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MODIGLIANI

A LIFE

This narrative is taken over by doubtful speculations and by a faithful, but wearying catalogue of an oeuvre renowned for...

It shouldn’t be possible to write a dull life of Amedeo Modigliani, but Meyers (Impressionist Quartet, 2005) manages the task.

The most cursed of the artists maudit who crowded bohemian Paris in the early-20th century, Modigliani burned his candle at both ends and in the middle to boot, dying in obscure poverty only a few years before collectors discovered his work. Among his peers, Modi’s vast talent was legendary, as was his charismatic personality and his striking physical beauty. But in the age of Cubism and abstraction, he dedicated himself to the sensuous, figurative painting evident in his renowned series of erotic nudes and couldn’t help but be overshadowed by his friend and rival Picasso. Though Modigliani never received the recognition he craved, he lived a brief life of extraordinary abandon. A devotee of Nietzsche and of Lautréamont, and a gifted poet himself, this pampered son from a family of bourgeois Italian Jews became the most terrible of Paris’s enfants terribles. Even in a community notorious for its excesses, Modi stood out for the wretched intensity of his drinking and drug use and for the grand passion of his many unhappy love affairs. By the age of 35, he was dead of tuberculosis. Unfortunately for Meyers, Modigliani left almost no letters or diaries behind, and the only written records that survive come from heavily poeticized tributes written after his death. Lacking the material to construct a distinctive portrait, Meyers seeks to render Modigliani by invoking strained comparisons to other men he may have resembled. (“Though the two artists never met, the tragic career of . . . French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Breszka . . . illuminates Modi’s character.”)

This narrative is taken over by doubtful speculations and by a faithful, but wearying catalogue of an oeuvre renowned for its lack of variety.

Pub Date: March 20, 2006

ISBN: 0-15-101178-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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