Intelligent and well-crafted portraits of some of history’s most intriguing geniuses.
Group portrait of the French artists linked by shifting alliances who emerged in the 1860s, endured parody and ridicule before triumphing at their first New York City exhibition in 1886 and enjoy towering reputations (and prices) today.
In his late 70s, near death but still painting, Renoir reportedly said of his profession, “I think I am beginning to understand something about it.” His words could serve as an epigraph for this fine synthesis of a remarkable movement and its principals. It took decades for professional art critics and the public to accept the work of Manet, Monet, Degas, Cézanne and the other astonishingly talented artists who, for survival’s sake, first formed a loose coalition, then actually wrote and signed a (short-lived) charter. Poet and novelist Roe has written about the art world before (Gwen John: A Painter’s Life, 2001) and here shows evidence of having read the significant biographies of both major and minor players (many quotations are tertiary) and of walking the ground the notables once trod. The title suggests titillation and does not disappoint, with its frank account of the subjects’ financial and personal struggles, loves and losses. But she also deals with the era’s political, economic and military developments. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 had a particularly powerful impact on the artists; a number of them ran toward the fray, and one of their number, Bazille, died in battle. Roe has plucked from her subjects’ lives many engaging and poignant stories: Renoir’s escape from a firing squad, Manet’s fascination with feet (and his death from syphilis), the savage reviews the group endured from critic Albert Wolff, Degas’s struggles with his sculpture of a young dancer. The author properly emphasizes the pivotal role played by art-dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who believed in the Impressionists from the start and dedicated his life to their cause—and financial solvency.
Intelligent and well-crafted portraits of some of history’s most intriguing geniuses.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-054558-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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