A complex, elegant biography of one of the most famous—and famously combative—painters of the 17th century. Caravaggio’s paintings, with their dramatic naturalism and haunting religiosity, give evidence of a compelling personality, but details about the artist are scant. Few of his words were ever recorded by his peers, and he wrote nothing that has survived. In spite of a dearth of original material, British biographer Langdon, in her first book, has created an account that interweaves a lively, informed discussion of his work with known details about his life. What is beyond dispute is that his talent catapulted him to the forefront of the art world by the age of 30. His was “a brooding and profoundly Catholic art,” in Langdon’s words, that rejected idealism in favor of realism. Using models and painting from life, Caravggio created an enfranchising religious vision: when he needed a Virgin, a local whore posed for him; his saints and apostles were humble men illumined by their faith. The passionate, painterly force for which he was lauded in Rome was not divisble from his life, however, and Caravaggio repeatedly brawled with other artists over slights both real and imagined. “Having won sudden stardom, with a place in the world, [Caravaggio] responded badly,” Langdon writes. “He became vain and proud, increasingly involved in street violence, and so famed for his belligerence that news of it circulated through Europe.” He was nothing if not a man of his times, and in Rome, in the 17th century, toughs walked the streets with daggers and swords; Caravaggio was no different. Fleeing Rome after killing a man in a fight, he suffered a tragic, untimely, but unsurprising death as he was attempting to return. To her credit, Langdon skillfully interweaves the coarse tragedy of Caravggio’s existence with the transcendent humanism of his art and uses each to illuminate the other. (43 color plates, b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-11894-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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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