A gorgeous, thoughtful, and quietly provocative assemblage of art.
An artistic exploration of four prominent women from the Torah.
Debut author Lewis has long been fascinated by the intersection of Judaism and art, and she finally found time to devote herself to examining it in depth after she retired in 2000 from her position as a college biology professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. She began taking art classes and eventually rented studio spaces and exhibited her work in art shows. Inspired by an exhibit of artist Natalie Frank’s work, which offered “feminist re-imaginings” of the Brothers Grimm’s famous fairy tales, the author set out to conduct an artistic investigation of four biblical matriarchs: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah. Lewis created 12 original paintings of them, done in acrylics and pastels, all beautifully reproduced in this coffee table–worthy hardcover. Each image is accompanied by relevant biblical quotes, fleshing out each story’s context, as well as Lewis’ own commentary, including an account of her artistic process. Her approach is personal but panoramic, and in her artworks, the reader gets the opportunity to see each figure from a variety of angles. For example, Sarah is portrayed as the “face of power,” the “face of joy,” and “the face of brokenness.” Lewis doesn’t produce an iconoclastic deconstruction of these women in this book; instead, she attempts to capture their lives as they lived them, mostly as “spouse, homemaker, child bearer, and caregiver.” As the author herself points out, her art style is clearly inspired by Russian-French artist Marc Chagall’s work, with its dreamy juxtaposition of images, its hint of surrealist imagination, and its use of brilliant color. Overall, Lewis’ collection of artworks is an engrossing one. She aims for a realistic fidelity to her subjects, but, for her, that doesn’t mean photographic realism. She powerfully captures the complexities of all four of these intriguing figures, all “exemplary yet flawed,” and by extension, she provides profound illustrations of different aspects of humanity. The author also manages to deliver astonishingly complete expressions of the four women despite the limited information that’s available about them: “what we do know suggests they are women of strength: they speak their minds and act; they show loyalty to God and their spouses and families,” she writes. Her descriptions and commentaries offer lucid, even plain, language, permitting the pictures, and the pertinent quotations from Scripture, to take center stage. She also limits the scope of her commentaries on the art itself, mostly offering observations about technical production; this gives readers the interpretive space to freely fashion their own responses to it. What emerges is a moving glimpse into the lives of a group of famous but mysterious women—thrillingly concrete images that gesture in the direction of something more intimate. This book will be an unconventional treat for anyone who shares the author’s interests in modern art and the history of Judaism. The book also hints at a broad, if less modern, interpretation of feminism along the way.
A gorgeous, thoughtful, and quietly provocative assemblage of art.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-946295-02-6
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Sociosights Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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