A thoroughly readable biography—the first in 30 years—of the eclectic-minded collector, patron, and designer whose unique legacy, an art-filled Venetian palazzo in Boston's Fenway neighborhood, continues to inspire visitors to the present day. A fan of baseball and boxing, the bohemian Gardner, born in 1840 and living at the dawn of the media age, was able to use the negative response of a patriarchal society to female accomplishment for her own purpose—what the author calls ``the art of scandal.'' In her relationships with men other than her husband, Jack Gardner—the painter John Singer Sargent, and writers Henry James and Francis Crawford included—she scandalized Boston society. Crawford and Gardner, writes the author, were deeply, passionately intimate—soul mates, for sure- -but this need not suggest a sexual union, he says. In art collecting, Gardner found her vocation. In Paris in 1892 she purchased Vermeer's Le Concert for $6,000. Soon, with the help of Bernard Berenson, she added a major Botticelli and Titian's Rape of Europa. At the high point of her life (and this book) lies the building in 190001 of her museum/home, a whimsical pastiche whose construction incorporates such disparate elements as medieval choir stalls, architectural fragments, and Spanish tiles, all shipped from Europe. ``Mrs. Jack'' would fill Fenway Court—which featured a series of Venetian terraces opening onto a six-story courtyard domed in steel and glass, art and music galleries, an apartment on the top floor, even a private chapel- -with priceless paintings and decorative arts from East and West. Gardner, who bridged old and new worlds in her tastes, her tolerance for social outcasts such as Jews and homosexuals, displayed grace and independence. Art historian Shand-Tucci (Boston Bohemia, not reviewed, etc.) here succeeds in depicting her as fully three-dimensional, writing her life as an odyssey, ``a Kunstlerroman as the Germans call it, an `artist's novel' '' of literary, intellectual, artistic, and religious quest. (47 b&w, 4 color illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-018643-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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