An impressively detailed but cold and disagreeable biography of the neglected modernist poet and visual artist Mina Loy. Born Mina Lowy into a half-Jewish, half-neurotic London household in 1882, the renamed Loy embarked on her artistically and geographically wide-ranging experience of life, which she chronicled in writings that Burke (Literature/Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) has used as the basis for this biography. Loy's story is that of a woman deviating from confining social norms to seek out lovers and husbands and mingle with like-minded artistes in the big-name movements that fermented early in this century: Jugendstil in Munich, Futurism in Florence (Loy had an affair with the movement's leader, Marinetti), Dadaism in Paris and New York. Beginning as a painter, Loy moved on to vers libre and artistic- political manifesto, producing works with names like ``Psycho- Democracy'' and Lunar Baedecker. The weird love of her life was ``poet-boxer'' Arthur Cravan, who fathered her youngest child and then disappeared in a boat off the coast of Mexico. Burke, for all her obviously painstaking research, fails to convey the feel of her subject's personality. Loy comes off as a creature who might just as easily have been invented, pieced together from scraps of her contemporaries for whom we do have a feel: Gertrude Stein, Mabel Dodge, Marcel Duchamp, et al. While we might hail Loy as an early, arty feminist, this image is manipulated so tendentiously by Burke that it is tempting to view her instead as a self-mythologizing groupie-dilettante. It is only late in the book, through descriptions of Loy's attempts to relieve her grinding poverty, that she comes alive in her evoked ingenuity. Readers fascinated by the period of artistic hoppingness in Europe and New York between the wars will be glad of this book; otherwise, better to wait for Farrar Straus's promised (but still unscheduled) reissue of Loy's poetry before committing to read about her. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-10964-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
