Genuinely rewarding and thoroughly enjoyable.
An illuminating double biography of philanthropist art collectors Sterling and Stephen Clark.
As background to the brothers’ lives and troubled relationship, art critic Weber (Patron Saints, 1992, etc.) provides vivid profiles of the elders who shaped them: their shrewd, straitlaced grandfather Edward; his partner, the colorful and scandalous Isaac Singer; their talented and generous father Alfred, who had clandestine relationships with a handsome Norwegian tenor and a French sculptor; their respectable, churchgoing mother Elizabeth. Born in 1877 and ’82 respectively, Sterling and Stephen developed a deep passion for art, particularly 19th-century French painting. For a time, they went to galleries together and consulted each other about purchases, but Sterling’s 1927 lawsuit against the family over his inheritance turned them into enemies. The brothers did not speak again until the death of Stephen’s son in 1952. Nevertheless, their lives ran on parallel tracks as both continued to enthusiastically buy—and generously give away—some of the world’s greatest art. Stephen served as a deeply involved trustee of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; he also made major donations to Yale University. Sterling founded the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. Besides tracking the wealthy collectors on their art-collecting expeditions, Weber includes a fascinating account of Sterling’s possible involvement in a plot to overthrow President Roosevelt and replace him with a fascist dictator, and he explores in some depth Stephen’s controversial firing of Alfred Barr as director of the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Weber’s insights into the Clarks’ complex personalities are supplemented by his knowledgeable analyses of the art they collected, including such individual paintings as Van Gogh’s The Night Café, Cezanne’s The Card Players, Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room and Seurat’s Circus Sideshow.
Genuinely rewarding and thoroughly enjoyable.Pub Date: May 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-26347-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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