Thoroughly, even lovingly researched. But chatty, catty, and tendentious, too. (16 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)
Richly detailed, highly sympathetic portrait of the Guggenheim who rebelled against her family and then left to them her extraordinary collection of contemporary art.
Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) could not have wished for a more generous biographer than Dearborn (Mailer, 1999, etc.). Although Dearborn reminds us continually of Guggenheim’s prominent nose (“famously ugly,” “potato-ish,” “bulbous,” “putty-shaped blob”), she credits her for being a principal force in the public’s acceptance of mid-20th-century artists, especially Jackson Pollock, whom Guggenheim signed to an exclusive contract and whose works subsequently skyrocketed in value. The five years Dearborn devoted to researching and writing this text were well spent. She depicts with authority all of Guggenheim’s protégés and friends (Djuna Barnes, thank goodness, had “a lovely nose”); she comments knowledgeably on everything from modern art to early-20th-century celebrity (Emma Goldman and Isadora Duncan, among many others, make appearances); she dutifully chronicles Guggenheim’s failed marriages and leporine love life—a Herculean labor all by itself, since her bedmates were numerous, whether famous (Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett) or faceless but eager. Dearborn also keeps track of Guggenheim’s two children, Sinbad and Pegeen, seeing the latter’s death in 1967 (a drug addict, Pegeen choked on her own vomit) as a loss from which her mother never recovered. We get much family history along the way: Peggy was one of the “poor” Guggenheims (she left an estate of millions rather than hundreds of millions); her father went down on the Titanic; and fellow art collector Solomon was her uncle. The Guggenheim women were not supposed to work, so Peggy was an anomaly among them. Overall, Dearborn too often focuses on exteriors—how people looked, what they wore, where they stayed, how they tanned—and slights the more complicated and ultimately more interesting interiors.
Thoroughly, even lovingly researched. But chatty, catty, and tendentious, too. (16 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-12806-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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