This beautifully written, impeccably researched biography does much to resuscitate French’s substantial contributions to...
The first comprehensive biography of a great American sculptor.
Award-winning historian and Abraham Lincoln scholar Holzer (1865: America Makes War and Peace in Lincoln's Final Year, 2015, etc.) offers a much-needed biography of the little-known American sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931). The author begins his superb book with a stirring account of the 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. At the front of the large crowd was President Warren G. Harding and Lincoln’s son, Robert, while off to the side, “unrecognized by most,” sat the “thin, aging,” New England sculptor of the iconic, 240-ton marble statue, which is “now regarded as the most famous sculpture ever created of or by an American.” Black dignitaries, meanwhile, were seated on benches a “block away.” French was largely self-taught, and his supportive father enlisted instruction for his teenage son from the “accomplished watercolor painter May Alcott.” Afterward, French joked, he decided to become a sculptor. His “talent was undeniable.” In lavish detail, Holzer chronicles the development of French’s career. His first major commission was Minute Man bronze monument (1875) in Concord, Massachusetts, for which he received “rhapsodic reviews” and generous royalties from popular reproductions. His impressive The Awakening of Endymion followed, and then a commission to sculpt Ralph Waldo Emerson, who exclaimed, “That is the face that I shave!” With his sculpture of the renowned deaf educator Thomas Gallaudet, Holzer writes, French reached a “new plateau of virtuosity.” His “hard-won status” was now secure, and two of his sculptures, including the colossal Republic, were exhibited at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. In 1903, French was elected to the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and assisted them in acquiring crucial American works of sculpture. He accepted the Lincoln commission in 1915. Its dedication would be the “crowning moment” of “French’s long and extraordinary career.”
This beautifully written, impeccably researched biography does much to resuscitate French’s substantial contributions to American art.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61689-753-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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