Seaman’s frequent thesaurus-leaning renders her portraits overpainted, but despite its awkward turns, this is a decidedly...
Vital portraits of forgotten women artists that aim to celebrate their lives and work and to establish their permanent standing within the canon of contemporary art.
With impressive research, Booklist editor Seaman (Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books, 2005, etc.) curates a fine retrospective on the history of women in the male-dominated world of 20th-century art. Inspired by the carelessness with which scholars would identify group photographs of artists—famous men named, women overlooked—the author chronicles her subjects’ lives in lengthy essays that fall gently between biography and scholarly criticism. Louise Nevelson, Gertrude Abercrombie, Loïs Mailou Jones, Ree Morton, Joan Brown, Christina Ramberg, and Lenore Tawney each led rich lives of passionate pursuit, all while managing the uneven expectations hoisted upon midcentury wives and mothers. This fine selection of artists lends the book both cultural and technical diversity. Jones, an accomplished black painter often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, studied under Rodin in Paris and embraced her African heritage while facing racial prejudice at home. Tawney worked exclusively in fiber, weaving tapestries in New York City while friends Agnes Martin and Robert Rauschenberg worked nearby. Abercrombie, queen of the Chicago jazz scene and painter of mesmerizing works, appears in photographs alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. Ramberg’s sensual graphics can be found not only in analyses of the Chicago Imagists, but also in the pages of Playboy in the 1970s. Seaman exuberantly portrays each highly accomplished woman as the inspirational force she was, and she does a service by bringing them back into contemporary discourse. Unfortunately, the author too often lets her excitement carry her away, running lists of adjectives and too many descriptions on top of one another. This results in clumsily executed passages—e.g., Brown’s “slapped, sloshed, slashed, layered, kinetic canvases” and Abercrombie’s “bewitching, enigmatic, elegant, awkward, eerie, funny, clever, sad, anguished, teasing and playful” paintings.
Seaman’s frequent thesaurus-leaning renders her portraits overpainted, but despite its awkward turns, this is a decidedly important and long-overdue showcase (two 16-page color inserts).Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62040-758-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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