An exuberant attempt to penetrate the mysteries surrounding the astounding paintings and brief, turbulent life of the Italian artist who has come to be known as Caravaggio. As Robb (Midnight in Sicily, 1998) points out, even the painter’s real name (probably Michelangelo Merisi) is a matter of conjecture, as is his birthplace (Robb opts for Milan). The name Caravaggio comes from a small town in which, according to tradition, the painter had been born, perhaps in 1571 or 1573. His end is as uncertain as his beginning: He disappeared in July, 1610, and was widely assumed to have been murdered, though his body was never discovered. So little known a figure would seem an unpromising subject for a biography. Yet out of the slender documentation, a close and often deeply convincing reading of Caravaggio’s several dozen surviving paintings, and an admirable grasp of the hard realities of life in Italy during the violent expansion of the Counter-Reformation, Robb has written an account that is consistently gripping and generally persuasive. The painter would not seem at first to be a particularly sympathetic figure. He was, according to many who knew him, difficult, often contentious, and sometimes violent. It seems likely that he killed a man. Yet Robb makes a good case that “M,” as he calls him, was difficult at least in part to protect his artistic integrity, which produced revolutionary paintings that embraced harsh reality in a way more cautious painters avoided and the church condemned. Robb’s readings of M’s paintings, including such astonishing works as “The Crucifixion of Saint Peter,” “The Beheading of John the Baptist,” “The Weeping Magdalen,” and “Mary Dead,” are detailed, energetic, and convincing, as is his version of M’s death. A compelling portrait of the painter as outsider and provocateur; a first-rate evocation of both a genius and the violent times in which he lived. (16 pages illus.)
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-6356-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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