More decoding of Leonardo: a beautifully written, masterful biography of the great artist/scientist as person....
The venerable prize-winning Nicholl (Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91, 1999) examines one of the icons of Western culture.
For all Leonardo’s well-deserved reputation as universal man, Nicholl devotes his opening section to the artist’s (illegitimate, to boot) upbringing on a Tuscan farm, demonstrating the way many of Leonardo’s future interests and observations derive from this period and from the circumstances of his life (Freud’s interpretations are weighed regularly). Copiously researched, and enhanced by the author’s residence in Italy and his own observations, particularly, of the Tuscan way of life, the book makes logical deductions from scraps of source material. Nicholl gives us short vignettes, about ten to each of the seven broader sections. In each, he asks questions about Leonardo’s life: Why did he leave Florence, in 1481, for 18 years? Why was he impaziente of painting by 1500? He also follows the strings of Leonardo studies—from paintings to notebooks, jokes (dirty and otherwise), subpoenas, studio assistants, cryptic scribbles—and is led to deductions about Leonardo’s sexuality (be sure to read to the end), what he was trying to achieve in his paintings, and the question that seems to baffle all who confront Leonardo’s career: Why was he so successful if what survives of his work is so fragmentary and unfinished? Particularly fascinating is Nicholl’s presentation of the broad context of the era, outlined by one who has penetrated the layers of surviving hints about the culture. We learn about the contents of artists’ studios and of probate inventories, census and tax records, and museum curatorial files. Nicholl understands and decodes the shorthand jargon of Renaissance Italian and reminds us of the frequently autobiographical nature of Leonardo’s notebook musings. Details are compelling in a long book that defies skimming.
More decoding of Leonardo: a beautifully written, masterful biography of the great artist/scientist as person. (Illustrations throughout; plates not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03345-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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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