Sharp, stylish, and anecdotal, the books offers a fresh glimpse into a fertile artistic world.
Personal perspectives on the creation of modernism.
First published in 1963, this charming collection of reminiscences by surrealist poet Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) offers warm, generous, appreciative profiles of some of his famous contemporaries. Framed by an introduction by Mark Polizzotti, who interviewed Soupault as part of his research about Breton, and an afterword by poet Ron Padgett, who met the author in 1975, the volume includes pieces on writers whom Soupault knew well, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, René Crevel, Pierre Reverdy, Georges Bernanos, and Blaise Cendrars, and two from the past: painter Henri Rousseau and poet Charles Baudelaire. Coming of age as an artist after World War I, Soupault says the spirit of the times was one of destruction, incited by the arrival of Tristan Tzara (“like a bomb”), who brought Dadaism, the iconoclastic movement that set the stage for surrealism. Dada, Soupault saw, was trying “to destroy all the established values, the literary practices, and the moral bias that the great captains of literature and journalism want to continue imposing.” Although not a Dadaist, Apollinaire recognized a “new spirit” in art; calling himself “a signal rocket,” he was an outspoken defender of cubism. The shocked response to his writings taught Soupault the importance of scandal. He deeply admired Joyce, who at the time they met was writing Ulysses; they went to the theater and opera together, always sitting in the first row, where the nearly blind Joyce could better see the stage. As a writer, Soupault observed, Joyce was “tormented by a word, rebelliously constructing a framework…drawing a hallucination from music.” Padgett notes that Reverdy and Cendrars, two vastly different personalities, served as Soupault’s mentors. Reverdy coveted solitude; Cendrars loved people, hanging out at the Café de Flore, “fedora askew and cigarette butt on his lip,” always “madly cheerful.”
Sharp, stylish, and anecdotal, the books offers a fresh glimpse into a fertile artistic world.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-87286-727-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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