Hurst’s reputation, though, has now been ably resurrected by a devoted albeit not uncritical friend and student. He couldn’t...
Memoir of a friendship with a gay, Irish, octogenarian filmmaker.
In the 1970s, Robbins (Test of Courage, 2000, etc.) was a scrappy free-lance journalist, deep in debt, barely able to pay his rent, who was then introduced to Brian Desmond Hurst, a leading Irish filmmaker who wanted to cap his career by making a movie about the events leading up to the birth of Jesus. “Larry Oliver” had already agreed to participate in the project. Robbins at first wanted to back off—Hurst seemed a little weird, and Robbins had never read, let alone written, a screenplay. But Hurst offered a whopping salary, and Robbins signed on. Robbins quickly figured out that Hurst had his own financial woes; he was often unable to find the cash either to pay the milkman or cover his bar tab. Even when friends and associates offered to back the movie, some psychological block prevented Hurst from moving forward. So the film was never made. Still, Robbins and Hurst traveled, and drank, and occasionally wrote. Robbins began working with his eccentric friend on his memoirs, another project that never saw the light of day. But along the way, Hurst included Robbins in a number of adventures, including friendship with (and theft from) a Russian baroness and spy. Robbins’s droll account (winner of the Saga Award for Wit, given previously to Alexander McCall Smith) also offers a glimpse into the gay subculture of pre–Stonewall England—Hurst was sometimes discriminated against by movie execs who didn’t want to work with a “bugger.” He died in 1986 and, despite a career that had included making Malta Story and Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was rapidly forgotten. The filmmaker, says Robbins, “outlived his reputation”—when he died, he hadn’t made a film in two decades.
Hurst’s reputation, though, has now been ably resurrected by a devoted albeit not uncritical friend and student. He couldn’t have wished for a finer tribute.Pub Date: May 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-56025-709-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.
An epic cradle-to-grave biography of the king of pop art from Gopnik (co-author: Warhol Women, 2019), who served as chief art critic for the Washington Post and the art and design critic for Newsweek.
With a hoarder’s zeal, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) collected objects he liked until shopping bags filled entire rooms of his New York town house. Rising to equal that, Gopnik’s dictionary-sized biography has more than 7,000 endnotes in its e-book edition and drew on some 100,000 documents, including datebooks, tax returns, and letters to lovers and dealers. With the cooperation of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the author serves up fresh details about almost every aspect of Warhol’s life in an immensely enjoyable book that blends snappy writing with careful exegeses of the artist’s influences and techniques. Warhol exploded into view in his mid-40s with his pop art paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and silkscreens of Elvis and Marilyn. However, fame didn’t banish lifelong anxieties heightened by an assassination attempt that left him so fearful he bought bulletproof eyeglasses. After the pop successes, Gopnik writes, Warhol’s life was shaped by a consuming desire “to climb back onto that cutting edge,” which led him to make experimental films, launch Interview magazine, and promote the Velvet Underground. At the same time, Warhol yearned “for fine, old-fashioned love and coupledom,” a desire thwarted by his shyness and his awkward stance toward his sexuality—“almost but never quite out,” as Gopnik puts it. Although insightful in its interpretations of Warhol’s art, this biography is sure to make waves with its easily challenged claims that Warhol revealed himself early on “as a true rival of all the greats who had come before” and that he and Picasso may now occupy “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses.” Any controversy will certainly befit a lodestar of 20th-century art who believed that “you weren’t doing much of anything as an artist if you weren’t questioning the most fundamental tenets of what art is and what artists can do.”
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-229839-3
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A sparkling, imaginative rendition of a literary classic.
Whimsical illustrations meet quirky prose in this tag-team reinvention of the iconic 1933 book.
An award-winning New Yorker illustrator, designer, and author, Kalman (Swami on Rye: Max in India, 2018, etc.) takes on the challenge of illustrating Stein’s iconic “auto” biography of her longtime companion Toklas. Even though it’s not as ambitious as Zak Smith’s Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow (2006) or Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick in Pictures (2011), Kalman’s 70-plus color illustrations, rendered in her distinctive playful and Fauve-esque style, perfectly reflect the artistic and intellectual world of Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. In a short afterword, written in Kalman’s distinctive script, she describes the book as a “love story” about how “two people, joined together, become themselves. They cannot breathe right without each other.” An accompanying illustration shows them sitting together at a table, Stein reading a book (aloud?), Toklas looking on (listening?). On the final page of the book, Stein notes that Toklas probably will not write her autobiography, so “I am going to write it for you….And she did and this is it.” On first meeting Stein, Toklas said there are a “great many things to tell of what was happening then….I must describe what I saw when I came.” With the current volume, we see what Kalman saw. Here’s Stein sitting in a bright yellow chair at her popular Paris home at 27 rue de Fleurus, Picasso’s famous portrait of Stein on the wall behind her. Luminaries came and went, all beautifully captured with Kalman’s bright brush strokes: Toulouse-Lautrec; Seurat, who “caught his fatal cold”; the “extraordinarily brilliant” Guillaume Apollinaire; William James, Stein’s former teacher; Marcel Duchamp (“everybody loved him)”; Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky; James Joyce and Sylvia Beach; Hemingway; the “beautiful” Edith Sitwell; and of course, Toklas, wearing one of her hats with “lovely artificial flowers” on top.
A sparkling, imaginative rendition of a literary classic.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59420-460-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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