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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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