Albert and the Whale

Albert and the Whale
Philip Hoare
Our Price:
NZ$ 24.99
Paperback
h198 x 129mm - 304pg
3 Mar 2022 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9780008323325
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of Leviathan, or The Whale. Albrecht Durer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in 1498 of the plague ridden Apocalypse - the first works mass produced by any artist - to his hyper-real images of animals and plants, his art was a revelation: it showed us who we are but it also foresaw our future. It is a vision that remains startlingly powerful and seductive, even now. In Albert & the Whale, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Durer' s art endures. He encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Durer' s fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists and downed angels provoke awkward questions. What is natural or unnatural? Is art a fatal contract? Or does it in fact have the power to save us? With its wild and watery adventures, its witty accounts of amazing cultural lives and its delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world, Albert & the Whale offers glorious, inspiring insights into a great artist, and his unerring, sometimes disturbing gaze.
Praise for Albert and the Whale' In Albert & the Whale he leads his readers off on a marvellously varied, vividly imaginative, seductively digressive adventure that traces the path of another colossus. . . this is a book to immerse you' The Times, Book of the Week, Rachel Campell-Johnston' Magnificent new book . . . Hoare' s feeling for Durer exceeds anything I have ever read . . . his greatest work yet' Observer, Book of the Week, Laura Cumming' Marvellous, unaccountable book. This is a book like the stomach of a whale: capaciously ready to accommodate whatever disparate stuff comes its way. . . Hoare' s modern encyclopedism also allows us to wallow in the book' s fluidity, the unpredictability of which disrupts everything, transmuting whatever is steeped in it into something rich and strange' Literary Review' Philip Hoare, best know for Leviathan, his discursive and personal book about whales, has written a very Sebaldian new book. In it, he traverses his own patch and sniffs out an assortment of seemingly unrelated themes - Albrecht Durer, cetaceans, Thomas Mann and David Bowie, a deformation of the hand, the death of his mother - and proceeds to reveal the single degree of separation between them. . . Enlightening' Michael Prodger, Sunday Times' Visionary: a tone poem put together from the lives of others, with detailed use of archives' Financial Times
Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction: Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990) and Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wilde' s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (1997), Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000), and England' s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005). Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Most recently, The Sea Inside (2013) was published to great critical acclaim. An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC' s Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 2011.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780008323325
Published: 3 Mar 2022
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Fourth Estate
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Format: Paperback
Height: 198mm
Width: 129mm
Spine: 23mm
Weight: 290g
Pages: 304

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