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Product Identifiers
PublisherPegasus Books
ISBN-101639364951
ISBN-139781639364954
eBay Product ID (ePID)11059000897
Product Key Features
Book TitleOnce Upon a Time World : the Dark and Sparkling Story of the French Riviera
Number of Pages464 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2023
TopicRich & Famous, Europe / France, Social History
IllustratorYes
GenreBiography & Autobiography, History
AuthorJonathan Miles
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height2 in
Item Weight22.4 Oz
Item Length9 in
Item Width6 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
LCCN2024-442073
ReviewsJonathan Miles's Once Upon a Time World is a delightful, dizzying romp through the world's most glamorous muse: the French Riviera. Reading this breathtaking account of the transformations of the French Riviera over the last two millenniums is like riding shotgun with a racecar driver in the Monaco Grand Prix., As fascinating in its historical sweep as its devotion to gossip and misbehaviour, Once Upon a Time World is a delirious chronicle of excess. A phenomenal work of research across hundreds of histories, biographies, memoirs and letters. It shifts with masterly control across a dozen arenas from high art to low scandal, taking in fashion, sport, ballet, and motor racing. It's utterly absorbing, indelicate to a shocking degree, and I devoured every page of it., Why did they come to the Riviera? Mr. Miles credits an alluring trifecta that persists to this day: natural beauty, man-made entertainment and proximity to prominence. Picasso, Monet and Renoir all painted here. Nietzsche and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote here. Matisse designed a chapel here, and the dancer Isadora Duncan died here after her scarf tangled in a car's wheel during an evening ride. Here, of course, is the Côte d'Azur, a slice of southern France that for decades has been host to extravagant creativity and tragedy, grand gestures and bad behavior., Entertaining and comprehensive. Distant conflicts, revolutions and financial crises, as much as the oscillations of Paris fashion, all echoed on the Côte-D'Azur. Dr. Miles chronicles all this with a keen eye for piquant details., In this fabulous romp of a book, Jonathan Miles tells the story of how an 80-mile stretch of rocky shoreline became history's first playground for the rich and famous., Jonathan Miles's cinematic telling shows how the drama, the absurdity, the splendor and the squalor of the imperial capital all found their way into Russia's finest novels, operas and paintings. In this compelling account of St Petersburg's turbulent history, Miles peels back the layers of myth in which the city is swaddled, while never losing sight of its haunting grace., The story of how the French Riviera was born a century ago is well-known, but this fascinating account goes back much, much farther than that. Consider this a whirlwind history tour of the region, from its Roman Empire beginnings, to the influx of royals in the Belle Epoque to the Murphy era in the 1920s and beyond, with plenty tales of scandal, corruption, and greed in between., Miles's whirlwind of characters coalesces into a narrative of booms and busts throughout the decades: the highs of the Belle Époque, the Roaring '20s, and the 1950s-when Hollywood stars took the area's glamor to a new level-but also the lows of both World Wars and the Great Depression., He corrals all the all the myths and legends into a bigger-picture mosaic. Miles writes in a rattling from-the-hip fashion, which only adds to the book's party atmosphere. The French Riviera emerges from this well-researched, enthuasiastically shaped book as a constant temptation.
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Synopsis*A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice* Chronicling two-hundred years of glamour, intrigue, and hedonism, this rich and vivid history of the French Riviera features a vast cast of characters, from Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel to Andre Matisse and James Baldwin. 1835, Lord Brougham founded Cannes, introducing bathing and the manicured lawn to the wilds of the Mediterranean coast. Today, much of that shore has become a concrete mass from which escape is an exclusive dream. In the 185 years between, the stretch of seaboard from the red mountains of the Esterel to the Italian border hosted a cultural phenomenon well in excess of its tiny size. A mere handful of towns and resorts created by foreign visitors - notably English, Russian and American - attracted the talented, rich and famous as well as those who wanted to be. For nearly two centuries of creativity, luxury, excess, scandal, war and corruption, the dark and sparkling world of the Riviera was a temptation for everybody who was anybody. Often frivolous, it was also a potent cultural matrix that inspired the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Coco Chanel, Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, James Baldwin, Catherine Mansfield, Sartre and Stravinsky. In Once Upon a Time World, Jonathan Miles presents the remarkable story of the small strip of French coast that lured the world to its shores. It is a wild and unforgettable tale that follows the Riviera's transformation from paradise and wilderness to a pollution imperiled concrete jungle.
LC Classification NumberDC608.5.M55 2023
