Not definitive, but masses of information make it worthwhile.
An extensively researched biography of arguably the most identifiable American painter of the 20th century.
Tracing the artistic and emotional evolution of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) into an increasingly self-centered and unpleasant personality, art journalist Drohojowska-Philp takes account of the painful circumstances that shaped that evolution. Contrary to the artist’s own description of her early years as independent and happy, the author chronicles an extremely difficult adolescence and young adulthood, followed by an early artistic maturity that was almost entirely dominated by her lover (and later husband), photographer and impresario Alfred Stieglitz. O’Keeffe divided her life into before, during, and after Stieglitz, and her biographer uses the same organization. Drohojowska-Philp pays so much attention to the Stieglitz circle that she almost loses O’Keeffe in the process, but giving context to the artist’s life and career is the most impressive achievement here. That gives way in the third section to serial descriptions of paintings and a prosaic repetition of the venerable artist’s travels in lieu of more critical consideration of the period during which O’Keeffe created a not entirely accurate image of herself as a recluse and became America’s foremost art-world prima donna (not to mention the originator of Santa Fe chic). The author provides extensive endnotes, but also plenty of unattributed anecdotes, such as the story of the now-famous O’Keeffe returning to the site of one of her early teaching positions, appearing in her old room during a class led by her former supervisor, striding to a cabinet and removing her remaining drawings, then leaving without a word. Drohojowska-Philp’s cavalier attitude toward references might not bother a popular audience, but it’s problematic for specialists who would otherwise find her text helpful. Nonetheless, the author’s use of previously untapped sources confirms a wealth of information previously a matter of debate or obscured by O’Keeffe herself in establishing her official mythology.
Not definitive, but masses of information make it worthwhile.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05853-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
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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