Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (Harvard Paperbacks)
A remarkably absorbing and lucid biography of Berenson's early career. The book does full justice to the verve and excitement of Berenson's connoisseurship. (Saturday Review)A portrait replete with the complex ironies created in the conflicts between vaulting idealism and the harsh necessities of living well...[It] makes clear the tortuous conflicts of his life, and stands as a splendid monument to its author's understanding of the human quandaries of his extraordinary subject and his equally extraordinary wife. (Chronicle Review)Berenson has an ideal biographer in Samuels. Impeccable in method, strong in narrative skill, Samuels scants nothing as to place, period or person, and is no less remarkable for inwardness, depth and charity of feeling. (Nation)This is a life filled with extraordinary people...Collectively they made the 1890s outrageously exciting, and the Berensons, in their relentless quest for recognition and security, serve as the perfect mirror. Samuels turns the mirror deftly, through Boston, London, Florence, Oxford, Vienna, and Chicago, pausing briefly in the boudoir, lingering in the golden hills of Tuscany, relentlessly reflecting the social scene...Samuels brilliantly captures it all. (Christian Science Monitor)