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 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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