At times too brief, but written with clarity and compassion: a portrait Chagall would have enjoyed.
A brisk and very sympathetic biography of the celebrated painter by fiction-writer Wilson (An Ambulance Is on the Way, 2005, etc.).
This recent entry in the publisher’s Jewish Encounters series both benefits and suffers from brevity. The author provides some careful, even artful descriptions, but the absence of reproductions is unfortunate; that old saw about pictures and thousands of words still holds true. Because Chagall (1887–85) lived in so many places, his biographer arranges most chapters by location. We learn about the painter’s birth in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, his education in St. Petersburg and Paris, his return to Vitebsk to marry Bella Rosenfeld, the love of his youth, their moves to Berlin, Paris, Vilna and elsewhere. Wilson swiftly relates the Chagalls’ 1941 flight from occupied France to Spain and then New York City, rightly chiding Chagall for his curious reluctance two decades later to help the man who arranged their escape. The text records Bella’s tragic death, her widower’s two brisk remarriages and his relationships with his two children. Ably charting Chagall’s rise to superstardom, the author addresses controversies surrounding his subject. He offers interesting thoughts on the Jewish artist’s continual use of images of Jesus and the crucifixion. To the prevalent suggestion that when the big bucks started arriving, Chagall softened, painted with bright colors and coasted, Wilson replies: Not so.
At times too brief, but written with clarity and compassion: a portrait Chagall would have enjoyed.Pub Date: March 13, 2007
ISBN: 0-8052-4201-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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