A masterfully written biography of Matisse, whose dedication to an art of “balance, purity, and tranquility” was his primary defense against a life of hardship, disruption, and loss. Few who know Matisse’s work would equate the dynamism of his palette—full of saturated, singing colors—with the fierce emotional intensity of the man himself, but Spurling, a British theater critic and literary editor of the Spectator, makes the connection. With tremendous sensitivity to her subject, she casts the story of Matisse’s early life as “a flight toward the brilliant light” from the dark and dour northern landscape of his birthplace, Bohain-en-Vermandois, near the Belgian border. It was, she points out, the same cultural and geographic area that had given rise to van Gogh some 16 years earlier, and while Matisse’s own artistic fever was never quite as incapacitating as his predecessor’s, it was still intense. Matisse suffered from unrelenting insomnia for much of his life and sometimes —feared that the blazing colors he had let loose would end by making him go blind.— Fortunately, he escaped that fate, although he did not escape being maligned and ridiculed. When Matisse submitted Le Bonheur de vivre to the Salon des IndÇpendents in 1906, for example, practical jokers defaced handbills posted outside the local urinals so that they read: —Matisse has caused more harm in a year than an epidemic!— and —Matisse drives you mad!— Spurling delves into Matisse’s past with a historian’s eye for detail and a fervor that gives her narrative compelling force. She maintains that, from the start of his career, Matisse undertook nothing less than a groundbreaking exploration of color, form, and emotionality in painting. “Matisse was not simply discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color,— she writes, —he was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries.” Matisse’s genius was to make conscious subjectivity the defining force of his painting; Spurling, in this first volume of his biography, excels by revealing the forces that shaped both the man and his aesthetic. (24 pages color and 152 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 5, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-43428-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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