culture

by Yoko Kawaguchi

Yale University Press, 336 pp., $43.95

A few years ago, in her best-selling book, Sex Secrets of an American Geisha: How to Attract, Satisfy, and Keep Your Man Positively Sexual, the Korean-American writer Py Kim Conant offered a piece of advice for female readers in search of a husband: find your inner geisha. The doll-like child-woman wrapped in her silk kimono and broad tight obi, with her scarlet lips, plucked and penciled-in eyebrows, white make-up, black, lacquered hair, and exotic sexual technique, provides many lessons for (in Conant’s words) “American women who want to be married soon, to their good men.

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Stanley Cavell's Philosophical Improvisations

The Chronicle Review

Stanley Cavell's Philosophical Improvisations

Fritz Hoffmann for The Chronicle Review

Stanley Cavell, at home in Brookline, Mass.

By Thomas S. Hibbs

In God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, the latest in a number of recent books critical of the modern research university, the influential Irish-born philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that "neither the university nor philosophy is any longer seen as engaging the questions" of "plain persons." These questions include: "What is our place in the order of things? Of what powers in the natural and social world do we need to take account? How should we respond to the facts of suffering and death? What is our relationship to the dead? What is it to live a human life well? What is it to live it badly?" Now in his 80s, MacIntyre is among a small group of philosophers who have sought to address such questions. Other members, about the same age, include the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and, perhaps especially, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, whose life both in and out of philosophy is on display in his just-published autobiography, Little Did I Know (Stanford University Press).

The Grandest Duke

FROM : The New York Review of Books

by Harvey G. Cohen
University of Chicago Press, 688 pp., $40.00

The Duke Box
Storyville, eight CDs, $79.98

Leonard Herman Photography, LLC

Duke Ellington at a private party after a performance, Paris, 1960; photograph by Herman Leonard from Jazz, a collection of his images of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and others, to be published by Bloomsbury USA in November

On more than one occasion Duke Ellington described his childhood in Washington, D.C., as a sort of paradise, at least for him and those around him in the family circle. In the song “My Mother, My Father” (written for his 1963 musical show My People) he wrote:

My mother—the greatest—and the prettiest
My father—just handsome—but the wittiest…
I was raised in the palm of the hand
By the very best people in this land
From sun to sun
Their hearts beat as one
My mother—my father—and love

Born Edward Kennedy Ellington in 189

FROM :

The Berlin-Baghdad Express

From : Review
Photo : http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com

The Berlin-Baghdad Express

By SEAN McMEEKIN

Essay by A.C. Grayling

Here are two facts that might jolt your perception of current tensions in the Middle East. The first is that the empire which, at its height, had more Muslim subjects than any other empire ever – counting as subjects over one in three of the world’s Muslims – was the British Empire.

The second fact is that at the end of the First World War, Britain had more than a million soldiers in the Middle East, and in the years immediately following it cut up the map of the region into the shape it bears today, creating entirely new countries in the process and putting its nominees and clients into power in them.

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From : London Review of Books
Photo :http://www.lrbshop.co.uk

Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman

The world of letters: does such a thing still exist? Even within the seemingly homogeneous sphere of the university English department, a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing: disciplines which differ in their points of reference (Samuel Richardson v. Jhumpa Lahiri), the graduate degrees they award (Doctor of Philosophy v. Master of Fine Arts) and their perceived objects of study (‘literature’ v. ‘fiction’). Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, a study of Planet MFA conducted from Planet PhD, might not strike the casual reader as an interdisciplinary bombshell, but the fact is that literary historians don’t write about creative writing, and creative writers don’t write literary histories, so any secondary discourse about creative writing has been confined, as McGurl observes, to ‘the domain of literary journalism’ and ‘the question of whether the rise of the writing programme has been good or bad for American writers’: that is, to the domain of a third and completely different group of professionals, with its own set of interests, largely in whether things are good or bad. McGurl’s proposal to take the rise of the programme ‘not as an occasion for praise or lamentation but as an established fact in need of historical interpretation’ is thus both welcome and overdue.

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10 books you have to read this fall

From : The Globle and Mail
Photo : www.theglobeandmail.com

10 books you have to read this fall

We're well along into a brilliant fall for books. Much of the best Canadian fiction has already been published in order to qualify for this year's glittering prizes, but there are so many promising titles that it's wrenching to be restricted to a mere 10. There's fiction to come from Sheila Heti, Michael Cunningham, Myla Goldberg, Kevin Major, Nicole Krauss, Paul Auster, Cynthia Ozick, Steve Martin and Robert Wiersema, not to mention important new translations of Madame Bovary and Doctor Zhivago.

But here are 10 books no self-respecting reader should miss:

Changing My Mind, by Margaret Trudeau (HarperCollins)
This second memoir from the former hippie-dippy wife of Pierre Trudeau attributes her often bizarre behaviour – singing to Castro, a flirtation with the Rolling Stones – to a crushing depression and bipolar personality, one that left her suicidal in the wake of the deaths of her son Michel and PET. Expect an open book.

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WAR ON TERRORISM OR AMERICAN STRATEGY FOR GLOBAL DOMINANCE

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

War for U.S. global dominance

ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

WAR ON TERRORISM OR AMERICAN STRATEGY FOR GLOBAL DOMINANCE: Manzoor Alam; Vantage Press Inc., 419 Park Ave, South, New York, NY 10016. $ 18.95

Manzoor Alam uses a wide range of sources, from books through think-tank reports and official documents to authoritative mass media analyses; he shows the incoherence of all the stated purposes of the U.S.-led invasions and subsequent occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, which purportedly occurred in response to the attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. He shows how, in respect of Afghanistan, a mighty military coalition possessing some of the most advanced weapons in history launched its forces against one of the world's weakest countries. The invasion of Iraq, for its part, was allegedly justified by gross lies; the gigantic U.S. propaganda machine, furthermore, had willing help from large sections of the international press.

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What Ever Happened to Modernism?

From : The Wall Street Journal
Photo : http://online.wsj.com

What Ever Happened to Modernism?

By Gabriel Josipovici
Yale University Press, 208 pages, $28

The French poet Paul Valéry (1871-1945) once said that he could never write a novel because sooner or later he would find himself setting down such a sentence as "The marquise went out at five o'clock." Why did the marquise leave at five? he wondered. Why not at six or seven? In fact, why did she go out at all? And why a "marquise"? Why not a duchess or a washerwoman? The arbitrary nature of narrative devices irked Valéry; they pretended to an authority that was, at bottom, a sham. They invited us to treat mere fancy as hard fact.
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From : The Book
Photo : www.tnr.com

Defacing the Score

Gustav Mahler

Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World

by Norman Lebrecht

Pantheon, 336 pp., $27.95

The British critic Norman Lebrecht has no counterpart in American cultural life. He is a polemicist whose field of play is high culture—classical music in particular; and his target audience is decidedly mainstream. He is a fascinating and infuriating figure, inexhaustibly opinionated, generally iconoclastic, sometimes brilliant, often tendentious, and frequently trivial. He has clashed prolifically with prominent musicians, scholars and music industry leaders; he has been denounced and his publisher was sued; and he has an eager audience which delights in his breezy, readable, and provocative books.

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From : The Wall Street Journal
Photo : http://online.wsj.com

O Captain, Our Captain

George Washington was a genius and a titan, but it was politics, not war, at which he excelled

Washington: A Life

By Ron Chernow
The Penguin Press, 904 pages, $40

It was said of Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck that he was the subtle son of his feline mother posing all his life as his heavy, portentous father. Similarly, the George Washington who emerges from this truly magnificent life is an acute, consummate politician who posed all his life—with next to no justification—as a bluff but successful soldier. The pose came off because Washington himself so desperately wanted it to be true, but Ron Chernow wrenches back the curtain to reveal the real Washington, a general almost bereft of tactical ability yet a politician full of penetrating strategic insight. In this (English, anti-Revolutionary) reviewer's estimation, Washington emerges a far greater man.


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From : The New York Times
Photo : www.nytimes.com


After the birth of each of our three children, my wife and I breathed a deep sigh of relief. We had been meticulous in following our obstetrician’s advice: we had been screened for the Tay-Sachs trait, and had an amniocentesis to check for chromosomal changes associated with Down syndrome, and ultrasound to assess the fetus’s growth. Everything looked normal. But with the acute awareness of two physicians, we knew that these tests did not reveal all the problems that can occur during gestation. So when we heard the piercing cry of our newborn and were told the baby had a high Apgar score, we believed we had successfully skirted the perils of pregnancy.

But in the decades since our children’s birth, results from research studies have suggested that we do not put fetal life so readily behind us. Rather, as Annie Murphy Paul writes in her informative and wise new book, “fetal origins research suggests that the lifestyle that influences the development of disease is often not only the one we follow as adults, but the one our mothers practiced when they were pregnant with us as well.” This hypothesis was initially put forth by David Barker, a British physician who in 1989 published data indicating that poor maternal nutrition put offspring at risk for heart disease decades later.

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The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

From : The Washington Post
Photo : www.washingtonpost.com

'The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy,' reviewed by Michael Dirda

(Courtesy Of Harper - Courtesy Of Harper) Your browser's settings may be preventing you from commenting on and viewing comments about this item. See instructions for fixing the problem.

By Michael Dirda

Thursday, September 30, 2010

THE DIARIES OF SOFIA TOLSTOY

By Michael Dirda

Thursday, September 30, 2010

THE DIARIES OF SOFIA TOLSTOY

So you think you have an unhappy marriage? On Oct. 8, 1862, just two weeks after she wed the 34-year-old novelist Leo Tolstoy, the former Sofia Behrs was writing in her diary: "The whole of my husband's past is so ghastly that I don't think I shall ever be able to accept it." Tolstoy had just let his sheltered, 18-year-old bride read his own youthful diaries, in which he described his gambling, drunkenness and debaucheries. A few days later, Sofia confesses that she doesn't make her husband happy and that his "coldness will soon be unbearable." By Nov. 23, she is talking of killing him. Later, she spoke frequently of killing herself and attempted to do so on at least two occasions.

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State of Emergency: The Way We Were. Britain

From : The Economist
Photo : www.google.ca

Britain in the 1970s

Worst of times, best of times

Sep 23rd 2010

State of Emergency: The Way We Were. Britain, 1970–1974. By Dominic Sandbrook. Allen Lane; 768 pages; £30.

AS PRIME MINISTERS, Edward Heath and Gordon Brown had quite a lot in common. Both were monstrously self-centred, permanently grumpy and capable of astonishing rudeness. Both of their relatively short-lived premierships ended in humiliating failure. In a recent poll of academics on Britain’s best and worst prime ministers since the second world war, Heath came ninth out of twelve and Mr Brown tenth. But that is where the similarities end. Whereas Mr Brown was largely the author of his own misfortunes (the banking crash apart), Heath, as Dominic Sandbrook reminds us in his splendidly readable new history of Britain during the four years from 1970, was faced with a set of problems whose intracta
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Wait For Me

From : The Guardian
Photo : www.guardianbookshop.co.uk





Deborah Devonshire is a natural writer with a knack for the telling phrase and for hitting the nail on the head. She tells the story of her upbringing, lovingly and wittily describing her parents (as fictionalised by her sister Nancy); she talks candidly about her brother and sisters, and their politics (while not being at all political herself), and finally sets the record straight.






Deborah Devonshire is a natural writer with a knack for the telling phrase and for hitting the nail on the head. She tells the story of her upbringing, lovingly and wittily describing her parents (as fictionalised by her sister Nancy); she talks candidly about her brother and sisters, and their politics (while not being at all political herself), and finally sets the record straight.


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INDIA'S SILICON PLATEAU

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

Bangalore: the success story of ICT industry

DEEPA KURUP

INDIA'S SILICON PLATEAU - Development of Information and Communication Technology in Bangalore: R.C. Mascarenhas; Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd., 3-6-752, Himayatnagar, Hyderabad-500029.

A lot has been said and written about Bangalore, and its iconic status as the “IT capital of India.” With its clear and chronological account — on both the ICT revolution and why it converged upon Bangalore — India's Silicon Plateau gives a fresh ‘byte' of perspective. Throughout his narrative, Mascarenhas maintains that Bangalore's reputation of being a technopolis preceded the “IT outsourcing boom”, which, he says, rode on the back of a “scientific base” established by public sector research and educational institutes in the city.

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The Divine Sarah

From : The New York Review of Books
Photo : www.nybooks.com

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt
by Robert Gottlieb
Yale University Press, 233 pp., $25.00

Sarah Bernhardt as Pierrot in Jean Richepin’s Pierrot assassin, 1883; photograph by Paul Nadar

It is no wonder that we know so little about the woman who was the world’s most famous actress for the best part of half a century. When Sarah Bernhardt died in 1923, almost half a million people lined the streets of Paris. Most of them had seen her on stage and in movies, performing as though each plot were a conduit for her own emotions and as though every play from Racine’s Phèdre to Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias had been written as a psychobiography of Sarah Bernhardt. “No temperament more histrionic than Mme Bernhardt’s has, perhaps, ever existed,” wrote the obituarist of the London Times. “To read her memoirs is to live in a whirl of passions and adventures—floods of tears, tornadoes of rage, deathly sickness and incomparable health and energy.” As Robert Gottlieb warns in his appropriately lively biography, “She was a complete realist when dealing with her life but a relentless fabulist when recounting it
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