Charming the Bones: A Portrait of Margaret Matthew Colbert

Rating:
Summary: Portraiture, A Lost Art Revived
Review: Let me just say right off that only about ten books in the world get five stars from me, so four stars is a great compliment and a sign that Charming the Bones is well worth investigating. It begins as true portraiture, an artform nearly as lost as the dinosaurs that the book's heroine spends so much time illustrating, but toward the final third, the book's focus shifts to that of the anthropologically sensitive travelogue. Aside from the obvious pleasures of dropping in on Georgia O'Keefe and touring Europe, I wound up sampling--and all but participating in--cultures I'd never heard of from remote corners of India and South Africa (during apatheid). As seen through Margaret's eyes and Ann Elliot's expert pen, every detail is rendered vividly and with a keen attention to scientific detail. The results are both beautiful and readable. Elliot's book takes on the business of setting down a life in print, no easy task, and she succeeds on all fronts. Reading it makes you yearn to travel more, hunt down fossils of your own, and dig out the brushes and try once more to paint that elusive masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Portraiture, A Lost Art Revived
Review: Let me just say right off that only about ten books in the world get five stars from me, so four stars is a great compliment and a sign that Charming the Bones is well worth investigating. It begins as true portraiture, an artform nearly as lost as the dinosaurs that the book's heroine spends so much time illustrating, but toward the final third, the book's focus shifts to that of the anthropologically sensitive travelogue. Aside from the obvious pleasures of dropping in on Georgia O'Keefe and touring Europe, I wound up sampling--and all but participating in--cultures I'd never heard of from remote corners of India and South Africa (during apatheid). As seen through Margaret's eyes and Ann Elliot's expert pen, every detail is rendered vividly and with a keen attention to scientific detail. The results are both beautiful and readable. Elliot's book takes on the business of setting down a life in print, no easy task, and she succeeds on all fronts. Reading it makes you yearn to travel more, hunt down fossils of your own, and dig out the brushes and try once more to paint that elusive masterpiece.