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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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