An impressive portrait of a “busy, daring, and eventful life,” profoundly independent and intellectual, though also...
British novelist and poet Roe (The Spitfire Factory, not reviewed, etc.) pens a well-tempered, bracing biography of the painter too often trivialized as Augustus John's sister or Auguste Rodin's lover.
Working from letters in the Musée Rodin, the Tate Archives, the New York Library, and private collections, Roe takes John (1876–1939) out of the shadows into which, it begins to seem, she has been willfully put by others. Far from being the wimpy recluse of art-history tradition, John was an important, respected, and active member of the art community in Paris during a particularly vibrant era. Emotionally, she was vulnerable: her broken affair with Rodin threw her sideways for some time, she tended to confuse “devotional love with emotional yearning,” and she displayed a “chronic need for approval of her work.” But artistically and socially she was fulfilled: her work was admired by contemporaries (including her brother); neighbors and friends included poet Rainer Maria Rilke, critic Arthur Symons, and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne. Roe builds a supple and rolling narrative from the correspondence, striving for accuracy in presentation and keeping the speculation to a minimum as she tracks John through her years in France and numerous close friendships. The author also does a smart, unadorned job of following John's evolution as a painter, from her animated early works, with their interiorist tones, to the later oblique paintings, with their misshapen subjects. A very recognizable and human picture of John emerges as a searcher for faith and love quite like Roe's description of one of her letters: “portentous, eerie, with a sustained mood of beauty in strangeness.”
An impressive portrait of a “busy, daring, and eventful life,” profoundly independent and intellectual, though also melancholic.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11317-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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