art's most distinctive figures. (16 color and 31 b&w illus., not seen)
Eloquently and movingly, music critic and biographer Matossian (Xenakis, not reviewed) plumbs the mystery surrounding
painter Arshile Gorky, born Manoug Adoian (1902–1948). Matossian lyrically sketches Manoug's troubled childhood in Khorkum near picturesque Lake Van, Armenia, in which the boy, though late in speaking and often silent, early showed a proclivity for drawing and painting. Tragedy, later reflected in his paintings, pervaded the artist's childhood: He endured the Turkish anti-Armenian pogrom of 1908 and the attempted genocide of 1915–20; his father fled to America when he was six; and as refugees in 1919, he and his sister Vartoosh witnessed the death from privation of their beloved mother Shushan, whom the artist would obsessively paint for the rest of his life. In 1920, Manoug and Vartoosh fled for America, where he eventually drifted into New York art circles, assumed the name Gorky, and quickly established himself as an important artist in the tradition of Cezanne and Picasso: later, he was influenced by Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. While not neglecting Gorky's art—some important works are analyzed in depth, and Gorky's often inventive techniques are described in detail—Matossian is also interested in the painter’s complex psychology, his usually easygoing but sometimes turbulent personality, his delight in line and color, his tumultuous relationships with women. Basing her narrative on interviews with surviving members of the artist's family, Matossian recounts the tragedies that continued to punctuate his life: Between 1946 and 1948, most of his paintings were destroyed in a fire; he suffered first cancer and then paralysis in a car accident; and he was abandoned by his wife, who betrayed him with Matta. Deprived of his work and his family, he committed suicide. A powerfully researched, thoughtful, and sensitive biography of a tragic hero of American painting, and one of 20th-century
art's most distinctive figures. (16 color and 31 b&w illus., not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58567-006-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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