Word: schama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With the richness of brocade and the smoothness of shot silk, Schama's prose unfurls the life of Rembrandt in all its pathos. From prodigy to pauper, the troubled genius of 17th century Dutch painting is intricately conceived as he rises and falls in a world of war, plague and stolid bourgeois comfort. A galvanic force--ambitious, hugely inventive, avaricious--he is the portraitist of the poshest plutocrats, nobly aglitter, and the allegorist of human wreckage. Schama's book is a marvel of storytelling: sometimes heart pounding, always sympathetic and coolly reasoned. Seamlessly joining social history and art, what...
Three years ago, Simon M. Schama was one of those professors who seemed destined for greatness...
...when Schama's wife, Virginia E. Papaioannou, then an associate professor at Tufts, was offered a tenured job at Columbia in 1993, Schama agreed to leave his Harvard appointment to accept a position there...
...loss of Schama was not the first time Harvard lost a noted professor because his or her spouse had career possibilities in another city. Nor will it be the last...
...Schama is that academic exoticus, a professor without a Ph.D.; he has said, "All I want to do is share the past." Like his earlier masterworks, Landscape and Memory is studded with apt illustrations from art and literature, and its pages crackle with epigram and, at times, a dry Gibbonian wit. The book also has a message of rebuke for those multiculturalists who despise Western civilization as the archenemy of nature and the world's primary despoiler of pristine wilds. "Even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture," Schama writes, "may turn out, on closer...