In January 1986 Dal° summoned Gibson to a meeting at which he exhorted author to make it clear in the forthcoming second volume of his biography of Gabriel Garc°a Lorca that the poet had loved Dal° sexually. The stories Dal° told him provided the catalyst for this book. The task of telling Dal°’s life is not easy; the artist was a skilled dissembler who cultivated his myth and wrote an autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal°, as, Gibson suggests, a means of forestalling “meddlers.” Gibson himself is a talented biographer with a detective’s soul. He plunges into Dal°’s correspondence and diaries, exposes their half-truths and falsehoods, and dares to suggest that Dal° was driven by a profound sense of shame. In the artist’s early years, shame reduced him to furiously blushing agony and made even the most cursory social interactions difficult. Playing out this psychoanalytic theme, Gibson explores the repercussions throughout his life and his art. Sexual anxiety not only shaped the artists’s relationships—including those with Lorca and Gala, the artist’s wife—but also provided a lexicon of imagery in Dal°’s wildly inventive Surrealist paintings. Gibson never lets his psychoanalytic interpretation overpower his narrative, however, and skillfully manages to maintain control of the story even as the characters in Dal°’s life multiply, divide, and become increasingly successful and strange. Wisely, he compresses the latter part of Dal°’s life, and expends most of his authorial energy on the first third, a period of time in which Dal° completed his most original, visually dissonant work and collaborated with both Lorca and Luis Bu§uel. In spite of his social agonies, Dal°’s shame—if indeed that’s what it was—powered some of the most outrageous and compelling paintings of the early 20th century. Mastering vast quantities of information, Gibson succeeds in evoking not only Dal°’s life, but also the intellectual and aesthetic milieu of a close-knit group of artists and writers whose work shocked the world. (30 color illustrations, b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04624-9
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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