{"title":"Christopher Benfey","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"degas-in-new-orleans-book-christopher-benfey-9780520218185","title":"Degas in New Orleans","description":"Edgar Degas traveled from Paris to New Orleans during the fall of 1872 to visit the American branch of his mother's family, the Mussons. This war-torn, diverse, and conflicted city elicited from Degas some of his finest paintings. He arrived at a key moment in the cultural history of this most exotic of American cities, still recovering from the agony of the Civil War. This decisive period of Reconstruction, in which his American relatives were importantly involved, was also the time when the American writers Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable were beginning to mine the resources of New Orleans culture and history.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49532383527185,"sku":"GOR008928438","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49789358407953,"sku":"CIN0520218183G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0520218183.jpg?v=1751008230"},{"product_id":"summer-of-hummingbirds-book-christopher-benfey-9780143115083","title":"A Summer of Hummingbirds","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe country's most noted writers, poets, and artists converge at a singular moment in American life, a great companion to fans of the film \u003ci\u003eA Quiet Passion,\u003c\/i\u003e starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e At the close of the Civil War, the lives of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade intersected in an intricate map of friendship, family, and romance that marked a milestone in the development of American art and literature. Using the image of a flitting hummingbird as a metaphor for the gossamer strands that connect these larger-than-life personalities, Christopher Benfey re-creates the summer of 1882, the summer when Mabel Louise Todd-the protégé to the painter Heade-confesses her love for Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, and the players suddenly find themselves caught in the crossfire between the Calvinist world of decorum, restraint, and judgment and a new, unconventional world in which nature prevails and freedom is all.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49564526608657,"sku":"CIN0143115081G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50329423282449,"sku":"CIN0143115081VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999488217361,"sku":"NIN9780143115083","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0143115081.jpg?v=1751036755"},{"product_id":"summer-of-hummingbirds-book-christopher-benfey-9781594201608","title":"Summer of Hummingbirds","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe country's most noted writers, poets, and artists converge at a singular moment in American life, a great companion to fans of the film \u003ci\u003eA Quiet Passion, \u003c\/i\u003estarring Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson. \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e At the close of the Civil War, the lives of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade intersected in an intricate map of friendship, family, and romance that marked a milestone in the development of American art and literature. Using the image of a flitting hummingbird as a metaphor for the gossamer strands that connect these larger-than-life personalities, Christopher Benfey re-creates the summer of 1882, the summer when Mabel Louise Todd-the prot g  to the painter Heade-confesses her love for Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, and the players suddenly find themselves caught in the crossfire between the Calvinist world of decorum, restraint, and judgment and a new, unconventional world in which nature prevails and freedom is all.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50127466889489,"sku":"GOR003551358","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50283835392273,"sku":"CIN1594201609A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51423764775185,"sku":"CIN1594201609VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52107115135249,"sku":"CIN1594201609G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1594201609.jpg?v=1751452413"},{"product_id":"great-wave-book-christopher-benfey-9780375754555","title":"The Great Wave","description":"When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to Old Japan, with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an international power. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn \u003cb\u003eThe Great Wave\u003c\/b\u003e, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit group of nineteenth-century travelers--connoisseurs, collectors, and scientists--who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving Old Japan. As Benfey writes, A sense of urgency impelled them, for they were convinced--Darwinians that they were--that their quarry was on the verge of extinction. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThese travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is shadowed by hostile and mysterious Japan; the historian Henry Adams and the artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an art-collecting trip and find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who marries a samurai's daughter and becomes Japan's preeminent spokesman in the West; Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb Mt. Fuji; Edward Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world's leading expert on both Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the astronomer Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and writes seminal works on Japanese culture before turning his restless attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo enthusiast) Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous Easterners come West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of Tea became a cult favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher of his time, who studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eFinally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eFrom the Hardcover edition.\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50205639016721,"sku":"CIN0375754555G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50325253161233,"sku":"CIN0375754555VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51001905840401,"sku":"NIN9780375754555","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53394404671761,"sku":"GOR008986802","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53394745032977,"sku":"GOR008200890","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0375754555.jpg?v=1751229019"},{"product_id":"red-brick-black-mountain-white-clay-book-christopher-benfey-9780143122852","title":"Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay","description":"\u003cb\u003e\"Beautiful, haunted, evocative and so open to where memory takes you. I kept thinking that this is the book that I have waited for: where objects, and poetry intertwine. Just wonderful and completely sui generis.\"  (Edmund de Waal, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Hare with Amber Eyes\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e An unforgettable voyage across the reaches of America and the depths of memory, this generational memoir of one incredible family reveals America's unique craft tradition. In \u003ci\u003eRed Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay\u003c\/i\u003e, renowned critic Christopher Benfey shares stories--of his mother's upbringing in rural North Carolina among centuries-old folk potteries; of his father's escape from Nazi Europe; of his great-aunt and -uncle Josef and Anni Albers, famed Bauhaus artists exiled at Black Mountain College--unearthing an ancestry, and an aesthetic, that is quintessentially American. With the grace of a novelist and the eye of a historian, Benfey threads these stories together into a radiant and mesmerizing harmony.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50307672506641,"sku":"CIN0143122851G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50345025634577,"sku":"CIN0143122851A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999479894289,"sku":"NIN9780143122852","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52437651161361,"sku":"CIN0143122851VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52612232184081,"sku":"GOR008205690","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0143122851.jpg?v=1750737245"},{"product_id":"red-brick-black-mountain-white-clay-book-christopher-benfey-9781594203268","title":"Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay","description":"\u003cb\u003eBeautiful, haunted, evocative and so open to where memory takes you. 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At the height of his fame in 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming its youngest winner. His influence on major figures--including Freud and William James--was pervasive and profound. But in recent decades Kipling's reputation has suffered a strange eclipse. Though his body of work still looms large, and his monumental poem \"If--\" is quoted and referenced by politicians, athletes, and ordinary readers alike, his unabashed imperialist views have come under increased scrutiny. In \u003ci\u003eIf\u003c\/i\u003e, scholar Christopher Benfey brings this fascinating and complex writer to life and, for the first time, gives full attention to Kipling's intense engagement with the United States--a rarely discussed but critical piece of evidence in our understanding of this man and his enduring legacy.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Benfey traces the writer's deep involvement with America over one crucial decade, from 1889 to 1899, when he lived for four years in Brattleboro, Vermont, and sought deliberately to turn himself into a specifically American writer. It was his most prodigious and creative period, as well as his happiest, during which he wrote \u003ci\u003eThe Jungle Book\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eCaptains Courageous\u003c\/i\u003e. Had a family dispute not forced his departure, Kipling almost certainly would have stayed. 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And I can't live in either.\"\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In this fresh examination of Kipling, Benfey hangs a provocative \"what if\" over Kipling's American years and maps the imprint Kipling left on his adopted country as well as the imprint the country left on him. \u003ci\u003eIf\u003c\/i\u003e proves there is relevance and magnificence to be found in Kipling's work.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50359963910417,"sku":"CIN0735221456G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51006290821393,"sku":"NIN9780735221451","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51694202683665,"sku":"CIN0735221456VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53162979164433,"sku":"GOR014790308","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53175300325649,"sku":"GOR014791823","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0735221456.jpg?v=1751263412"},{"product_id":"if-book-christopher-benfey-9780735221437","title":"If","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51104689455377,"sku":"CIN073522143XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51356481683729,"sku":"GOR010175473","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51423382077713,"sku":"CIN073522143XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/073522143X.jpg?v=1751168632"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-christopher-benfey.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}