A well-written, compassionate portrait of a paragon of human talent and ambition.
Balanced, generously illustrated biography of the revolutionary artist (1887–1985).
Financial Times chief visual-arts critic Wullschlager (Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, 2001, etc.) begins quietly. Russian-born Chagall, having escaped the Nazis, moved to the United States and settled with his devoted wife, Bella, and grown daughter, Ida, in Manhattan, where his art had not yet attracted the notoriety it does today. The author notes that Chagall never much departed from his “triple fixations”—Judaism, Russia and love—and the remainder of the text convincingly supports her thesis. Born in Vitebsk, Movsha Khatskelev Shagal (the name alteration came later) was the son of the working class, one of nine children. His education was spotty, but in 1903 he took his first formal art lessons and continued making art until the end of his life. Wullschlager charts his early financial struggles; his repeated returns to Vitebsk when funds ran out; his long, sometimes absentee, courtship of Bella; his sojourns in St. Petersburg, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere; his involvement in the 1917 revolution, in which he served as a government official; and his interest in theatrical design. He was living in France when the Nazis attacked, and Hitler pointed to Chagall’s works as instances of decadent Jewish art. He eventually escaped and lived for years in the United States without learning English. When World War II ended, he returned to France, where he lived the remainder of his life. Later he visited Russia but refused to see Vitebsk, which was devastated by the war. Thrice married and twice a father, Chagall lived to become wealthy and revered.
A well-written, compassionate portrait of a paragon of human talent and ambition.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-41455-8
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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