Begley capably brings to life the lost Parisian world where Nadar held court. His outsized personality dominates this...
A lively portrait of a photography pioneer who altered the cultural landscape of 19th-century France.
If readers in America know anything about Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1820-1910), better known as Nadar, it's that he took some penetrating, iconic pictures of French celebrities—Victor Hugo, Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, and George Sand among them—and perhaps also that he broke new ground in aerial photography by taking his camera and tripod aloft in a hot air balloon. As Begley (Updike, 2014, etc.) reveals in this entertaining biography, these facts hardly suggest the full range of Nadar's involvement in the haut monde of his day. He was also a cultural force, a one-man entertainment industry who spawned a host of imitators. In his early days, he was a young rebel. Along with close friends like the poet Charles Baudelaire and the tormented (and ultimately suicidal) writer Gérard de Nerval, he was a bohemian: young men of exhausted means who lived on the margins of society, borrowing from each other and running up debts. Nadar started his professional life as a writer of hopelessly corny moral tales. Never one to stay in the same place for long, he then became a widely known caricaturist who created a pen-and-ink pantheon of French society under the Second Republic of Louis-Napoleon. Barely did he make a name for himself before giving it up for photography, where he found his calling. He became a master of the new medium, adept at manipulating light and shade. He gained wealthy clients who liked seeing themselves immortalized in their finest clothes; he also helped create what we now know as celebrity culture. He also became rich enough to pursue new and sometimes insanely risky ideas involving flight as well as to fight endless legal battles with the brother who kept stealing his name.
Begley capably brings to life the lost Parisian world where Nadar held court. His outsized personality dominates this enjoyable and amply illustrated volume.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90260-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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