Gefter draws on interviews and considerable research to create a richly detailed portrait of a connoisseur who defied...
The life of an influential champion of photography as an art form.
Educated at Yale and the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, Sam Wagstaff (1922-1987) was a prominent art collector and promoter from the 1960s, when he was hired as curator of painting, prints and drawings at the Wadsworth Atheneum, until his death from complications due to AIDS. Coming of age in the 1950s, he became an expert, former New York Times staff writer Gefter (Photography After Frank, 2009) writes, “at leading the double life of a homosexual, relying on his impeccable etiquette to shield his activities in the closet.” In his circles of artists, writers, dancers and musicians, the closet included Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Allen Ginsberg and John Cage. Although these gay men socialized easily among themselves, some, like Wagstaff, lived behind a “veil of fear about being discovered.” Not until 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a pathology, did many gay men begin to feel some freedom. By that time, Wagstaff had become the highly visible lover, and generous patron, of the young Robert Mapplethorpe. Wagstaff was fascinated both by Mapplethorpe’s art and his sexual allure. Mapplethorpe had been involved with wealthy men before, but no one as charming, handsome and appealing as Wagstaff. Besides, the writer Edmund White noted, “he was also very rich, and…very powerful in the art world.” Although others saw Mapplethorpe as a bit of a hustler, Wagstaff was smitten, and he bought him a Hasselblad camera and a loft. The relationship pushed Wagstaff into the world of photography, where he stood out as a collector and opinion maker. In 1978, the eminent Corcoran Gallery mounted a photography show drawn from his collection; by the 1980s, he had become internationally famous.
Gefter draws on interviews and considerable research to create a richly detailed portrait of a connoisseur who defied convention in the art world and in his own life.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-87140-437-4
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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