Biddle, a former president of the Whitney Museum of American Art and granddaughter of the museum’s legendary founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, here commemorates the illustrious female dynasty of art lovers and the institution they created and sustained. Nowadays an integral part of the Manhattan art landscape, the Whitney was at its inception just a studio on Eighth Street, opened by the sculptor and wealthy heiress. Seeking to support contemporary American artists, she transformed her studio into a full-fledged museum by 1930 and remained its president and most generous benefactor until her death in 1942, when her daughter took over. By the middle of the century, running a museum had become a challenging business, requiring a well-trained staff and a constant influx of money. Reluctantly, the Whitney Museum changed its original policy, focusing less on acquiring new artwork than on interpreting and properly displaying the finest items in its collection. The Museum became progressively more dependent on donations, and an admission fee was introduced in 1966. At the same time, it widened the range of its activities to include lectures, publications, a library, films, and trips abroad for members. When Gertrude’s granddaughter became trustee and later president of the museum, it was moved to its present prominent location on Madison Avenue. While painstakingly recording endless fund-raising campaigns and providing an overview of day-to-day management, Miller Biddle also discusses the precarious balance between her private and public roles. After raising several children, she assumed responsibilities at the museum her mother had entrusted to her, while simultaneously taking continuing education classes and collaborating with Bob Friedman on her grandmother’s 1978 biography. Her life and legacy, like that of her mother and grandmother, became inseparable from the Whitney. Despite its relative neglect of art and artists, an estimable history of the Whitney, with illuminating forays into the history of several prominent American families.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55970-509-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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