A rigorously researched and often fascinating history that morphs into memoir.
An art historian offers six largely flattering portraits of key members of the famed Bauhaus group that flourished in Germany in the 1920s, then died when the Nazis enforced their own definitions of art and its functions.
Weber (Le Corbusier: A Life, 2008, etc.) profiles some of the most iconic figures in modern-art history, including Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, who, the author demonstrates, were fine friends, not rivals. The journey begins with Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school, and this section provides the rough structure for the subsequent ones. General comments about his significance segue into a biographical sketch and a detailed examination of his career at the Bauhaus, followed by another quick summary of the subject’s post-Bauhaus career and death. Weber quotes liberally from correspondence, provides a wealth of illustrations and offers his running assessment of each person’s contributions to art history. The author clearly admires—even reveres—these six figures. Klee “brought the liberating spirit of surrealism to the Bauhaus”; Kandinsky “altered the course of world art.” Weber reserves his most intimate praise for Josef and Anni Albers, whom he befriended late in their lives and whose eponymous charitable foundation he now directs. The author, in fact, was the executor of Anni’s will, and relates an uncomfortable anecdote about the odd pleasure he took in informing actor Maximilian Schell that Anni had excluded him from mention or bequest. In the final 200 pages Weber adopts the first-person voice, becoming a character in the story.
A rigorously researched and often fascinating history that morphs into memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-26836-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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