A noble attempt to bring a legend down to earth.
Another stab at decoding the real da Vinci.
“The only fully valid source of knowledge, for Leonardo, was looking at real things and phenomena,” writes Kemp (History of Art/Trinity Coll., Oxford), who in six chapters examines just what it was Leonardo looked at, learned, and passed on to posterity. Leonardo’s notion of looking is encapsulated in the English verb “to see,” avers the author; it means both “to look at” and “to understand” or “comprehend.” Outlining Leonardo’s experimental investigations, such as dissections, observations of nature, and fortifications, Kemp links them to his extraordinary notebooks and paintings. The sheer weight of the artist’s ambition caused a number of problems. Far from being a genius who methodically produced one extraordinary scientific discovery or painting after another, Kemp demonstrates that Leonardo failed to finish several commissions and apparently never sold a painting; the observations in his famous notebooks were often brilliant, occasionally disorganized and haphazard. The weight of Leonardo’s ambition sometimes caused his graphic technique to collapse as his drawings recorded everything his fertile mind observed on a small piece of paper. Similarly, Kemp’s attempt to explicate the polymath Leonardo in a short book from time to time suffers from the weight of its ambition. The chapters on art (the author’s specialty) read much more easily than the ones on scientific issues, which make earnest but hard going as technical terms are tossed about as if a casual reader should understand them. But Kemp’s experience offers just as many pleasures and benefits; after a career spent researching the artist, he’s well suited to provide a personal account of Leonardo, enriched by anecdotes and contemporary analogies. At the close, he succinctly reviews why Leonardo is worth studying, using the Mona Lisaas a case in point and giving a marvelous description of the experience of seeing the painting out of its frame and bullet-proof case. It makes an exceptional finale.
A noble attempt to bring a legend down to earth.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-19-280546-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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
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