by Dianne Hales ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 5, 2014
The breezy tone is a jarring contrast to the considerable scholarship that informs the author’s history.
Like many visitors to the Louvre, journalist Hales (La Bella Lingua: A Passionate Journey through the World’s Most Beautiful Language, 2009, etc.) was fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait and set out to investigate the real Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo: “Why did the most renowned painter of her time choose her as his model?...And why does her smile enchant us still?”
The author already established her affection for anything Italian in her previous book. Here, she romps through Italy’s roiling political past, eager to make 15th-century figures seem contemporary. Reading letters between one husband and wife, she felt that she was viewing “a medieval version of a television reality show” in which the husband was a “workaholic merchant….I can imagine the stressed-out businessman as a character in a Woody Allen film—perhaps a neurotic, death-obsessed Wall Street trader, with a therapist on speed dial, antacids in his pocket, and Xanax in his medicine cabinet….” Artists in Florence, she insists, “reigned like rock stars.” Inserting herself into the narrative, Hales recounts brief, often banal conversations and discloses her own wide-eyed responses to people, places and things. Upon finding Lisa’s birth certificate: “Leaping out of my chair, I dance in excitement.” Her jaw dropped when she visited a Baroque palace to interview a princess. As for Lisa—wife of a wealthy merchant and mother of seven (one a stepson)—little evidence exists about her life. Hales, then, extrapolates what her life “would have been” from books about Renaissance women. The repetition of “would have,” “might have” and “perhaps” throughout the book gives the narrative—as lively and detailed as it is—a speculative quality. The author also includes a “Mona Lisa Timeline” and a list of key characters.
The breezy tone is a jarring contrast to the considerable scholarship that informs the author’s history.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5896-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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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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