This elegantly composed volume concludes Lord’s rich, rarefied series of portraits of people who lived for Art. When Lord (Picasso and Dora, 1993) was a young writer, Thomas Mann complimented him on having “the gift for admiration which above all enable[s] a talented person to learn.” It’s a gift much on display here in Lord’s record of his friendships with Peggy Guggenheim, Sonia Orwell (George’s widow), Peter Watson (the patron of Cyril Connolly’s fabled magazine Horizon) and Isabel Rawsthorne, the fascinating beauty who modeled for Jacob Epstein, Giacometti, and Francis Bacon. Rawsthorne, for example, often gets only sketchy mentions in the biographies of those artists, but Lord gives her captivating personality and her fierce independence their due, even though he knew her in her dissipated later years. Though the figures recollected in this volume may be a little less august than those profiled in such earlier works as Six Exceptional Women (1994) and Some Remarkable Men (1996), Lord renders their characters with a subtle and convincing psychological insight. There are, for instance, the wealthy collectors Henry McIlhenny and Ethel Bliss Platt, charming, intriguing, and, even after years of friendship, still capable of surprising Lord. McIlhenny, a perfect host and a connoisseur, astonished his friend when he sold off a Seurat masterpiece rather than restrict his opulent lifestyle. Likewise, Lord was nonplussed that the widowed Ethel Platt could contain her feelings upon discovering that her husband’s extensive photography archive of Italian art had fallen into disrepair after he had left it to Princeton, his beloved alma mater. As Lord discovered, she had an unsuspected spiritual strength that allowed her to appreciate life as much as art. A fresco of a bygone era, executed with a Jamesian eye for detail, with a tart dash of gossip. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-28192-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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.
