The library is closed on Saturday, 3/29 due to the storm. Be safe!
Camden Public Library warmly welcomes award-winning author Natalie Dykstra, for a book talk on her latest title, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner. There will be book sales, thanks to Arctic Tern Books in Rockland, and a signing session with the author to follow.
This event will take place in the library’s beautiful and historic Reading Room. Limited seats are available. Pre-registration is strongly recommended for this event. To reserve your free seat, RSVP below!
Natalie Dykstra delivers the definitive biographical portrait of the ambitious and innovative—and until now misunderstood—woman behind one of America’s most important art collections. With access to all archival holdings at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—including thousands of digitized and newly accessible letters and other unpublished records—as well as original sources in Paris, Venice, and more, Dykstra brings Isabella to life as never before.
An incredible achievement of storytelling and scholarship, Chasing Beauty illuminates the fascinating ways the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of living memoir—as the place where Isabella “put herself on display . . . her taste, her passions, her sorrow, her nerve, her capacious curiosity, her relationships.”
A tribute to the transformative power of art and the indomitable spirit of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Chasing Beauty stands as an inspiring tale of beauty and loss, resilience and self-invention, and the enduring legacy of a visionary creator.
“[An] exquisitely detailed and perceptive biography.” — New York Times Book Review
“Sympathetic, impeccably researched.” — Wall Street Journal
“[A] thrilling new biography.” — Town & Country
“Marshalling vivid facts, fluent insights, and narrative radiance, Dykstra fully captures Gardner’s dynamism, intrepidity, creativity, and singular achievements.” — Booklist, *starred* review
“An elegant depiction of a larger-than-life trailblazer.” — Publishers Weekly
Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life. Her work on Isabella Stewart Gardner has won a Public Scholars Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO). Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner is a finalist for the 19th Annual Marfield Prize for arts writing. Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, lives with her husband in Waltham, MA.
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