America's Medicis: The Rockefellers and Their Astonishing Cultural Legacy

"Loebl (America's Art Museums) chronicles the collecting and funding exploits of oil heir John D. Rockefeller Jr.; his wife, Abby; and their children in this placid, appreciative study of 'America's greatest arts patrons.' Their imprint on 20th-century art was indelible--Abby cofounded New York's Museum of Modern Art--but the author surveys a vast set of initiatives underwritten by the family, including the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, influential collections and museums of medieval Mexican, African, and American folk art. There were also grand houses and parks, and architectural gems like New York's Rockefeller Center and Riverside Church. Loebl generally applauds Rockefeller tastes, downplays the dynamic of plutocratic vanity, and shrugs off urbanist criticisms of the Rockefeller-led Lincoln Center. Aside from the brouhaha over Diego Rivera's Communist-inflected Rockefeller Center mural, with images of a saintly Lenin and wealthy socialites wreathed in syphilis germs, there's not much excitement. Loebl's interest is less in personalities than in the art and architecture, which she describes in rapturous detail accompanied by lavish photos that make the book feel like a gracefully written but staid gift shop catalogue. 16 pages of color photos, 48 b&w photos. (Dec.) 'Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections of history: that of women and power,' writes Schiff in this excellent, myth-busting biography. It is that intersection that interests Schiff rather than romance. Cleopatra was no great beauty, we learn/ But the Egyptian queen (69 — 30 B.C.E.)--who was actually a Greek Ptolemy--was charismatic, intelligent, shrewd, and ruthless, concerned less with love than with maintaining her kingdom and Ptolemaic grandeur, threatened by Rome's civil wars. Caesar and Antony were seduced by her most alluring feature--her fabulous wealth, which Rome desperately needed. Schiff, author of the acclaimed A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, faces a dearth of documentation on Cleopatra, as well as unreliable portraits by Plutarch, Dio, and others, forcing her often to speculate about Cleopatra's feelings and motives. But Schiff enters so completely into the time and place, especially the beauty and luxury of the 'great metropolis' of Alexandria, Cleopatra's capital, describing it in almost cinematic detail. And though we all know the outcome, Schiff's account of Cleopatra's and Antony's desperate efforts to manipulate their triumphant enemy, Octavian, make for tragic, page-turning reading. No one will think of Cleopatra in quite the same way after reading this vivid, provocative book. (Nov.) Austrian novelist and playwright Bernhard (1931 — 1989) continues to upset the applecart in this chip-on-the-shoulder recounting of nine literary prizes he was awarded and sidestepped or rejected with gusto except when cash was involved. Most of the fun comes from the deadpan telling, so that reading this book is like watching a W.C. Fields movie: it is almost too painful to laugh. Whether accepting a prize to pay for a misbegotten real estate deal, or a small Austrian state prize that causes such a ruckus that a Viennese newspaper describes Bernhard as 'a bug that needed to be exterminated,' these withering accounts of crusty petit bourgeois expectations and stale modernity are disarmingly arch and refreshing. The rest of the fun is in a sampling of bubble-bursting speeches he delivered. After reading these tales of aggression and self-acknowledged vanity ('I hated the ceremonies, but I took part in them, I hated the prize-givers, but I took their money'), one can only imagine what--if he had been so honored--his Nobel acceptance speech might have been. (Nov. 23)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright PWyxz LLC)

Suzanne Loebl is a writer living in New York and Maine. She is the author of fourteen books, most recently America’s Art Museums.