Fine reading for art buffs and students of early-modern European history alike.
An ably wrought biography of the Dutch master.
Though a fixture in art-history texts, the painter Johannes Vermeer has long been something of a puzzle; his life from baptism to betrothal is, as New Yorker staff writer Bailey notes, “document-free,” and his total output numbers only some 35 works. The author makes educated guesses about those missing years, which appear to have been happy enough, and he paints a lively portrait of daily life in the waning years of Holland’s golden age—when a tiny nation at the edge of the sea controlled a vast mercantile empire, and when the ideas of the likes of Baruch Spinoza and Constantijn Huygens enlivened the intellectual discourse of an uncommonly easygoing Protestant society. Bailey is a knowing commentator who makes subtle observations on the body of Vermeer’s work; he notes, for instance, that Vermeer slyly avoided several conventions, shunning formulaic portraiture in favor of psychological studies, mostly of women, whose self-regard he rendered with keen insight. (He also, Bailey notes, kept his work largely free of the dogs that figure so prominently in the paintings of his contemporaries; only one dog figures in his oeuvre, this one a docile Springer spaniel that incongruously accompanies the hunting goddess Diana.) “Vermeer went out of his way not to be seen drawing moral lessons. It seems to me that he removed the speech from his characters’ lips and froze their actions in perpetual ambiguity.” The painter’s singular skills have made him a favorite of collectors—and of thieves, although only one Vermeer (The Concert, stolen from a Boston museum in 1990) is still missing.
Fine reading for art buffs and students of early-modern European history alike.Pub Date: April 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6718-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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