Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age by Eksteins, Modris (2012) Hardcover

In Solar Dance, acclaimed writer and scholar Modris Eksteins uses Vincent van Gogh as his lens for this brilliant survey of Western culture and politics in the last century. The long-awaited follow-up to Modris Eksteins' internationally acclaimed Rites of Spring and Walking Since Daybreak. Now he has produced another thrilling, iconoclastic work of cultural history that is a trailblazing biography of an era--from the eve of the First World War and the rise of Hitler to the fall of the Berlin Wall--that illuminates our current world, with its cults of celebrity and the crisis of the authentic. Solar Dance is a penetrating examination of legitimacy and truth, fakery and pretence--highly relevant to all of us today.

MODRIS EKSTEINS is professor emeritus of history at the University of Toronto. His bestselling, acclaimed Rites of Spring was published in 9 countries, won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize and the Trillium Book Award, and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Globe and Mail and the New York Times. Walking Since Daybreak was also a national bestseller, winner of the Pearson Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, and was named one of the Best Books of 2000 by the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times and the Globe and Mail.