A lame and unscholarly life of a major artist, by novelist and biographer Callow (From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman, 1992, etc.). While the title may be the first indication of Callow's approach to biography, the foreword sets the stage for this life of CÇzanne. Here we are told, ``To journey through the world of CÇzanne is to move, more and more often toward the end, through empty stretches of time, silent featureless places where no word reaches.'' Still waxing poetic, the author further indulges his romantic sensibility by devoting an entire chapter to the history of Provence, from Caesar on, to underline the connection of that ``wild country'' to CÇzanne's roots and character. The leitmotif throughout the book is CÇzanne's ongoing though often strained relationship with his childhood friend Emile Zola. While Callow's reliance on primary sources, such as the correspondence between the two friends, makes for fascinating reading, we are all too often forced to view CÇzanne through Zola's subjective eyes. This is most problematic in the author's constant use of material from Zola's novel The Masterpiece, which is loosely based on CÇzanne and his life. Callow, no art historian, is overly reliant on the comments and observations of others when it comes to analyses of CÇzanne's work. Most alarming from the scholarly point of view, however, is Callow's penchant for inserting citations on unrelated subjects into his text (a line by Storm Jameson on Stendhal, for instance, arrives out of nowhere). Also disturbing is his tendency to take on the role of psychic, delving deep into the inner recesses of CÇzanne's mind: ``He sometimes wondered if he could ever escape his own fatal weakness and become strong at the center of himself, instead of nothing.'' This source material remains, needless to say, unfootnoted. An unfortunate biography, written in Irving Stone mode. (8 pages photos and color plates, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56663-084-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
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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