A lively addition to the understanding of this difficult and important American artist.
An unfussy, thoroughgoing look at a multifaceted, restless genius.
Civil War historian Sutherland (History/Univ. of Arkansas; A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War, 2009, etc.) does not pass judgment too harshly on the brilliant, controversial and litigious American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), who fought to refashion art criticism from the artist’s point of view. The author clearly brings out Whistler’s uniqueness in terms of his technique; he was both a kind of naturalist and a trailblazing user of etching and pastels. The eldest of a large family, born in Lowell, Mass., Whistler spent a formative six years in St. Petersburg, Russia, when his engineer father was hired by the czar to help build the railroad; learning French turned out to be an important asset for Whistler when he began to pursue his career as an artist in Paris. Intractable and headstrong, winning and personable, he was bounced out of his father’s alma mater, West Point, and was finally able to play at being the young bohemian in Paris. With his practiced drawing talent and curiosity, he absorbed the styles of the masters around him, from classicism to realism to naturalism to photography. He began to hone his own style—e.g., in At the Piano and The White Girl, which was his “first tentative step away from narrative painting…one of the great artistic controversies of the century.” Indeed, in London, Whistler took his “art for art’s sake” credo to combative new heights by taking critic John Ruskin to task for disparaging his delicate, quick brush technique. While Whistler’s notoriety grew, the prices of his paintings did not, and he was often insolvent, self-promoting yet fiercely devoted to his craft. In this immensely readable work, Sutherland brings out how enormously influential Whistler became to younger artists, especially in Scotland.
A lively addition to the understanding of this difficult and important American artist.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-20346-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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 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
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