Description
Book SynopsisThis fifth and final volume of an award-winning series charts the changing inner history of our times from the tumult of World War I to the 1990s, when personal identity was released from its moorings in gender, family, social class, religion, politics and nationality.
Trade ReviewA History of Private Life has been an immense undertaking… The series has deservedly attracted huge praise from historians of all hues for its scholarly imagination and beautiful presentation. It is thus an unusually strong recommendation to say that the final volume is worthy of its predecessors. -- Andrew Freeman * Financial Times *
The wealth of materials is impressive, and Arthur Goldhammer’s skillful translation captures the contributors’ voices… Lavishly illustrated with well-captioned reproductions. -- Joseph Coates * Chicago Tribune *
The text is leavened with an abundant display of imagery… The entire series amounts to a vast treasury of human thought and experience, a sourcebook of ideas and images. At times lyrical, then analytical, but always provocative… A tool for the analyst and the novelist as much as the historian and anthropologist. -- Jonathan Kirsch * Los Angeles Times *
Together these five compact volumes cover much of the history of the classical world, and do so with both ease and authority. * Washington Post Book World *
There’s something wonderfully audacious about the very concept of ‘History of Private Life,’ a five-volume study that seeks to reveal the most intimate details of everyday life over three millennia of Western European history. Here is one scholarly work in which the bathroom and the bordello figure as importantly as the storming of the Bastille or the defeat of Napoleon… A fascinating glimpse into the distant and exotic past. -- Jonathan Kirsch (reviewing the series) * Los Angeles Times *
The new emphasis on the history of everybody has now been consecrated in [this] ambitious five-volume series…masterfully translated by Arthur Goldhammer… Copious illustrative materials—paintings, drawings, caricatures, and photographs, all cannily chosen and wittily captioned to display domestic life… Magnificent. -- Roger Shattuck * New York Times Book Review *
