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THE HIRSCHFELD CENTURY

Name: THE HIRSCHFELD CENTURY
Author: Al Hirschfeld
ISBN: 978-1-101-87497-4

PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AND HIS AGE

by Al Hirschfeld edited by David Leopold ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015

An intelligent, carefully representative look at Hirschfeld’s work that ably shows why the artist deserves to be remembered...

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A richly illustrated study of the artist who richly illustrated publications, marquees, and other venues for eight decades.

Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) was, in the words of museum curator Leopold, “a visual journalist who ‘reported’ what he saw, with no interest in picking winners or losers, but looking for character whether it was expressed in word, music, or movement, which he would then translate into his signature line.” That signature line, swooping and evocative, could not be mistaken for the hand of any other, and so influential was Hirschfeld that, in Leopold’s witty assessment, after he drew the Marx Brothers, the troupe “started to look more like Al’s drawings, rather than the other way around.” A favorite of Franklin Roosevelt and Frank Sinatra alike, Hirschfeld lampooned and japed, and though he tried his hand at serious work—some of his early pieces on display here resemble Chagall, while others clearly borrow from Gauguin and perhaps less clearly from Covarrubias—it is his whimsical show-business portfolio for which he is best remembered, and particularly his broad-stroke portraits of Laurel and Hardy, Milton Berle, and other stars of a bygone era. (Yet he kept himself current: two of Hirschfeld’s final portraits portrayed Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and comedian Jerry Seinfeld.) As Leopold notes in this critical but by no means arid study of the art, Hirschfeld was extraordinarily prolific, completing more than 10,000 pieces over a long life. He was a “Zelig-like character in a good bit of cultural history of the twentieth century.” He was good-natured about it, too, joking that he supported the capitalist system as a machine “so sloppily and benevolently conceived that even I could wind up owning a house.”

An intelligent, carefully representative look at Hirschfeld’s work that ably shows why the artist deserves to be remembered today.

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-101-87497-4

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)