An Amazon Best Book of the Year
An O Magazine 15 Titles to Pick Up Now Selection, Summer 2014
“Journalist Elizabeth Mitchell recounts the captivating story behind the familiar monument that readers may have assumed they knew everything about.”—New York Times
“Liberty’s Torch reveals a statue with a storied past . . . Mitchell uses Liberty to reveal a pantheon of historic figures, including novelist Victor Hugo, engineer Gustave Eiffel and newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. The drama—or “great adventure,” to borrow from the subtitle—runs from the Pyramids of Egypt to the backrooms of Congress. . . . By explaining Liberty’s tortured history and resurrecting Bartholdi’s indomitable spirit, Mitchell has done a great service. This is narrative history, well told. It is history that connects us to our past and—hopefully—to our future.”—Los Angeles Times
“Streamlined and well constructed. . . . Proceeding chronologically, the author divides her story into three parts (“The Idea,” “The Gamble,” “The Triumph”) and opens with just the right amount of initial biographical detail on the designer, bolstering her portrait with further historical background as the narrative warrants. . . . deft strokes and always apt, telling details. . . . Mitchell successfully conveys the enormity of the undertaking and the infuriating amount of bureaucracy and old-fashioned glad-handing required to finish the job. . . . In Bartholdi, Mitchell has found a fascinating character through which to view late-19th-century America, and she does readers a service by sifting fact from fiction in the creation of one our most beloved monuments.”—Boston Globe
“A myth-busting story starring the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. Mitchell’s adjectives for him include crazy, driven, peevish and obnoxious. He rarely missed an opportunity to advance his own career, but Mitchell says he had “an incredible ability to soldier on” through a 15-year struggle. . . . Were it for not for Bartholdi, the statue probably would not have been built. In today’s world, Mitchell can't imagine any single person driving such a massive undertaking.”—USA Today
“Turns out that what you thought you knew about Lady Liberty is dead wrong. Learn the truth in this fascinating account of how a French sculptor armed with only an idea and a serious inability to take no for an answer built one of the most iconic monuments in history.”—O, the Oprah Magazine
“Every American schoolchild learns the story: In a grand gesture representing their shared reverence for freedom, France presented to a grateful United States the imposing 305-foot Statue of Liberty. . . . Except, like all history, the story is a little more complicated than that. Elizabeth Mitchell takes us inside the statue’s history . . . Despite the statue’s iconic status in American culture, Bartholdi’s name probably does not spring into your mind as soon as you see its image. But Mitchell’s book does a fine job of retrieving him from the mists of history—and of recounting how long and hard he labored, not just artistically but financially and politically, to make the statue a reality. . . . Fascinating.”—Tampa Bay Times
“Mitchell casts doubt on several myths about the genesis of and inspiration for Lady Liberty . . . Quite certain that the sculptor did not use his mother as the model for the statue's face, Mitchell speculates that he may have had his deceased brother Charles in mind. And she suggests that there may be something to rumors, circulated at the time, that the body of Lady Liberty resembled Bartholdi's paramour, later his wife.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“The Statue of Liberty, which has stood at the entrance to New York’s harbor for more than a century and a quarter, is chiefly the work of a French sculptor named Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi . . . Mitchell tells the story of its construction . . . a good story.”—Washington Post
“Through her portrait of the statue’s creator, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, and her careful examination of his journey to build the colossus now known as the Statue of Liberty, Mitchell brings to life a gripping adventure story . . . Mitchell feels obliged to be as accurate as possible, yet manages to give her readers access to troves of detail. Her depictions of scenes can be sensual. . . . In a story comprising tragedy and humor, Mitchell revives a slice of history. She teaches the importance of faithfulness to accuracy in reporting, and demonstrates that adherence to the facts will likely yield a story that is at once true and entertaining.”—Brooklyn Daily Eagle
“An absolutely brilliant and entertaining book—a delightful romp through a seemingly impossible history. It’s a bit amazing how much I didn't know about the best-known statue in America, or its maker, Frédéric Bartholdi—a character so brazen and outrageous and charming that his life reads like a picaresque nineteenth-century novel. I delighted in every page.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Signature of All Things and Eat, Pray, Love
“Is there any more globally recognizable American icon than the Statue of Liberty? Or any about which Americans know less? In Elizabeth Mitchell’s capable hands, the fascinating story of its quixotic creation—the mix of idealism and hustle, selflessness and selfishness, a crazy dream realized with breathtaking ingenuity—is a perfect parable for the moment mongrel America arose to become the world’s spectacular, improbable colossus.”—Kurt Andersen, author of True Believers
“Filled with outlandish characters, fascinating tidbits and old world adventure, Liberty’s Torch is a rollicking read about one of America’s most beloved and, until now, misunderstood, icons.”—Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette
“What we take for granted as a fait accompli was anything but, as we learn in this engrossing, witty, well-researched and surprising account of the Statue of Liberty’s bumpy path to glory. Mitchell does a beautiful job of breathing new life into a too-mythic tale, taking us behind the scenes to witness the hustling, chicanery, rivalries, back-stabbings, lies and disappointments that foreshadowed this eventually triumphant merger of patriotism, opportunism and the art world.”—Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and To Tell and Two Marriages
“Elizabeth Mitchell is an inspired writer and Liberty’s Torch is a great book. While the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi is Mitchell’s colorful hero, a gallery of historical figures like Victor Hugo and Joseph Pulitzer make grand appearances. My takeaway from Liberty’s Torch is to be reminded that the Statue of Liberty is the most noble monument ever erected on American soil.”—Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University and author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
“Lady Liberty has her secrets . . . In Liberty’s Torch, Elizabeth Mitchell chronicles the efforts of French artist Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi to erect his colossal statue, from a failed concept on the Suez Canal to the icon’s dedication in New York harbor.”—Metro
2014-05-17
Mitchell (Three Strides Before the Wire: The Dark and Beautiful World of Horse Racing, 2002, etc.) maintains a light touch in this examination of the life of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904), the designer of the Statue of Liberty.A proud Alsatian whose widowed mother moved him and his older brother to Paris to further their artistic careers, Bartholdi studied under painter Ary Scheffer and was influenced by the work of architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in his restoration of Notre-Dame. Having visited and drawn the monuments of the Nile Valley, Bartholdi fancied stone as his "mania" and initially proposed to the khedive of Egypt a colossal statue of a female slave holding a torch to stand at the mouth of the Suez Canal, a construction-in-progress marvel by engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps. Bartholdi maintained that his idea for a lighthouse in the form of "the angel Liberty" was in fact inspired by a poem by Victor Hugo. Spurred by the pro-American views of writer Édouard René de Laboulaye, whose bust Bartholdi was commissioned to make, and faced with revolution in Paris in 1871, he set sail for New York to try to sell his idea, especially as newly fashioned Central and Prospect parks needed statues—although nothing quite this large. Bedloe's Island in the harbor, containing 14 acres and a crumbling fort, seemed a perfect site, but it would take until October 1886 for the enormous funds to be gathered and the statue actually dedicated. Bit by bit, Bartholdi drummed up support from Franco-American friends and the American wealthy, from President Ulysses S. Grant to architect Richard Morris Hunt, while relying on the engineering know-how of Viollet-le-Duc and ironworker Honoré Monduit, as well as invaluable advice from bridge builder Gustave Eiffel.A low-key, mannered treatment of the realization of a great vision.
