Having a crappy day? I have just the thing: J. M. Rogers’ review of Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman, edited by Jay Gluck, Noël Silver and Sumi Hiramoto Gluck (Ashiya: SoPA, 1996). As Rogers puts it:
“What did they do to deserve this volume, which at 680 pages is a severe test of one’s patience? Despite the inordinate length and the obtrusive egos of their self-obsessed informants, the repetitiveness, and the leaden, and often irrelevant interpolations by Jay Gluck they manage to present an unrelievedly disagreeable picture.”
He goes on to say:
“The scale on which Pope dealt — he claimed in 1932 (p. 167) to have purchased, i.e. sold, more than three quarters of a million dollars’ worth — suggests, however, that ‘Purveyors of Persian Art’ would also have been an apposite title for this volume.”
And:
“Though Phyllis Ackerman’s papers are for the moment inaccessible in Shiraz she emerges as more awful than Pope. The marriage, which she appears to have engineered, may have been less fulfilling than she hoped, which may explain her almost comical obsession with sexual symbolism in middle age.”
Finally:
“With friends like this enemies are superfluous, and Jay Gluck’s admission (p. 573) that everyone connected with the couple had a love-hate relationship with them almost suggests that it is unconscious revenge. As a work of reference, moreover, the volume suffers severely from an absence of explanatory notes and relevant bibliography. Few will need to peruse it, but for the present reviewer it has been a lowering experience.”
It brings a smile to my face every time I read it. The review is published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series 7 (1997), 455-8. Enjoy!