Status Updates From Sentinel: The Unlikely Orig...

How the Statue Of Liberty came to also memorialize the dead.

Back when crazy rich people had nothing better to do than write fables...

Bartholdi, Orientalism, architectural uses for collosal sculptures. We see the primeval antecedents to the Statue of Liberty.

This part of the book kind of drags, despite the fact that Bartholdi is doing some proper adventuring. Still, the book is like a detective story, ferreting out the inspirations for the Statue of Liberty. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

Forays into the architectural, philosophical and political history of Paris; lots and lots about earlier colossal statues and inspirations Bartholdi would have seen; Bartholdi as an early adopter of photography.

I'm not entirely sure what I thought this book was going to be about. Before I picked it up I knew only that it was meant to be a history of the Statue of Liberty, which could have been a dull litany of facts and figures and who-did-what-where-when, but it has turned out to be more like a very, very close reading of the Statue of Liberty as a work of art and the lives of the people who brought it into the world.