Lucid and learned and propelled by a piercing dramatic irony.
In the fall and early winter of 1888, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin shared a studio in a yellow house in the south of France. Result? Much painting and whoring and, at the end, a meltdown and an ear-slicing.
Gayford (co-editor of the Grove Book of Art Writing and chief art critic for Bloomberg News) has crafted a brisk, engaging narrative about the brief co-habitation of two of the world’s most celebrated painters. Although the author focuses more frequently on the mercurial van Gogh and his varied vagaries, Gauguin comes off well, and the many reproductions offered here of the works he produced during his time with van Gogh form an eloquent testimony to his genius. Gauguin also emerges as a tolerant man who recognized the prodigious and prolific talent of his friend and endured the tortured Dutchman as long as possible. Things started well that remarkable fall. The two took walks, painted common subjects, visited local museums, read books together (Zola, for instance), visited the local prostitutes regularly, agreed on the splendors of Delacroix, argued about the merits of other painters. Gauguin’s career accelerated during the period (he sold several paintings through the offices of Theo van Gogh, the painter’s brother), occasioning some anxiety in Vincent, who was not doing so well. The bonhomie eventually weakened, and when van Gogh sliced off his ear (or a part thereof), Gauguin, after helping rescue his friend, entrained for Paris; the two never saw each other again. Gayford’s principal interest is with the paintings. He discusses the major ones (and some of the minor) with great care and sensitivity and sees in the artists’ work some cross-fertilization. The author ends with the deaths of all involved and speculates that van Gogh suffered from bipolar disorder.
Lucid and learned and propelled by a piercing dramatic irony.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-76901-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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