In this entertaining and informative book, Rose (Modigliani: The Pure Bohemian, 1991) chronicles the tumultuous life of a French woman whose exceptional talent and determination earned her the admiration of her more famous contemporaries. Born in 1865 to an unmarried seamstress, Suzanne Valadon used her formidable beauty to enter Montmartre’s bohemian circles as a painter’s model. She joined the cohort of Toulouse-Lautrec and other great artists, and her vibrant, unsentimental drawings of women and children led them to accept her as one of their own. (Degas in particular became a lifelong supporter of her work, buying many of her “wicked and supple drawings” for his own collection.) Nonetheless, Valadon’s accomplishments were often overshadowed by the scandal surrounding her fiery, unconventional life—which included many lovers, an illegitimate son, a stint as a bourgeois wife, and a passionate affair with a man half her age, who later became her second husband. Despite violent alcoholism, Valadon’s neglected son, Maurice Utrillo, became an artist in his own right, and the commercial success of his simple, melancholy cityscapes eventually came to support his mother’s critically acclaimed work. Her womanizing second husband became business manager for both. The “unholy trio” lived together, providing much gossip for artists and critics alike, until their financial ties were broken up by Utrillo’s late marriage. Valadon died three years later, in 1938. The mourners at her funeral included Picasso, Derain, and the director of Paris’s Fine Art Museum, though none of the daily papers reported the event. Rose does a fine job of tracing the development of the “pitiless . . . precise and firm” lines and vivid color that characterize Valadon’s best work. The book is filled with lively anecdotes about the famous artists, dealers, and performers of Valadon’s milieu. However, her tendency to simplify the complexities of Valadon’s relationship with her famous son (can we really consider her a devoted mother when she seems to have largely ignored Utrillo until the budding of his success?) can sometimes be disturbing. (8 pages color, 73 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19921-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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