Customer Reviews

Tina Modotti: A Life

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Tina Modotti -- photographer, model, lover of famous men, revolutionary Communist. What a fascinating life. I finished this biography -- which flows like a novel -- inspired to follow my own convictions and amazed by this bewitching, powerful woman.

Although I agree that San Francisco was home to many artistic and cultural activities that make it distict from any other American city, to assert that it was "Not founded by Anglo-Saxon Protestants, San Francisco developed as a city without Puritan influences, much like the great European cities that favored radical innovations and a healthy indifference toward conventional morality." (can you taste the superiority of the european writer in that quote?)

Anyone who believes that does not know who founded San Fransisco. Guess what. It was Mormons. Yep. They pulled into the bay and off loaded from the Good Ship The Brooklyn, before the gold rush and mass influx of others. Before that, it had been all but abandon as a Presidio by the Spanish. And since I know my history, I can tell you the Mormons of that time had more in common with the Puritanism of the original colonies than other Anglos. But that is just one of the stretches... Of course the Mormons were over run with the advent of the Gold Rush. San Francisco has been a pendulum that swings back and forth from anarchy to corruption in its city government in the last 150 years.

As for the rest of the book, take out some of the added quasi-history spices and it would have been much more valuable, or at least worth recommending. But maybe I shouldn't look at it for historical value, but as a great romance?