
All the Beauty in the World
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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Narrated by:
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Patrick Bringley
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By:
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Patrick Bringley
About this listen
New York Times bestseller
Named one of the best books of the year by the New York Public Library, the Financial Times, the New York Post, Book Riot, and the Sunday Times (London).
An “exquisite” (The Washington Post) “hauntingly beautiful” (Associated Press) portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.
Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamourous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought that he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.
To his surprise and your delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.
In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All the Beauty in the World is an “empathic” (The New York Times Book Review), “moving” (NPR), “consoling, and beautiful” (The Guardian) portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.
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Art Is Life
- Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night
- By: Jerry Saltz
- Narrated by: Jerry Saltz, Mark Bramhall
- Length: 16 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: Witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary listeners to fine art as few critics have.
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WRONG for audio program
- By Karen Lehrer on 11-07-22
By: Jerry Saltz
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The Art Detective
- Fakes, Frauds, and Finds and the Search for Lost Treasures
- By: Philip Mould
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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What separates a masterpiece from a piece of junk? Thanks to the BBC's Antiques Roadshow and its American spin-off, everyone is searching garage sales and hunting online for hidden gems, wondering whether their attics contain trash or treasures. In The Art Detective, Philip Mould, one of the world's foremost authorities on British portraiture and an irreverent and delightful expert for the Roadshow, serves up his secrets and his best stories.
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The Art Detective was Interesting
- By L. O. Pardue on 10-04-11
By: Philip Mould
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The Gardner Heist
- The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft
- By: Ulrich Boser
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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After the death of famed art detective Harold Smith, reporter Ulrich Boser decided to take up the case. Exploring Smith's unfinished leads, Boser travels deep into the art underworld and comes across a remarkable cast of characters, including a brilliant rock 'n' roll thief, a gangster who professes his innocence in rhyming verse, and the enigmatic late Boston heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner herself. Boser becomes increasingly obsessed with the case and eventually uncovers startling new evidence about the identities of the thieves.
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Loved it!
- By Amanda D. on 05-21-19
By: Ulrich Boser
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Adventures in the Louvre
- How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum
- By: Elaine Sciolino
- Narrated by: Lynn Bradford
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress. Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum's lifeblood.
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Easy Recommendation for Travelers to Paris
- By Jim Kane on 04-27-25
By: Elaine Sciolino
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A Place for Everything
- The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
- By: Judith Flanders
- Narrated by: Julia Winwood
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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From a New York Times best-selling historian comes the story of how the alphabet ordered our world. A Place for Everything is the first-ever history of alphabetization, from the Library of Alexandria to Wikipedia. The story of alphabetical order has been shaped by some of history's most compelling characters, such as industrious and enthusiastic early adopter Samuel Pepys and dedicated alphabet champion Denis Diderot. But though even George Washington was a proponent, many others stuck to older forms of classification.
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You have to love library science
- By A. Yoshida on 10-23-21
By: Judith Flanders
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Get the Picture
- A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See
- By: Bianca Bosker
- Narrated by: Bianca Bosker
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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An award-winning journalist obsessed with obsession, Bianca Bosker’s existence was upended when she wandered into the art world—and couldn’t look away. Intrigued by artists who hyperventilate around their favorite colors and art fiends who max out credit cards to show hunks of metal they think can change the world, Bosker grew fixated on understanding why art matters and how she—or any of us—could engage with it more deeply.
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I Don’t think I Got the Picture
- By Emily J. on 03-23-24
By: Bianca Bosker
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Your Brain on Art
- How the Arts Transform Us
- By: Susan Magsamen, Ivy Ross
- Narrated by: Ellyn Jameson
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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What is art? Many of us think of the arts as entertainment—a luxury of some kind. In Your Brain on Art, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross show how activities from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture, and more are essential to our lives.
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Practical, even utilitarian ways of leveraging art
- By Lucy A. Pithecus on 04-07-23
By: Susan Magsamen, and others
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The History of Western Art
- By: Peter Whitfield
- Narrated by: Sebastian Comberti
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves? This history of art shows how painters, sculptors and architects have expressed the belief systems of their age: religious, political and aesthetic. From the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, to the revolutionary years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the artist has acted as a mirror to the ideals and conflicts of the human mind.
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A whirlwind tour of Western art
- By Adeliese Baumann on 11-18-12
By: Peter Whitfield
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Mad Enchantment
- Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies
- By: Ross King
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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We have all seen, whether live, in photographs or on postcards, some of Claude Monet's legendary water lily paintings. They are in museums all over the world and are among the most beloved works of art of the past century. Yet, ironically, these soothing images were created amid terrible personal turmoil and sadness.
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Wonderful book. Awful awful narration.
- By StphnyC on 06-23-17
By: Ross King
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The Story of Art Without Men
- By: Katy Hessel
- Narrated by: Katy Hessel
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway? Guided by Katy Hessel, art historian and founder of @thegreatwomenartists, discover the glittering paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century United States, and the artist who really invented the "readymade." Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women defining art in the 2020s.
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Great book, no pdf?
- By Amazon Customer on 08-11-24
By: Katy Hessel
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Camille Pissarro
- The Audacity of Impressionism
- By: Anka Muhlstein, Adriana Hunter - translator
- Narrated by: Christine Rendel
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The celebrated painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) occupied a central place in the artistic scene of his time: a founding member of the new school of French painting, he was a close friend of Monet, a longtime associate in Degas's and Mary Cassatt's experimental work, a support to Cezanne and Gauguin, and a comfort to Van Gogh, and was backed by the great Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel throughout his career. Nevertheless, he felt a persistent sense of being set apart, different, and hard to classify.
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a good education
- By VMXO L. on 10-26-24
By: Anka Muhlstein, and others
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Con/Artist
- The Life and Crimes of the World's Greatest Art Forger
- By: Tony Tetro, Giampiero Ambrosi
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone, Tony Tetro, Giampiero Ambrosi
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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The art world is a much dirtier, nastier business than you might expect. Tony Tetro, one of the most renowned art forgers in history, will make you question every masterpiece you’ve ever seen in a museum, gallery, or private collection. Tetro’s “Rembrandts,” “Caravaggios,” “Miros,” and hundreds of other works now hang on walls around the globe.
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Incredibly interesting!
- By Carole Wooten on 12-07-22
By: Tony Tetro, and others
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The Slip
- The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever
- By: Prudence Peiffer
- Narrated by: Melissa Redmond
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world.
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The narrator mis-pronounces everones name
- By Stephanie Laffont on 12-26-23
By: Prudence Peiffer
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Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018
- By: Peter Schjeldahl, Jarrett Earnest - introduction
- Narrated by: Peter Schjeldahl
- Length: 15 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Hot Cold Heavy Light collects 100 writings - some long, some short - that taken together form a group portrait of many of the world’s most significant and interesting artists. From Pablo Picasso to Cindy Sherman, Old Masters to contemporary masters, paintings to comix, and saints to charlatans, Schjeldahl ranges widely through the diverse and confusing art world, an expert guide to a dazzling scene.
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needs pictures
- By Petra Juarez on 02-19-20
By: Peter Schjeldahl, and others
What listeners say about All the Beauty in the World
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- Mags10708
- 06-11-23
Deeply moving. Slow down. Loved it.
I have lived within 2 miles of the Met for 30 years and have only been less than 10 times. This book has made me see how much I miss rushing through my NY life.
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2 people found this helpful
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- oiuser@worldnet.att.net
- 07-14-23
Thank you for the beautiful respite from the ‘noise’
The reader’s voice bringing the author’s words to life carries awe and wonderings about meaning, artistry, the lives of all who created, ‘guarded’ and viewed an exhibit. Some of the pieces I’ve seen and could revisit in my mind…a gift. Thank you, Mr. Bringley, for sharing your words, thoughts, life and helping me to think beyond the art on the walls at any museum.
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1 person found this helpful
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- ROJ
- 04-17-23
The Beauty of this Book
This is one of the most beautifully written memoirs I've ever experienced. Art tours and art history lectures could be based on this book, as well as grief healing therapy. The author's reading is appropriate in tone and pacing. My only reservation with the audio book is his speech articulation disorder, the guttural L. Like Tom Brokaw, it hasn't limited his success but if you are a speech therapist, it might grate your ears. Sorry Mr Bringley.
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- Rosemary Wells
- 02-21-23
Sensationally unique and brilliant book
I had no idea what to expect when I first listened. This is the story of man in deep grief at his brother’s death who finds himself and a new life. Few of us can imagine the depths of the collections of the huge Metropolitan Museum of Art. The author is so brilliant a thinker and a writer that it all becomes a world we never knew no matter how many times we’ve visited. I will look at museum collections in an entirely different way and so will you!
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- Tony Fratto
- 02-19-23
Love for the Met, but so much more
This is a lovely book — loving for the magnificent museum that I love, but it’s so much more — our lives, with each other, and how art and awareness can make things sometimes a little better. Sometimes a lot better.
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- pat
- 03-07-23
Good read
What a lovely story about transformation and grief. Wonderful to get a peek into the Metropolitan Museum of Art from behind the scenes and appreciate the beauty!
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- catherine
- 01-01-24
Cathartic journey of grief through art
Beautiful story, just not exactly what I was expecting. I did appreciate the author’s guide and experience through different exhibits. I’ll definitely be planning another trip to the met soon!
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- L J
- 08-29-24
Touching personal story
Author finds solace and wisdom through art. The book lifted my spirits and brought a richness to art appreciation.
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- LB
- 12-26-24
A beautiful reflection about life, loss and art.
I love the tone of the book and it’s way to reflect on many profound themes. Definitely recommend it.
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- Dina
- 04-29-23
Simply Lovely
This was the most lovely book I've read in a long time. Bringley's willingness to be so vulnerable with his grief is admirable. Neither himself nor anyone in his life seemed to put him on a time table to getting over his brother's death. Having a mother who taught me the joys of art and museum going, the setting of the MET particularly spoke to me. Beautifully written and perfectly paced.
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4 people found this helpful