Fascinating reading about a significant artistic figure and his legacy.
A documentary producer’s memoir of the unexpected lessons he learned from a church caretaker about faith, the human condition, and the Italian painter Caravaggio.
In the early 2000s, Ward (Searching for Hassan: An American Family's Journey Home to Iran, 2002, etc.) was on a research trip to Naples when a tour of the Duomo of San Gennaro altered the course of his visit. While in the duomo, he came across a mysterious Caravaggio painting called The Seven Acts of Mercy. A church guardian began to explain the work to him. Each grouping of figures in the “eerie chiaroscuro” was an interpretation of the seven mercies as presented in the Gospel of Matthew. Rather than attempt to render the painting along more classical lines, Caravaggio broke with tradition and used “Neapolitans fresh off the streets as his models.” Some of the acts he depicted—such as a daughter offering her starving and imprisoned father her own breast to feed and comfort him—bordered on scandalous. The more Ward listened to the guardian and his stories over successive visits, the more he found himself intrigued by Caravaggio, whose mysterious life he imagines and deftly interweaves into the main narrative. Gradually, he began to understand that through the painting, Caravaggio was attempting to offer a purified version of Christianity, which the artist saw as classist and exclusionary. The artist’s “truth,” writes the author, “ignores earthly divisions of wealth, power, [and] birth.” Instead, Caravaggio focused on the shared humanity of the individuals and suggested a more egalitarian vision of Christian brotherhood. In an ironic twist, the guardian’s life became a study in the power of mercy when he was confronted with his wife’s adultery. Remembering Caravaggio, he transcended his pain to eventually accept both his wife’s frailties and his own. Ward’s work offers a refreshing look at a once-forgotten—but now much-celebrated—artistic genius. The author also reveals the subtle and profound ways in which art and life interact.
Fascinating reading about a significant artistic figure and his legacy.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-592-6
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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