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SAUL STEINBERG

A BIOGRAPHY

Followers of the postwar art world will love this book but may be disappointed by the lack of examples of his work.

National Book Award winner Bair (Calling It Quits: Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over, 2007, etc.) exhaustively explores everything related to Steinberg.

It is well into the book before the author digs deeply into the thoughts behind his art. Born in Romania and educated in Milan, Steinberg was an extremely private man who was terrified of exposing himself by discussing his work, but he had an extremely active social life and a desperate need to seduce any woman who took his fancy. His wife, the artist Hedda Sterne, as well as his lovers, let him get away with it. Perhaps his generosity assuaged their furor. Like so many artists of that age, he seemed to be able to escape to rest his mind for large parts of the year. Bair chronicles all of Steinberg’s trips, noting every flight, sailing, hotel, train and bus ride. His dealings with galleries are interesting; travel plans and his digestion are not. Steinberg produced a wide array of work, from cartoons, books, murals, stage sets, fabric designs and even greeting cards. Call to mind View of the World from 9th Avenue, which appeared on the cover of the New Yorker in 1976, and you’ll see how his mind allowed him to lead us through his free-association world. His works with “5” and “E” are masterpieces of wordless comedy, and his images were so intense that words were never needed. Bair’s book, though overlong, will help readers understand the breadth of Steinberg’s talents.

Followers of the postwar art world will love this book but may be disappointed by the lack of examples of his work.

Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-385-52448-3

Page Count: 752

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012

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NIGHT

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. 

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.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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