A rivetingly detailed, unforgivingly blunt biography of the photographer whose celebrity portraits and depictions of the sadomasochistic gay subculture ignited public controversy. More voyeuristic titillation than serious art historical examination, Morrisroe's study of Mapplethorpe (19461989) gains credibility from her exhaustive research: The New Yorkbased journalist interviewed the artist about his life on numerous occasions before his death from AIDS, spoke at length to former lovers and art world associates, and won the confidence of his long-estranged parents. The book opens with heavy irony at Mapplethorpe's Catholic funeral in Floral Park, Queens, the artist's boyhood home. His youth was an awkward period of slow self-discovery in the shadow of a gregarious older brother and domineering father. At Brooklyn's Pratt Institute in the '60s, the ROTC cadet blossomed into an acid-eating hippie art student. He soon found his muse in aspiring rock poet Patti Smith; the pair moved to Manhattan and held court from the Chelsea Hotel. The author depicts Mapplethorpe as a conniving seducer who wrote his own ticket to the art world by winning the love and support of Sam Wagstaff, a prominent and monied photography collector. With his patronage, Mapplethorpe flourished, turning his personal fascinations into compelling photo series, most frequently of gay S&M rituals, black men, bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, eroticized flowers, and celebrities. Morrisroe treats Mapplethorpe as a kind of sexualized social savant with a magic touch, making much ado of his shameless career manipulations pitting galleries and power players against one another. Pathos comes to the fore in the chapters on the '80s, in which the dying artist achieves ever-greater levels of fame and controversy. Rich in sharp observation and risquÇ revelation, an immorality tale that shamelessly mines Mapplethorpe's sad legacy for all it's worth. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to Vanity Fair; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-57650-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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