An exuberant attempt to penetrate the mysteries surrounding the astounding paintings and brief, turbulent life of the Italian artist who has come to be known as Caravaggio. As Robb (Midnight in Sicily, 1998) points out, even the painter’s real name (probably Michelangelo Merisi) is a matter of conjecture, as is his birthplace (Robb opts for Milan). The name Caravaggio comes from a small town in which, according to tradition, the painter had been born, perhaps in 1571 or 1573. His end is as uncertain as his beginning: He disappeared in July, 1610, and was widely assumed to have been murdered, though his body was never discovered. So little known a figure would seem an unpromising subject for a biography. Yet out of the slender documentation, a close and often deeply convincing reading of Caravaggio’s several dozen surviving paintings, and an admirable grasp of the hard realities of life in Italy during the violent expansion of the Counter-Reformation, Robb has written an account that is consistently gripping and generally persuasive. The painter would not seem at first to be a particularly sympathetic figure. He was, according to many who knew him, difficult, often contentious, and sometimes violent. It seems likely that he killed a man. Yet Robb makes a good case that “M,” as he calls him, was difficult at least in part to protect his artistic integrity, which produced revolutionary paintings that embraced harsh reality in a way more cautious painters avoided and the church condemned. Robb’s readings of M’s paintings, including such astonishing works as “The Crucifixion of Saint Peter,” “The Beheading of John the Baptist,” “The Weeping Magdalen,” and “Mary Dead,” are detailed, energetic, and convincing, as is his version of M’s death. A compelling portrait of the painter as outsider and provocateur; a first-rate evocation of both a genius and the violent times in which he lived. (16 pages illus.)
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-6356-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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