This biography of Edouard Manet (183283) captures the significance of one of modern art's founding figures. Perfectly sociable in public, Manet kept his private life intensely private. This split self is at the center of Brombert's analysis of Manet's character, but since he left few personal writings, such as letters, Brombert (Cristina: Portrait of a Princess, 1977) can do little to penetrate the artist's innermost thoughts. She does, however, chart the course of his career and its context with skill and aplomb. Manet was born into the haute bourgeoisie as it boomed under the rule of Louis-Philippe. His father, a judge, hoped he would go into law or the navy, but a gift for caricature led him to take up painting instead. An attachment to Suzanne Leenhoff, originally his piano teacher, complicated Manet's youth. Some years after Leenhoff gave birth to a son, Manet married her. And while his decision was an honorable one, his reluctance to be seen in public with her showed his determination to wall off his private life. Professionally, though, Manet took a bold stance, producing paintings whose vibrant colors and everyday subjects shocked the art establishment. Manet's colleagues and champions included Emile Zola, StÇphane MallarmÇ, Berthe Morisot, and above all, perhaps, Charles Baudelaire. Brombert's readings of important canvases, from Le DÇjeuner sur l'herbe to the Execution of Maximilian to the Bar at the Folies-Bergäre, generally shine, as do her accounts of the changing social and political environment in which Manet worked, and her informed discussions of syphilis, the disease that claimed Manet's father and then Manet himself. One does wish, however, that Brombert had placed more emphasis on the highly original idea of Manet's split self, which she introduces early on, suggesting that the incessant doubling motifs in his work reflect his character. Well researched, complexly conceived, and clearly written, Brombert's life of Manet achieves a balanced synthesis of art criticism, historical repotage, and biography. (70 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-10947-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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