A sobering but ultimately sympathetic portrait balanced by the author’s critical sense and buoyed by her engaging style.
An absorbing biography detailing the public and private hazards of being America’s favorite painter.
Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) may seem an unusual subject for Solomon, who previously explored the abstract universes of Joseph Cornell (Utopia Parkway, 1997) and Jackson Pollock (1987) and “grew up gazing at a Helen Frankenthaler poster” in her bedroom. In her latest life story, the author is both scourge and defender. On a personal level, she doesn’t much like Rockwell—and he does come across as chilly. Wholly devoted to his work and given to bouts of depression, he was remote from his family, his friends and most of his subjects; even the accidental death of a young boy who posed for him drew little emotion. “Phobic about dirt and germs,” writes the author, “he cleaned his studio several times a day.” Although there’s no evidence that he was gay, he much preferred the company of men and boys in both life and art. His first wife fled, his second wife drank herself into an early grave, and his third (and happiest) wife slept in another room. His life was at odds with his image; he drew covers for a magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, which he couldn’t stand and was the official artist for the Boy Scouts of America even though he knew or cared little about Scouting. Was he a mere illustrator, as the critics claimed, or a skilled visual storyteller in the tradition of the great Renaissance painters he worshipped? For Solomon, his paintings are representational Rorschachs of a lonely life, dramas about being an outsider, essays on the act of watching—whether they involve diners staring at an old woman as she prays, a town-hall crowd looking at a speaker or a young girl gazing in a mirror. Is looking at a Rockwell less fulfilling than looking at a de Kooning? Solomon doesn’t think so; neither did de Kooning.
A sobering but ultimately sympathetic portrait balanced by the author’s critical sense and buoyed by her engaging style.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-11309-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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 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
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