So, too, is Huxtable’s biography: a fine and unsparing appreciation of an American original.
Eminent architectural critic meets eminent but-ever-so difficult architect.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959) was “a fascinating anachronism,” in many respects a man of the 19th century, Huxtable says. “He was always out of the mainstream; he fit neither the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s nor the age of irony with which the century ended.” Sometimes this was not a problem, and sometimes it was: Wright’s old-fashioned insistence on craftsmanship and solid materials customarily led to hemorrhaging cost overruns—“there is no more expensive way to build than this ad hoc, custom procedure with its booby-trapped ‘extras,’” Huxtable sagely observes—but also to extraordinary works of art. Wright is now uncool, Huxtable writes, or at least his later buildings are, and she offers any number of reasons for us not to admire him. He was casually but not programmatically anti-Semitic, “uniformly politically incorrect,” a spendthrift, a martinet, haughty and arrogant, if with a sense of humor about it: when called to testify at a court case and asked to identify himself, Wright “announced that he was the world’s greatest architect. When asked how he could make such a statement, he replied, with visible enjoyment and a gleam in his eye, that he had no choice, he was under oath.” But Wright was also enormously intelligent, gifted, cultivated in the way of someone raised to esteem knowledge and beauty, a true innovator whose ideas on organic architecture gave the transcendentalism of 19th-century America voice in the future; a magpie, he “remembered everything, but copied nothing, absorbing what he liked and learned into his own creative thinking.” If he wore great swirling capes, demanded to be treated like visiting royalty or at least a rock star, designed buildings with odd lighting and leaky roofs, and didn’t pay his bills—well, still, he was always interesting.
So, too, is Huxtable’s biography: a fine and unsparing appreciation of an American original.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03342-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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