Flint’s life of “the original star architect” astutely captures Le Corbusier’s hubris and vulnerabilities and makes a...
The life and work of an iconic modernist.
In 1920, Swiss-born architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris changed his name to Le Corbusier (1887-1965). The dramatic “single moniker,” writes journalist Flint (Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City, 2009, etc.), “signaled his break with the past…and the embrace of the modern.” The author ably chronicles Le Corbusier’s pursuit of the modern in designs that remained remarkably consistent during his long career. In villas, apartment complexes and public buildings, Le Corbusier conceived stark, concrete structures perched on concrete columns, with open-plan interiors swathed in natural light and containing minimalist furniture, such as the metal tubing and leather chairs designed by a member of his firm. His wife found the ambience dispiriting: It was like living in a hospital, she complained, or “a dissecting lab!” Some clients, although impressed by the theatricality of the imposing architecture, found living within its walls uncomfortable, especially in a villa that became inundated with water after every rain. Le Corbusier had grander ambitions than simply designing for wealthy clients. During World War II, he nimbly allied himself with the Vichy government, hoping to redesign Paris after the war’s destruction; in 1945, he easily—and with no repercussions—switched sides. He envisioned entire cities “with places and buildings for all human activities by which the citizens can live a full and harmonious life.” Constructed rigidly on a grid, with large spaces between buildings comprised of small modular apartments, the cities would include schools, shops and extensive roof gardens representing the natural landscape. Critics asserted that he was blind to people’s real lives and the interactions that created community, but Le Corbusier believed that well-designed density, “a repeatable urban form,” was the overriding need of the future.
Flint’s life of “the original star architect” astutely captures Le Corbusier’s hubris and vulnerabilities and makes a persuasive case for his artistic significance.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0544262225
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amazon Publishing/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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