An engrossing, vivid inquiry into a man and his magisterial creation.
The story behind one of the world’s most unique buildings.
The bold opening sentence of art historian van Hensbergen’s (Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-century Icon, 2004, etc.) intoxicating book about one of the world’s most “puzzling” and “quixotic” structures instantly engages: “Gaudí, possibly more than any other architect in history, has been totally misunderstood.” The author writes that Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926), like his buildings, was often seen as “far too eccentric, too bizarre and in Catalonia—the land of Salvador Dalí—almost too obviously surrealist and actually downright strange.” To understand the method behind his architectural madness and his iconic Basilica and Expiatory Church of the Holy Family, it’s necessary to understand Gaudí’s profound Catholic faith. Van Hensbergen takes us on a tour of the building, pointing out its unique and distinctive features, from the roof’s complex vaulting, like an “inverted egg box,” to Gaudí’s invention of the centenary arch, which miraculously holds up the roof without buttressing via inverted chainlike links. When finished, 18 towers will “crowd together and push up in unison like a family in stone.” Gaudí drew on nature—snake skeletons, springtime shoots, and the gnarls and knots on oak trees—revealed through “the omnipresence of God’s guiding hand”—to fashion the ornaments. They “had to speak.” The idea for the basilica came from Joseph Maria Bocabella, a small-time Barcelona religious bookseller. Gaudí took over the commission in 1883 shortly after the first architect was let go. He finished the crypt in 1889, but his “next decision almost defies logic.” He decided to focus on just one facade, meaning that he “would only ever see a fraction of the entire building finished within his own lifetime.” They hope to finish the basilica by 2026, the 100th anniversary of Gaudí’s death. Van Hensbergen’s rich, poetic prose is perfectly suited to describe this unprecedented work of art.
An engrossing, vivid inquiry into a man and his magisterial creation.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-781-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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