Abundant primary sources inform James’ sharply drawn, sympathetic portraits.
Six artists in quest of the exotic.
Throughout his career, novelist, cultural critic, and travel writer James (Rimbaud in Java: The Last Voyage, 2011, etc.) was drawn by “the romantic allure” of the mysterious and remote; since 1999, the Houston-born writer has made a home in Indonesia. Like the artists he profiles in this richly detailed, absorbing cultural history, the author well understands the motivation of “exotes,” “an elite group of travelers who seek to immerse themselves in otherness.” His major focus is on painters Paul Gauguin, Walter Spies, and Raden Saleh; writers Isabelle Eberhardt and Victor Segalen; and filmmaker Maya Deren. All from different places, they shared a cosmopolitan background, confused cultural identity, unconventional private lives, and an overwhelming desire to reinvent themselves. Gauguin, “sexually frustrated and perpetually in debt,” left France for Tahiti, intent on starting a new, liberated life but always with an eye on the Paris art market. James sees him as “a pioneer of a new vision of travel as a one-way proposition.” Like Rimbaud before him and Spies after, he was motivated “more by a disgust with the homeland than by an informed attraction to the new home.” Unlike James’ other subjects, who fled from the stultifying materialism of Western culture, Saleh, “an enthusiast who fervently idealized Europe and European ways,” left Java for Germany, where he became a dandy, painting and socializing with aristocrats. Handsome, blond Spies left his famous lover, filmmaker F.W. Murnau, in Germany when he sailed to Bali, where he “created a cosmopolitan social whirl of his own,” with guests who included Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, and Leopold Stokowski. James does not argue for the artistic greatness of his lesser-known characters, but they prove to him “that cultural identity can be a choice,” pursued with joy.
Abundant primary sources inform James’ sharply drawn, sympathetic portraits.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-16335-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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