An engrossing feast for the eyes and the emotions.
A painter plumbs dark subjects—anxiety, loss, 9/11—with a deceptively simple and bright style in this lush coffee-table art book.
Rath, a Brooklyn artist, has a technique that might be called childlike if the child in question were a precocious Picasso. His acrylic-on-canvas compositions are flat and depthless; his figures are rudimentary and archaic to the point of cartoonishness; wind and the flight paths of insects are traced by curving vapor trails. But an unsophisticated look doesn’t mean a deficit of imagination, visual interest or creative resources. His landscapes and cityscapes—the bulk of the selection—teem with gnarled trees, creeping vines, buzzing wasps and ornate flowers, and throb with rich, chiaroscuroed colors—arresting red skies, black rivers, cool blue nightscapes. Yet the people who move through them seem too distracted and glum—such as the ones in the satirical “Happy Couples United in Heaven”—to notice their glowing surroundings. Rath uses this contrast between intense settings and numbed, depressive human affect to address a wide range of subjects. Some are personal, such as a series of paintings provoked by the death of his wife Laura; some, such as “Trickle Down Economics,” a portrait of a nude man rummaging through garbage, are overtly political. Rath’s 9/11 series features fireballs, panicky crowds and pensive subway riders. It seems that only when people are entirely absorbed into nature, as in “Old Couple,” a portrait of Rath and Laura as trees, that they can really be happy. The author includes some written meditations on his art and captions for a few of these superb color reproductions. Sometimes these writings are unnecessarily didactic (“This painting shows the thousands of people walking home to Brooklyn, while the World Trade Towers burn,” reads the caption for “Exodus”—and, sure enough, it does). But Rath’s more poetic reflections—“Laura came to me in dreams, beautiful and vigorous. She walked in a field of diamonds”—reinforce the impact of his already very expressive paintings.
An engrossing feast for the eyes and the emotions.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1441539038
Page Count: 141
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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