Genuinely rewarding and thoroughly enjoyable.
An illuminating double biography of philanthropist art collectors Sterling and Stephen Clark.
As background to the brothers’ lives and troubled relationship, art critic Weber (Patron Saints, 1992, etc.) provides vivid profiles of the elders who shaped them: their shrewd, straitlaced grandfather Edward; his partner, the colorful and scandalous Isaac Singer; their talented and generous father Alfred, who had clandestine relationships with a handsome Norwegian tenor and a French sculptor; their respectable, churchgoing mother Elizabeth. Born in 1877 and ’82 respectively, Sterling and Stephen developed a deep passion for art, particularly 19th-century French painting. For a time, they went to galleries together and consulted each other about purchases, but Sterling’s 1927 lawsuit against the family over his inheritance turned them into enemies. The brothers did not speak again until the death of Stephen’s son in 1952. Nevertheless, their lives ran on parallel tracks as both continued to enthusiastically buy—and generously give away—some of the world’s greatest art. Stephen served as a deeply involved trustee of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; he also made major donations to Yale University. Sterling founded the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. Besides tracking the wealthy collectors on their art-collecting expeditions, Weber includes a fascinating account of Sterling’s possible involvement in a plot to overthrow President Roosevelt and replace him with a fascist dictator, and he explores in some depth Stephen’s controversial firing of Alfred Barr as director of the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Weber’s insights into the Clarks’ complex personalities are supplemented by his knowledgeable analyses of the art they collected, including such individual paintings as Van Gogh’s The Night Café, Cezanne’s The Card Players, Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room and Seurat’s Circus Sideshow.
Genuinely rewarding and thoroughly enjoyable.Pub Date: May 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-26347-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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
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
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