{"title":"Alice Kaplan","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAlice Kaplan\u003c\/strong\u003e offers a captivating blend of biography and cultural exploration, inviting readers into the intimate worlds behind her subjects. Her works illuminate personal stories through the lens of history and art, often weaving rich narratives that capture the essence of place and identity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFrom memoir to cultural analysis, Kaplan’s writing engages with themes of memory, creativity, and historical moments that shape human experience. Readers can anticipate thoughtful reflections that bridge the personal and the cultural with clarity and nuance.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"dreaming-in-french-by-alice-kaplan-9780226054872","title":"Dreaming in French","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA year in Paris... Since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision—and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. \u003ci\u003eDreaming in French\u003c\/i\u003e tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAll three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life. But when they embarked for France, they were young, little-known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn’t have been more different.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eJacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program—in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eKaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eJackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration—to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem “too French.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence—to be grappled with, explored, and transcended—the rest of her life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDavis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with Algerian independence. For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once studied.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eKaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent role in her classic memoir, \u003ci\u003eFrench Lessons\u003c\/i\u003e, spins these three quite different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge of how a single year—and a magical city—can change a whole life. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46855763460332,"sku":"9780226054872","price":54.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780226054872.jpg?v=1759276196"},{"product_id":"seeing-baya-by-alice-kaplan-9780226835082","title":"Seeing Baya","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe first biography of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, celebrated in mid-twentieth-century Paris, her life shrouded in myth.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOn a flower farm in colonial Algeria, a servant and field worker known as Baya escaped the drudgery of her labour by colouring the skirts in fashion magazines. Three years later, in November 1947, her paintings and fanciful clay beasts were featured in a solo show in Paris. She wasn't yet sixteen years old. In this first biography of Baya, Alice Kaplan tells the story of a young woman seemingly trapped in subsistence who becomes a sensation in the French capital, then mysteriously fades from the history of modern art—only to re-emerge after independence as an icon of Algerian artistic heritage.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe toast of Paris for the 1947 season, Baya inspired colonialist fantasies about her \"primitive\" genius as well as genuine appreciation. She was featured in newspapers, on the radio, and in a newsreel; her art was praised by Breton and Camus, Marchand and Braque. At the dawn of Algerian liberation, her appearance in Paris was used to stage the illusion of French-Algerian friendship, while horrific French massacres in Algeria were still fresh in memory.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eKaplan uncovers the central figures in Baya's life and the role they played in her artistic career. Among the most poignant was Marguerite Caminat-McEwen-Benhoura, who took Baya from her sister's farm to Algiers, where Baya worked as Marguerite's maid and was given paint and brushes. A complex and endearing character, Marguerite—and her Pygmalion ambitions—was decisive in shaping Baya's destiny. Kaplan also looks closely at Baya's earliest paintings with an eye to their themes, their palette and design, and their enduring influence.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn vivid prose that brings Baya's story into the present, Kaplan's book, the fruit of scrupulous research in Algiers, Blida, Paris, and Provence, allows us to see in a whole new light the beloved artist who signed her paintings simply \u003cem\u003eBaya\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46855832273132,"sku":"9780226835082","price":49.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/20579103482268.jpg?v=1759280335"},{"product_id":"states-of-plague-by-laura-marris-9780226833309","title":"States of Plague","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eStates of Plague\u003c\/em\u003e examines Albert Camus's novel as a palimpsest of pandemic life, an uncannily relevant account of the psychology and politics of a public health crisis.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAs one of the most discussed books of the COVID-19 crisis, Albert Camus's classic novel \u003cem\u003eThe Plague\u003c\/em\u003e has become a new kind of literary touchstone. Surrounded by terror and uncertainty, often separated from loved ones or unable to travel, readers sought answers within the pages of Camus's 1947 tale about an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic. Many found in it a story about their own lives—a book to shed light on a global health crisis.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn thirteen linked chapters told in alternating voices, Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris hold the past and present of \u003cem\u003eThe Plague\u003c\/em\u003e in conversation, discovering how the novel has reached people in their current moment. Kaplan's chapters explore the book's tangled and vivid history, while Marris's are drawn to the ecology of landscape and language. Through these pages, they find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Along the way, Kaplan and Marris examine how the novel's original allegory might resonate with a new generation of readers who have experienced a global pandemic. They describe how they learned to contemplate the skies of a plague spring, to examine the body politic and the politics of immunity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBoth personal and eloquently written, \u003cem\u003eStates of Plague\u003c\/em\u003e uncovers for us the mysterious way a novel can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on other possible futures.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47428152426732,"sku":"9780226833309","price":30.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780226833309.jpg?v=1774767139"},{"product_id":"states-of-plague-by-laura-marris-9780226815534","title":"States of Plague","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eStates of Plague\u003c\/em\u003e examines Albert Camus’s novel \u003cem\u003eThe Plague\u003c\/em\u003e as a palimpsest of our own pandemic life, its account of the psychology and politics of quarantine uncannily relevant to our time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOne of the most discussed books of the COVID-19 crisis, Albert Camus’s classic novel \u003cem\u003eThe Plague\u003c\/em\u003e has been a touchstone for readers over the past two years. As people were surrounded by terror and uncertainty, often separated from loved ones or unable to travel, many sought answers within the pages of Camus’s tale about an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic in 1947. People began to read it as a story about their own lives—a book to shed light on a global health crisis.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn thirteen linked chapters told in alternating voices, Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris hold the past and present of \u003cem\u003eThe Plague\u003c\/em\u003e in conversation, discovering how the novel has reached people in our current moment. Kaplan’s chapters explore the book’s tangled and vivid history, while Marris’s are drawn to the ecology of landscape and language. Through these pages, they find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Kaplan herself is struggling with a case of covid as the book opens; as it closes, Marris receives her first vaccine shot. In between, they find aspects of Camus’s novel that once seemed merely literary spoke directly to their own fear and grief. They describe how they learned to contemplate the skies of a plague spring, to examine the body politic and the politics of immunity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBoth personal and eloquently written, \u003cem\u003eStates of Plague\u003c\/em\u003e uncovers for us the mysterious way a great novel can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on our possible futures.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47432652488940,"sku":"9780226815534","price":37.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780226815534.jpg?v=1774556785"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.pro\/collections\/alice-kaplan.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}