For most people, the work of Frederic Remington conjures an antiquarian world of all things "western." Why this is so, and whether it "should" be so, are two of the critical questions raised in this book. Stephen Tatum closely considers selected paintings from Remington's last four years of life--his so-called years of critical acclaim. Tatum's purpose is twofold: first, to understand these paintings, both formally and thematically, within their historical, aesthetic, and biographical contexts; and second, to account for what endows them today--after marking the centennial of Remington's death in 1909--with continuing aesthetic and cultural significance. To this end, Tatum examines these late paintings in relation to Remington's other works, his letters and published writings, his evolving critical reception, and the writing and artwork of other cultural figures of the era, such as historian Frederick Jackson Turner and sociologist Georg Simmel. The book provides an illuminating glimpse of how and why particular Remington works might seize a viewer's attention in his or her past or present moment of reception--how in fact their unstable visual complexity can ultimately absorb their viewer. In his "Coda," Tatum offers a personal memoir of his own encounter with Remington's "The Love Call," a critical meditation enacting and questioning the "Remington Moment."

"Child of the Fire" is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis's sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis's intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis's fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct "American" national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood.

Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis's career--including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy--and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis's most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha"; "Forever Free "and" Hagar in the Wilderness" in light of art historians' assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and "The Death of Cleopatra" in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.

Meditations on the paradoxes generated around the ending of western slavery. In his tour-de-force ""Blind Memory"", Marcus Wood read the visual archive of slavery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Britain with a closeness and rigor that until then had been applied only to the written texts of that epoch. ""Blind Memory"" changed the way we look at everything from a Turner seascape to a crude woodcut in a runaway slave advertisement. ""The Horrible Gift of Freedom"" brings the same degree of rigor to an analysis of the visual culture of Atlantic emancipation. Wood takes a troubled and troubling look at the iconography inspired by the abolition of slavery across the Atlantic diaspora. Why, he asks, did imagery showing the very instant of the birth of black slave freedom invariably personify Liberty as a white woman? Where did the image of the enchained kneeling slave, ubiquitous in abolitionist visual culture on both sides of the Atlantic, come from? And, most important, why was freedom invariably depicted as a gift from white people to black people? In order to assess what the inheritance of emancipation imagery means now and to speculate about where it may travel in the future, Wood spends the latter parts of this book looking at the 2007 bicentenary of the 1807 Slave Trade Abolition Act. In this context a provocative range of material is analyzed including commemorative postage stamps, museum exhibits, street performances, religious ceremonies, political protests, and popular film. By taking a new look at the role of the visual arts in promoting the 'great emancipation swindle', Wood brings into the open the manner in which the slave power and its inheritors have single-mindedly focused on celebratory cultural myths that function to diminish both white culpability and black outrage. This book demands that the living lies developed around the memory of the emancipation moment in Europe and America need to be not only reassessed but demolished.

Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity offers an entirely new perspective on the concept of constructing nation-states. The book explores the nature of national identity constructs produced in pre-modern Japan by examining two aspects of its cultural production, the sphere of fine arts and the sphere of literature inter-twined with a genre of poetry pictorialization. The discussion is centered on the artistic practice of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and contextualizes his woodblock print series entitled Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki in a wider perspective of Japanese historical, political, social, cultural and artistic phenomena emerging prior to the birth of the modern Japanese nation. Hokusai's work, oscillating between the domain of text and the domain of image, transposes the classical Japanese poetry into late Edo period (1603-1868) popular culture. Machotka argues that in the process of text/image translation Hokusai projected a new image of «Japaneseness, thereby contributing to the development of national identity prior to the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state.

A lively and distinctive look at realism in great modern books and art Realist Vision exploresthe claim to represent the world "as it is." Peter Brooks takes a new look at the realist tradition and its intense interest in the visual. Discussing major English and French novels and paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brooks provides a lively and perceptive view of the realist project. Centering each chapter on a single novel or group of paintings, Brooks examines the "invention" of realism beginning with Balzac and Dickens, its apogee in the work of such as Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola, and its continuing force in James and modernists such as Woolf. He considers also the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud, and such recent phenomena as "photorealism" and "reality TV."

"The Unknown Blakelock" offers new perspectives on Ralph A. Blakelock (1847-1919) by addressing the modernity of his accomplishments as reflected in the exhibition's paintings. A self-taught artist, Blakelock digressed from habitual procedures into stylistic experiments that were considerably in advance of common practice of the time. Associated primarily with the two dominant themes of moonlight views and Indian encampments, Blakelock was already acknowledged as a colorist during his career, an aspect of his painting attesting to his receptivity to modernist developments but largely overlooked in critical discourse. The works featured in this exhibition also attest to a salient characteristic of our own time, namely, the artist's growing autonomy. "The Unknown Blakelock" explores this ongoing impact of Blakelock's work, which has previously been placed in the context of the exploration of his own--not our--contemporaries.
"The Unknown Blakelock" is a catalog of the exhibition of lesser-known works of Blakelock held at the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, from January 25 to August 24, 2008, and at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts in New York City, from September 25, 2008, to January 4, 2009.

This book, featuring the life and works of Ralph Blakelock, situates him in the context of American art. Representing over twenty years of study and the examination of several thousand works attributed to him, "Beyond Madness" reveals the unusual nature of Blakelock's life story as it offers clear parallels to his painting. Largely self-taught and supported by few patrons, Blakelock regularly struggled with the financial pressures of supporting his nine children and pursuing his art. Called both brilliant and doomed, and institutionalized on and off for the last decade of his life, he nonetheless created some of the most beloved--and some of the most frequently forged--paintings in the American canon. As in the author's own time, modern assessments of his work are often colored by notions of Blakelock the man, leading to a paradoxical legacy of suffering and hope, obscurity and prominence. Taking Blakelock's art on its merits, "Beyond Madness" stands as a testament to the indefatigable spirit of art scholarship as well as a tribute to the artist and his enduring passion for the creative process. It finally casts new light on the life and character of Blakelock and on the nature of the incomparable art he contributed to the American tradition.

This book addresses the lively artistic dialogue that took place between Russia and the West-in particular with the United States, Britain, and France-from the 1860s to the Khrushchev Thaw. Offering stimulating new readings of cross-cultural exchange, it illuminates Russia's compelling, and sometimes combative, relation with western art in this period of profound cultural transformation. Russian Art and the West breaks new ground in the range of its material and its chronological span. Attending both to vanguard tendencies and to the official artistic institutions and practices of the tsarist and Soviet eras, it casts light on seminal developments little studied in western scholarship, while also providing new contexts for, and fresh insights into, the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. The book's eleven essays by leading experts on Russian art and design explore painting, architecture, and the decorative arts, considering not only the objects but also the patrons, audiences, exhibitions, and critical readings that together shaped national culture in an international context. Written in an accessible style and encompassing a variety of approaches, they collectively rethink conventional polarities and influences, and unpack the myths of separateness and isolation so often associated with artistic endeavor in late imperial or Soviet Russia. This illustrated volume will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers seeking to understand the fuller context of Russian artistic culture during a remarkable century of social and political change.

This new volume accompanies and complements the publication of the major new 2-volume catalogue the Brooklyn Museum's collection of American paintings by artists born before 1876. It provides a richly illustrated general survey of the Museum's most significant paintings by American artists. Each painting is illustrated in colour, many with accompanying colour details and comparative images. The selected works are arranged in four thematic sections: early American art, art of the 1830's to 50's, American painting in the Civil War Era, and painting of the late 19th and early 20th Century. Extended captions discuss the key features of each painting, information about the artist, and the wider artistic context of the work and the period in which it was produced. The volume features a Chronology, which focuses on wider key moments, movements and styles that developed in American art post-Independence. Special attention is also given to works by individual artists who heavily influenced the development of American painting, such as Copley, Cole and Eakins.

This is the first major study of the Italian painter Girolamo Pieri Nerli, who spent the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Australia and New Zealand and is best known as a teacher of Frances Hodgkins. The fruit of many years of research, this careful and thoughtful book will be of considerable interest to art historians and the general public. Nerli painted a wide range of subjects in a wide range of styles and is associated with the introduction of Impressionism to the Antipodes. T hough he returned to Italy his most important work, which shows an appealing liveliness with paint, was done in the South Pacific and most of it remains here. His best paintings, full of colour and warmth often with attractive human subjects, have continuing appeal and relevance to both Australia and New Zealand at an important turning point in their cultures. The book includes an introductory text of two chapters, the first on Nerli's life and personality, the second on his painting, accompanied by black and white photographs and reproductions setting the context and evoking the era. This is followed by 40 full-page full-colour reproductions of the most important paintings, each with commentary on the facing page. There will also be a chronology, a bibliography, an appendix reproducing some vivid letters written by Nerli and his wife, and a list of exhibitions.

The beaux-arts mural movement in America was fueled by energetic young artists and architects returning from training abroad. They were determined to transform American art and architecture to make them more thematically cosmopolitan and technically fluid and accomplished. The movement slowly coalesced around the decoration of mansions of the Gilded Age elite, mostly in New York, and of public buildings and institutions across the breadth of the country. The Virgin and the Dynamo: Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917 is the first book in almost a century to concentrate exclusively on the beaux-arts mural movement in the United States. Beginning with a short history of the movement from its inception in Boston during the American Renaissance, Bailey Van Hook focuses on the movement's public manifestations in the period between the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the First World War. Professor Van Hook explores different aspects of the mural movement, the concept and meaning of "decoration," the claim that murals are inherently democratic, the shift in preference from allegory to history, the gendered concept of modernity, the ideologies behind the iconography, and, finally, the decline of the movement when it began to be seen as old fashioned and anachronistic. The Virgin and the Dynamo raises our understanding of the beaux-arts movement to a new level. For the general reader, this illustrated history will explain many familiar representations of local and national values.

Thousands of women pursued artistic careers in the United States during the late nineteenth century. According to census figures, the number of women among the ranks of professional artists rose from 10 percent to nearly 50 percent between 1870 and 1890. Examining the effects of this change, Kirsten Swinth explores how women's growing presence in the American art world transformed both its institutions and its ideology.

Swinth traces the careers of women painters in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, opening and closing her book with discussion of the two most famous women artists of the period--Mary Cassatt and Georgia O'Keeffe. Perhaps surprisingly, Swinth shows that in the 1870s and 1880s men and women easily crossed the boundaries separating conventionally masculine and feminine artistic territories to compete with each other as well as to join forces to professionalize art training, manage a fluid and unpredictable art market, and shape the language of art criticism. By the 1890s, however, women artists faced a backlash. Ultimately, Swinth argues, these gender contests spilled beyond the world of art to shape twentieth-century understandings of high culture and the formation of modernism in profound ways.

The subject matter and iconography of much of the art in the U.S. Capitol forms a remarkably coherent program of the early course of North American empire, from discovery and settlement to the national development and westward expansion that necessitated the subjugation of the indigenous peoples.
In "Art and Empire," Vivien Green Fryd's revealing cultural and political interpretation of the portraits, reliefs, allegories, and historical paintings commissioned for the U.S. Capitol, the reader is given an enhanced appreciation for the racial and ethnic implications of these works.
This latest contribution to the United States Capitol Historical Society's Perspectives on the Art and Architectural History of the United States Capitol series provides an affordable and accessible insight into one of our most visited, viewed, and revered national buildings. Professor Fryd demonstrates how the politics of our history is written in stone and painted on the walls of these hallowed halls.

Robert L. McGrath surveys -- often at an exhilarating pace -- the topographic and metaphoric landscape of New Hampshire's White Mountains through the artistic and tourist life of the region as it appears in paintings and illustrations. Extending from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, he includes by far the most extensive collection of pictorial works relating to the White Mountains to date.

Although the scenic beauty of the White Mountains attracted many of America's most significant artists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Thomas Cole, Frank Stella, Winslow Homer, Fernand Leger, John Marin, and Marsden Hartley, no comprehensive account of this region's rich contribution to the history of American art has ever been published.

Written in a vital, concise prose style, full of fresh insights, comparisons and juxtapositions, this study promises to command and hold the attention of anyone with an interest in the interplay of art, nature, and American culture.

"This book will become the most complete and useful English-language text on its subject, and will be the essential starting point for anyone wishing to incorporate Mexican material into a photographic survey course, to add photography to a course on Mexican culture, or to do more research in the field." -- Martha A. Sandweiss, Associate Professor of American Studies and History, Amherst College

The history of photography in Mexico was a largely untold story until the 1994 publication of Olivier Debroise's Fuga Mexicana, un recorrido por la fotografi a en Me xico. Based on ten years' research in public and private photographic archives in Mexico, the United States, Guatemala, and Europe, Fuga Mexicana provided the first comprehensive survey of Mexican photography from the advent of the daguerreotype in 1839 to the present.

Now this benchmark publication is available in English as Mexican Suite. Olivier Debroise and Stella de Sa Rego have revised this edition to include more current material and explanatory notes for an audience less familiar with Mexican history. They have also eliminated some of the general history of photography and added more of the early history of photography in Mexico, as well as many new, previously unpublished images. The book is organized both chronologically and thematically, which allows viewer/readers to follow the evolution of major photographic genres and styles. Debroise also examines the role of photography in the development of modern Mexico and the influence of prominent foreign photographers such as Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In its totality, Mexican Suite constitutes an extended essay onMexican culture as a whole and on how this culture has been read, interpreted, and imagined.

This study of colonialism and art examines the intersection of visual culture and political power in late-eighteenth-century British painting. Focusing on paintings from British America, the West Indies, and India, Beth Fowkes Tobin investigates the role of art in creating and maintaining imperial ideologies and practices--as well as in resisting and complicating them.
Informed by the varied perspectives of postcolonial theory, Tobin explores through close readings of colonial artwork the dynamic middle ground in which cultures meet. Linking specific colonial sites with larger patterns of imperial practice and policy, she examines paintings by William Hogarth, Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, Arthur William Devis, and Agostino Brunias, among others. These works include portraits of colonial officials, conversation pieces of British families and their servants, portraits of Native Americans and Anglo-Indians, and botanical illustrations produced by Calcutta artists for officials of the British Botanic Gardens. In addition to examining the strategies that colonizers employed to dominate and define their subjects, Tobin uncovers the tactics of negotiation, accommodation, and resistance that make up the colonized's response to imperial authority. By focusing on the paintings' cultural and political engagement with imperialism, she accounts for their ideological power and visual effect while arguing for their significance as agents in the colonial project.
Pointing to the complexity, variety, and contradiction within colonial art, "Picturing Imperial Power" contributes to an understanding of colonialism as a collection of social, economic, political, and epistemological practices that were not monolithic and inevitable, but contradictory and contingent on various historical forces. It will interest students and scholars of colonialism, imperial history, postcolonial history, art history and theory, and cultural studies.

A thought-provoking analysis of Frederic Bazille that sheds new light on the origins and dilemmas of modernist painting.

Studio companion of Monet and Renoir, protege of Courbet, and friend of Manet, Frederic Bazille (1841-1870) is more often remembered for the financial assistance he provided to future Impressionists than for his own vivid and often unsettling work. In this first complete book in English devoted to Bazille, Dianne Pitman seeks to situate this often overlooked artist within the complex and contradictory art world of the 1860s. In the process, she greatly refines our understanding of the modernist tradition.

Pitman examines a series of major paintings and critical essays by Bazille and his contemporaries and frames them within the modernist discourse about purity, or respecting the proper limits of the medium. She stresses the problem of pose -- the way in which painted subjects seem to respond to the artist's presence and the implied presence of the beholder -- and explores his responses to the new medium of photography, the idea of painting without subject matter, the burden of tradition, and the problematic of self-portraiture. As these themes again come to the fore in much of the most controversial art and criticism of the late twentieth century, this study also represents an important contribution to the ongoing debate concerning the oppositions and continuities between modernism and postmodernism.

"The Culture of Love" interprets the sweeping change in loving that spanned a period when scientific discoveries reduced the terrors and dangers of sex, when new laws gave married women control over their earnings and their bodies, when bold novelists and artists shook off the prudishness and hypocrisy that so paralyzed the Victorians. As public opinion, family pressure, and religious conviction loosened, men and women took charge of their love. Stephen Kern argues that, in contrast to modern sex, Victorian sex was anatomically constricted, spatially confined, morally suspect, deadly serious, and abruptly over.

Kern divides love into its elements and traces profound changes in each: from waiting for love to ending it. Most revealing are the daring ways moderns began to talk about their current lovemaking as well as past lovers. While Victorians viewed jealousy as a "foreign devil," moderns began to acknowledge responsibility for it. Desire lost its close tie with mortal sin and became the engine of artistic creation; women's response to the marriage proposal shifted from mere consent to active choice. There were even new possibilities of kissing, beyond the sudden, blind, disembodied, and censored Victorian meeting of lips.

Kern's evidence is mainly literature and art, including classic novels by the Brontes, Flaubert, Hugo, Eliot, Hardy, Forster, Colette, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Musil as well as the paintings and sculptures of Millais, Courbet, Gerome, Rodin, Munch, Klimt, Schiele, Valadon, Chagall, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi. The book's conceptual foundation comes from Heidegger's existential philosophy, inparticular his authentic-inauthentic distinction, which Kern adapts to make his overall interpretation and concluding affirmation of the value of authenticity: "The moderns may have lost some of the Victorians' delicacy and poignancy, perhaps even some of their heroism, but in exchange became more reflective of what it means to be a human being in love and hence better able to make that loving more their very own."

This illustrated catalog of Thomas Moran's field sketches includes an interpretive essay tracing the artist's seventy-year career in the field; a chronological, stylistic, and geographical survey of his fieldwork; an illustrated checklist of the 1080 sketches in public collections.
Moran is best known for his work in the American West during the post-Civil War expansion, particularly in what would become Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite national parks. Yet this virtuoso painter and draftsman also traveled in search of inspiration in Pennsylvania, New York's Long Island, Florida, Wisconsin, Mexico, England, Scotland, Wales, France, and Italy, returning repeatedly to favorite subjects. An almost compulsive desire to sketch refined his innate skill as one of America's finest landscape artists.
Most of Moran's known field sketches are reproduced here. As described in the introduction, "their range encompasses summary contour drawings of the spectacular topography of the American West, luminous watercolors that simultaneously fix local color and evoke the artist's rapturous response to the natural world, and fully realized works that nevertheless preserve the intensity of Moran's firsthand experience of his plein air subjects."
No serious formal study of Thomas Moran can be made without reference to this volume.

The life of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), who abandoned his wife, five children, and a successful career as a stockbroker to paint in poverty in exotic Tahiti, is one of the legendary tales of the art world. Today he is recognized as a highly influential founding father of modern art, who emphasized the use of flat planes and bright, nonnaturalistic color in conjunction with symbolic or primitive subjects. Familiarity with Gauguin the writer is essential for a complete understanding of the artist. "The Writings of a Savage" collects the very best of his letters, articles, books, and journals, many of which are unavailable elsewhere. In brilliantly lucid discussions of life and art Gauguin paints a triumphant self-portrait of a volcanic artist and the tormented man within.

Edgar Degas's painting entitled A Cotton Office in New Orleans is one of the most significant images of nineteenth-century capitalism, in part because it was the first painting by an Impressionist to be purchased by a museum. Drawing upon archival materials, Marilyn R. Brown explores the accumulated social meanings of the work in light of shifting audiences and changing market conditions and assesses the artist's complicated relationship to the business of art.

Despite the financial failure of the actual cotton firm he represented, Degas carefully constructed his picture with a particular buyer--a British textile manufacturer--in mind. However, world events, including an international stock market crash and declines in the market for cotton and art, destroyed his hopes for this sale. It was under these circumstances that the canvas was exhibited in the second Impressionist show in Paris in 1876. While it received a more positive response than other works exhibited, its success was with the conservative audience. After considerable difficulty, Degas finally succeeded in selling the painting in 1878 to the newly founded museum in the city of Pau. The painting was probably regarded as an appropriate homage to the old textile manufacturing family who funded its purchase. It also appealed to "progressive" provincial and more cosmopolitan audiences in Pau.

The picture's scattered form and atomized figures--in which some interpreters today read evidence of the artist's own ambivalence about capitalism--seemingly contributed to its "innovative" cachet in Pau. But the private and public meanings of the painting had shifted, in discontinuous fashion, between its production and consumption. Under the circumstances, Degas's unfixed and even mixed messages about business became, among other things, his most successful (if unwitting) marketing strategy. The official recognition Degas received in Pau in 1878 heralded the gradual upswing of his own financial status during the 1880s, but his attitudes towards success remained mixed.

Sketches & Measurings - Danish Architects in Greece 1818-1862

Was the Royal Academy of San Carlos, founded in 1785 by the King of Spain, beneficial or detrimental to the development of a valid, living art in Mexico? The answer lies in the archives of the school, but nobody thought about constructing an aesthetic history from them until Jean Charlot accidentally discovered their extent and interest while searching for other material.

In this straightforward, documented account he presents not merely opinions and criticism but evidence, including curricula and contemporary drawings by students and teachers.

Since Pre-Conquest art there have been, it is usually assumed, two periods in Mexican art: the Colonial and the Modern. Between these peaks lies the dark Academy-dominated hiatus called Neo-Classicism, an episode that this treatise makes the first attempt to under-stand. The academic canons imported from Europe during this period were undeniably wrong for the indigenous people, and especially wrong at a time when a revolutionary Mexico was struggling for its own identity. But instead of throwing out this strange episode as foreign and imitative, it now becomes possible to see it as a period of acculturation through which the Mexican spirit emerged.

Aside from its interest as aesthetic history, this book makes an important contribution to the social history of Mexico. Some provocative ideas emerge: the interrelations between cultural and political attitudes, the historical impact of events and personalities on ideology. In the seesaw of political and financial fortunes, the worst moments of confusion were often the most pregnant artistically, with mexicanidad rising inevitably when official guidance weakened. As social history this account constitutes an interesting parallel to similar cultural experiences in the United States and in other countries of the Americas.

Charlot presents this material without special pleading, but not without appraisal. He writes: ..". in the periods when the Academy was most strictly run along academic lines, it helped the young, by contrast, to realize the meaning of freedom. When the school was manned by men blind to the Mexican tradition, and sensitive only to European values, their stubborn stand became a most healthy invitation to artistic revolution."

This book follows the life of Ivan Agueli, the artist, anarchist, and esotericist, notable as one of the earliest Western intellectuals to convert to Islam and to explore Sufism. This book explores different aspects of his life and activities, revealing each facet of Agueli's complex personality in its own right. It then shows how esotericism, art, and anarchism finally found their fulfillment in Sufi Islam. The authors analyze how Agueli's life and conversion show that Islam occupied a more central place in modern European intellectual history than is generally realized. His life reflects several major modern intellectual, political, and cultural trends. This book is an important contribution to understanding how he came to Islam, the values and influences that informed his life, and-ultimately-the role he played in the modern Western reception of Islam.