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
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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