Drawing on interviews with Hockney, his siblings, and colleagues; Hockey’s autobiography; and diaries of famous friends,...
Hockney from age 38 to 75, bubbling with enthusiasm.
In this second lively volume of David Hockney’s authorized biography, Sykes (David Hockney, 1937-1975, etc.) covers the artist’s peripatetic, energetic years of fame: major exhibitions (a 1988 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art attracted 16,000 visitors the first week), commissions to design opera and ballet sets, and an outbreak of Hockneymania when his work was exhibited at the esteemed Tate Gallery in London. Typically working from dawn (painting the sunrise from his bedroom window) to dusk, Hockney, a friend told Sykes, “loves to work until he’s so exhausted…his body has already caved in. At that moment he’s making his discoveries and those are inspirational.” The artist thrived on discoveries, which increasingly involved new technologies. Quantel Paintbox allowed him to layer colors without muddying them. He also played with a photocopier, which he found much more creative than lithography, producing “the most beautiful black I had ever seen on paper.” The fax machine inspired “endless experiments” in tone and led to his creating pictures made up of more than one sheet of paper, to be assembled by the recipient. Faxing also enabled him to communicate more easily than by telephone, which became impossible as Hockney became increasingly deaf. He was excited by the Brushes app on the iPhone, the process of digital drawing on an iPad, and especially the computer, which enabled him to make huge pictures. For a 10-gallery exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art, he produced the largest work ever hung in the gallery’s history. Only the AIDS epidemic and loss of friends and colleagues dampened Hockney’s irrepressible spirits.
Drawing on interviews with Hockney, his siblings, and colleagues; Hockey’s autobiography; and diaries of famous friends, such as Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender, Sykes matches his subject’s ebullience in this admiring, well-researched life.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0385535908
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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 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
PERSPECTIVES
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