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
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
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