Even those who don’t especially care for Benton’s work might agree that an artist whose work is so enduringly popular merits...
Judgmental biography of the controversial American painter.
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) was controversial because he was a realist in an age when artists and curators, though not necessarily the general public, considered abstraction the most advanced, exciting form of art. He also vigorously defended himself and fellow regionalists like his friend Grant Wood by attacking the elitist art world in terms that even at the time were judged homophobic and jingoistic. Yet, as Wolff (Art History/Univ. of Maine; Richard Caton Woodville, 2002) demonstrates, Benton was no ignorant philistine. Born into a prominent Missouri political family, he studied in Paris, was affiliated (albeit uneasily) with Alfred Stieglitz’s circle in New York and grappled for many years with abstraction before turning to the muscular, writhing figures that impart dynamism—and occasionally stereotypes—to such famous murals as The Arts of Life in America and A Social History of the State of Missouri. Benton’s best work did not airbrush American history; he had read Marx in his youth and remained influenced by Marxist analysis long after he turned to the right politically. In the 1930s, when he was at the height of his fame, his art and opinions fit comfortably under the umbrella of New Deal liberalism. Wolff does a decent job of explicating Benton’s belief that art had a public purpose and should be accessible to the common people, but his distaste for the vast majority of the artist’s work is so plain that readers may wonder why he chose to write this biography—particularly after reading the final chapter’s closing lines, in which the author speculates on what this convinced realist might have achieved as an abstract painter. It’s jarring, as is Wolff’s habit of jumping decades ahead in chronology within a single paragraph.
Even those who don’t especially care for Benton’s work might agree that an artist whose work is so enduringly popular merits a more sympathetic assessment.Pub Date: March 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-19987-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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