A treat for fans of off-the-beaten-track places as well as odd corners of art history.
Pleasantly spun tale of a museum with an unlikely history—and collection.
Located some 100 miles east of Portland, Oregon, the Maryhill Museum (dedicated in 1926) contains an offbeat assemblage of artifacts, ranging from Native American crafts to a lock of Queen Victoria’s hair, a huge collection of chess sets, and 87 pieces by Auguste Rodin. That all these things, plus a full-size concrete replica of Stonehenge, should be in the same remote place speaks to the strange genius of Sam Hill, who, retired journalist Wiegand writes, “depending on whom you asked…was either a visionary or crazier than an outhouse rat.” A world traveler and railroad executive, Hill built a 5,300-acre Shangri-La, with a palatial home intended for a mentally ill daughter, along the banks of the Columbia River while planning “quixotic” projects such as a peace arch spanning the border of the U.S. and Canada. Into his orbit had fallen Queen Marie of Romania, who boasted, “I am said to be the most beautiful woman in Europe,” and whose friend Loie Fuller, an actress and dancer whose “life overflowed with exclamation points,” convinced Hill to turn that home into a museum. Fuller used her connections with French artists such as Rodin to fill the place with art, using funds contributed by another partner. Fuller herself had been hospitalized for mental troubles, and everyone involved had colorful histories, but somehow everything came together. Beyond the founders, the Maryhill Museum survived but never exactly thrived: Its “nearly nonexistent acquisitions budget” required it to be innovative without becoming, Wiegand writes, “the kind of roadside tourist trap that parked a covered wagon on the lawn and sold grape Slushies at the ticket booth.” As the author observes, the museum endures, though it derives more of its revenue from the sale of alfalfa and wind power than from ticket sales.
A treat for fans of off-the-beaten-track places as well as odd corners of art history.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61088-494-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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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