"Liberty's Torch" The Great Adventure in Building the Statue of Liberty by E. Mitchell
Item Number: 232
Time Left: CLOSED
Description
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Please see reviews below!
" The real story of Lady Liberty doesn't come close to what Americans have been taught. The Statue of Liberty wasn’t designed as a symbol of freedom; it began life as a sculpture of an Egyptian slave. It wasn’t a "gift" from the French; it was an orphan in need of a home. Elizabeth Mitchell's myth-busting Liberty’s Torch is a hoot of a story packed with entertaining cameos by Victor Hugo, Ulysses Grant, Thomas Edison, and more. At center stage is the maddeningly egotistical artiste Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a snobbish boor who disliked America and her "subpar" people. Yet, through persistence and will, he found a home for his statue in New York Harbor and wooed newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer into raising money for the pedestal on Bedlow's Island, a former military fort. (One of Pulitzer's fund-raising contests yielded the poem by Emma Lazarus that’s inscribed on the statue's base: "Give me your tired, your poor...") After nearly twenty years of construction, with the artist using his mother as the model for the statue's face, Liberty--by far the tallest statue in the world, at over 300 feet--was unveiled to near unanimous adoration on October 28, 1886. Relying on Bartholdi's diaries and letters, Mitchell reveals the unlikely truth behind a sculptor’s obsession becoming a nation's icon. --Neal Thompson"
"The Statue of Liberty is one of the most recognizable monuments in the world, a powerful symbol of freedom and the American dream. For decades, the myth has persisted that the statue was a grand gift from France, but now Liberty's Torch reveals how she was in fact the pet project of one quixotic and visionary French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. Bartholdi not only forged this 151-foot-tall colossus in a workshop in Paris and transported her across the ocean, but battled to raise money for the statue and make her a reality.
A young sculptor inspired by a trip to Egypt where he saw the pyramids and Sphinx, he traveled to America, carrying with him the idea of a colossal statue of a woman. There he enlisted the help of notable people of the age - including Ulysses S. Grant, Joseph Pulitzer, Victor Hugo, Gustave Eiffel, and Thomas Edison - to help his scheme. He also came up with inventive ideas to raise money, including exhibiting the torch at the Phildaelphia world's fair and charging people to climb up inside. While the French and American governments dithered, Bartholdi made the statue a reality by his own entrepreneurship, vision, and determination."
Special Instructions
Amazon Best Book of the Year! 2014
Reviews:
“Journalist Elizabeth Mitchell recounts the captivating story behind the familiar monument that readers may have assumed they knew everything about.”—New York Times
“Liberty’s Torch reveals a statue with a storied past . . . Mitchell uses Liberty to reveal a pantheon of historic figures, including novelist Victor Hugo, engineer Gustave Eiffel and newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. The drama—or “great adventure,” to borrow from the subtitle—runs from the Pyramids of Egypt to the backrooms of Congress. . . . By explaining Liberty’s tortured history and resurrecting Bartholdi’s indomitable spirit, Mitchell has done a great service. This is narrative history, well told. It is history that connects us to our past and—hopefully—to our future.”—Los Angeles Times
“Streamlined and well constructed. . . . Proceeding chronologically, the author divides her story into three parts (“The Idea,” “The Gamble,” “The Triumph”) and opens with just the right amount of initial biographical detail on the designer, bolstering her portrait with further historical background as the narrative warrants. . . . deft strokes and always apt, telling details. . . . Mitchell successfully conveys the enormity of the undertaking and the infuriating amount of bureaucracy and old-fashioned glad-handing required to finish the job. . . . In Bartholdi, Mitchell has found a fascinating character through which to view late-19th-century America, and she does readers a service by sifting fact from fiction in the creation of one our most beloved monuments.”—Boston Globe
“A myth-busting story starring the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. Mitchell’s adjectives for him include crazy, driven, peevish and obnoxious. He rarely missed an opportunity to advance his own career, but Mitchell says he had “an incredible ability to soldier on” through a 15-year struggle. . . . Were it for not for Bartholdi, the statue probably would not have been built. In today’s world, Mitchell can't imagine any single person driving such a massive undertaking.”—USA Today
“Turns out that what you thought you knew about Lady Liberty is dead wrong. Learn the truth in this fascinating account of how a French sculptor armed with only an idea and a serious inability to take no for an answer built one of the most iconic monuments in history.”—O, the Oprah Magazine