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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a summer reading jewel, June 12, 2008
Hummingbirds! I would have never thought of them as some kind of ambiguous stand-in for a number of concerns of the period (marital infidelity or bliss, abolitionist arguments of freedom, a hint of tea totaling or the pleasures of a sumptuous life) but I'm sure I'll see them everywhere now.
Benfey provides you with a paragraph or so of Twain, a few stanzas of Dickinson, a painting of Heade and then composes fascinating readings, sensitive of them by combining close analysis and historical detail. His pleasure and enjoyment of these authors and artists is palpable and contagious.
I really appreciate the way this book resists the common urge to treat Dickinson's biography as freakish (the white dresses, the recklessness, etc.). Benfey calls her a "stay-at-home visionary" and points out that "by April 1882, Dickinson could have published a volume of her poems had she wished to do so."
One of my favorite aspects of this book is the way it makes moments of the nineteenth century seem so close to our own experience. Benfey ends a description of the "hotel-world" that Henry Flagler creates: "Guests arrived at the resort in luxury railroad cars designed by Flagler, bearing the same yellow trim--`Flagler Yellow'--as the arches and windows of the hotel. The transition between railroad and hotel was seamless..." Doesn't that just sound like the branded, constructed trip one would get from, say Disney?
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26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Pedestrian, May 31, 2008
The overall symbol of the hummingbird to describe how America was changing from a staid worldview to a more transient, evanescent one in the Civil and post Civil War period is probably insightful. The author also gives us some biographical details not well known about well known luminaries (and people who would become luminaries) of that period. HOWEVER, his writing is pedestrian and I found the book quite a slog. I'm a huge fan of Emily Dickinson(who knew?) and an admirer of Mark Twain, et al. So, I persevered; but I kept thinking about how dull this English professor's classes must be, despite the interesting subject matter.
I don't think this book would capture/retain the interest of the general reader.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Smoldering intellects catching fire, January 15, 2009
It is a little difficult to pin down what "A Summer of Hummingbirds" is. Like the little bird that serves as the central metaphor, the narrative flits about, darting among its "flowers," the artistic and cultural lights of 19th century America, creating a kaleidoscope of their intersecting relationships, influences, work and zeitgeist. The experience of reading it is very much like viewing a large collage comprised of many recognizable individual images and materials, that taken in its entirety is at once abstract yet pleasingly aesthetic.
There are no surprises among the cast of characters Benfey traces through their swirling circles, except the 20th century artist Joseph Cornell who serves as a coda absorbing and releasing the energy of the muses before him. Artist Martin Johnson Heade seems to touch all of the 19th century line-up, including Thomas Higginson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, Emily Dickinson, Austin Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd and Mark Twain. Early in their lives, Lord Byron, slavery and the Civil War inspire meditations on freedom, and Darwin alternately stirs up curiosity about natural phenomenon and challenges to religious belief in the creation story. Hummingbirds turn up everywhere, as images of freedom, images of restless lives, images caught in poetry and on canvas, and as pets and taxidermy specimens. Benfey's subjects are intellects on fire. It is only time before their passions boil over to more physical alliances that seem to coalesce around the summer of 1882, also the year of the transit of the planet Venus. The hermetic Emily Dickinson is engaged, her married brother becomes involved with the also married Mabel Loomis Todd, charismatic preacher Henry Ward Beecher is undone by an extramarrital affair, and the aging Heade who also lusts after Todd finally takes a wife. Meanwhile, America is gradually transformed from a place of ruins and frontier to a developing world stitched together by trains and sporting new luxuries like resorts in Florida.
Benfey stakes a lot on the leitmotif of the hummingbird to impose a narrative structure on what are essentially many concurrent lives on a continuum. For much of the book I was thinking, now which summer is the summer of the title? Much of the action takes place before or overshoots 1882, and it seems that at that point, the arbutus or mayflower has become the symbol of a re-ordering sensuality among this group. Mark Twain is more of a tangential figure, more influenced by the group than a player, and little is made of friendship with Harriet Beecher Stowe in their Hartford days. All that said, it is a pleasant trip following the author around trying to catch his human hummingbirds in a world of slipping paradigms.
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