A shrewd eye investigating worlds too often dominated by hype.
Urbane essays from a noted fashion, art, and culture critic.
As editor-in-chief of Artforum and Interview magazine and contributor to the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, Sischy (1952-2015) was immersed in the worlds of art and fashion from the 1980s until her death. Warmly introduced by artist and musician Laurie Anderson, these smart, stylish, and perceptive essays, selected by Sischy’s wife, Brant, impressively display the range of her interests and talents. Praising painter Alice Neel for deciding to “represent the powerful instead of the powerless” as subjects, Sischy wrote that Neel “seems to have been born to paint this world, a world in which she had one foot in and one foot out.” Sischy also observed art and fashion with clarity and a certain detachment, and she respected individuals who did not flaunt their celebrity: Miuccia Prada, for example, who brings to her designs “consciousness of the history of beauty” and yet is not “fooling herself with pronouncements that she will revolutionize fashion with her latest move.” Nicole Kidman, the subject of a Vanity Fair profile, struck Sischy as modest, sincere, dependable, “a person who doesn’t let others down” and “hasn’t undergone the kind of narcissistic transformation that can turn extremely famous people into absolute bores or unbearable phonies.” Sischy seemed drawn, as well, to the vulnerable: photographer Bob Richardson, whose struggle with drugs and alcohol led to homelessness; Calvin Klein, whose retirement from fashion precipitated a substance abuse relapse; Jeff Koons, who “can be as hot-blooded as Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire”; John Galliano, “a highly functioning addict, relying on an almost lethal mix of alcohol and pills to stay on top of his game”; and Keith Haring, feverishly ambitious, who died of AIDS at 31. Sischy was also sensitive to “vicissitudes of taste” that affected artists’ reputations. “The notion that art speaks for itself is appealing but unrealistic,” she wrote in an essay about 19th-century photographer Clementina, Lady Hawarden, largely ignored during her lifetime.
A shrewd eye investigating worlds too often dominated by hype.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3203-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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