A scholarly, illuminating biography of one of the 18th century’s most successful female portraitists. Although her paintings appear in museums the world over, critics and historians have often given VigÇe Le Brun short shrift, faulting her for the complaisant quality of her art. Here Goodden, a fellow in French at Oxford University, duly notes this tendency but also makes plain the aesthetic and economic constraints within which the artist had to work. For although she was the daughter of a minor portrait painter and precociously talented as a child, VigÇe Le Brun was denied any formal art training on the basis of her sex. “Such institutional prejudice mattered insamuch as life drawing was the basis of historical painting, the highest genre in the pictorial hierarchy, and one to which ambitious women aspired,” notes Goodden. And so, from the time she first set up her own studio—when she was just an adolescent—VigÇe Le Brun became a painter of portraits, primarily those of French royalty, power brokers, courtiers, and courtesans. For better or worse, she also gained unparalleled access to the royal court and became the chosen portraitist of Marie-Antoinette. Fortunately, her close affiliation with the queen did not doom her to suffer the same grisly fate; she fled Paris in disguise even as the royal family was being forcibly removed from Versailles. Although Le Brun continued to earn a handsome living from the royal ÇmigrÇs who scattered throughout Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, the world she had known disintegrated, and with it her hopes of becoming a painter of history. What she did, though, she did exceptionally well and earned her place as one of only a handful of women admitted to the AcadÇmie Royale in Paris. Without overemphasizing the rarity of her subject, Goodden balances VigÇe Le Brun’s personal adventurousness and her political conservatism with cool objectivity. (8 pages color, 16 pages b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-233-99021-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Collins & Brown/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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