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Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore

(Larger Image)	Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore by John Taliaferro, Taliaferro Product Group: Book Publisher: PublicAffairs (2002-11) ISBN: 1891620983 EAN: 9781891620980 Binding/Media: Hardcover - 464 pages Edition: 1st Release Date: 2002-11-05 SKU: 5_661 Condition: New Comments: A WONDERFUL HARDBACK BOOK! 2002. PUBLIC AFFAIRS. 1ST EDITION, STATED SO. 1ST PRINT. HARDBACK BOOK, DUST COVER AND PAGES ARE IN MINT CONDITION. SHIPS RAPIDLY. GREAT PACKAGING. PRIORITY AIR MAIL.
Editorial Reviews
Product Description The unlikely story of one of the oddest monuments in American history, its obsessive mastermind, and our misguided attempts to create an American heritage. . Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, hoped that ten thousand years from now, when archaeologists came upon the four sixty-foot presidential heads carved in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they would have a clear and graphic understanding of American civilization. Borglum, the child of Mormon polygamists, had an almost Ahab-like obsession with Colossalism-a scale that matched his ego and the era. He learned how to be a celebrity from Auguste Rodin; how to be a political bully from Teddy Roosevelt. He ran with the Ku Klux Klan and mingled with the rich and famous from Wall Street to Washington. Mount Rushmore was to be his crowning achievement, the newest wonder of the world, the greatest piece of public art since Phidias carved the Parthenon. But like so many episodes in the saga of the American West, what began as a personal dream had to be bailed out by the federal government, a compromise that nearly drove Borglum mad. Nor in the end could he control how his masterpiece would be received. Nor its devastating impact on the Lakota Sioux and the remote Black Hills of South Dakota. Great White Fathers is at once the biography of a man and the biography of a place, told through travelogue, interviews, and investigation of the unusual records that one odd American visionary left behind. It proves that the best American stories are not simple; they are complex and contradictory, at times humorous, at other times tragic.
Amazon.com Review Former Newsweek editor John Taliaferro calls Mount Rushmore "one of the nation's most luminescent beacons of democracy," ranking up there with the Liberty Bell and the Statue of Liberty. Yet comparatively little is known about its remarkable genesis. Taliaferro wryly notes that pop singer Cher "honestly believed that the sculpture was a natural formation." He tells the story of how Rushmore was conceived and built, and why controversy surrounded the project from the start. Great White Fathers is about the meaning of public art, the rise of automobile tourism, and the development of kitsch culture. At its center is Rushmore's feisty sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who waged an energetic campaign on behalf of his artistic vision and then carved the faces of four presidents into a mountainside. Taliaferro discusses every conceivable aspect of the monument, from the filming of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (a minor hullabaloo) to the Native American activists who have threatened it (a more significant one) to recent suggestions by conservatives that Ronald Reagan's image be added (not yet one only because it hasn't approached reality). Great White Fathers is an engaging blend of travelogue and history; vacationers willing to spend umpteen hours driving all the way to the Black Hills of South Dakota would be wise also to invest a few in this fascinating book. --John J. Miller

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