by Franny Moyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 2016
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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