bookshelf

JOHN CONSTABLE

Name: JOHN CONSTABLE
Author: Anthony Bailey
ISBN: 0-7011-7884-1

A KINGDOM OF HIS OWN

by Anthony Bailey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2007

And so it is that Constable is known today, though this literate and lively biography adds new shades to the artist’s...

bookshelf

The Romantic art rebel comes in for thoughtful biographical treatment at the hands of New Yorker alumnus Bailey.

It took the French to make John Constable (1776–1836) English. Which is to say, as Bailey notes, Constable worked for much of his life largely unrecognized, painting idyllic English pastoral landscapes that were dismissed as, well, mere landscapes. “But then,” writes Bailey, “the French took him up—gold medals were bestowed—and the London art world slowly opened its eyes to what he was up to.” Part of the trouble may have been that Constable, who grew up in the countryside and knew his farm equipment, painted landscapes with windmills that look as if the wind could actually turn them, something much too tame for the wild-eyed aesthetic of the Coleridge and Keats school. Constable also seems to have lacked a little of the tireless self-promotional gene that made his contemporaries and sometime rivals such as J.M.W. Turner so successful. For Constable, the kingdom of home and family was enough, and even though he did work and lobby endlessly to get into the Royal Academy, there is some suggestion that he preferred idling in the sticks to the social swirl. Bailey offers persuasive readings of Constable’s work, which includes well-known paintings such as The Hay Wain and Salisbury Cathedral; many landscapes, he finds, are so alive that a viewer, like the painter, “could smell the mud and slime on the banks,” even if some were dashed off, even incomplete. Well into his career, Constable paid to have his portfolio, English Landscape, printed, but he wound up poorer and not much better known; just after his death, some of the works that are most famous today sold at auction for a few pounds. Yet, “despite the less than dramatic prices,” the sale sent many hitherto unknown Constables out into the world.

And so it is that Constable is known today, though this literate and lively biography adds new shades to the artist’s well-earned reputation.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007

ISBN: 0-7011-7884-1

Page Count: 366

Publisher: Chatto & Windus/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
VELÁSQUEZ AND <i>THE SURRENDER OF BREDA</i>
by Anthony Bailey

- BOOK REVIEW
VERMEER
by Anthony Bailey

- BOOK REVIEW
STANDING IN THE SUN
by Anthony Bailey

bookshelf

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.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

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...

bookshelf

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)