Casts new and unexpectedly sympathetic light on arguably the dominant figure in the early-20th-century art world. (86 photos...
After a decade-long sojourn among musicians (Stephen Sondheim, 1998, etc.), Secrest returns to her previous specialty (Being Bernard Berenson, 1979, etc.) with a portrait of the world’s greatest art dealer.
The flamboyant Lord Duveen (1869–1939) is still notorious in Britain for persuading aristocrats to sell him such items of their country’s cultural patrimony as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. He invariably sold this plunder to American “squillionaires” as he called them, in time becoming a squillionaire himself. Making use of the newly unsealed Duveen Archive, Secrest documents the family’s origins and the complicated history of the Duveen firm with all its internecine quarrels. Specifically, the author clarifies the term “Duveen,” which today is tossed about as if it all referred to Joe (as he was informally known). In fact, there was first his father’s antiques shop, which Joe took over, but also several competing firms set up by brothers and cousins, all of whom Joe scared off, bought off, absorbed, or sued. Due to such business maneuvers and his long association with art historian Berenson, who authenticated Italian masters for him and sometimes made convenient changes of attribution, Duveen has always been considered a slippery character, and his biographer’s tone is breezy and superior, bordering on condescending. (She also occasionally gets in over her head with art history.) Duveen’s considerable charm, however, survives the treatment he receives from Secrest, who acknowledges his acts of philanthropy to British museums and the manipulation of his stable of American clients to establish great public collections, improve private collections, or donate to already established institutions. The author struggles to keep Duveen in the context of his own age, but frequently judges him based on contemporary standards of conservation and ethics. She does make it clear that museums in Britain and the US would be far worse off without the great Duveen, warts and all.
Casts new and unexpectedly sympathetic light on arguably the dominant figure in the early-20th-century art world. (86 photos and illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41042-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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