Twilight of the Belle Epoque

The Paris of Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Renault, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, and Their Friends Through the Great War

De: Mary McAuliffe

Narrado por: Nancy Peterson

Mary McAuliffe's Dawn of the Belle Epoque took the listener from the multiple disasters of 1870-1871 through the extraordinary re-emergence of Paris as the cultural center of the Western world. Now, in Twilight of the Belle Epoque, McAuliffe portrays Paris in full flower at the turn of the 20th century, where creative dynamos such as Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, and Isadora Duncan set their respective circles on fire with a barrage of revolutionary visions and discoveries. Such dramatic breakthroughs were not limited to the arts or sciences, as innovators and entrepreneurs such as Louis Renault, Andre Citroën, Paul Poiret, François Coty, and so many others - including those magnificent men and women in their flying machines - emphatically demonstrated. But all was not well in this world, remembered in hindsight as a golden age, and wrenching struggles between church and state, as well as between haves and have-nots, shadowed these years, underscored by the ever-more-ominous drumbeat of the approaching Great War - a cataclysm that would test the mettle of the City of Light, even as it brutally brought the Belle Epoque to its close.

©2014 Mary S. McAuliffe (P)2021 Tantor

2 volumes, great!

These 2 informative volumes were great preparation for our trip to the Olympics. Thank you.

Fun, immersive listen; but the narrator...

Yet another well-researched dive into a specific Parisian era; but I'm baffled by the narrator,
She's got an appealing voice and cadence and (unlike many) actually tackles the accents with some skill, but it seems like she is sight-reading and committing bizarre inconsistencies. Among the more egregious are Proust, to whom she refers as "Proo" and "Proust" -- even in the same paragraph. Other names are similarly butchered. I don't expect everybody to master every accent, but the weird thing here is that she actually does have a grasp of accents. She just drastically changes the pronunciation of recurring names for no reason whatsoever. PROO? Really? It's almost like she has no idea what is going on. Would it be too much to ask for a narrator who does a modicum of research? Are there no editors here? It just feels lazy -- and kind of strange. That said, I happily stuck with it, thanks to Mary McAuliffe. But come on, readers. Try doing just a minimum of homework.

Very disjointed storytelling but great historically.

I thought the storytelling was very disjointed so it was difficult to recall who was who when time periods and events changed. A great story of the time and culture but hard to keep up and understand the narrative of each “character’s” life and career progression.

Hard on the ears

I couldn't finish this audiobook because it was painful on my ears when the narrator switched to French for certain words. it was jarring and annoying. I can think of many audiobook I enjoyed more, such as a recent book about JS Sargent, Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee, Caroline Weber's Proust Duchess, The Great Improvisation abiut Ben Franclin in France. I really can't stand the switch to French accent by this narrator.