An impressive work of history that gives the reader a greater appreciation for the art, if not an understanding of the mind,...
A fascinating look at the paintings and history of 17th-century Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez, through the prism of one of his greatest masterpieces.
Longtime New Yorker writer Bailey (John Constable: A Kingdom of His Own, 2007, etc.) uses Velázquez’s painting of the 1625 surrender of the Dutch town of Breda to Spanish forces as an entry point into a richly detailed portrait of the court of King Philip IV as Spain’s Hapsburg empire crumbled around him. Though the basic details of Velázquez’s life are known and some 125 of his paintings survive, as Bailey apologetically reminds us throughout, when it comes to his inner thoughts and feelings, there is little to go on. The only description of the painter’s personality, given by several sources, is that he was phlegmatic—“in modern parlance, Velázquez was cool.” There is, however, much documentation about Philip IV’s court, and Bailey brings it vividly to life, as he simultaneously traces the artist’s rise from humble beginnings to eventual nobility. The author also thoroughly examines the military victory at Breda, a high point on the downward slope, along with other important events and many of Velázquez’s most famous works. Bailey does not resist the temptation to speculate about the painter’s inner life based on his work, with mixed results. Ultimately, Velázquez remains a cipher, a man whose ambition seems to have been focused on advancing at court rather than on becoming a great artist. That he did become one is confirmed by the paintings he left behind, and his influence, covered by Bailey in the penultimate chapter, on those who followed.
An impressive work of history that gives the reader a greater appreciation for the art, if not an understanding of the mind, of one of the world’s master painters.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8835-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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