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
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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