Sorting through the detritus of the artist’s short life, the author ultimately connects those events in great detail, but...
Prolific biographer Secrest (Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject, 2007, etc.) introduces us to Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), and he’s not nearly as exciting as the myths that surround the “accursed” artist.
The author provides an overabundance of details about her subject’s childhood and his diseases: pleurisy, typhoid, scarlet fever and the tubercular meningitis that eventually killed him. When Secrest finally focuses on Modigliani the artist and his search for the simplicity of the perfect “line,” the author diligently illustrates his quest for fulfillment. The city of Paris engrossed him completely and showed the peripatetic artist how to find his own style through long discussions in the cafés with Soutine, Picasso, Utrillo et al. The author discredits many of the legendary exploits surrounding the artist as enhancements of friends who were easily as inebriated as he. There’s no doubt, however, that he had multiple addictions. Secrest posits that his use of alcohol and laudanum began as an anesthetic to control his consumptive cough, and that he sacrificed his love of sculpture due to the physical strain involved. Eventually he discovered the perfection of his line in nudes. While rejecting cubism, Modigliani idolized Picasso, whose influence shows throughout his work. Although many classify his work as the School of Paris, when asked in what manner he painted, he would reply simply “Modigliani.” As one of the most widely copied artists of the period, his swan-necked portraits single him out as his very own “ism.”
Sorting through the detritus of the artist’s short life, the author ultimately connects those events in great detail, but sometimes a bit too meticulously. The myths were more fun.Pub Date: March 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26368-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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