by James Lord ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1994
The Paris-based author of Giacometti: A Biography (1985) follows his recent remembrance of Picasso's model, Dora and Picasso, with sharply detailed profiles of six other interesting figures. He begins with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, explaining the ambition behind their relationship and the power of the tyrannical author's personality, while showing her close up, running errands and walking the dog. Lord convincingly makes the startling claim that the subject of Picasso's great portrait now at the Metropolitan Museum ``had a certain basic indifference to the visual arts.'' ``It was her private, subjective experience alone that determined the character of her objective convictions,'' he writes. ``Despite the unerring discrimination of her taste as a young woman, she may always have been more interested in painters than she was in painting.'' Three of Lord's other subjects he also met in post-war Europe, their lives marked by the political and cultural upheaval: The French actress Arletty, the star of Children of Paradise, whose liaison with a German officer cut off her career; Marie-Laure de Noailles, who wielded her fortune to collect art and patronize the surrealists; Errieta Perdikidi, a Greek woman who braved the Nazi occupation and civil war with singular grace. The author's most moving portrait is of his mother, Louise Bennett Lord, who wrestles with her conscience and the conventions of an upper-class American upbringing to decide whether to subsidize her son's writing or force him to earn a living. This struggle is mapped out in a series of wonderful letters from mother to son whose clear measured prose reveals her bedrock kindness, tolerance, and honesty. ``I am willing to finance this artistic enterprise within reason,'' she wrote, ``but I fear that I shall have to be the judge as to what reason is.'' In his penetrating commentary on his relationships with these six women, Lord reveals much about himself and examines the nature of friendship, loyalty, patronage, creativity, and moral courage. The book has the effect of a small exhibition of candid, finely rendered portrait sketches. Drawn in prose at once formal and immediate, the encounters are not quickly forgotten. (Photographs, not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-26553-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
Share your opinion of this book
More by James Lord
BOOK REVIEW
by James Lord
BOOK REVIEW
by James Lord
BOOK REVIEW
by James Lord
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
National Book Award Winner
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.