Customer Reviews

Barcelona the Great Enchantress (Directions)

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

 

 

Essentially condensing, rewriting and updating his earlier work the 574 page Barcelona, this new 168 page version uses the examination of Catalan architecture to tell how the strong independent nature of it's citizens has created one of the most architecturally interesting cities in the world. The book begins with the Australian author's third and most recent wedding in the 700 year old town hall by the mayor of the city he has loved for 30 some years. A thorough knowledge of the history, culture, art, and politics of Barcelona presented with wit, keen observation, and an open fondness. Excellent book to read before going or if you have been, or for armchair travelers. Read this before the larger book, which you could read after this to obtain much more detail on the all aspects.

I read this delightful book on a plane to Barcelona. It whet my appetite for the cultural repast to come. Hughes gives a foretaste of the rich melange of language, history, art, and architecture that makes Barcelona and Catalonia so compelling. Though Hughes clearly loves this city, the writing is fresh and he mixes in sharp opinions so the book never cloys. Delectable.

Hughes makes the buildings, history and pride of the Catalan people come alive. His use of Architecture tells a quick story of a strong and independant people, with Barcelona at it's center. His love of the city and people is evident in his story of his most recent wedding in Barcelona. The great thing about the book is that you want more, I'm happy he has a larger volume that covers the city and its eccletic history.

A brief sample history of Barcelona and its effect on art, architecture, and the people. Hughes fell in love with this city and became a frequent visitor to the second largest city in Spain. Barcelona is indeed a famous city and one of the holdouts to the Franco regime in the Spanish CIvil War. Perhaps Hughes through his wording tried to convey his love of the city in his writings. However this book came across as a sketchy summary history of this great city.

This is an OK read on this great city. If you want more history, check out Hughes earlier book on this city.

Which is not a bad thing, since the original 574-page version, written in 1992 just after the Barcelona Olympics, is too verbose. This version appears to have benefited from aggressive editing, deleting much of the generally irrelevant material on Barcelona's history and Catalan literature and art, which may generously be described as undistinguished.

Hughes' real strength lies in architectural criticism, and here he shines. Readers who share that interest may well want to buy the 1992 version which discusses that topic in depth.

Neither book, unfortunately, has a sufficient number of pictures.

There is an excellent VHS tape of Barcelona [ASIN: 6303209777] that combines both ground and aerial footage. Well worth purchasing.

I brought this book along with me on my honeymoon to Paris and Barcelona and started reading it on our overnight train to Barcelona. I finished it in about four hours of reading, closing it just before getting in a cab to our Barcelona hotel.

Barcelona: The Great Enchantress is a page turner, especially if you are planning a trip there. In fact, if you are planning a trip there, this book is mandatory reading. It will pump you up for your visit like no tour guide can do. It doesn't contain a lot of in-depth advice for tourists or a careful history of Barcelona's rich architectural history (Hughes has another book for that, although I have not read it). What it does is whet your appetite.

Read this book and get excited about one of the most amazing cities in Europe! This is travel writing at its best and most engaging.

This small volume overflows with passion for Barcelona's art and architecture, subjects Hughes generously expands to include cultural history, food, and politics, as well as sketches of his personal engagement with Barcelona's people and the creative life-force of the city. Hughes writes, "You are lucky if not too late in life, you discover a second city other than your place of birth which becomes a true home town."

This book will give you a sense of the Catalan spirit and personality. The author's professional interest in art focuses the book more heavily in that direction, but it is not overladen with details. This book will give you a sense of the atmospherics of Barcelona and some insight into who the Catalans are. This book is a not a traditional travel book in that Robert Hughes doesn't just travel to Barcelona; for at least 30 years it has been his second home and he has important friendships there. He has effectively adopted the city, and this book tells us why. I enjoyed the book; I learned more about Catalunya and the spirit of its people without being overburdened by too much historical detail. The author has a dry sense of humor that some might interpret as veering into arrogance; at this point he is a semi-cantankerous old man. But his joy in revealing his love for his adopted city is apparent.

This book is the perfect length for the plane flight from America to Barcelona. It is also a bit choppy and has been fairly obviously edited from its much larger original text. If you enjoy art and architecture, you'll probably want more than the tidbits that this book has to offer; if you don't, it's not accessible nor well-written enough to give you a fundamental understanding of what you are looking at when you are on the ground in Barcelona. It's very much a memoir or an autobiography, so read it with the understanding that what you like and what Robert Hughes likes may be very different things. As a traveler who likes to research the places he is going pretty extensively before I travel, I found this book fairly lacking in interesting details and far too personal for my taste, but as far as I can tell it is the only non-travel-guide book of its kind out there on the ancient city of Catalonia. In short, I would check this book out of a local library for the trip, as its length fits nicely into the trans-Atlantic flight doldrums, but don't spend the money purchasing it for life, unless you're like me and you plan on putting it on your bookshelf so everyone can see how snooty and worldly of a traveler you are.

This is one of the least interesting reads in a long time for me. i had heard so much good but all the good tumbled to the bottom of the page as i read each page. Boring does not describe the book, uneventful is a start. did i really want to hear over and over about the OLD days and nothing about the viviality of an exciting city? No. What I wanted was a story, a lifeline to the city, a novel maybe that incorporated a lifestyle. this book left me flat and almost not wanting to visit a city that I had already visited several years ago. I fell in love with it then and hoped to fall more deeply in love with Barcelona through this book. This did not happen nor did it even spark my interest to read anything else of Robert Hughes. If anyone can recommend a good,interesting read of the life of Barcelonians, I'd be interested in hearing about it. OK, I'm off looking for a current Barcelona novel with some creative juices to prepare me for my next European adventure.