Jacob's back! This is good news, as he's an engaging character with a clear voice, and he's a good counterpoint to heroine Pia Sabel's earnestness. ThJacob's back! This is good news, as he's an engaging character with a clear voice, and he's a good counterpoint to heroine Pia Sabel's earnestness. This time around, Jacob has to land on a remote Caribbean island in order to rescue Pia from the bad guys -- at night, in the middle of a hurricane. No problem.
This could easily have turned into superheroics, but author James wisely reined in Jacob's exploits to minimize the amount of required disbelief suspension. A new, interestingly ambiguous villain arrives, and the background conspiracy loses some of its mystery while gaining a certain level of credibility not always achieved by thriller-based conspiracies. All in all, a worthy installment in this ongoing saga.
Serials still don't really work for me -- when I read a story, I want to do it on my schedule -- but Seeley James seems to be doing well by the form. If you've made it this far through Trench Coats, you need to pick up Part IV. If you haven't started yet, there's enough of it out there to keep you occupied until Part V.
Merged review:
Jacob's back! This is good news, as he's an engaging character with a clear voice, and he's a good counterpoint to heroine Pia Sabel's earnestness. This time around, Jacob has to land on a remote Caribbean island in order to rescue Pia from the bad guys -- at night, in the middle of a hurricane. No problem.
This could easily have turned into superheroics, but author James wisely reined in Jacob's exploits to minimize the amount of required disbelief suspension. A new, interestingly ambiguous villain arrives, and the background conspiracy loses some of its mystery while gaining a certain level of credibility not always achieved by thriller-based conspiracies. All in all, a worthy installment in this ongoing saga.
Serials still don't really work for me -- when I read a story, I want to do it on my schedule -- but Seeley James seems to be doing well by the form. If you've made it this far through Trench Coats, you need to pick up Part IV. If you haven't started yet, there's enough of it out there to keep you occupied until Part V....more
When last we saw rookie agent Emma Makepeace, she'd just finished a marathon footrace across London, avoiding the gazillion CCTV cameras infesting eveWhen last we saw rookie agent Emma Makepeace, she'd just finished a marathon footrace across London, avoiding the gazillion CCTV cameras infesting every corner of the city and contending with several GRU assassination teams along the way. Since Alias Emma, the book that chronicled Emma's 10k-from-hell, did reasonably well (I rather liked it), it would've been natural for the author to follow it up with more of the same, except bigger and flashier. Luckily, the author restrained herself from forcing poor Emma to run across Paris or Mumbai while still opening up the arena in which she plays. This is both good news and bad.
In The Traitor, Emma gets her call to action when her off-books, MI5-adjacent employer discovers that an MI6 operative has been nastily killed in London after poking his nose into the business of two Russian oligarchs. There might also be a mole in MI5 or MI6 helping the baddies along. Emma's flinty boss Ripley assigns her to infiltrate the camp of one of the oligarchs by posing as a member of his megayacht's crew. Needless to say, this becomes hella messy, putting Our Heroine in near-constant mortal danger.
As before, Ms. Makepeace is a plucky, resourceful, risk-embracing young field agent who doesn't know how to stop when she's ahead. Unlike many of her fellow covert operatives in other stories of this ilk, she's neither omnipotent nor omniscient; she makes mistakes, trusts the wrong people, and gets tired, hungry, and frustrated as her assignment grinds her down. In other words, she's recognizably human, a blessing when she's on every page. It's not hard to root for her during her adventures.
The plot moves fast and breaks lots of things. Emma and the readers don't get much time to catch their breaths. (I finished reading the paperback's 316 pages in one day.) The settings--economical in Alias Emma--are positively skeletal this time around even though they're scattered along the French and Spanish Rivieras, some of the best scenery in Europe. The plot keeps going until the very end (not the case in the previous book), and the ending itself is more surefooted this time, a welcome development.
I know--some of this sounds like damning with faint praise. So do the three stars. What's up with that?
Emma had an equally sympathetic foil in Alias Emma who motivated her epic run and gave us another reason to cheer for them both. Unfortunately, there's no one person filling that role in The Traitor. We barely see the dead MI6 agent alive, rendering his life and death rather meaningless to us. The procession of oligarch girlfriends Emma tries to save are likely meant to be the story's relatable innocent victims, but they're so similar and have so clearly made their own problems that it's hard to care much about them. So Emma shoulders the reader-engagement load on her own and isn't always up to it.
The first book's plot was a tight, satisfying puzzle box. Its limited playing space created a palpably claustrophobic atmosphere that set off the action nicely. This story broadens the playspace, but the minimalist settings often fail to deliver either atmosphere or visuals. However, the biggest plot question--who is the mole?--becomes the plot's greatest liability. I figured out the traitor's identity nearly a hundred pages before Emma did, which kept me wondering why she wasn't able to see what should've been perfectly plain to her.
The Traitor is an okay but not stellar follow-up to a boffo freshman spy-thriller yarn. Plotting, setting, and character issues give the reader too much time to think about what's going on, never a good thing in this genre. If Alias Emma heightened your expectations for this sequel, you may be disappointed. If you start this series here, though, this book may be just fine for that beach trip or transcon flight, and you'll be primed to be blown away by the prequel....more
Leisure travel was, not so long ago, the province of the very rich. Who else could afford to take a couple months off work (if you had to work at all)Leisure travel was, not so long ago, the province of the very rich. Who else could afford to take a couple months off work (if you had to work at all) to take a steamship to the Antipodes (a.k.a Australia), play with roos for a few weeks, then sail back to whatever cold and damp place you came from?
Having both the time and the folding allowed the steamer set to not only visit established tourist sites, but to also create new destinations out of fishing villages and mountainside way-stations. Of course, once the plutocracy's presence had transformed these places into unrecognizable playgrounds, and the proletariat started using the new roads/ports/railroads the upper crust's travel created, the 1% moved on to create new, exclusive destinations for themselves elsewhere.
This, in a nutshell, is what Holidays and High Society is all about.
This slim book -- 160 pages, with tons of pictures -- looks at this process as it happened in eight mostly European travel hotspots in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th. Privileged British tourists were the drivers of change for seven of the eight locations (Germans got Baden Baden started). If you've read anything about the aristocracy at play in those fifty years straddling the turn of the 20th century, none of the places included in the book will surprise you in the least.
The author writes in a clear, confidential style that goes down easy. She drops names (so many names!) regularly and with great aplomb. Reading this is like sitting down for tea at Claridge's with a well-traveled, well-connected pal who just has to share all the juicy titbits she just learned about the French Riviera or Deauville or St. Moritz. Is it good reading? Yes. Will you get to peek behind the curtains at the lifestyles of the rich and (formerly) famous? Of course. Will you be able to base the master's thesis for your hospitality management studies on it? Not a chance. That's not what it's for.
Each story runs roughly the same way: a hamlet or collection of hamlets exists in sleepy obscurity until some titled Brit stumbles into the place, builds a villa, and invites all his rich friends to visit for a few weeks at the best time of year. Soon the hamlets are gone, replaced by lavish hotels, spas, and casinos. The former fisherfolk come to make their livings towing waterskiers, changing sheets in those hotels, or selling souvenirs. The foreign visitors live high, misbehave outrageously, and spend obscenely. Musicians, artists, and other hangers-on roll in. Then the plebes on their package holidays (or, worse, the Americans) crash the party, World War II finishes off the last of the glamor, and the fancy people go to play elsewhere.
The illustrations are the real draw of this book. Vintage photographs, travel posters, and artwork leap out at you from nearly every page. The posters and magazine adverts are printed in glorious full color and are exemplars of the golden age of advertising art. No wonder everyone wanted to go to these places with pictures like these luring them in.
Why only three stars? The repetitiveness of the chapters is one reason; the lack of an index is another. There aren't many dates or even years mentioned to help us keep track of the passage of time. There's usually not much said about the social, political, or economic context for these islands of privilege, nor do we hear about the effects of these places' radical redevelopment on the people who lived and worked in them. I for one would've liked to hear about the impact on Venice Lido tourism when the Fascists came to power in Italy, but that's just me. (At least the author mentioned how Nazism changed Baden Baden's atmosphere.)
Ultimately, Holidays and High Society is a book to be perused, not studied. The gorgeous pictures and the racy tales of rich, titled men and bathing beauties are the whole point. I bought my copy in a bookshop in the Riviera's Beaulieu-sur-Mer a few blocks from the Med, the perfect place to find it. Had I been inclined, I could've taken it straight to the beach, read a bit, squinted hard, and imagined I was sunbathing with Coco Chanel, the Fitzgeralds, the Churchills, and all the rest of the cast. That's what this book is for, and that could be just fine....more
The department store--the once-revolutionary, then indispensable, now dying mainstay of high streets around the world--is a relatively recent developmThe department store--the once-revolutionary, then indispensable, now dying mainstay of high streets around the world--is a relatively recent development. Starting as hopped-up general stores in the late 18th century, they grew increasingly large and comprehensive by the late 1800s, reaching their zenith in the first half of the 20th century. One of the great architects of this retail apotheosis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was also arguably the inventor of shopping as entertainment: Harry Gordon Selfridge. This book is the story of his rise and fall, and with him the revolution in merchandising he brought about.
Selfridge escaped the wilds of Wisconsin for Chicago in 1876 when he joined the staff of Field, Leiter & Company--better known by its later name, Marshall Field & Co. Over the next 25 years, he rose from stockboy to junior partner. He was a perpetual motion machine all his life, always ambitious and innovative, and always looking for the next big thing that would drive customers to the ever-growing, palatial State Street department store. When Marshall Field passed him over for a promotion, Selfridge retired with a fortune that could have kept him in whiskey and green fees for the rest of his life. Predictably, retirement didn't suit him. When he discovered that London didn't have a grand emporium like the ones in New York City and Chicago, he decided he'd build one of his own there. Selfridge & Co. opened on Oxford Street in 1909. London was never the same.
This background fills the first 70-some pages of this book; the rest is about Harry's adventures and misadventures in London. Mass merchandising in England (such as it was) was still rather fusty in 1909, having outgrown its general-store roots in scope but not in attitude. Bringing his unstoppable energy and showman's drives fully to bear, Harry made "Selfridge's" inescapable around town, in the press, and on Oxford Street itself, where he replaced a mess of potty shopfronts with a gigantic retail cathedral that still exists today.
The author catalogues all this activity--the building, the publicity stunts, the innovations--with an evident affection and admiration that luckily stops short of hagiography. She had full access to the store's extensive archives as well as a deep lode of primary sources. Her tone is warm and light (this is shopping, after all, not statecraft) and she pulls in supporting players when needed without letting the camera stray too far from Harry and the store. She sometimes turns her lens on the competitive environment in England to keep the store tethered to the world in which it had to operate.
The author doesn't stint on Harry's many failings, saving the book from becoming a whitewash. The showman in Harry often elbowed aside his inner businessman, dreaming up stunts that rarely paid for themselves. He was a sucker for a sob story and rarely did his due diligence before forking over his money. He was a compulsive--and unsuccessful--gambler, squandering vast sums in French casinos and the poker tables of English society until the casino at Monte Carlo cut him off in an overdue act of mercy. He had an over-fondness for pretty women, especially after his wife Rosalie died in 1918, and carried on serial liaisons with a string of very expensive lovers, all of whom cost him enormous amounts of money he didn't have to spare. The author documents all this in detail, following the confluence of these faults to his inevitable downfall.
I would've liked to have more pictures in the book, especially of the famous Selfridges display windows and of the store's interior. Much of the store's impact came from its visual contrasts with the competition, none of which we get to see. The end notes and bibliography are comfortably extensive, and the index is reasonably useful, a blessing given the size of the cast.
Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge is an ode to recreational shopping as well as a profile of a dreamer whose reach finally exceeded his grasp. Harry Selfridge is the kind of man usually called "larger than life"; in this case, the story justifies that description for better and for worse. If you're at all interested in the roots of modern mass consumerism or simply want to watch an essentially good man's virtues drive him to self-destruction, you could do way worse than this book....more
In the inexhaustible saga of high-end decadence among the Bright Young Things on the French Riviera before WWII, Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel's name featurIn the inexhaustible saga of high-end decadence among the Bright Young Things on the French Riviera before WWII, Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel's name features in heavy rotation. The now-legendary couturière owned an estate (La Pausa, if you must know) on the Côte d'Azur from 1929 to 1953, bouncing between it and Paris during these turbulent years. Being already rich and famous, she fit in quite nicely with all the other rich and/or famous people haunting the coast, though she actually did something to earn her money.
That's ostensibly what Chanel's Riviera is about.
This is the second nonfiction book I've read about this milieu. Rather than repeat the background for the action here, I'll shoot you over to my review of The Riviera Set, about which I was lukewarm, at best. (Go ahead; I'll wait.)
(Finished? Good.) A lot of the same people show up in this book, too, including Maxine Elliott, whose seaside villa wasn't far from La Pausa. A lot of the same bad behavior also features in this book. It's something of an exercise in deja vu, especially when read close together. Chanel's Riviera differs in a few ways; some good, some not so much.
Chanel was a "difficult" woman. Orphaned young and the survivor of a convent education (being surrounded by nuns in her formative years may explain her early fascination with black-and-white clothes), Chanel clawed her way up through the French fashion industry, reaching its pinnacle in the 1920s. She was driven, a workaholic, tyrannical with her workers, and mercurial. She could cut long-time friends dead with abuse, then turn around and shower money, cars, even homes on other friends or acquaintances. She never married or had children, but carried on a very active love life as a serial mistress to the rich/famous men who gravitated to her. And when Paris got to be too much, she'd ride the Train Bleu down to the Med and take up residence in La Pausa for "a restful pause" (thus the villa's name). All this is documented to one extent or another in Chanel's Riviera, especially her carousel of lovers.
When war came to Paris in 1940, Chanel shut down her fashion house -- throwing over 4000 mostly female employees out of work without a thought -- and idled in either the Ritz, where she kept an apartment, or at La Pausa. Her roundelay of British, French, and Russian lovers expanded to include Germans. A convinced antisemite, she meshed well with the collaborationist haute monde and suffered none of the privations visited on ordinary French people.
While Chanel partied, the Riviera suffered at the hands of Petain's Vichy regime, then the Italians, then the Nazis. Vichy Milice and the Nazi SS rounded up the French and non-French Jews who had fled to the Riviera, including a number of prestigious authors, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and other intelligentsia, many of whom perished in the holding camps in France or the death camps in central and eastern Europe. Food began to disappear under these succeeding rounds of despots until the residents of the Riviera found themselves on the brink of starvation by the time the Allies invaded in August 1944. This, too, is documented at length in this book, something The Riviera Set didn't manage. The story's timeline ends as the war does.
The author has made a career out of chronicling the prewar idle rich, so this is familiar territory for her. The prose is clear and generally well-formed, though you'll need a scorecard to keep track of the enormous cast of incidental players. An impressive list of primary and secondary sources in the back pages shows she was a busy bee while preparing to write this. Chanel's Riviera is more ambitious than The Riviera Set; it fills in holes the other book left gaping, and in Chanel it has a focus the other book lacked.
And yet, if we had half-stars, I'd give this 3.5 of the little beggars. Why the meh rating? Ultimately, its ambition undoes it. This book can't seem to decide whether it's a profile of Chanel in the 1920s and 1930s, a chronicle of the Riviera's golden era, or a story of France during the Occupation, so it tries to be all three with varying levels of success. Chanel's pre-1920s life, when presented at all, is disjointed and out of sequence. In the last third of the book, we spend nearly as much time in wartime Paris as we do on the Riviera. Like The Riviera Set, we never learn much about the common folk who made the Riviera work. That said, if I had to choose between these two books, I'd take Chanel's Riviera because it's less breathless and better rounded than The Riviera Set. I'd have to think about it, though.
Chanel's Riviera attempts to be a dual portrait of a small slice of Mediterranean France and one of the gilded inhabitants of that small, clubby enclave. It's not always successful, but it tries hard. Go into this with the proper expectations and you'll get an interesting tale of a place and time that's now as dead as Pompeii or Babylon...just don't expect it to be the last word in anything....more
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