Richardson (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a memoir, 1999), once head of Christie’s US operations and now a contributor to...
Engaging essays about an odd mix of artists, writers, tycoons, trendsetters, and con guys from the worlds of literature and art.
Richardson, noted author of the ongoing three-volume Picasso life (A Life of Picasso, Vol. II: 1907–1917, 1996, etc.), has taken time off from that work to bring us some lighter but equally mesmerizing mini-biographies. His 28 delightfully gossipy essays are also extremely insightful, taking us behind the scenes in the lives of the famous, if not always the rich and famous. These are articles about people the author has known, or would like to have known, intrigued by their genius or quirkiness. And readers will be, too. Richardson’s flawless style, incisive wit, and extensive knowledge make the volume a pleasure. Openings are colorful: “Most people who had dealings with Salvador Dalí’s Russian wife, Gala, would agree that to know her was to loathe her.” “Those cultivated American playboys of the 1920s who drew upon sizable trust funds to support their forays into the avant-garde and lavish bohemian lifestyle tended to end sadly or badly.” Although it helps if you’re already familiar with the cast of characters—like Dr. Albert Barnes of the Barnes Museum in Merion, Pennsylvania, whom Richardson says had an “acute case of paranoia”; Lucian Freud, the youngest of Sigmund’s three sons, who set his art school on fire by smoking at night; or Pablito Picasso, the grandson of Pablo who committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of bleach—the author provides just enough history and background to fill in readers who may be newcomers. Ten pages or so on average, these crisply written pieces focus on the compelling idiosyncrasies of each subject, whetting the appetite and impelling readers to move on to full-length biographies.
Richardson (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a memoir, 1999), once head of Christie’s US operations and now a contributor to Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, etc., proves again that he’s one of our foremost biographers.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-42490-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
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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