—The Painter of the Paris Night” emerges as a politically revolutionary and provocative artist inextricably linked with the volatile milieu of turn-of-the-century Paris. Sweetman (Paul Gauguin, 1996, etc.) probes the details and darknesses of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life in order to contextualize the artist’s paintings. The son of first cousins, Toulouse-Lautrec was afflicted with a range of congenital illnesses. When the young artist left the countryside for to live and paint in Paris, political revolutionaries, promoting an anarchistic view of social and intellectual life, shaped his ideological and aesthetic convictions. Toulouse-Lautrec’s Parisian lifestyle’studying in the ateliers of Leon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon, cavorting in seedy brothels and the Moulin Rouge, associating with actors, dandies, and anarchists—imbued him with a zesty kinship for the downtrodden and the bohemian, the oppressed and the insouciant. Tragic and listless love affairs, including one with Suzanne Valadon, inspired Toulouse-Lautrec, as in his famous depiction of Valadon as the bareback rider of the Cirque Fernando. Sweetman also explores the populist appeal of Toulouse-Lautrec, who, with the advent of lithographic presses, effected a radical change in the availability of art. Despite his friend Oscar Wilde’s maxim that “art is the supreme manifestation of individualism,” Toulouse-Lautrec’s art is deeply concerned with human suffering, especially in his depictions of female despair. Such sympathy for the rough limits of the human condition illuminate his art as well as the strong loyalties of his life—his deep ties with Oscar Wilde when most had forsaken him and his alliance with anarchist FÇlix FÇnÇon. Both an eminently readable biography of a great artist and an exploration of how the fin-de-siäcle advanced new modes of artistic and political expression.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-81179-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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