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 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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