Backstage view of the various lives of the legendary Liberman- -artist, photographer, and powerful editorial director of the CondÇ Nast magazines—by journalist Kazanjian and New Yorker staff writer Tomkins (Post-to-Neo, 1988, etc.). Liberman was born in 1912 in Russia to brilliant timber- industry analyst Semeon Liberman and Henriette Pascar, a domineering extrovert who directed a state-run children's theater before the family left the Soviet Union for good. Educated at English and French boarding schools, and pushed by Henriette to be a painter, Liberman in 1933 became assistant art director for the Paris weekly Vu. In 1941, he left Nazi-occupied France for N.Y.C., where Vu owner Lucien Vogel introduced him to publisher CondÇ Nast. Particularly interesting here are glimpses of the evolution and workings of CondÇ Nast publishing and Vogue as they passed through the hands of various editorial innovators (``difficult to control'' Diana Vreeland, Anna Wintour, etc.) while Liberman (art director of CondÇ Nast from 1941-62) hovered in the wings. The sharp-eyed authors are frank about Liberman's extravagant socializing, his creative insecurities, and his subservience to his demanding wife, Tatiana, a hat designer at Saks who died in 1991 after a Demerol- addicted old age. According to Tatiana's daughter, writer Francine du Plessix Gray, Liberman thrived on the ``thrill of...walking the tightrope of power and winning respect as a serious artist.'' The authors credit Liberman's long-term influence in magazines to his ``world class charm'' and ``protean and infinitely renewable'' style, and they quote one Vogue editor as saying that Liberman goes for ``the deepest humanity and the deepest meaning''—but also for the ``cheap thrill.'' Liberman's deeper loyalty, the authors contend, is to his painting and sculpture, excellently analyzed here in the context of the New York School. Intriguing, persuasive account of a mercurial personality and the American fashion journalism he helped shape. (One hundred b&w photographs promise, judging from the eight seen, to add both gloss and substance.)
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-57964-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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
PERSPECTIVES
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