Casts new and unexpectedly sympathetic light on arguably the dominant figure in the early-20th-century art world. (86 photos...
After a decade-long sojourn among musicians (Stephen Sondheim, 1998, etc.), Secrest returns to her previous specialty (Being Bernard Berenson, 1979, etc.) with a portrait of the world’s greatest art dealer.
The flamboyant Lord Duveen (1869–1939) is still notorious in Britain for persuading aristocrats to sell him such items of their country’s cultural patrimony as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. He invariably sold this plunder to American “squillionaires” as he called them, in time becoming a squillionaire himself. Making use of the newly unsealed Duveen Archive, Secrest documents the family’s origins and the complicated history of the Duveen firm with all its internecine quarrels. Specifically, the author clarifies the term “Duveen,” which today is tossed about as if it all referred to Joe (as he was informally known). In fact, there was first his father’s antiques shop, which Joe took over, but also several competing firms set up by brothers and cousins, all of whom Joe scared off, bought off, absorbed, or sued. Due to such business maneuvers and his long association with art historian Berenson, who authenticated Italian masters for him and sometimes made convenient changes of attribution, Duveen has always been considered a slippery character, and his biographer’s tone is breezy and superior, bordering on condescending. (She also occasionally gets in over her head with art history.) Duveen’s considerable charm, however, survives the treatment he receives from Secrest, who acknowledges his acts of philanthropy to British museums and the manipulation of his stable of American clients to establish great public collections, improve private collections, or donate to already established institutions. The author struggles to keep Duveen in the context of his own age, but frequently judges him based on contemporary standards of conservation and ethics. She does make it clear that museums in Britain and the US would be far worse off without the great Duveen, warts and all.
Casts new and unexpectedly sympathetic light on arguably the dominant figure in the early-20th-century art world. (86 photos and illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41042-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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