A well-intentioned but underdeveloped new perspective in art’s discourse.
An encyclopedic series of short biographies focused on overlooked women in art history.
In this “herstory,” Charney, a professor of art history and author of The Devil in the Gallery and The Collector of Lives, aims to “teach the history of art using only female artists.” While he succeeds at finding representatives for each major historical movement, the author frequently leans too far into his subjects’ lives and omits descriptions of their work. The book is underillustrated, many features are forgettable due to their lack of visual information, and Charney rarely paints a picture with his prose. This is particularly frustrating as he explicitly touts the importance of balancing biography with art appreciation. Regarding Judith and Holofernes, a violent work by baroque master Artemisia Gentileschi that was likely influenced by her own history of sexual abuse, Charney writes, “this masterpiece should be considered as a great artwork unto itself, avoiding an over-focus on Artemisia’s biography that turns the work’s analysis into a revenge fantasy while ignoring its technical brilliance.” Despite this, much of the text is too focused on biography. To his credit, Charney offers a unique twist and expands the scope of his history to include women patrons and collectors, many of whom were instrumental in the formation of major museums. He closes with a new take on Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” offering a lukewarm urge to reframe the discussion. He finds her argument “concerning, potentially destructive to the art historical narrative, to empowering women, to giving credit to those heroines of the past. The same point can be made in a supportive, inclusive way.” Unfortunately, Charney’s book falls short of being empowering, as the cascading biographies eclipse the spirit of his subjects. Readers intrigued by the subject should turn to Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men.
A well-intentioned but underdeveloped new perspective in art’s discourse.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781538170991
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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