With the assistance of children’s author Tate (Kate Larkin, the Bone Expert, 2008, etc.), blind artist Bramblitt chronicles his childhood and his art without resorting to pathos or sentimentality.
From an early age, the author accepted the two halves of his life, sick and well, and integrated the two. In his memoir, he offers no complaints of the poor medical care he received from age 4 in his Texas hometown. He suffered from undiagnosed congenital kidney disease for three years, then months of Lyme disease, again undiagnosed, and eventually the epilepsy that would lead to total blindness. He was lucky, however, in that he always had friends by his side. They may not have always understood his difficulties, but they supported him. The author’s determination to complete school and teach, in spite of missed classes and incompletes, illustrates the remarkable tenacity with which he has attacked life. Early on, Bramblitt drew from memory—“all my favorite drawings were stored in my brain in all their intricate detail.” Surely this ability is what led him to find and develop haptic visualization, a way of seeing the small parts of an object in order to make them a whole. The sense of touch is a large part of the nature of that perception, and Bramblitt’s work is a good example of an artist who proves Picasso’s comment that a painter “paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.” An artist’s story about more than just his talent and his techniques.
Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7627-8007-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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