A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade
Author: Christopher Benfey
A surprising and scandalous story of how the interaction within a group of exceptional and uniquely talented characters shaped and changed American thought
At the close of the Civil War, the United States took a deep breath to lick wounds and consider the damage done. A Summer of Hummingbirds reveals how, at that tender moment, the lives of some of our most noted writers, poets, and artists-including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade-intersected to make sense of it all. Renowned critic Christopher Benfey maps the intricate web of friendship, family, and romance that connects these larger than life personalities to one another, and in doing so discovers a unique moment in the development of American character.
In this meticulously researched and creatively imagined work, Benfey takes the seemingly arbitrary image of the hummingbird and traces its "route of evanescence" as it travels in circles to and from the creative wellsprings of the age: from the naturalist writings of abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson to the poems of his wayward pupil Emily Dickinson; into the mind of Henry Ward Beecher and within the writings and paintings of his famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. A Summer of Hummingbirds unveils how, through the art of these great thinkers, the hummingbird became the symbol of an era, an image through which they could explore their controversial (and often contradictory) ideas of nature, religion, sexuality, family, time, exoticism, and beauty.
Benfey's complex tale of interconnection comes to an apex in Amherst, Massachusetts, during the summer of 1882, a time when loyalties were betrayed andthoughts exchanged with the speed of a hummingbird's wings. Here in the wake of the very public Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton sex scandal, Mabel Loomis Todd-the young and beautiful protйgйe to the hummingbird painter Martin Johnson Heade-begins an affair with Austin Dickinson and leaves her mentor heartbroken; Emily Dickinson is found in the arms of her father's friend Judge Otis Lord, and that's not all.
As infidelity and lust run rampant, the incendiary ghost of Lord Byron is evoked, and the characters of A Summer of Hummingbirds find themselves caught in the crossfire between the Calvinist world of decorum, restraint, and judgment and a romantic, unconventional world in which nature prevails and freedom is all.
The Washington Post - Mindy Aloff
…[a] tender, suspenseful and informed meditation on action and thought in the cultivated realms of East Coast America following the Civil War.
M. Neville - Library Journal
Literary professor, scholar, and critic Benfey (The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan) examines the intertwining lives of several American writers and artists in post-Civil War America. Contending that while these were years of societal instability, as much had changed after the war, Benfey likewise sees this era as a time of liberation for this group of gifted men and women. Readers gain insight into the behavior of an extended cast of characters including renowned preacher/orator Henry Ward Beecher; writer and painter Mabel Loomis Todd; Austin Dickinson, Emily Dickinson's prominent attorney brother; and painter Martin Johnson Heade. Their parallel interests-e.g., travel and exploration of warmer climates, obsessions with the hummingbird (a bird native only to the Americas) and the trailing arbutus flower, and a fascination with the English romantic writer Lord Byron-are also emphasized. It is clear the author seeks to enlighten, and he achieves that goal with this scholarly yet intimate behind-the-scenes glimpse into the lives of some of our most important artists. Recommended for larger academic libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
Ambitious, eccentric synthesis of late 19th-century artistic currents shows a static America progressing after the Civil War into a period of movement and romance. As evidenced by his previous teeming works, Benfey (The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan, 2003, etc.) likes to keep the literary pot boiling. In this elegant but not entirely cohesive study, he uses the hummingbird as a metaphor for the postwar era's evanescent spirit, and as a means of spotlighting the shared interests of the actors he has assembled. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a radical writer who served as a colonel in the Union army, published essays about hummingbirds that were read avidly by Emily Dickinson, who in turn wove the birds into poems and wrote to Higginson for literary advice. Harriet Beecher Stowe, credited by President Lincoln with starting the Civil War with Uncle Tom's Cabin, sheltered, named and drew pictures of a wounded hummingbird, which Benfey argues became a stand-in for her troubled, alcoholic son Fred. Martin Johnson Heade, recognized for his paintings of salt marshes and haystacks, traveled to Brazil to paint hummingbirds; his work was beloved by Stowe and her brother, abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, for whom the bird was a metaphor for the delicate female parishioners he seduced. Heade's comely apprentice and crush, Mabel Todd, mingled with the Dickinsons in Amherst, Mass., offering Emily her sketches of hummingbirds while having an affair with the poet's brother Austin; Mabel later helped bring Emily's work to the public light. One life dovetails into the other in this spiraling contemplation, which shows itinerant journalist Mark Twainemerging from his own trip to the tropics "at a critical moment of self-recognition," recognizing that Heade had undertaken "a kindred quest."A handsomely illustrated volume that reflects Benfey's depth of reading and passionate interests, though the connections he makes are occasionally strained.
Table of Contents:
Dramatis Personae
Prologue: A Place in the Sky Where a Cloud Has Been 1
Pt. 1 An Oblique War
Ch. 1 A Tea Rose 13
Ch. 2 The Prodigal 39
Ch. 3 Beecher's Pockets 63
Ch. 4 Tristes Tropiques 81
Pt. 2 At the Hotel Byron
Ch. 5 The Prisoner of Chillon 107
Ch. 6 Birds of Passage 133
Ch. 7 : Covert Flowers, Hidden Nests 159
Pt. 3 Transits of Venus
Ch. 8 Foggy Bottom 179
Ch. 9 A Route of Evanescence 195
Ch. 10 Florida 221
Epilogue: Toward the Blue Peninsula 243
Acknowledgments 261
Notes 263
Index 279
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Windows Forensic Analysis DVD Toolkit
Author: Harlan Carvey
If your job requires investigating compromised Windows hosts, you must read Windows Forensic Analysis.
Richard Bejtlich, Coauthor of Real Digital Forensics and Amazon.com Top 500 Book Reviewer
The Registry Analysis chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
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I also found that the entire book could have been written on just registry forensics. However, in order to create broad appeal, the registry section was probably shortened. You can tell Harlan has a lot more to tell.
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Windows Forensic Analysis DVD Toolkit, 2E replaces the first edition as the most comprehensive and thorough resource on incident response and forensic analysis of Windows systems available, providing information and resources not available anywhere else. This book covers both live and post-mortem response collection and analysis methodologies, addressing material that is applicable to law enforcement, the federal government, students, and consultants. It also brings this material to the doorstep of system administrators, who are often the frontline troops when an incident occurs, but due to staffing and budgets do not have the necessary knowledge to respond effectively. The companion DVD contains significant new and updated materials (movies, spreadsheet, code, etc.) not available any place else, because they were created and maintained by the author.
In the two years since the first edition was originally published, cybercrime has continued to increase, and thecriminals committing the crimes have continued to become more sophisticated. Analysts and investigators need up-to-date information to stay one step ahead, whether they're examining a system for signs of an intrusion or a data breach. Also, state and federal legislation (e.g., CA-1386), as well as standards issued by regulatory bodies (e.g., PCI and HIPAA), are adding an entirely new dimension to what was once thought to be solely the domain of IT staff. Incident responders and forensic analysts now have a whole new set of questions to answer, and the only way to answer them is to be armed the latest and most up-to-date information and analysis techniques, all of which are covered in detail in this critical update of the best-selling resource.
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