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Barcelona
by Robert Hughes
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Random House Audio (1992-03-31)
ISBN: 0679411992
EAN: 9780679411994
Dewey Decimal #: 940
Binding/Media: Audio Cassette
Release Date: 1992-03-31
SKU: AManPro-0004020
Condition: New
Comments: BRAND NEW! FACTORY SEALED! Ships Today with Free Delivery Confirmation! Satisfaction Always Guaranteed!
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Chronicling more than 1,500 years of Catalan history, this fascinating narrative captures the political, economic, military, social, and cultural facets of the Spanish city of Barcelona.
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Customer Reviews
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All you ever wanted to know:but perhaps didn't care to ask
Rating  (3)
Date: 2010-02-28
Robert Hughes mines the depths and soars into the stratosphere in this historical work on Catalunya/Barcelona.It's all here in 500 plus pages of political unrest, international intrigues, economic blunders and city/ province building; over a 2,000 year span.Overarching the meticulous some times ponderous work is Hughes' architectural observations and artistic, and scientific musings. A challenging read, but worth the effort for the student of regional Iberian history.
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Much More than Just Architecture
Rating  (5)
Date: 2009-08-07
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Only the mentally deranged would have one believe that the works of Isaac Albeniz, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Francesc Trabal, and Joanot Martorell are "mediocre". In classical literature, Cervantes, father of the novel, considered Martorell's "Tirant lo Blanch" to be the best chivalry novel. In classical music,the great pianists, Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen, gave Albeniz's "Iberia" the highest praise, with Messiaen referring to it as, "the wonder for the piano; it is perhaps on the highest place among the more brilliant pieces for the king of the instruments". And who,in their right minds, with any modicum of taste and understanding of our artistic heritage, could ever doubt the genius of both Dali and Miro.
This is a good book. Barcelona is a great city. Visca Barcelona! Som Catalans!
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Detailed enough to get you in trouble with the natives
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-01-04
6 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
While "Barcelona" was intended as a social and artistic history, not as a guidebook, it is sufficiently detailed as to have gotten a friend of mine in trouble there.
Few stones are left unturned. One is an exploration of Catalan nativity scenes. These include, typically, a figure of a squatting peasant defecating, symbolic of the fertility of the soil. Characteristically, Hughes knows of a museum of these figures, in the upper story of an obscure building on a byway.
A friend of mine was traveling to Barcelona on a business trip, so I asked her to pick up one of these peasants for my own Christmas display. Her Catalan hosts were extremely displeased to learn that she knew about this part of their history.
Catalans, famous heretics, have always been known for going their own way, and as -- originally -- an art historian and critic, Hughes revels in the idiosyncratic art and especially architecture of Barcelona.
Probably the only Catalan architect many Americans could name is Gaudi, but there were many like him. `Modernism' in art had a different meaning in Barcelona than it has elsewhere.
Hughes writes, wistfully, of the Catalan tradition of hand craftsmanship that allowed the Gaudis to have their fancies turned into three-dimensional reality. All gone under the press of industrialization.
But there is much more, including Spain's vicious politics.
Unless specially interested in Barcelona or Catalonia, most readers probably would shy away and doubt whether they really want to know 500 pages worth about Barcelona. Once started, though, they are likely to become enmeshed in what Hughes calls the "immense, often irrational ambitions" of the city.
Once taken up, this book is hard to put down.
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Interesting and entertaining history of the city
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-03-23
1 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
For instance:
You could see traces of that ancient, tattered dandyism in Barcelona twenty-five years ago. Today, none remains. It lived at all levels. The Catalan gypsies of the Parallel had it in abundance. Corbero swears that he owes his conception of the dignity of his metier as an artist to three gypsy friends back in the early 1960s, old-cloths sellers who went under the nicknames of Puca (Flea), Flanel (Flannel), and Plastic. They were brilliant salesmen. They sold the worst, the rattiest clothes as though they were the newest English tweeds from Bel on Passieg de Gracia. They were so good that the artist, amazed, suggested that they go upscale. Why not put some of the take back into buying better merchandise, things that -- compared with the course rubbish they now sold with such virtuoso effect -- would walk out of the cart? Flea, Flannel and Plastic listened to the suggestion gravely and with scorn. "You may be right about the pesetas," concluded Flannel, dismissively. "But what about art?"
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Review by a Barcelona native
Rating  (4)
Date: 2006-06-26
6 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
I am glad Robert Hughes wrote this book. We, Barcelonites tend to take our city for granted and have lost the ability to take in its historical depth.
Now, when Barcelona is changing rapidly and is spilling over the former sleepy towns and small industrial settlements that are now its suburbs, Hughes book is a comprehensive and easy-to-read source of information about our ancient city, the city that is somehow still living under all the modern development driven by nothing-short-of-ridiculous real estate prices.
One can see that Hughes has written this book with the utmost care. There are surprisingly few errors. The only one worth mentioning is that Hughes mistakenly translates the nickname of the legendary Catalan ruler, Guifré el Pelós, as "Guifré the Hairy", when it should have been "the Fuzzy". In the Catalan language "pelós" refears to short and fuzzy hair, which our first independent ruler is supposed to have had instead of a full beard. A peach, for example is "pelós". If Count Guifré would have been indeed hairy, his nickname would have been "Guifré el Pelut".
Thus, except for this point (and the erroneous conclusions Robert Hughes derives from it in a paragraph at the end of chapter 2, part 5), the book "Barcelona" makes excellent reading.
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