New light is shed on both architects in this absorbing, well-organized, delightfully told story.
An in-depth portrait of two “grand men of American architecture.”
The prolific Howard (Mr. and Mrs. Madison’s War: America’s First Couple and the War of 1812, 2012, etc.) offers up another sterling book of popular history, one about the “peculiar calculus” of the “flint and steel” friendship between two great architects of the 20th century, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and Philip Johnson (1906-2005). Fierce rivals for nearly 30 years, they were the “yin and the yang, in love and in hate, the positive and the negative charges that gave architecture its compass.” Both could be imperious, inspiring, trivial, and proud. Wright was mostly a cantankerous coot. He was the unreformed romantic, Johnson the modernist who still liked the classical. Howard starts by nicely summarizing the early careers of his subjects. Wright’s career early on had been dramatic and successful, but in the 1930s, he was languishing. In 1931, Johnson wanted Wright’s work represented in a traveling Museum of Modern Art show he was organizing. Wright agreed but later withdrew; his letter included a snide remark about Johnson’s homosexuality. Only after Lewis Mumford interceded did Wright capitulate. The show helped resuscitate Wright’s career. In 1935, he designed an iconic home for a wealthy client in Pennsylvania: Fallingwater; Johnson “always spoke grudgingly of [it].” They continued to compete: Wright did the Guggenheim Museum, Johnson did the Seagram Building. Howard describes them as a “dog and a cat forced to share the same home.” In 1949, Johnson finished his most iconic structure, the Glass House, as something of a rebuttal to Wright’s now-famous “waterfall cottage,” as Wright called it. Minimalist and modern, Johnson’s own residence outside New Haven was made of glass and framing, “akin to a plain black frame on a photograph.” Over time, Johnson came to recognize the value of their “odd alliance,” finally admitting Wright was the greater architect.
New light is shed on both architects in this absorbing, well-organized, delightfully told story.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62040-375-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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