A fine biography—and a study of why revolutionary art can be reviled in its own time and revered in another.
The life of the 17th-century “sinner-saint” artist Caravaggio.
Capturing the brevity and paradox of her subject’s life, National Book Award finalist Prose takes on an artist as loathed in his own time as any modern artist since. Today, however, Caravaggio is considered part of the canon, an artist whose works draw admirers to out-of-the-way places. Novelist Prose (A Changed Man, March 2005, etc.) leads us on the artist’s odyssey from the small town of Caravaggio, to Milan, Rome, Naples, Malta, Sicily, back to Naples, and finally to Porto Ercole, where he died of a fever. She excels in relaying what little we know of the artist’s personality, a complex mix of undoubted charisma but with an almost psychopathic urge for self-destruction. Caravaggio had an attraction to rough trade, which belied his role as the live-in artist for one of the most cultured and civilized ecclesiastical salons of Rome. The author tracks that personality in Caravaggio’s art—his work went from sexy and alluring to so realistic that, when he emerged as an independent artist, many in the establishment thought it vulgar. But it was his ability to illustrate eternal truths by use of the everyday, the mundane, the specific, that made him so popular with those who instinctively understood his art. To many, Caravaggio was merely a copyist, one finding inspiration among the most base members of society; it was inconceivable that Caravaggio would use a dead prostitute for the model of the dead Virgin, despite a result that is today considered one of the most captivating of Baroque paintings.
A fine biography—and a study of why revolutionary art can be reviled in its own time and revered in another.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-057560-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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