Vast in scope and detailed in execution, this biography evokes the artist with an ambitiousness he surely would have recognized. Most people recall Diego Rivera as a painter of complex, highly symbolic and politically charged murals; few know he was equally inventive with his own life. In writing this biography—the first of Rivera in some 35 years—Marnham has undertaken a formidable challenge: pulling apart fact and fantasy. Rivera’s own friend, Bertram Wolfe (who wrote the only other biography existent) referred to the lies Rivera told as the “labyrinth of fables.” The artist claimed, for example, that at age 11 he enlisted as the youngest soldier in the Mexican army and that as an art student in Mexico City, he fell in with a crowd of medical students who regularly dined on the flesh of their cadavers. Marnham does an excellent job debunking these myths. In their place, he offers a compelling—and even somewhat sympathetic—portrait of Rivera as a talented, hardworking young painter who evolved into a fervent communist and blustering egomaniac. His appetites were huge; so was his ambition: Rivera was powered by a desire to make paintings with relevance to Mexico’s political present as well as its past and future. To his credit, Marnham skillfully describes the complex spheres of power, influence, idealism, and corruption that influenced the communist movement in the 1920s and the artist himself. Nor does he slight Rivera’s emotional life: he duly notes virtually all of Rivera’s known paramours and wives (Frida Kahlo was, after all, his third). But somehow, Marnham never quite manages to convey the strange passion that must have bound Kahlo to this huge, fleshy, forceful, adulterous man. Their interaction, while grounded in their art, seems clinical: dependent and passionate, but distant. Marnham excels as a biographer of history and personality, less so as a biographer of creativity and obsession. But all of those qualities were integral to Rivera’s life.
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-43042-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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