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 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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