A handsome production, one that just might touch off a Truex revival.
A capably written, well-illustrated life of a doyen of American interior design.
Although the subtitle is a tad too grand, as subtitles often are, Lewis, himself an interior designer, does a good job of showing how influential Van Day Truex (1904–79) once was as both a merchant and arbiter of taste. Lewis treats Truex’s life as a somewhat unlikely American success story: born on the frontier, the son of a crusty employee of then-local dry-goods merchant J.C. Penney, Truex was shunned by his own family for his effeminate manner but encouraged by well-meaning relatives and teachers (and even Penney) to develop his artistic talents. This meant moving to New York, where Truex quickly distinguished himself as a student of the aesthete Frank Alvah Parsons. After winning a scholarship to study in Paris, Truex soon moved comfortably in a circle that included expatriate intellectuals, members of the nobility, and artists from all over the world. Truex took Parsons’s command “to produce art work in which one has an idea to sell” seriously, and he enjoyed considerable success as a commercial artist, reaching the pinnacle of his career as the chief designer for Tiffany & Co. In one of the many telling anecdotes here, Lewis relates how Truex settled a heated discussion among executives over how the company’s playing cards should look by producing a pen and quietly sketching a repeated line of hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds, leaving room in the center for a personalized monogram; the design remains on Tiffany cards half a century later. It helps, Lewis admits, that Truex enjoyed the support of Tiffany president Walter Hoving, who signed off on almost everything Truex did—including commissioning Andy Warhol to design a line of Christmas cards.
A handsome production, one that just might touch off a Truex revival.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03024-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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