A sparkling, thoroughly entertaining portrait of a brilliant popularizer who brought art to the masses.
The man who wanted to civilize us all.
Kenneth Clark’s (1903-1983) name is synonymous with the BBC’s massively popular 1969 series Civilisation, which he wrote and narrated. It helped him earn his peerage, but he was already a well-known personage at home before the series, as Stourton (Great Houses of London, 2012, etc.) shows in this outstanding, authorized biography. A distant Scottish relative invented the cotton spool, and henceforth the family was wealthy or, as Clark called his parents, the “idle rich.” He grew up an only child in a massive home living a solitary life, but he loved it. Bright, energetic, and hardworking, he went to the best schools. His privilege brought him opportunity, and he took advantage of it. Clark always had a profound love of art, but two of his mentors, Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, convinced him that it was his life’s duty to promulgate “taste,” to bring culture and beauty to the widest possible audience. This passion brought him early success: keepership of fine art at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum at 27 and, at 29, the youngest director of the National Gallery. King George V eventually convinced him to serve as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. Still, Clark found time to write. Leonardo da Vinci (1939) is now a classic, but he was “proudest” of The Nude (1956). After the Gallery, Clark taught at Oxford and gave popular and inspiring radio and TV talks, the “lifeblood of [his] reputation.” In 1966, the BBC’s David Attenborough approached Clark with an ambitious “project.” Clark’s wife thought it a “bad idea,” but he plunged into Civilisation with gusto; it was “heaven.” The three-year production was “unprecedented”; a huge success, it brought him “cult status.” After it ran in America on PBS, Clark’s reputation swelled. Stourton proves to be a highly capable guide to this significant 20th-century life.
A sparkling, thoroughly entertaining portrait of a brilliant popularizer who brought art to the masses.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35117-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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 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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