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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
