A thorough account of an actual “Renaissance man”—in every way.
Cultural historian Witham (Picasso and the Chess Player: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and the Battle for the Soul of Modern Art, 2013, etc.) returns with a wide-ranging account of the life, work and legacy of Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca (1412–1492).
The author writes that he was drawn to Piero because of the interplay of art, religion and science in his work, and throughout this illuminating treatment, he unwinds and examines each of these cultural threads. First, Witham examines Piero’s life, a life, the author admits, whose details are hard to come by. (Iterations of “probably,” “no doubt” and the like appear often.) Still, some key documents have emerged over the years, and the author follows Piero from his boyhood in Sansepolcro, Italy (60 miles from Florence), to Florence, Ferrara, Rome (where he did some work for the Vatican), Urbino and elsewhere. Witham notes that Piero was wont to take on more commissions than he could handle, sometimes taking years to fulfill agreements. The author also pauses periodically to describe and appreciate Piero’s key artistic works—The Baptism of Christ, The Flagellation of Christ and others—as well as his various publications, including Abacus Treatise and On Perspective for Painting. The biographical focus on Piero ends about a third of the way through the volume (the artist died on the day Columbus arrived in the New World); in the remaining chapters, Witham deals with Piero’s slow rediscovery—by art historians and collectors and, even more interestingly, by mathematicians and scientists. Throughout, the author deals with concepts of vision, light, beauty and mind, drawing on the works and theories of numerous philosophers (from the ancient to the present world), psychologists and neuroscientists to illuminate the various debates about the nature of reality and of the mind.
A thorough account of an actual “Renaissance man”—in every way.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-494-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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