An engrossing foray into architectural history.
The tale of a relationship and the “architectural treasure” it created.
As Boston Globe columnist Beam (The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the End of a Beautiful Friendship, 2016, etc.) stylishly lays it out, this is the story of two very smart and strong-willed people and the unique house that came between them. The author begins in 1945 with a dinner party in an elegant Chicago apartment. Edith Farnsworth (1903-1977), an accomplished doctor and researcher, had recently purchased land near the Fox River, an hour southwest of Chicago, where she hoped to build a getaway home. Also at the party was the noted architect Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), who had recently moved from Europe to America. When they met, van der Rohe said, “I would love to build any kind of house for you.” Farnsworth was prosperous, and the architect was ambitious. He had the innovative idea to “build the house of steel and glass; in that way, we’ll let the outside in.” From 1946 to 1947, the two made enjoyable visits to the site, and a close relationship developed. They agreed on a house with floor-to-ceiling glass at an estimated cost of $40,000. However, as Beam writes, a “funny thing happened on the way to building Mies’s glass house. [Architect] Philip Johnson built it first”—but he graciously acknowledged van der Rohe’s influence. By 1949, Farnsworth and van der Rohe “were no longer intimate friends.” Beam diligently chronicles the back-and-forth squabbles over skyrocketing costs that eventually brought the price to $70,000. The architect demanded more money, but Farnsworth had had enough, so she sued him. “Some of the great moments in the history of twentieth-century architecture flew by in the sleepy Yorkville courtroom,” writes the author, whose detailed recounting of the trial may be too much for some readers, but most will enjoy the cultural history aspect of the narrative. They settled out of court. Farnsworth rarely lived in her glass house (though it is now iconic), and van der Rohe became famous.
An engrossing foray into architectural history.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-59271-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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