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PAUL GAUGUIN

A COMPLETE LIFE

This sprawling narrative of Paul Gauguin's messy life provides new insights, despite its lack of formal coherence. Sweetman (Mary Renault, 1993; Van Gogh, 1990) names the three sections of his book after the three questions posed by a late Gauguin masterpiece's title: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Gauguin's origins make for a fascinating story. His mother, born into French feminist and radical circles, was for a time cared for by George Sand. Family connections led Gauguin's parents to emigrate to Peru; his father didn't survive the trip. Gauguin soon returned to France with his mother; Sweetman shows how the Peruvian experience would nevertheless inform the artist's aesthetic sensibility. Gauguin came late to painting as a career. He worked as a sailor before making, and then losing, a great deal of money in investment banking. The latter enterprise, provided Gauguin with an entrÇe to the Impressionist circles where he would serve his apprenticeship; Pissarro, in particular, became a mentor. Sweetman exhaustively details Gauguin's associations with CÇzanne, MallarmÇ, Seurat, and Van Gogh. Gauguin's Danish wife, from whom he became estranged, and his many mistresses also find illumination. Sweetman explores at length the degraded physical condition, confused philosophizing, and glorious artistic productions that characterized Gauguin's visionary last years in the South Pacific. The significance of the expatriate's work remained in dispute until the results of his famous late-life relocation to Tahiti were exhibited in France. Sweetman suggests, in his last section, that the ``we'' whom Gauguin invoked in his painting's title includes us. We follow Gauguin in our ambivalence toward the modern vices- -money worship, misogyny, and colonialism. If Gauguin did not succeed in getting beyond these vices, neither have we, Sweetman suggests. And if Sweetman doesn't entirely succeed in maintaining his narrative focus, he does provide a biography that brings our own time into clearer view along with that of his subject. (color and b&w illustrations, not seen)

Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1996

ISBN: 0-684-80941-9

Page Count: 608

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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