In Solar Dance, acclaimed writer and scholar Modris Eksteins uses Vincent van Gogh as his lens for this brilliant survey of Western culture and politics in the last century. The long-awaited follow-up to Modris Eksteins' internationally acclaimed Rites of Springand Walking Since Daybreak. Now he has produced another thrilling, iconoclastic work of cultural history that is a trailblazing biography of an era--from the eve of the First World War and the rise of Hitler to the fall of the Berlin Wall--that illuminates our current world, with its cults of celebrity and the crisis of the authentic. Solar Danceis a penetrating examination of legitimacy and truth, fakery and pretence--highly relevant to all of us today.
Author
MODRIS EKSTEINS is professor emeritus of history at the University of Toronto. His bestselling, acclaimed Rites of Springwas published in 9 countries, won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize and the Trillium Book Award, and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Globe and Mail and the New York Times. Walking Since Daybreakwas also a national bestseller, winner of the Pearson Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, and was named one of the Best Books of 2000 by the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times and the Globe and Mail.
Reviews
FINALIST 2012 – Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction SHORTLISTED 2013 – BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction LONGLISTED 2013 – Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction WINNER 2013 – BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction
“Brilliant.... Deeply researched.... The story of Wacker’s unlikely rise and equally quick unravelling makes for compulsive reading, made especially gripping by Eksteins’ sure-handed unfolding of the narrative. A crackerjack archival researcher, Ekstein brings to life not just Wacker but the world that created him and allowed him to briefly thrive.... Eksteins is a major historian and Solar Dance, like everything he writes, deserves a wide and attentive readership.” —Jeet Heer, National Post
“Solar Dance vividly captures the large within the small…. It’s a story of an evocative moment along the 20th century’s ideology-ravaged road.” —Maclean’s
“Subtle and engaging…. Eksteins tells his story in a suitably looping and layered manner, with many darts and artful reverses, using a range of knowledge and allusion reminiscent of his 1989 masterpiece, Rites of Spring.” —Mark Kingwell, The Globe and Mail
“Uses Van Gogh as a prism to illuminate the contradictions and complexities of modernism and modernity. The results are learned . . . elegant . . . provocative.” —Winnipeg Free Press
