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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
