Well-illustrated miscellaneous Churchill-iana, some of it good.
Winston Churchill was a skilled painter, albeit an amateur, and his still enormous fan base will welcome this mixed bag of writings about his hobby.
There is nothing bland about his paintings. As British Academy president Cannadine (History/Princeton Univ.; Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906, 2018, etc.) writes, “like his speeches, they were often bright, warm, vivid, highly colored and illuminated creations, full of arresting contrasts between the light and the dark, the sunshine and the shadows.” The editor begins with a fine 50-page history of Churchill’s fascination with painting—not taken up until he was 40—and then assembles his writing and speeches on the subject before concluding with a few essays by others, including Thomas Bodkin and John Rothenstein. The quality varies from delightful to inconsequential. The latter group includes several 1930s newspaper reviews of annual Royal Academy Exhibitions in which he chats about paintings by artists mostly unknown to even knowledgeable readers. Illustrations of these works would help, but they are not included in the text. A dozen short speeches, mostly to audiences of artists, are solid enough, filled with elements such as wit, scholarship, worldly knowledge, and colorful imagery and insights. Although an amateur painter, he was a professional writer, as demonstrated by a superb essay on the pleasures of painting. Despite an excess of charisma and self-regard, Churchill loved his paintings without implying that they were works of genius, and he always deferred to professionals, sometimes grabbing his palette to correct a defect on the spot. Returning the favor, some critics and artists agree that he took art seriously and showed modest talents. “While he never claimed to be a great artist,” writes Cannadine, “painting…furnished an essential element of his latter-day public persona as a veritable Renaissance man of exceptionally varied accomplishments.”
Well-illustrated miscellaneous Churchill-iana, some of it good.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4729-4521-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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