Engrossing and revealing material, supplemented by innumerable reproductions of Picasso’s paintings and many period photos.
The biography’s long-awaited third volume finds the prolific artist at work in Italy, Spain and France.
Richardson (Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters: Beaton, Capote, Dalí, Picasso, Freud, Warhol, and More, 2001, etc.) lives up to expectations, delivering another fastidious examination of the painter’s life. He opens with Picasso and poet/filmmaker Jean Cocteau in Rome, working together on materials for Sergei Diaghilev’s 1917 ballet, Parade. Richardson makes note of Picasso and Cocteau’s dalliances with the dancers and documents the painter’s flirtation with the Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova, which ultimately resulted in marriage. Their tumultuous relationship forms a generous portion of this weighty tome. The author spots early warning signs that their relationship was doomed. Picasso continued indulging his addiction to whorehouses, for example, while sequestering Olga in his Parisian villa in 1917 and ’18. This period also saw the cementing of his friendship with musician Erik Satie. The most interesting sections contain Richardson’s interpretations of Picasso’s art in relation to his always-unstable personal life. The paintings of Olga in particular, the biographer notes, undergo a remarkable transformation from affectionate portraits to images “seething with ridicule and rage.” The birth of their son Paulo in 1921 did nothing to halt Picasso’s affairs with other women. In 1927, he began his famous liaison with teenage Marie-Thérèse Walter, chronicled in lurid detail that documents the artist’s sadomasochistic tendencies. Asides on Cocteau’s and Satie’s lives provide a welcome diversion as this period unfolds. Richardson chronicles Cocteau’s hopeless opium addiction and notes that Picasso was so close to Satie that he found it “too painful” to attend the composer’s funeral. The author also makes some interesting points on latter-day bidding wars over Picasso’s works, describing Dream, painted not long before the volume closes in 1932, as “sullied” by its $139 million price tag and its current resting place in a Las Vegas casino.
Engrossing and revealing material, supplemented by innumerable reproductions of Picasso’s paintings and many period photos.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-26665-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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