The Paris-based author of Giacometti: A Biography (1985) follows his recent remembrance of Picasso's model, Dora and Picasso, with sharply detailed profiles of six other interesting figures. He begins with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, explaining the ambition behind their relationship and the power of the tyrannical author's personality, while showing her close up, running errands and walking the dog. Lord convincingly makes the startling claim that the subject of Picasso's great portrait now at the Metropolitan Museum ``had a certain basic indifference to the visual arts.'' ``It was her private, subjective experience alone that determined the character of her objective convictions,'' he writes. ``Despite the unerring discrimination of her taste as a young woman, she may always have been more interested in painters than she was in painting.'' Three of Lord's other subjects he also met in post-war Europe, their lives marked by the political and cultural upheaval: The French actress Arletty, the star of Children of Paradise, whose liaison with a German officer cut off her career; Marie-Laure de Noailles, who wielded her fortune to collect art and patronize the surrealists; Errieta Perdikidi, a Greek woman who braved the Nazi occupation and civil war with singular grace. The author's most moving portrait is of his mother, Louise Bennett Lord, who wrestles with her conscience and the conventions of an upper-class American upbringing to decide whether to subsidize her son's writing or force him to earn a living. This struggle is mapped out in a series of wonderful letters from mother to son whose clear measured prose reveals her bedrock kindness, tolerance, and honesty. ``I am willing to finance this artistic enterprise within reason,'' she wrote, ``but I fear that I shall have to be the judge as to what reason is.'' In his penetrating commentary on his relationships with these six women, Lord reveals much about himself and examines the nature of friendship, loyalty, patronage, creativity, and moral courage. The book has the effect of a small exhibition of candid, finely rendered portrait sketches. Drawn in prose at once formal and immediate, the encounters are not quickly forgotten. (Photographs, not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-26553-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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