Rachel Corbett - Böcker

Master sculptor Auguste Rodin’s illuminating writings on cathedrals in France are especially relevant and significant following the recent fire at Notre Dame.In this volume, the writer and Rodin scholar Rachel Corbett selects excerpts from the famous sculptor’s book Cathedrals of France, first published in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. Cathedrals were central to the way Rodin thought about his art: he saw them as visual metaphors for the human figure, among the finest examples of craftsmanship known to modern man, and as a model for how to live and work—slowly, brick by brick.Here, Corbett takes the fire at Notre Dame and the concerns over its restoration as an entry point in an exploration of Rodin’s cathedrals. Rodin adamantly opposed restoration, as he felt it often did more damage than the original injury. (Many of the cathedrals that Rodin looks at in his texts were, in fact, bombed during the war.) But while he rails against various restoration efforts as evidence that “we are letting our cathedrals die,” the book, with its tenderly rendered sketches and written portraits, is itself an attempt to preserve these cathedrals. The selection of texts in this volume is a reminder—as is the tragedy of Notre Dame—of why we ought to appreciate these feats of architecture, whether or not they are still standing today.

In Paris in 1902, Auguste Rodin had just completed The Thinker; visiting from Prague was Rainer Maria Rilke, broke and with writer’s block. When Rilke was commissioned to write a book about Rodin, everything changed. You Must Change Your Life tells one of the great stories of modern art and literature: Rodin and Rilke’s years together as master and disciple, their heartbreaking rift and finally, their moving reconciliation. Rachel Corbett reveals how Rodin’s friendship led Rilke to write his most celebrated poems and inspired his Letters to a Young Poet. She captures the dawn of Modernism amid the characters that made up Rilke and Rodin’s circle, including Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Lou Andreas-Salome, George Bernard Shaw and Jean Cocteau. And she recounts the friendship of two artists whose work reverberates a century later.

In Paris in 1902, Auguste Rodin had just completed The Thinker; visiting from Prague was Rainer Maria Rilke, broke and with writer’s block. When Rilke was commissioned to write a book about Rodin, everything changed. You Must Change Your Life tells one of the great stories of modern art and literature: Rodin and Rilke’s years together as master and disciple, their heartbreaking rift and finally, their moving reconciliation. Rachel Corbett reveals how Rodin’s friendship led Rilke to write his most celebrated poems and inspired his Letters to a Young Poet. She captures the dawn of Modernism amid the characters that made up Rilke and Rodin’s circle, including Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Lou Andreas-Salome, George Bernard Shaw and Jean Cocteau. And she recounts the friendship of two artists whose work reverberates a century later.

Criminal profiling—the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological “fingerprints” of the monsters among us—holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. In The Monsters We Make, prize-winning author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society’s most seductive and quixotic undertakings through six significant moments in its history. She delves into Arthur Conan Doyle’s work on the Jack the Ripper case, Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray’s pioneering profile of Adolf Hitler and his later experiments on his student Ted Kaczynski and the FBI’s famed Behavioural Science Unit’s investigations of such killers as Ted Bundy. Taking the story into our own time and the use of “predictive policing”, Corbett examines how thin the line separating those who do harm and those who aim to stop it can be.

Criminal profiling—the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological “fingerprints” of the monsters among us—holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. But what exactly is it, does it work, and why is the American public so entranced by it? What do we gain, and endanger, from studying why people commit murder? In The Monsters We Make, author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society’s most seductive and quixotic undertakings through five significant moments in its history.Corbett follows Arthur Conan Doyle through the London alleyways where Jack the Ripper butchered his victims, depicts the tailgate outside of Ted Bundy’s execution, and visits the remote Montana cabin where Ted Kaczynski assembled his antiestablishment bombs. Along the way emerge the people who studied and unraveled these cases. We meet self-taught psychologist Henry Murray, who profiled Adolf Hitler at the request of the U.S. government and later profiled his own students—including the future Unabomber—by subjecting them to cruel humiliation experiments. We also meet the prominent Yale psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, who ended up testifying that Bundy was too sick to stand trial. Finally, Corbett takes the story into our own time, explaining the rise of modern “predictive policing” policies through a study of one Florida family that the analytics targeted—to devastating effects.With narrative intrigue and deft research, Corbett delves deep into the mythology and reality of criminal profilers, revealing how thin the line can be separating those who do harm and those who claim to stop it.