Reviews for Italian frescoes, High Renaissance and Mannerism, 1510-1600

The average rating for Italian frescoes, High Renaissance and Mannerism, 1510-1600 based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-06-15 00:00:00 Richard D. Salinas I feel obligated to write a half-ass review rather than the crude jokes I normally post, because this book was pretty awesome and there is only two other reviews. I’ll have to reread this eventually, there’s so much going on in this very slim volume of historical metafiction that I’m sure I’ve missed quite a bit. Mary Ellen Pleasant was a successful hotelier, abolitionist, civil rights hero, who financed John Brown’s raid on Harper’s ferry. Cliff paints John Brown as merely an ally rather than a leader, and much of this novel is a critique of not only that event, but all school textbook history, the “Official versions for public consumption . . . printed, bound, and gagged, resides in schools, libraries, the majority unconscious. Serves the common good. Does not cause trouble. Walks across tapestries, the television screen. Does not give aid and comfort to the enemy. Is the stuff of convocations, colloquia; is substantiated -like the host- in dissertation." Cliff captures the confusion of history making, the tendency to give credit to one man for the collective actions of many and how storytelling is just as valuable as written history, fairy tales function as ‘an antidote’ to prayers. There’s a leper colony replaying out the subjugation of indigenous people. Missionaries precede armies, spiritual colonization justifies the actually, then taken over by the United States government and the reduction of people to numbers, ending in propagandist media and the utter indifference of the colonized, now only concerned with superficial distractions like sports. There so much here that is applicable to us today. Also there was a bit about Captain James Cook. Pretty much most of what I know about Cook now comes from Cliff and Hunter Thompson. The craziest thing about this book is its pro-Capitalism bent. She cleverly challenges what she refers to as John Brown’s Christian communism, which “saw our people’s experience as somehow ennobling; that we were better than capitalism, since we had been crucified by it.” Cliff cautions against the dangers of romanticizing oppression by viewing it as some form of a divine test,“the notion of suffering into redemption.” Her character correctly points out that African Americans have already paid for capitalism in sweat and blood and what is suggested is the creation of a level playing field through violent revolution for her idea of some sort of honest capitalism. This leads in to question of how much responsibility falls on citizen that support, through inactivity, the laws that keep people in oppressed. I certainly wasn’t taught about John Brown in high school (I did read about him on my own) but I did hear about Nat Turner repeatedly and there was always this slant to it, “oh, how gruesome to kill ‘innocent’ people”, yet the cause itself, is often glossed over and there is hardly the shock at the murder of hundreds of thousands of women and children perpetrated by an entire nation.(Someone please tell me that I just had a shitty history teacher once, rather than this being institutionalized racism feed to children?!?!?) There’s so much more in these 213 pages. Malcolm X’s future ghost hangs out in the background. “I stare at photographs of myself, the only evidence at hand that I exist, am three-dimensional, and I can’t recognize the subject. Who is she?”

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-23 00:00:00 Joe Snowaen Free Enterprise is a valuable novel on the economics of slavery and the necessity of keeping one's history alive, even if only orally. One aspect of this novel that I found particularly fascinating was the leper colony scene to illustrate the treatment of indigenous peoples and African Americans. The story is told in almost a dreamlike quality, led by two captivating and dynamic central female characters.