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Title: Challenging reading, excellent information
Review: Unlike most of the reviewers here, I did enjoy Shand Tucci's biography. He has a genuine interest in getting to the "touchy" parts of biography which I find rewarding to have read. The older biographies are very dated hagiographies and really don't prompt an interest in anything but the conventional. This book has interesting things to say about James, Sargent, Bourget, Wharton, Berenson, and others. The style is a little like the gossipy, chatty, whispering voice of a turn of the century Bostonian so it fits well with the idea in the title. This book is certain to lead the future books that come out about Gardner and hopefully people won't continue regarding her as the Byzantine goddess of the Sargent portrait, but a woman of flesh and blood with strengths and weaknesses.
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