Although Neiman’s words are not often extraordinary, his images caught and characterized an era.
The nonagenarian artist reviews his long career as one of the country’s most popular and public painters.
Neiman’s most interesting pages deal with the earliest days of his life: family history, discovery of his ability, early fondness for boxers and poolrooms, days in the military. He landed at Normandy only days after D-Day. Following some formal study after the war, he headed for Chicago and a future that would one day glow as brightly as one of his signature paintings. Early on, he fell under the influence (and payroll) of Playboy’s Hugh Hefner, and he writes with an odd cagey frankness about the parties in Hefner’s mansion. He tells of his marriage to a woman whose capacity for tolerance seems mythical then proceeds into the less interesting final two-thirds of the volume, which often seem more like a chronicle of his adventures with celebrities from the worlds of sport, Hollywood, Vegas, politics and even the Mob. He declares repeatedly that he doesn’t really care that the professional art world shunned him at times—especially when he became a fixture on The Wide World of Sports and other shows. But he mentions this so many times that his claim rings hollow. Occasionally he offers something like cultural criticism (“We’re a country that craves stars”), and he reproduces a generous, colorful assortment of his work throughout the decades—so once again we see those familiar, iconic images of Muhammad Ali, Bobby Fischer, Mickey Mantle and so many others.
Although Neiman’s words are not often extraordinary, his images caught and characterized an era.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7627-7837-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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