A respectful, by-rote biography of the expatriate African-American painter who was James Baldwin's mentor and Henry Miller's friend. Leeming (English/Univ. of Conn.) reaches into the footnotes of his thick, official biography of Baldwin (1994) to assemble a complete, if brief, chronicle of the person Baldwin called his ``principle witness.'' The conflicted teenage Baldwin met the 40-year-old Delaney at a crucial time; Delaney became the troubled young man's model of artistic possibilities and his teacher. Both were black, came from religious families, and were struggling with their homosexuality. Delaney, however, had successfully made his break with his Knoxville, Tenn., roots to follow an artistic career, reaching a tenuous compromise with his country's prejudices. Although he had arrived in New York at the beginning of the Depression, he managed to establish himself as a painter of psychologically penetrating portraits and vibrant street scenes. Growing into a Greenwich Village guru, he was a close friend of such luminaries as Countee Cullen and Al Hirschfield, and painted haunting portraits of black notables from W.E.B. Du Bois to Louis Armstrong. In 1953 his inability to make a living from his art drove him to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1979. Despite Delaney's famed serenity, Leeming brings out some of the conflicts that he expressed only in his journals: the dilemma he felt as a ``Negro painter'' torn between his individual aesthetic and his ethnic pride, and his alienation from his well-meaning but patronizing white friends. Unfortunately, biographic reticence prevents Leeming from directly addressing Delaney's psychological problems, which spiraled into paranoia and psychosis. He was eventually committed to an insane asylum and remained unaware of the acclaim his work was finally receiving in America. Leeming, a diligent biographer, gets the facts down, but not what made Delaney, in Baldwin's description, ``a cross between Brer Rabbit and St. Francis of Asissi.'' (b&w and color illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 1998
ISBN: 0-19-509784-X
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
