Sorting through the detritus of the artist’s short life, the author ultimately connects those events in great detail, but...
Prolific biographer Secrest (Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject, 2007, etc.) introduces us to Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), and he’s not nearly as exciting as the myths that surround the “accursed” artist.
The author provides an overabundance of details about her subject’s childhood and his diseases: pleurisy, typhoid, scarlet fever and the tubercular meningitis that eventually killed him. When Secrest finally focuses on Modigliani the artist and his search for the simplicity of the perfect “line,” the author diligently illustrates his quest for fulfillment. The city of Paris engrossed him completely and showed the peripatetic artist how to find his own style through long discussions in the cafés with Soutine, Picasso, Utrillo et al. The author discredits many of the legendary exploits surrounding the artist as enhancements of friends who were easily as inebriated as he. There’s no doubt, however, that he had multiple addictions. Secrest posits that his use of alcohol and laudanum began as an anesthetic to control his consumptive cough, and that he sacrificed his love of sculpture due to the physical strain involved. Eventually he discovered the perfection of his line in nudes. While rejecting cubism, Modigliani idolized Picasso, whose influence shows throughout his work. Although many classify his work as the School of Paris, when asked in what manner he painted, he would reply simply “Modigliani.” As one of the most widely copied artists of the period, his swan-necked portraits single him out as his very own “ism.”
Sorting through the detritus of the artist’s short life, the author ultimately connects those events in great detail, but sometimes a bit too meticulously. The myths were more fun.Pub Date: March 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26368-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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