Richly researched, intelligent, and graceful, but some readers may wonder if Gehry has a dark side.
An admiring life of the celebrated architect who designed, among other notable structures, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
Vanity Fair contributing editor Goldberger, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize (Distinguished Criticism, 1984), has published other works on architecture (Building Up and Tearing Down, 2009, etc.) and has known Gehry for decades. His affection and admiration are patent throughout the book. Although he acknowledges some of Gehry’s personal weaknesses—e.g., he does not like firing people and passes on such tasks to subordinates—the closest he comes to something full-on negative is when he comments that when Gehry’s recent design for an Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., received some noisy opposition, it was just “one of those moments when Babe Ruth strikes out.” In many ways, Goldberger presents a traditional biography. He begins with a key event (the opening of a New York City apartment tower in 2011; he returns to it some 350 pages later) and then chronicles some family history before following Gehry, born in Canada in 1929 as Frank Owen Goldberg, a name he would change in 1954. The author takes us through Gehry’s schooling, his decision to try architecture, his early struggles, and his eventual ascension to what has been a career to rival that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Goldberger highlights Gehry’s pioneering use of design software, credits his most valuable associates (some of whom he later fired), and comments periodically about his relationships with his children (from two marriages), whom he didn’t see much, although one son joined the firm and has risen to prominence there. The author ends with the heartaches that all long-living human beings must endure—deaths of loved ones and the decline of health, mental acuity, and creative power.
Richly researched, intelligent, and graceful, but some readers may wonder if Gehry has a dark side.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-70153-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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