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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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