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Mark Borthwick, "A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright"
Manage episode 364640461 series 3362831
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Stu Levitan welcomes Mark Borthwick, here to talk about his new biography of his second cousin thrice removed, A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright, from the good people at the University of Wisconsin Press.
Mamah Borthwick was a highly educated, charismatic young woman from Oak Park Illinois at the turn of the 20th century, soon to become the translator of the internationally renowned Swedish feminist Ellen Key. But as Mark Borthwick writes, she lived with a man she didn’t love in a house designed by a man she did, and despite her many talents and accomplishments, Borthwick would become one of the most reviled women of her era because she left her husband and young children in 1909 to go to Europe with the architect of that house, Frank Lloyd Wright, and then live with him at the magnificent hillside home he built in Spring Green WI, Taliesin, where she and her children were murdered in 1914.
It is quite a tale of forbidden love and devastating loss social change and artistic triumph which Mark Borthwick tells well in this important addition to the literature about the self-proclaimed world’s greatest architect.
Mark Borthwick’s resume is perhaps not quite what you would expect from the author of such a book. A graduate of Northwestern University, he served with the US Army in Vietnam, and later received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Iowa and then two postdoctoral fellowships. After a stint on the staff of the Foreign Relations Committee of the House of Representatives, he became the founding US Executive Director of the US National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation, and then the Director of the United States Asia Pacific Council, a project of the East-West Center. His previous book, Pacific Century: The Emergence of Modern Pacific Asia, was the textbook companion to the award-winning, ten-hour PBS television documentary of that name.
It's a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Mark Borthwick
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