Engrossing, impressively researched, and keenly perceptive.
A fresh biography of the influential modernist architect who shaped aesthetics from the 1920s to our own time.
Award-winning biographer and design and architecture critic MacCarthy (The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination, 2011, etc.) brings insight and sensitivity to a sweeping, penetrating life of Walter Gropius (1883-1969), founder of the Bauhaus, an experimental community of architects, sculptors, painters, and craftsmen. Established in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus, in its early years, was devoted to craft, owing “so very much,” Gropius admitted, to William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement. Soon, influenced by Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy, who joined the community as a teacher, Gropius changed the emphasis “from the handmade and romantic to the clean-cut and mechanistic,” leading to a “smooth-lined, restrained, subtly geometric” design that became emblematic of Bauhaus style in architecture, furniture, and art. The school attracted brilliant artists as teachers, including Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, and Marcel Breuer. But there was often conflict among them and, after the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, between the community and “less enlightened members” of the public. Money was a perennial problem, as well; in 1928, Gropius resigned and moved to Berlin, where he aligned himself with a radical group of architects who hoped to go beyond “the design of individual buildings into the economic planning of whole cities.” By 1932, however, architectural innovations faced Nazi artistic censorship, and Gropius was vilified. MacCarthy follows Gropius’ career in Britain and the U.S. after he left Germany in 1935 and, a few years later, became chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where his students included such eminent architects as I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson. Besides following Gropius’ professional life, the author vibrantly portrays his love affairs, marriages (notably to the turbulent Alma Mahler), the death of his beloved daughter, and his close, sometimes-strained friendships. Altogether, she produces a multidimensional portrait of a towering, complex figure whose ideas, one historian remarked, “reshaped the world.”
Engrossing, impressively researched, and keenly perceptive.Pub Date: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-674-73785-3
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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