
Plagued by Fire
The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright
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Narrated by:
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Arthur Morey
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By:
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Paul Hendrickson
About this listen
Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius. Harder to detect, but no less real, is a Wright who fully understood, and suffered from, the choices he made. This is the Wright whom Paul Hendrickson reveals in this masterful biography: the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this, we see, is the Wright of many other neglected aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his life; the connection between the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the murder of his mistress, her two children, and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home. In showing us Wright's facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a fresh, deep, and more human understanding of the man. With prodigious research, unique vision, and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic, and undeniably brilliant, he has given us the defining book on Wright.
©2019 Paul Hendrickson (P)2019 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Dazzling.... Ingenious.... Plagued by Fire has moments of raw emotional power.” (Amanda Hurley, The American Scholar)
“Hendrickson is one of our great stylists.” (Boston Globe)
“Paul Hendrickson has made a life of taking the figures we think we know, and revealing how little we actually understood them. From the depression-era photographer Marion Post Wolcott to the war-maker Robert McNamara and the writer Ernest Hemingway, his subjects tend to be complex, ambitious men and women caught in the thrust of outsized times. Hendrickson has his work cut out for him with Wright, certainly the most written about architect in the world. Yet this, his longest book might be his most beautifully written - there’s a tone of absolute curiosity and respect, a judiciousness about probing a long-dead psyche, and a depth of understanding about how hidden demons often contribute to the art that artists make which [makes] this book absolutely riveting, as if all the buildings it describes have yet to be built.” (John Freeman, Executive Editor, Literary Hub)
Lyrical, interesting and informative prose style
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A Biography (with other topics)
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Fascinating
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Historic
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Frank Lloyd Wright
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Excellent perspective
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Author is full of himself. Ta
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Very disappointing
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The word "I", meaning the writer, shows up paragraph after paragraph, noticeably when he writes the like of "I can't prove it, but I feel it must be true." He's fond of titillating rumors.
He also writes, in a prose of self-conscious effects and affectations - "hoosegow" is used for 'jail' more than once - long tangents that barely touch on Frank Lloyd Wright. I often found myself wondering why he'd put me through 15 minutes of a passage that said next to nothing about the architect or architecture. Without such padding, this would be a much shorter and clearer book. The leaps back and forth in time are finally wearying as you try to hang on to the chronology.
In a similar vein, he often compares something about Wright to something about Ernest Hemingway. The first time or two confused me. What had they in common? Then he slips in that his recent other biography is about … you guessed it.
Before you buy this, look up the NY Times book review. The reviewer has more time to dismiss this book, which she does with many examples.
I stopped reading and intend to return it,
Biography as speculative gossip
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Revisionist, sensationalism.
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