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
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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