Colorful, animated portraits sympathetically rendered.
Perceptive biographies of a quartet of Gilded Age women.
During his long and fruitful career as a portraitist, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) counted among his opulent subjects four women embedded in the glittering, passionate, and sometimes-tawdry landscape of 19th-century high society. Drawing on much archival material, Lucey (Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age, 2006, etc.) returns to themes of her last book, revealing love, madness, greed, and occasional triumph at a time when even wealth did not necessarily guarantee women independence. Sargent himself stands at the periphery of Lucey’s engrossing stories, although he was handsome, dashing, and astonishingly productive. Portraiture supported him and his family, but toward the end of his career, he disdained the genre; he was tired, he said, of flattering his patrons. Lucey chose her subjects well: four women who responded in unexpected ways to the challenges that they faced. Elsie Palmer, daughter of a rich Colorado businessman, was destined to be the caretaker for her family until, at the age of 35, she courageously decided to marry—the only way, writes the author, that she could flee her father’s “smothering demands.” Lucia Fairchild was the sister of the beautiful Sally, subject of one of Sargent’s most enigmatic portraits. Raised in “a cocoon of privilege, money, and influence,” the Fairchild girls and their brothers saw their wealth vanish. Lucia managed through a combination of “talent and raw courage”: encouraged by Sargent, she became an artist, working tirelessly to support her spendthrift husband and their children. The lovely heiress Elizabeth Chanler suffered from a hip infection that left her strapped to a portable bed for two years during adolescence. She fell in love, scandalously, with a friend’s husband, the writer John Jay Chapman, and they married after his wife died suddenly. Isabella Stewart Gardner grew up a rebellious tomboy and never lost her willfulness and determination. She became the most prominent art collector of her time, leaving her collection—including Sargent’s work—in her own museum.
Colorful, animated portraits sympathetically rendered.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-07903-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
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