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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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