John Berendt:The City of Falling Angels
- Paperback 2012, ISBN: 9780143036937
Collins. Very Good. 234mm / 153mm. Paperback. 2012. 189 pages. <br>Based on an acclaimed professor's legendary strate gy course at Harvard Business School, The Strategist offers… More...
Collins. Very Good. 234mm / 153mm. Paperback. 2012. 189 pages. <br>Based on an acclaimed professor's legendary strate gy course at Harvard Business School, The Strategist offers a rad ically new perspective on a leader's most vital role. Are you a s trategist? That's the first question Cynthia Montgomery asks the business owners and senior executives from all over the world who participate in her highly regarded executive education course. I t's not a question they anticipate or care much about on opening day. But by the time the program ends, they cannot imagine leadin g their companies to success without being-and living the role of -a strategist. Over a series of weeks and months, Montgomery puts these accomplished executives through their paces. Using case di scussions, after-hours talks, and participants' own strategy dile mmas, she illuminates what strategy is, why it's important, and w hat it takes to lead the effort. En route, she equips them to con front the most essential question facing every business leader: D oes this company truly matter? In doing so, she shows that strate gy is not just a tool for outwitting the competition; it is the m ost powerful means a leader has for shaping a company itself. The Strategist exposes all business leaders-whether they run a globa l enterprise or a small business-to the invaluable insights Montg omery shares with these privileged executives. By distilling the experiences and insights gleaned in the classroom, Montgomery hel ps leaders develop the skills and sensibilities they need to beco me strategists themselves. It is a difficult role, but little els e one does as a leader is likely to matter more. ., Collins, 2012, 3, Penguin Books. Good. 8.2 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches. Paperback. 2006. 414 pages. Cover worn.<br>A #1 New York Times Bestseller! Funny, insightful, illuminating . . . --The Boston Globe Twelve years ago, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil exploded into a monu mental success, residing a record-breaking four years on the New York Times bestseller list (longer than any work of fiction or no nfiction had before) and turning John Berendt into a household na me. The City of Falling Angels is Berendt's first book since Midn ight, and it immediately reminds one what all the fuss was about. Turning to the magic, mystery, and decadence of Venice, Berendt gradually reveals the truth behind a sensational fire that in 199 6 destroyed the historic Fenice opera house. Encountering a rich cast of characters, Berendt tells a tale full of atmosphere and s urprise as the stories build, one after the other, ultimately com ing together to portray a world as finely drawn as a still-life p ainting. Editorial Reviews Review Funny, insightful, illuminati ng . . . [Venice] reveals itself, slowly, discreetly, under Beren dt's gentle but persistent prying. --The Boston Globe Berendt ha s given us something uniquely different . . . . Thanks to [his] s plendid cityportrait, even those of us far from Venice can marvel . --The Wall Street Journal About the Author John Berendt has be en a columnist for Esquire and the editor of New York magazine, a nd is the author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, whic h was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfictio n. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. An E vening in Venice THE AIR STILL SMELLED OF CHARCOAL when I arriv ed in Venice three days after the fire. As it happened, the timin g of my visit was purely coincidental. I had made plans, months b efore, to come to Venice for a few weeks in the off-season in ord er to enjoy the city without the crush of other tourists. If the re had been a wind Monday night, the water-taxi driver told me as we came across the lagoon from the airport, there wouldn't be a Venice to come to. How did it happen? I asked. The taxi driver shrugged. How do all these things happen? It was early February, in the middle of the peaceful lull that settles over Venice ever y year between New Year's Day and Carnival. The tourists had gone , and in their absence the Venice they inhabited had all but clos ed down. Hotel lobbies and souvenir shops stood virtually empty. Gondolas lay tethered to poles and covered in blue tarpaulin. Unb ought copies of the International Herald Tribune remained on news stand racks all day, and pigeons abandoned sparse pickings in St. Mark's Square to scavenge for crumbs in other parts of the city. Meanwhile the other Venice, the one inhabited by Venetians, was as busy as ever-the neighborhood shops, the vegetable stands, th e fish markets, the wine bars. For these few weeks, Venetians cou ld stride through their city without having to squeeze past dense clusters of slow-moving tourists. The city breathed, its pulse q uickened. Venetians had Venice all to themselves. But the atmosp here was subdued. People spoke in hushed, dazed tones of the sort one hears when there has been a sudden death in the family. The subject was on everyone's lips. Within days I had heard about it in such detail I felt as if I had been there myself. IT HAPPENED ON MONDAY EVENING, January 29, 1996. Shortly before nine o'cloc k, Archimede Seguso sat down at the dinner table and unfolded his napkin. Before joining him, his wife went into the living room t o lower the curtains, which was her long-standing evening ritual. Signora Seguso knew very well that no one could see in through t he windows, but it was her way of enfolding her family in a domes tic embrace. The Segusos lived on the third floor of Ca' Capello, a sixteenth-century house in the heart of Venice. A narrow canal wrapped around two sides of the building before flowing into the Grand Canal a short distance away. Signor Seguso waited patient ly at the table. He was eighty-six-tall, thin, his posture still erect. A fringe of wispy white hair and flaring eyebrows gave him the look of a kindly sorcerer, full of wonder and surprise. He h ad an animated face and sparkling eyes that captivated everyone w ho met him. If you happened to be in his presence for any length of time, however, your eye would eventually be drawn to his hands . They were large, muscular hands, the hands of an artisan whose work demanded physical strength. For seventy-five years, Signor Seguso had stood in front of a blazing-hot glassworks furnace-ten , twelve, eighteen hours a day-holding a heavy steel pipe in his hands, turning it to prevent the dollop of molten glass at the ot her end from drooping to one side or the other, pausing to blow i nto it to inflate the glass, then laying it across his workbench, still turning it with his left hand while, with a pair of tongs in his right hand, pulling, pinching, and coaxing the glass into the shape of graceful vases, bowls, and goblets. After all those years of turning the steel pipe hour after hour, Signor Seguso's left hand had molded itself around the pipe until it became perm anently cupped, as if the pipe were always in it. His cupped hand was the proud mark of his craft, and this was why the artist who painted his portrait some years ago had taken particular care to show the curve in his left hand. Men in the Seguso family had b een glassmakers since the fourteenth century. Archimede was the t wenty-first generation and one of the greatest of them all. He co uld sculpt heavy pieces out of solid glass and blow vases so thin and fragile they could barely be touched. He was the first glass maker ever to see his work honored with an exhibition in the Doge 's Palace in St. Mark's Square. Tiffany sold his pieces in its Fi fth Avenue store. Archimede Seguso had been making glass since t he age of eleven, and by the time he was twenty, he had earned th e nickname Mago del Fuoco (Wizard of Fire). He no longer had the stamina to stand in front of a hot and howling furnace eighteen h ours a day, but he worked every day nonetheless, and with undimin ished pleasure. On this particular day, in fact, he had risen at his usual hour of 4:30 A.M., convinced as always that the pieces he was about to make would be more beautiful than any he had ever made before. In the living room, Signora Seguso paused to look out the window before lowering the curtain. She noticed that the air had become hazy, and she mused aloud that a winter fog had se t in. In response, Signor Seguso remarked from the other room tha t it must have come in very quickly, because he had seen the quar ter moon in a clear sky only a few minutes before. The living ro om window looked across a small canal at the back of the Fenice O pera House, thirty feet away. Rising above it in the distance, so me one hundred yards away, the theater's grand entrance wing appe ared to be shrouded in mist. Just as she started to lower the cur tain, Signora Seguso saw a flash. She thought it was lightning. T hen she saw another flash, and this time she knew it was fire. P apa! she cried out. The Fenice is on fire! Signor Seguso came qu ickly to the window. More flames flickered at the front of the th eater, illuminating what Signora Seguso had thought was mist but had in fact been smoke. She rushed to the telephone and dialed 11 5 for the fire brigade. Signor Seguso went into his bedroom and s tood at the corner window, which was even closer to the Fenice th an the living room window. Between the fire and the Segusos' hou se lay a jumble of buildings that constituted the Fenice. The par t on fire was farthest away, the chaste neoclassical entrance win g with its formal reception rooms, known collectively as the Apol lonian rooms. Then came the main body of the theater with its ela borately rococo auditorium, and finally the vast backstage area. Flaring out from both sides of the auditorium and the backstage w ere clusters of smaller, interconnected buildings like the one th at housed the scenery workshop immediately across the narrow cana l from Signor Seguso. Signora Seguso could not get through to th e fire brigade, so she dialed 112 for the police. The enormity o f what was happening outside his window stunned Signor Seguso. Th e Gran Teatro La Fenice was one of the splendors of Venice; it wa s arguably the most beautiful opera house in the world, and one o f the most significant. The Fenice had commissioned dozens of ope ras that had premiered on its stage-Verdi's La Traviata and Rigol etto, Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Benjamin Britten's T he Turn of the Screw. For two hundred years, audiences had deligh ted in the sumptuous clarity of the Fenice's acoustics, the magni ficence of its five tiers of gilt-encrusted boxes, and the baroqu e fantasy of it all. Signor and Signora Seguso had always taken a box for the season, and over the years they had been given incre asingly desirable locations until they finally found themselves n ext to the royal box. Signora Seguso had no luck getting through to the police either, and now she was becoming frantic. She call ed upstairs to the apartment where her son Gino lived with his wi fe and their son, Antonio. Gino was still out at the Seguso glass factory in Murano. Antonio was visiting a friend near the Rialto . Signor Seguso stood silently at his bedroom window, watching a s the flames raced across the entire top floor of the entrance wi ng. He knew that, for all its storied loveliness, the Fenice was at this moment an enormous pile of exquisite kindling. Inside a t hick shell of Istrian stone lined with brick, the structure was m ade entirely of wood-wooden beams, wooden floors, wooden walls-ri chly embellished with wood carvings, sculpted stucco, and papier- mâché, all of it covered with layer upon layer of lacquer and gil t. Signor Seguso was aware, too, that the scenery workshop just a cross the canal from his house was stocked with solvents and, mos t worrisome of all, cylinders of propane gas that were used for w elding and soldering. Signora Seguso came back into the room to say she had finally spoken with the police. They already knew ab out the fire, she said. They told me we should leave the house at once. She looked over her husband's shoulder and stifled a screa m; the flames had moved closer in the short time she had been awa y from the window. They were now advancing through the four small er reception halls toward the main body of the theater, in their direction. Archimede Seguso stared into the fire with an apprais ing eye. He opened the window, and a gust of bitter-cold air rush ed in. The wind was blowing to the southwest. The Segusos were du e west of the theater, however, and Signor Seguso calculated that if the wind did not change direction or pick up strength, the fi re would advance toward the other side of the Fenice rather than in their direction. Now, Nandina, he said softly, stay calm. We' re not in any danger. The Segusos' house was only one of many bu ildings close to the Fenice. Except for Campo San Fantin, a small plaza at the front of the theater, the Fenice was hemmed in by o ld and equally flammable buildings, many of them attached to it o r separated from it by only four or five feet. This was not at al l unusual in Venice, where building space had always been at a pr emium. Seen from above, Venice resembled a jigsaw puzzle of terra -cotta rooftops. Passages between some of the buildings were so n arrow one could not walk through them with an open umbrella. It h ad become a specialty of Venetian burglars to escape from the sce ne of a crime by leaping from roof to roof. If the fire in the Fe nice were able to make the same sort of leap, it would almost cer tainly destroy a sizable swath of Venice. The Fenice itself was dark. It had been closed five months for renovations and was due to reopen in a month. The canal along its rear façade was also cl osed-empty-having been sealed off and drained so work crews could dredge the silt and sludge from it and repair its walls for the first time in forty years. The canal between the Segusos' buildin g and the back of the Fenice was now a deep, muddy gulch with a t angle of exposed pipes and a few pieces of heavy machinery sittin g in puddles at the bottom. The empty canal would make it impossi ble for fireboats to reach the Fenice, and, worse than that, it w ould deprive them of a source of water. Venetian firemen depended on water pumped directly from the canals to put out fires. The c ity had no system of fire hydrants. THE FENICE WAS NOW RINGED BY A TUMULT OF SHOUTS and running footsteps. Tenants, routed from t heir houses by the police, crossed paths with patrons coming out of the Ristorante Antico Martini. A dozen bewildered guests rolle d suitcases out of the Hotel La Fenice, asking directions to the Hotel Saturnia, where they had been told to go. Into their midst, a wild-eyed woman wearing only a nightgown came stumbling from h er house into Campo San Fantin screaming hysterically. She threw herself to the ground in front of the theater, flailing her arms and rolling on the pavement. Several waiters came out of the Anti co Martini and led her inside. Two fireboats managed to navigate to a water-filled canal a short distance from the Fenice. Their hoses were not long enough to reach around the intervening buildi ngs, however, so the firemen dragged them through the kitchen win dow at the back of the Antico Martini and out through the dining room into Campo San Fantin. They aimed their nozzles at flames bu rning furiously in a top-floor window of the theater, but the wat er pressure was too low. The arc of water barely reached the wind owsill. The fire went on leaping and taunting and sucking up grea t turbulent currents of air that set the flames snapping like bri lliant red sails in a violent wind. Several policemen struggled with the massive front door of the Fenice, but to no avail. One o f them drew his pistol and fired three shots at the lock. The doo r opened. Two firemen rushed in and disappeared into a dense whit e wall of smoke. Moments later they came running out. It's too la te, said one. It's burning like straw. The wail of sirens now fi lled the air as police and firemen raced up and down the Grand Ca nal in motorboats, spanking up huge butterfly wings of spray as t hey bounced through the wakes of other boats. About an hour after the first alarm, the city's big fire launch pulled up at the lan ding stage behind Haig's Bar. Its high-powered rigs would at last be able to pump water the two hundre, Penguin Books, 2006, 2.5<
