Greig tries hard to avoid judgment, but in this case, mere reporting supplies judgment enough. Of interest to art history...
The editor of the Mail on Sunday and a veteran art critic explores the outsized talent and Pangaea-sized libido of painter Lucian Freud (1922–2011), grandson of Sigmund.
The exploits of Lothario, Casanova and Don Juan seem to pale in comparison to the astonishing sexual appetites and attitudes of a man who seemed interested in only two things: painting and sex. OK, gambling on horse races, as well (he lost millions of pounds). Freud’s personal privacy was, as Greig (King Maker, 2011, etc.) shows, quite difficult to penetrate—unless, of course, you were a young woman, in which case Freud would find a way to…work you in. The author had a relationship with Freud, meeting him, late in his life, for weekend breakfasts at a favorite restaurant, one that allowed Freud the privacy he craved. Greig interviewed Freud—there are some transcripts here—and many of his intimates and tells an astonishing story of appetite and accomplishment. He follows the painter from childhood to the grave, fills the book with photographs of the author and his work, and expands our notion of the capabilities of the human male. Freud had several wives and fathered 14 children (whom he basically ignored, though he did paint several of them, including nudes of 14-year-old Annie), most of whom remained devoted to him. Freud always had multiple relationships going—with models, with women he met accidentally, daughters of friends, whomever. Some partners accepted his busy agenda (or at least endured it) better than others; some were devastated by his betrayals. Greig also follows the arc of Freud’s career, which took years to flower but bore plenty of fruit once it did.
Greig tries hard to avoid judgment, but in this case, mere reporting supplies judgment enough. Of interest to art history students and ardent fans of Freud’s work.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-11648-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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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