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Title: The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues by Susan Griffin ISBN: 0-7679-0450-8 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 11 September, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.8 (10 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: More Saltpeter than Seduction
Comment: I wanted to love this book, due to its fascinating subject matter and highly lauded author. However, I found myself continuously irritated with it, for a number of reasons:
1. The author has a talent for stating the obvious, ad nauseum.
2. The scholarship seems sloppy. Griffin makes much of a Courbet painting that includes a courtesan wearing a Kashmir shawl, placing a feminist significance upon the shawl as an object "made in a a far-off country by women for very little money." If the author had done her homework, she would have discovered that 19th-century Kashmir shawls were made by men (for very little money.) In another chapter, the author tells of a man supposedly named "Alfred Sert," the husband of the 19th-century art patron Misia Sert, who divorced her to marry a courtesan. However, the dastardly cad in question was actually Misia's second husband, Alfred Edwards. (Her third husband was the artist José Maria Sert.) These are just a couple of facts that I happen to know about, which causes me to speculate about what other errors might be lurking in the text.
3. The avoidance of grammatical sentence structure is annoying rather than artistic. There are at least two sentences on every page that start with the word "But." (In one place the author begins two sentences in a row with that word.) The text is also littered profusely with sentence fragments. A skilled writer can use such devices judiciously to good effect , but it makes for choppy reading when they are employed on every single blasted page.
Alas, I wanted to be beguiled and seduced by the courtesans, but instead, my ardor was dampened by the foibles of their champion.
Rating: 1
Summary: Great subject, sloppy writing
Comment: Disorganized vapid prose and loads of wishful "thinking" - it's a gender feminist cream dream. Better you should read Proust for artistic insight on the topic, and look for a better written and more factual history.
Rating: 2
Summary: overly pretentious writing
Comment: Certainly the subject material is interesting. It's the writer's style that is lacking. It's like she is writing a thesis for university and has to increase the size of the paper and so she writes on and on. It's overly scholarly and analytical when the reader just wants the story/history of these courtesans. As others have said, I mostly skim-read it, skimming over the paragraphs to try to pull out the tidbits of interest.
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Title: The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Women in Culture and Society) by Margaret F. Rosenthal, Catharine R. Stimpson ISBN: 0226728129 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: January, 1993 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris (European Women Writers Series) by Celeste Venard De Chabrillan, Monique Fleury Nagem, Celeste Mogador ISBN: 0803282737 Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr Pub. Date: December, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Risqué Beauty: Beauty Secrets of History's Most Notorious Courtesans by Daniela Turudich ISBN: 1930064098 Publisher: Streamline Press Pub. Date: January, 2004 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Mama Gena's Owner's and Operator's Guide to Men by Regena Thomashauer ISBN: 0743247981 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 02 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title:Dangerous Beauty ASIN: 6305078319 Publisher: Warner Studios Pub. Date: 06 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $12.99 |
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