Just as the men would have wanted, Crase swimmingly describes two lives that were free of the limelight yet satisfyingly...
Discerning, admiring profiles of Rupert Barneby and Dwight Ripley, who had a profound impact on botany, the 20th-century avant-garde, and each other.
Barneby made his mark as a taxonomist, in particular of the complex genus Astragalus with its 2,500 separate species. Ripley was both a financial supporter of the arts and an artist in his own right. Poet Crase crafts a twin biography notable for the languid grace of his prose, if not its concision. (After all, he’s dealing here with the messiness of life.) Chronicling a relationship that lasted 48 years, from their schoolboy romance at Harrow in 1925 through a move to the US in the late ’30s to Ripley’s death in 1973, the author neatly delineates the canny fit of their lives, the way in which botany and art fueled each other. Their work speaks volumes on its own, but Crase gives liveliness to Barneby’s affinity for plants and playfulness with Latin, the “pungent hauteur” of his taxonomic writings, and to Ripley’s knack for vivid botanical description, his use of colored pencil, his imitation of avant-garde art, itself an imitation of intimating. Ripley’s modest trust fund helped the men pursue their objectives, but he also gave a large percentage of it to support the work of Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Fairfield Porter, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, all of whom helped alter post-WWII conventions. Crase draws a heartfelt portrait of the two men as life companions, supporting and egging on each other with Barneby’s clarity and Ripley’s psychological thrashings.
Just as the men would have wanted, Crase swimmingly describes two lives that were free of the limelight yet satisfyingly committed to the artistic and intellectual movements of their time. (Photographs)Pub Date: April 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42266-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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