by Florence Rubenfeld ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1998
A sympathetic biography of the controversial critic who championed the abstract expressionist school as early as 1944, when he anointed Jackson Pollock and a few others as the ``future of American painting.'' The bristly Greenberg, who died in 1994, began writing literary and art criticism and essays in the '30s, while working for the US Customs Service in New York. His classic manifesto ``Avante-Garde and Kitsch,'' published in the Partisan Review in 1939, distinguished high art from popular middle-class diversions, arguing that it was the function of the avant-garde not to experiment but to find a path along which culture can keep moving. In his celebration of artists like Willem de Kooning, Pollock, Morris Louis, and David Smith (and in his sweeping denunciation of Pop art), Greenberg, who in later years wrote for the Nation and Commentary, developed a reputation as a fighter, his power and influence earning him vocal enemies. Rubenfeld, a former East Coast editor for the New Art Examiner, notes the influence on Greenberg's criticism of T.S. Eliot, a sometime Partisan Review contributor, from whom Greenberg may have drawn in formulating his ideas on modern art and its relation to earlier traditions. Usefully locating Greenberg in the context of American art-world politics and letters, and making a persuasive case for his importance, she makes no apologies for the critic, who could be both brilliant and devastating in his opinions, even of his friends' work. His personal life as presented here was a series of fractured relationships. But as Rubenfeld notes, when he committed critically to an artist's work, he committed personally as well, forging close social ties with many of the painters and sculptors whose work he was drawn to, though these positions of influence sometimes led to inevitable questions of conflict of interest. A clear and honest summary of the life of one of the most pugnacious, influential, and original critics of modern art. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-19110-5
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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
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