Customer Reviews

The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

The nine reviewers who precede me have on balance been kind when giving this pretentious bit of nonsense an average rating of 2 stars. This is alleged to be a biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, and while she plays a part in this written mess, it is the Author, Douglas Shand-Tucci who places himself and his feelings on par with his alleged subject.

I have never read anything that was punctuated, or better stated mutilated, than this offering the New York Times deemed "Notable". Notable it is, for one reviewer gave up because of the exclamation points; this Author uses them more often than periods, but never begins to approach in frequency the repetitive structural disasters that riddle every page. Maybe it is because his name contains one, I can think of no other reason, for this man uses more hyphens on a page than normally would be encountered on 100 pages of any other work. Sentences that must compete for records in length in part due to the parentheticals, quotes, and other handfuls of punctuated nonsense that was thrown at these pages by the handful.

Then there is the incessant use of "I", this is used in inane asides, and when he answers himself endlessly, i.e. "What was it that Twain said..." And then there is his habit of condescending to his readers. He will use a word he presumes would not be understood by a junior-high English class, and then goes on to explain what he means to his readers, who he clearly believes to be semi-literate.

It is an accomplishment to write about a fascinating woman who first conceived, and then created a collection of art, and a building for it, on a scale no other woman had ever done. However after 150 pages she has bought 2 paintings that the Author devoted about the same number of sentences to, why, because the balance is spent exploring the personal lives of the people around her made doubly long by the Author's pontificating on their life preferences. Who cares? This was not supposed to be about Mrs. Gardner's friends, their private lives and suicides.

This Author even has the audacity to compliment himself, as he proclaims that no other Biographer "has ever" said this or that. The reason they have not Mr. Shand-Tucci is that nobody cares.

Any other biography on this woman and her museum has got to be better than this result, which is so bad it won't even put a person to sleep.

Like another reviewer I would happily return it, but to do so would lower the quality of the inventory that I elevated when I rid them of this nonsense.

The only "scandal" here is the book, and those that let it be printed.

I am an avid reader and I find the subject of Bella Gardner fascinating, and I was incredibly excited to find yet another book about her amazing life! Yet, little did I know that it would take me almost three weeks to slog through this terribly written piece! With little organization and darting from one thought to another, it is barely held together. But, dear reader, the worst is yet to come. Let me give you an example of just one of the "typical" sentences that make up the writing found within, and remember this is just one sentence: "Perhaps her most vivid counsel ever as muse and mentor, into which central venue of Isabella Gardner's life first James and then Crawford and now Sargent have conducted us, that advice reflects the fact that just as it has been argued of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's friendship with Arthur Hallam that although their relationship lasted a mere four years, those "four years probably [were] the equal in psychic importance to the other seventy-nine of Tennyson's life," so with act one of Gardner's and Crawford's affair, which lasted barely two years."
Now I realize how incredibly terrifying this is, and believe me, I have left punctuation, wording and phrasing exactly as they are found in the book. This is but one of three hundred pages of such dismal phrasing. Get the point...

A friend recently lent me this book, as I am fascinated with the subject, particularly with regard to Sargent. Unfortunately, Mr. Shand-Tucci's writing makes the book virtually unreadable. I'm halfway through, and will only stick it out in deference to the subject matter. A sample sentence:

A number of Hall's letters to her survive in her papers and his direct, no-nonsense requests for money for financial aid of all sorts, and Gardner's openhanded reponse, as well as her concerns for his health and consequent invitations to rest up at her country estate, all argue for a close mutual understanding and sympathy - as, above all, does the fact - utterly overlooked and ignored until now - that this Oxford graduate's most widely read book of readings was dedicated to Isabella Gardner - a dedication as key to understanding Gardner's role in Boston as the many better-known dedications of literary and musical works to her of which so much is always made.

Painful enough to type, but tortuous to read for 300 pages. How does a writer this stunningly bad get into print?

What a shame this book is so poorly written. Isabella Stewart Gardner was a fascinating woman, and Shand-Tucci brings insight to her story, but the style is so intrusive as to be distracting.

Mrs. Jack, a New Yorker transplanted to Boston by marriage and alienated from the Brahmins by character, was often generous but not always kind. She acted as mentor and patron to outcasts of the time -- homosexuals, Jews, artists and (to a lesser extent) women -- but she was also quick to reject those she considered beneath her interest. She built Fenway Court, a truly unique and visionary museum, for the people of Boston; but she would also have her carriage park on the sidewalk in inclement weather even though many pedestrians were inconvenienced.

Furthermore, the enigmatic Mrs. Gardner destroyed many of her letters and papers shortly before her death, so the fact that Shand-Tucci's insightful speculations about her seem plausible is no small feat. That is why it is particularly tragic (perhaps too strong a word, but close) that the reader can never forget the presence of this heavy-handed narrator. Here is a sample sentence (page 158):

"Though stimulated by her patronage-Gardner was one of the first to see Loeffler not only as a virtuoso but as the composer he wished to be and increasingly today is regarded as-Loeffler grew to feel at one point distinctly imposed upon by Gardner, who seemed to him possessive and only too willing to "show him off" in Ralph Locke's words, as "a kind of in-house virtuoso" in the Gardner music room, all of this, or (sic) course, quite classic behavior on the part of humble but artful, trustworthy but vain, kind but cruel and rampagingly dominant Isabella!"

One can open the book to almost any page, as I did with this example, and find sentences as bad or worse. The jacket states that the author won an award for a previous book, but that is difficult to imagine. It is almost unreadable, and I put the book down twice before I finally finished reading it. On the other hand, it did make me want to revisit Fenway Court (now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) in Boston, so the content is great but the style is almost insurmountable.

When you have to spend 10 minutes rereading a sentence to fully understand it's intent, a problem exists. Shand I fear purposefully writes in this manner because he is assuming himself to be eloquent, quite the contrary. Apart from extremely convoluted sentences, he has a habit of phrasing things in the negative thereby obscuring what could have been a VERY READABLE sentence in the affirmative. The use of exclamation points reached its limit surely in the first few chapters.

Furthermore, Shand has an extremely annoying habit of inserting himself into the biography which is completely inappropriate. For instance in a discussion of Gardener in the role of a muse, Shand inserts commentary on his own author/muse relationship.

This book was the monthly selection for our book club, but none of us could wade through it without falling asleep or becoming distracted. While the subject sounded interesting, the execution forces the reader to untangle long strings of writing in return for details of the lives of moderately interesting people. The author fails to translate what seems to be his personal passion into something interesting to the general reading public.

Just returned from a trip to Boston...during a dinner party in Cambridge, the following was overheard:

Harvard professor: "...my wife was reading a book about I.S. Gardner, but said it was so bad, she couldn't go on..."

It sounded familiar, and then I recalled this awful book. Sure enough, it was the same.

when i set out to write a research paper about Isabella Stewart Gardner, i decided to read her biographies. i opted to read them in chronological order, starting with Morris Carter's published in 1925. i was having a ball learning about such an interesting woman, until i got to the Shand-Tucci biography. this book confused me so much, not only because of it's writing style, but also because of it's content. Mr. Shand-Tucci presents information completely opposite to the info in Morris Carter and Louise Hall Tharp's biographies. these differences were so extreme that i ended up writing my research paper about them. no joke. three thousand words later, and i still feel i could write more on the faults of this book.

Just a side note, i talked to a friend who works at the Gardner Museum, and they stopped selling this biography in the museum shop because its allegations against Mrs. Gardner are so farfetched. if you want to read a good biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, i highly recommend "Mrs. Jack" by Louise Hall Tharp.

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a remarkable woman--a champion of the arts, a friend of the disenfranchised, an early feminist. She had the courage to combat racism and homophobia, as well as the vision to design and build one of the world's most unique museums. If only she had a better biographer. While Douglas Shand-Tucci should be commended for his research and enthusiasm, there's no denying that this is one of the most sloppily written, poorly edited books on the market. The New York Times Book Review called it "garrulous," but that doesn't begin to describe this 300-page mess littered with run-on sentences, intrusive asides, scatter-brained analogies, and so many exclamation marks that even Tom Wolfe would cringe. Shand-Tucci should hire a writing coach--and his editor should be shot.

Shand-Tucci has allowed his personal bias to color this life of I. S. Gardner. Central chapters are devoted to the theory that the young men and women who were mentored or inspired by Gardner were homo sexuals accounting for her independent spirit. As other reviewers have noted, the author's prose style is atrocious. Was he trying to imitate Henry James? One paragraph was one long convoluted sentence--full of appositional phrases, parenthetical comments, and attempts to write periodical sentences. It just doesn't work and tires--if not completely bores--the reader.