In this confusing and self-serving study, Lipton (formerly, Art History/SUNY-Binghamton; Looking into Degas, 1986—not reviewed) claims to find in Victorine Meurent (Manet's favorite model, known as ``Olympia''): herself; a mother-figure; and a surrogate victim of the patriarchal community of artists and art historians. Most of the narrative here is about Lipton and her rages- -against her mother for abandoning and then abusing her; against the faithless father whom Lipton thinks she has spent her life trying to please; against her arrogant first husband, the parents of her current husband/lover (the relationship is unclear), a friend who visited her in Paris (where most of the book takes place), a courteous librarian who was unable to find the manuscript Lipton wanted (``Idiot!''), and a male academic who served on her dissertation committee. Lipton admires sensuous female contemporaries; speculates on their sexuality; and offers, for no apparent reason, a detailed description of a meal she ate in Paris, of several tawdry sexual encounters, and of the position she most enjoys in bed with her husband, a locksmith who decided to become a professional painter. The real problem is fitting Olympia into all of this. Having depicted herself as a Jewish intellectual attending CUNY in the 50's, a misguided academic who later decided to give up her career to become a writer, and an overanalyzed and self-preoccupied feminist, Lipton resembles Woody Allen more than Olympia. As for Olympia—the author's ``alias''—Lipton concludes that she lived as a neglected painter and lesbian and died at an advanced age in a suburb of Paris. Unable to find any records of her, Lipton fears that Olympia ``had no life''—that ``she was a nothing.'' Olympia deserves better and, fortunately, she received it in Otto Friedrich's Olympia (p. 30), which captured her dignity and stature as an icon of her age.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-684-19417-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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