A perceptive, richly detailed biography.
The artistic career of Romare Bearden (1911-1988) reflects political, social, and aesthetic transformations.
Spelman College president Campbell (Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America, 1994, etc.) met Bearden in 1973 when she was a graduate student in fine arts at Syracuse University, spurring her interest in his work and leading to her curating her first museum show, Mysteries: Women in the Art of Romare Bearden. Drawing on her interviews with the artist and his first biographer, along with considerable archival and published material, Campbell offers a discerning portrait of Bearden’s long and successful career. Bearden grew up partly in Harlem, with his parents, and partly in Charlotte and Pittsburgh, where he lived with relatives. His mother, an activist, journalist, and New York City school board member, welcomed assorted artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals into her Harlem home, giving her son access to the creative spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. As a college student, he had two passions: baseball and cartoons, which appeared in undergraduate publications and political journals such as Crisis, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. Bearden’s more serious work as an artist began in the 1930s, a period that Campbell sees as “a cauldron of competing approaches to art” and controversy over how to represent African-American experience. Besides painting, Bearden worked as a case worker, which fueled an awareness of social injustice that emerged in his muckraking cartoons. Like the murals of Diego Rivera, whom he admired, his canvases showed “overtones of labor strife and the burden of poverty, and the strains they put on life.” The advent of modernism challenged Bearden to reassess his commitment to a naturalistic, social realist style; after a formative five-month stay in Paris in 1950, he returned feeling “unmoored from the markers of race and community.” The rise of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, however, caused another transformation, spurring him to reconcile “the multiple inheritances that made up his identity.” A 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art made Bearden a celebrity.
A perceptive, richly detailed biography.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-505909-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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