Ideal for readers seeking to delve deeply into Renoir’s personality; those seeking critical assessments of the individual...
An in-depth biography of the French impressionist painter.
White (Impressionists Side by Side: Their Friendships, Rivalries, and Artistic Exchanges, 1996, etc.) is one of the leading authorities on the life and work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), “one of the greatest and most creative artists who ever lived.” Here, the author offers an “intimate” look into his life, a narrative fueled by her amassing a cache of more than 3,000 letters. Many are from the families of Renoir’s illegitimate daughter, Jeanne, and his three sons, including the great film director Jean (whose own biography of his father White calls “historical fiction”), as well as from fellow artists. They shed particular light on his relationships with key women in his life, especially his wife, female models, and fellow artist Berthe Morisot. In workmanlike prose, White moves forward in seven chronological sections, each representing specific phases of Renoir’s career. Throughout, the author presents Renoir as an “inspiring and heroic individual who overcame daunting obstacles.” In his early years, he experienced great poverty; when he finally began to find success, he became afflicted with paralyzing rheumatoid arthritis, which turned his fingers and hands into gnarled fists. He would have a brush tied between his fingers so he could continue to paint and smoke his beloved cigarettes, both of which he did relentlessly. Renoir created 4,019 paintings and hundreds of pastels and drawings. He was “complex, maddeningly ambivalent, yet endearing,” but he could also be “secretive, shrewd and even sneaky.” Though the writing is often dry, White does a fine job of tracing the phases of his career. His work—“permeated with the freedom and joie de vivre of the Impressionists, fused with a classical search for balanced compositions and form”—inspired many painters, including Matisse and Picasso (they almost met).
Ideal for readers seeking to delve deeply into Renoir’s personality; those seeking critical assessments of the individual works should look elsewhere.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-500-23957-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.
As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.
The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin "to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years...I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.'' And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman—who "preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,'' fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter—for whom she worked long hours in the small café and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes "the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me.'' The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, "I shall never hear the sound of her voice again—the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.'' Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality.
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.Pub Date: May 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-941423-51-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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