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THE SWEETNESS OF LIFE

Name: THE SWEETNESS OF LIFE
Author: Angelica Goodden
ISBN: 0-233-99021-6

A BIOGRAPHY OF ELISABETH LOUISE VIGÉE LE BRUN

by Angelica Goodden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 1999

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A scholarly, illuminating biography of one of the 18th century’s most successful female portraitists. Although her paintings appear in museums the world over, critics and historians have often given VigÇe Le Brun short shrift, faulting her for the complaisant quality of her art. Here Goodden, a fellow in French at Oxford University, duly notes this tendency but also makes plain the aesthetic and economic constraints within which the artist had to work. For although she was the daughter of a minor portrait painter and precociously talented as a child, VigÇe Le Brun was denied any formal art training on the basis of her sex. “Such institutional prejudice mattered insamuch as life drawing was the basis of historical painting, the highest genre in the pictorial hierarchy, and one to which ambitious women aspired,” notes Goodden. And so, from the time she first set up her own studio—when she was just an adolescent—VigÇe Le Brun became a painter of portraits, primarily those of French royalty, power brokers, courtiers, and courtesans. For better or worse, she also gained unparalleled access to the royal court and became the chosen portraitist of Marie-Antoinette. Fortunately, her close affiliation with the queen did not doom her to suffer the same grisly fate; she fled Paris in disguise even as the royal family was being forcibly removed from Versailles. Although Le Brun continued to earn a handsome living from the royal ÇmigrÇs who scattered throughout Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, the world she had known disintegrated, and with it her hopes of becoming a painter of history. What she did, though, she did exceptionally well and earned her place as one of only a handful of women admitted to the AcadÇmie Royale in Paris. Without overemphasizing the rarity of her subject, Goodden balances VigÇe Le Brun’s personal adventurousness and her political conservatism with cool objectivity. (8 pages color, 16 pages b&w illustrations)

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1999

ISBN: 0-233-99021-6

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Collins & Brown/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.