A portrait fascinating in its details and themes.
A biography that rescues sculptor-painter-dancer-actor Paul Swan from near-obscurity.
When Andy Warhol filmed interviews with Swan in 1965, he reignited interest in the man, then 82. The Londravilles perform a similar function, as Swan is today largely forgotten. In what some may consider a quintessential portrait of a gay artist in the first half of the 20th century, the authors meticulously trace Swan’s life from his early personal and artistic struggles in a culturally parched Midwest to his success and then pathetic demise in New York City. Born to fundamentalist Methodist parents in Nebraska, Swan soon found solace in pursing his emerging talents as a painter and illustrator. A surrogate parent sped him to Manhattan when he was 19 and there he went on to dance, act and sculpt. In Hollywood for a time, he donned togas to appear in the first film versions of Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. He danced nude at salons in Paris and New York. Studying in Greece, he became preoccupied with Hellenic images of youth and beauty—his portraits (some still hanging at the Players’ Club in Manhattan) altered flaws and idealized his subjects. A rather stunning, intense beauty himself (Gershwin referred to Swan’s looks in a song lyric), Swan pursued men and women. He married Helen Gavit and fathered two daughters, while also engaging in passionate affairs with men. But as Swan’s artistic reputation grew with age, so did his deep distress over aging. Applying shoe black to his bald pate, lobbing on more mascara than Nefertiti and stuffing his pants with socks, he ended life as Mann’s Aschenbach incarnate.
A portrait fascinating in its details and themes.Pub Date: March 23, 2006
ISBN: 0-8032-2969-0
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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