Moyle writes that young Turner was “an instinctive and tireless networker, massively self-motivated, undeterrable in his...
He was the finest landscape painter of his time, and he knew it. This new biography explains why.
J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) painted the sunrise over Norham Castle with as much invention as he depicted sea battles, moments in British history, and Welsh villagers struggling to get piglets into a boat in choppy shallows. Born to a barber and wig-maker, Turner became one of the youngest ever Academicians at London’s Royal Academy and was so beloved by John Ruskin that the eminent art critic cataloged all 30,000 of the artist’s works (including, to Ruskin’s surprise, erotic drawings) after Turner’s death. Like all good storytellers, Moyle (Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde, 2012, etc.) begins with high drama: Turner’s death in a state of “moral degradation” in a neighborhood of Chelsea. From there, she returns to Turner’s Covent Garden youth and chronicles his successes and failures. This is a popular rather than scholarly work, light on technical analysis but heavy on scenes from Turner’s life. Moyle does highlight Turner’s technical innovations, including his experiments with backlit paintings and scioptic balls (“a kind of early wide-angle or fish-eye lens” used to create panoramic views), and she describes well such iconic paintings as The Battle of Trafalgar and The Fighting Temeraire. Her focus, however, is on personal stories: Turner’s relationship with the widow Sarah Danby, with whom he fathered two daughters; his mother’s incarceration in a mental asylum; and his controversial investment in the Dry Sugar Work near Spanish Town in Jamaica, “a cattle farm that depended on slavery for its labour.” Throughout, the author enlivens her tale with perfect details, as when undertakers bringing Turner’s large, expensive coffin to his Chelsea home can’t get the casket through the door.
Moyle writes that young Turner was “an instinctive and tireless networker, massively self-motivated, undeterrable in his determination.” This excellent biography shows the benefits, and the pitfalls, of such single-minded obsession.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2092-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
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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