Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [223]
The Italics Are Mine, Nina Berberova (Harcourt, Brace, 1969; Knopf, 1992, revised translation). Memoir of Russian writer and exile to Paris and the United States. Berberova, who passed away in 1993, is also the subject of “Going On,” an essay in Kennedy Fraser’s wonderful book Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women’s Lives from Edith Wharton to Germaine Greer (Knopf, 1996).
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, edited by Mark Roskill (Atheneum, 1963).
Madame de Sévigné: A Life and Letters, Frances Mossiker (Knopf, 1983).
Madame de Staël: The First Modern Woman, Francine du Plessix Gray (Atlas, 2008).
Édouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat, Beth Archer Brombert (Little, Brown, 1996).
M. F. K. Fisher and Me: A Memoir of Food and Friendship, Jeannette Ferrary (St. Martin’s, 1991; Thomas Dunne, 1998).
Matisse
Matisse and Picasso, Yve-Alain Bois (Flammarion, 1999).
Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art, Françoise Gilot (Doubleday, 1990).
Matisse, Picasso, Miró: As I Knew Them, Rosamond Bernier (Knopf, 1991).
The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869–1908 (1998) and Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Color, 1909–1954 (2005), both by Hilary Spurling and published by Knopf.
M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table, Joan Reardon (Harmony, 1994). Fisher, Child, and Waters were the pioneers in the American food world: due to Child’s PBS television series, the Food Network thrives today; due to Fisher’s passionate writing on gastronomy, cookbooks and food magazines grew to flourish; and Waters’s insistence upon fresh, seasonal food has prompted the growth of farmers’ markets and the local food movement.
Henry Miller: The Paris Years (Arcade, 1995), by the Hungarian photographer Brassaï, whose given name was Gyula Halász.
Misia: The Life of Misia Sert, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale (Knopf, 1980). Misia tells the wildly entertaining but true tale of the vivacious socialite Misia (née Marie Sophie Olga Zenaide Godebska), whose third husband, the Spanish painter José-Maria Sert, decorated such spaces as Rockefeller Center and the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.
Napoléon
The Horizon Book of the Age of Napoléon (American Heritage, 1963).
How Far from Austerlitz?: Napoléon 1805–1815, Alistair Horne (St. Martin’s, 1997). The years 1996 and 1997 marked the two hundredth anniversary of Napoléon Bonaparte’s first successes in the Italian Campaign against Austria, causing historian Horne to reflect upon his earlier book Napoléon, Master of Europe, 1805–1807 and ask, “Did he deserve it? How did his reputation look, nearly two centuries later?” and “What paths led him to his final, wretched exile?” Austerlitz has been referred to as “the first great battle of modern history,” Horne notes, and was Napoléon’s greatest victory; it was also the beginning of Napoléon’s downfall. Though How Far from Austerlitz? isn’t a biography of Napoléon, it provides a great starting point from which to view his life. (The title of this excellent book, by the way, is taken from Rudyard Kipling’s “A St. Helena Lullaby,” which stuck in my head long after I’d finished reading. Each line of the poem begins with “How far is St. Helena …,” referring to the island where Napoléon served out his exile. One stanza is: “How far is St. Helena from the field of Austerlitz? / You couldn’t hear me if I told—so loud the cannons roar.”)
Napoléon, Vincent Cronin (Collins, 1971).
Napoléon Bonaparte: A Life, Alan Schom (HarperCollins, 1997).
And though it’s historical fiction,