The paintings are remarkable, but the artist’s story only scrapes the surface.
A celebrated painter recalls his Americana roots and metropolitan adventures.
With broad helpings of grievous angel dust borrowed liberally from Sam Shepard, Tom Waits and Gram Parsons, Andoe depicts his dysfunctional personal life and recognizable artistry in distorted snapshots. The author recalls his unlikely elevation to fame as a painter, starting with a scrappy upbringing among rednecks and reprobates in Tulsa, Okla. The erratic opening half, focused on the author’s rebellious childhood, leads with self-centered grandiosity, like this report of his first teenage hangover. “At last I had mastered the low art of coming unmoored,” he writes. The overall effect is that of an urban poet trying to hustle some literary mileage out of generic rural tales of cars, drugs and girls that will echo with uncomfortable familiarity for anybody who grew up in the country’s dusty middle. The stories are punctuated by Andoe’s melancholic portraits of horses, stoner buddies and dull-eyed girlfriends. For all the clichés of adolescent lawbreaking and hot-blooded romantic misadventures presented, moments of truth emerge. Unlike the sharp-tongued noir facsimiles where Andoe is clearly trying to sound cool, the surprising candor of unguarded flashbacks come at the most unpoetic moments: the split second of his father’s heart attack, a hasty marriage proposal on a second date or the unexpected pitfalls of the marriage’s “twelve-year-long Mexican standoff.” His memories improve as we near the present day, shedding light on the absurdity of the art world but revealing very little about the artistic process.
The paintings are remarkable, but the artist’s story only scrapes the surface.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-124031-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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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