Large hats, monocle, cane, raucous laugh; eccentric, volatile, clever enough to be plagiarized by Oscar Wilde, arrogant enough to challenge John Ruskin's qualifications as an art critic: Whistler (1834-1903) was the stuff of tabloids. Fleming (English/Louisiana State; Murderers' Row, 1985, etc.) represents his life that way: gossip, repartee, names, cliques, quarrels, involvements—the portrait of an artist without an inner life. Born in America, raised in St. Petersburg, educated at West Point, Whistler's vivid life style and generosity earned him the title ``King of Bohemia'' while he studied in the conservative ateliers of Paris. Seeking more artistic independence, he moved to London, where he exhibited his paintings and drew critical scorn and parodies for their affectation and peculiar subject-matter. He lived with a series of lower-class women, fathered several illegitimate children, only one of whom he provided for (Fleming: ``the portraits and nocturnes may be worth a few neglected children''). Mostly, he was known for his temper, on which he often acted, punching a black man because of his color, knocking his brother-in-law through a plate-glass window in Paris—according to Fleming, using his fists as others used drink and drugs, as a release of tension. In his later years, he quarreled in print, sued anyone who disagreed with him, and courted publicity of any sort. Fleming says that he has no thesis, merely wanting to create an ``accurate portrait''—which may account for the lack of analysis, interpretation, and context, his separating the life from the works and the works from the artistic, economic, political, and social environment in which Whistler functioned. But given Whistler's curious behavior, and, as a painter, the many clues he gave to understanding it, there seems little excuse for not dealing with his psychology. Whistler himself claimed that a portrait is a solution to a problem; this one remains unresolved.
Pub Date: July 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05995-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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