The deeply felt tribute to Le Corbusier’s work is enriched by Weber’s engrossing, entertaining portrait of his complex...
Exhaustive biography of one of the most innovative and influential architects of the 20th century.
Cultural historian Weber (The Clarks of Cooperstown, 2007, etc.) had access to reams of revealing correspondence between Le Corbusier (1887–1965) and his mentor, Swiss music critic William Ritter; his wife; his American mistress; and his parents, especially his mother. Drawing on these archives, the author has produced a vivid, nearly day-by-day account of the architect’s peripatetic professional life and his previously undisclosed personal one. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in the Swiss Alps, he attended art school there; excerpts from the letters reveal his early struggles to free himself from a provincial background, his sexual frustrations and his volatile personality. He moved to Paris at age 29, soon adopted a new name and with the artist Amédée Ozenfant began promoting the artistic movement of Purism. A sculptor and painter as well as a visionary architect, Le Corbusier produced dozens of works on art, architecture and city planning. Weber clearly illustrates the development of his theories about the use of architecture to transform the human condition by combining modern industrial materials such as concrete, steel and glass with nature and light to provide ideal environments for all. The author quotes freely from correspondence that shows Le Corbusier to have been opportunistic, proud and authoritarian, willing to reshape facts to suit his vision of himself and holder of a long grudge against America. At the same time, he was generous and imaginative, fiercely attached to his mother, an ardent lover of female beauty. Weber visited most existing Le Corbusier buildings, which he describes here in glowing terms. L’Unité d’Habitation, an apartment complex in Marseille, is “a turning point in the history of how human beings live”; the General Assembly building in Chandigarh, India, “represents an apogee of imagination and courage”; the chapel at Ronchamp, is “a miraculous realm beyond total comprehension.”
The deeply felt tribute to Le Corbusier’s work is enriched by Weber’s engrossing, entertaining portrait of his complex personality.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-41043-7
Page Count: 944
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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 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
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