An intricate, visually lavish dive into a religiously influenced creative process.
In this debut memoir, a building designer asserts that divine inspiration helped turn an offbeat chapel into a jewel.
Pittsburgh-based architect Astorino was called to Rome in 1993 to consult on a proposed residence hall in Vatican City for visiting cardinals and bishops. The project stirred public controversy because the proposed structure would block views of St. Peter’s Basilica. As he devised a new design that lowered the building’s height, the process flowed so rapturously, he says, that he “felt like a pencil in someone’s hand.” However, Vatican bureaucrats resisted the plan. The devout author was bitterly disappointed, but then he experienced an epiphany in which the Holy Spirit prompted him to follow “the path of inner surrender and resignation.” Later, the Vatican commissioned him to design a small chapel dedicated to the Holy Spirit. After praying for guidance, he and his colleagues received a burst of inspiration that “felt natural and comfortable…as if someone were holding our hands.” The result was an innovative, modernist design based on triangle motifs, featuring a series of sharply peaked roofs, a marble floor of richly colored triangular grids, and a glass partition looking out on an ancient Roman wall hung with sculptures depicting the Stations of the Cross. The chapel is so inviting, Astorino says, that it’s become Pope Francis’ favorite place to celebrate Mass. (The book also includes an admiring tribute to Pope Francis’ intellect, avoidance of luxury, love of the poor, and willingness to pose for pictures with pilgrims.) Astorino and debut co-author Carney, a Franciscan nun, infuse this engaging architectural appreciation and procedural with Catholic ardor throughout: “The lighting system—its source recessed and carefully hidden—would augment the contemplative atmosphere of the chapel and reflect the mystery of the Holy Spirit.” They also illustrate the heartfelt remembrance with many sumptuous photographs of the finished chapel as well as of various blueprints, models, and other Vatican scenes, including Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and Swiss Guards in their particolored pantaloons. Overall, this book will surely captivate architecture mavens and fans of Vatican atmospherics.
An intricate, visually lavish dive into a religiously influenced creative process.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4809-9990-9
Page Count: 157
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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