Twelve chapters in search of an editor . . . or a canvas.
Syrupy prose flows thickly in this art-world autobiography.
As the subtitle suggests, the American-born Tanning is a fairly well-known figure whose creative contributions to the surrealist movement came not only in the form of her own paintings and sculptures, but in her supportive role as wife of Max Ernst. She convived with many surrealist heavy hitters (Tanguy, Duchamp, Breton, Levy) as both participant and observer—more often than not as the latter. She came to lament both her role (as the good wife of the better artist) and her good looks (“for a girl there is no greater handicap to creativity and self-fulfillment in the solitary arts than physical prettiness”). Such provocative ruminations on the perils of the artist-wife come late in a memoir largely comprised of famous visits and expatriate adventures—much in the tradition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. But, unlike Stein’s revealing window on the modernist art scene, most of Tanning’s glimpses into the surrealist world come to us in sentences as hazy and convoluted as their subject. For example, here is a waxing passage on life pre-Ernst: “The moments immediately preceding our first gaze weren’t really more decisive than, say, a day twenty years before when he was perhaps composing with glee and with Tzara a dada manifesto, while I in my eleven-year-old optimism was trying on a bra which, receiving nothing, was as wrinkled as a fallen parachute on the breast of the earth.” When the author eventually reveals her fear of transparent writing, one may surmise that being at the root of such painterly prose. Regardless of the cause, these overburdened images unfortunately detract from the precious unveiling of the author’s extraordinary life.
Twelve chapters in search of an editor . . . or a canvas.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05040-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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