Serious but plenty juicy: a treat for both aficionados of modern art and readers of celebrity bios. (24 pages b&w...
An inclusive account of the eventful life led by a driving influence in the world of modern art, by British playwright and historian Gill (An Honourable Defeat, 1994, etc.).
Born Marguerite, daughter of Benjamin and niece of the more famous Solomon R., Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) gained her first exposure to the world of the avant-garde as an unpaid clerk in her cousin Harold Loeb’s Sunwise Turn Bookshop in New York City. The 22-year-old took immediately to intellectual and artistic society; collagist and sculptor Laurence Vail, whom she married in 1922, was only one of the many artists in her collection of lovers. She blamed her promiscuity on Benjamin’s 1912 death aboard the Titanic, which left her “searching for a father,” but to his credit Gill refuses to take such remarks at face value. Instead, he weighs them against other testimony, noting that this “complex, anarchic, remarkable woman” was “not particularly introspective.” In Paris, Peggy soon found herself at the center of bohemian and expatriate society, forming durable friendships/love affairs with Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, and other notable avant-gardists. Moving on to London, she established Guggenheim Jeune in 1938, a gallery focused on contemporary art. On the eve of WWII, she accelerated her purchases, buying “a picture a day” and amassing one of the period’s most extensive private collections of modern art. Fleeing to New York with German surrealist (and future husband) Max Ernst, Peggy opened Art of This Century, which featured exhibitions by such then-unknowns as Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. She returned in 1948 to her beloved Venice; her 18th-century palazzo became the permanent site of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection upon her death. Gill makes a persuasive case for Guggenheim as a uniquely individual patron who single-handedly and single-mindedly helped determine art history’s course.
Serious but plenty juicy: a treat for both aficionados of modern art and readers of celebrity bios. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: April 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019697-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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