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 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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