A portrait fascinating in its details and themes.
A biography that rescues sculptor-painter-dancer-actor Paul Swan from near-obscurity.
When Andy Warhol filmed interviews with Swan in 1965, he reignited interest in the man, then 82. The Londravilles perform a similar function, as Swan is today largely forgotten. In what some may consider a quintessential portrait of a gay artist in the first half of the 20th century, the authors meticulously trace Swan’s life from his early personal and artistic struggles in a culturally parched Midwest to his success and then pathetic demise in New York City. Born to fundamentalist Methodist parents in Nebraska, Swan soon found solace in pursing his emerging talents as a painter and illustrator. A surrogate parent sped him to Manhattan when he was 19 and there he went on to dance, act and sculpt. In Hollywood for a time, he donned togas to appear in the first film versions of Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. He danced nude at salons in Paris and New York. Studying in Greece, he became preoccupied with Hellenic images of youth and beauty—his portraits (some still hanging at the Players’ Club in Manhattan) altered flaws and idealized his subjects. A rather stunning, intense beauty himself (Gershwin referred to Swan’s looks in a song lyric), Swan pursued men and women. He married Helen Gavit and fathered two daughters, while also engaging in passionate affairs with men. But as Swan’s artistic reputation grew with age, so did his deep distress over aging. Applying shoe black to his bald pate, lobbing on more mascara than Nefertiti and stuffing his pants with socks, he ended life as Mann’s Aschenbach incarnate.
A portrait fascinating in its details and themes.Pub Date: March 23, 2006
ISBN: 0-8032-2969-0
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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