Word: schama
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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CITIZENS: A CHRONICLE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION by Simon Schama (Knopf; $29.95). Exactly 200 years after the bloody facts, a Harvard historian offers a fascinating, often surprising account of what went right -- and wrong -- during one of the world's most celebrated social convulsions...
CITIZENS, A CHRONICLE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION by Simon Schama (Knopf; $29.95). Exactly 200 years after the bloody facts, a Harvard historian offers a fascinating, often surprising account of what went right -- and wrong -- during one of the world's most celebrated social convulsions...
Clearing away the Hollywood legends, Simon Schama's Citizens is both dramatic and thought provoking. -- Two vivid views of the U.S.'s tangled, bloody involvement with the Philippines...
...Schama's splendid recounting soon convinces us, however, that much of what we thought we knew is wrong, a collection of Hollywood versions of 19th century romances: Leslie Howard as "that demmed elusive Pimpernel," or Ronald Colman doing a "far, far better thing" by accepting the fate prescribed by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities. Schama's reality is very different from the legends...
This reassembling and rearranging of historical detail is brilliantly successful: Schama's tale is vivid, dramatic, thought-provoking. Yet such is the current academic vogue for bloodless and pseudoscientific historiography that the author repeatedly feels a need to apologize for what he somewhat disingenuously calls a "mischievously old-fashioned piece of storytelling." If Schama's portrait of the revolution is often surprising in its closeup details, however, it is no less so in coloring the background imagery of the French society being overturned...