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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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