Engrossing, impressively researched, and keenly perceptive.
A fresh biography of the influential modernist architect who shaped aesthetics from the 1920s to our own time.
Award-winning biographer and design and architecture critic MacCarthy (The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination, 2011, etc.) brings insight and sensitivity to a sweeping, penetrating life of Walter Gropius (1883-1969), founder of the Bauhaus, an experimental community of architects, sculptors, painters, and craftsmen. Established in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus, in its early years, was devoted to craft, owing “so very much,” Gropius admitted, to William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement. Soon, influenced by Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy, who joined the community as a teacher, Gropius changed the emphasis “from the handmade and romantic to the clean-cut and mechanistic,” leading to a “smooth-lined, restrained, subtly geometric” design that became emblematic of Bauhaus style in architecture, furniture, and art. The school attracted brilliant artists as teachers, including Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, and Marcel Breuer. But there was often conflict among them and, after the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, between the community and “less enlightened members” of the public. Money was a perennial problem, as well; in 1928, Gropius resigned and moved to Berlin, where he aligned himself with a radical group of architects who hoped to go beyond “the design of individual buildings into the economic planning of whole cities.” By 1932, however, architectural innovations faced Nazi artistic censorship, and Gropius was vilified. MacCarthy follows Gropius’ career in Britain and the U.S. after he left Germany in 1935 and, a few years later, became chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where his students included such eminent architects as I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson. Besides following Gropius’ professional life, the author vibrantly portrays his love affairs, marriages (notably to the turbulent Alma Mahler), the death of his beloved daughter, and his close, sometimes-strained friendships. Altogether, she produces a multidimensional portrait of a towering, complex figure whose ideas, one historian remarked, “reshaped the world.”
Engrossing, impressively researched, and keenly perceptive.Pub Date: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-674-73785-3
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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
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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