Like a modern-day Giorgio Vasari, Morris creates an intimate and unique you-are-there assessment of what made the...
An ideal introduction to the rebellious art movement.
Zoologist Morris (Cats in Art, 2017, etc.) is well-known for his many BBC nature programs and the influential The Naked Ape (1967), but he’s also a fine painter and was a member of the surrealist movement. In 1950, he exhibited with noted surrealist Joan Miró and made two surrealist films. Readers will be thankful that Morris, now 89, wrote this very personal take on his fellow surrealists. Although he only caught the tail end of it in the 1940s, he offers a revealing book filled with shocking anecdotes and outrageous quotations about 32 of them, from the renowned—Salvador Dalí was the “most skillful, most accomplished”—to the obscure. In these witty and succinct profiles, Morris focuses on their personalities, which, in many cases, were stranger than their art; surrealism wasn’t only an art movement, but a “whole way of life.” Many of the opening sentences immediately grab the reader’s attention. Hans Bellmer “holds the record for creating some of the most disturbing images in the history of the surrealist movement.” André Breton, more poet than artist, was the movement’s “most central, most important figure” even though he was a “petty dictator.” Max Ernst “was the ultimate surrealist” and the most exploratory, “restlessly inventive and forever trying out new techniques.” René Magritte “was an artist addicted to contradiction.” He spent his life “trying to think up novel ways of insulting the commonsense values of everyday existence.” Wolfgang Paalen “has the dubious distinction of being the only surrealist to have been eaten by wild animals.” There’s a distinct tell-all aspect to the narrative; Morris doesn’t shy away from describing the artists’ sexual proclivities and numerous relationships. The book also includes stunning photographs of the artists and their work.
Like a modern-day Giorgio Vasari, Morris creates an intimate and unique you-are-there assessment of what made the surrealists tick.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-500-02136-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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