by Elizabeth Cooke ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
An earnest artistic exposé that gives an old topic new life.
Novelist Cooke (Still Life, 2016, etc.) explores the relationships of six famous male painters and their lovers, and the art that their passions and partings inspired.
This book is more of an art appreciation than a formal art history text; by Cooke’s own admission, she wrote from “a genuine love for the works in question.” In her selections here, which include accounts of the tenuous affair of Pablo Picasso and Marie Thérèse Walter and of the one-sided devotion of Pierre Bonnard to Marie Bousin, she attempts to capture the variety of ways that a relationship can bring (or hold) two people together. The prose style of each section differs in order to better fit its theme—a particularly arresting passage, for instance, addresses readers in the second person from the perspective of Auguste Rodin’s future mistress, Camille Claudel—and the changing narration keeps the book’s formula fresh. The relationships also serve as nice introductions to each artist and effectively chart their artistic styles: one can watch, for example, as Amedeo Modigliani’s tortured marriage to Jeanne Hébuterne slowly distorts his representations of others, himself, and finally her. Cooke punctuates the developing stories of painters and their muses with brief quotations on the painters’ artistic practices, philosophies, and subject matter, and they successfully give readers a general sense of each artist. However, the tales might have been better served by the inclusion of letters between the pairs of lovers; it’s confusing to see only the painters represented in the quotes when the book’s aim seems to be to give voice to the women who worked and lived with them. By contrast, Cooke’s descriptions of the act of painting prove to be apt, as she doesn’t get caught up in the blurred mysticism of most art writing, but still manages to keep some of its poetry, as in her description of Paul Gauguin’s Nevermore: “All is sadness in this barbaric luxury of a painting, drenched in color.” Although the historical research sometimes feels a bit light, the book works well where it should, skillfully glossing the emotions embedded in oils and canvas.
An earnest artistic exposé that gives an old topic new life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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