This attempt at a panoramic biography of one of the dominant artists of the Renaissance reads more as a recap of the period's events than a persuasive dissection of character. Bull, a journalist (Inside the Vatican, 1983, etc.) and translator, seems more concerned with the times than the man: He's very good at weaving together a portrait of the social dynamics of patronage, the everyday lives of artists, and the political currents shaping and buffeting Florence and Italy during the Renaissance. But somehow Michelangelo gets a bit lost in the tapestry. The outline of his life is well known: As a teenager, Michelangelo was apprenticed to a sculptor by his impecunious father, who clung to the family's claims to nobility. The boy almost immediately distinguished himself. He proved to be socially savvy as well and was soon taken up by the immensely wealthy and powerful Lorenzo di Medici. For the rest of his life, he did not lack for patrons; several popes were among those who commissioned his work, although his ambitious, frequently monumental (and costly) works often made them uneasy. Yet his robust personality enabled him to negotiate the ever-shifting terrain of politics and religion. As a sculptor, architect, poet, and humanist, he came to define essential aspects of his era: its outsized appetites, intellectual curiosity, prodigious creativity. While Michelangelo was part of an immensely gaudy, violent, inventive period, Bull's book lacks any sense of the passion and excess that characterized the era; it pales sadly in the face of the artist's stupendous output and fails to plumb the sources of his art or to offer a particularly persuasive or detailed portrait of the man himself. A thorough and informative reference book that tells us much about the times but fails to capture the genius of one of our greatest artists. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15172-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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