A shrewd and captivating journey into Warhol’s art, combining psychological insights with evocative prose.
The celebrated pop artist Andy Warhol was a textbook example of how the mind can turn suffering into creative gold, according to this biographical meditation.
Romero, a psychiatrist and artist who knew Warhol personally, traces links between the artist’s artworks—including his carefully crafted public image—and his experiences of illness, social exclusion, and bereavement. These included serious childhood bouts of rheumatic fever and Sydenham chorea, also known as St. Vitus’ Dance, which had lasting physical and neurological effects on the artist, Romero contends; they included a flattened affect and verbal inexpressiveness, which he repurposed as an aloof, diffident, “cool” persona. Warhol’s father’s death in 1942 caused the teenager to hide under his bed for three days; however, Romero asserts, it also kindled an obsession with mortality that informed some of Warhol’s best-known paintings. His unhappiness about his physical appearance made him fixate on Hollywood-style beauty and glamour, which infused iconic paintings of James Dean, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe, and his early career as an advertising illustrator provoked disdain from the Abstract Expressionist elite, but it led the artist to an egalitarian pop art philosophy that erased the gap separating Campbell’s soup cans from fine art. And although Warhol’s intense shyness left him virtually friendless for much of his life, the author says, it also fueled a drive to become so famous that the world would seek him out, as when his Factory studio became the center of 1960s avant-garde New York. Romero fits these observations into a therapeutic framework that he calls Logosoma Brain Training, which combines ideas about the brain’s response to stress and its generation of creative thought patterns with evolutionary theory and Buddhist principles of nonattachment and mindfulness.
Romero’s nuanced portrait of Warhol teases out the complexities of his character, highlighting his agitation and insecurity—one vignette has him “sobbing hysterically” when a lover brought another man to their hotel room—and his veneer of Zenlike serenity: “The more you look at the same exact thing,” he said of his repetitive imagery, “the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.” The book’s analysis of Warhol’s contradictory personality conveys psychiatric tropes in colorful text with punchy metaphors: “Ondine, Factory superstar, coined a nickname for Andy—Drella, a portmanteau of Dracula and Cinderella. It reflects a poetic assessment of Warhol as a vampire seeking virgin blood while being disguised as a Cinderella-like virgin himself.” The author’s explorations of Warhol’s art are equally deft and open to the multiplicity of meanings in deceptively simple works: “What did Andy Warhol see when he looked at a can of Campbell’s soup? He saw lunch. He saw childhood memories with his mother….He saw the factories of mass production. He saw art. A masterpiece of human ingenuity, creativity, truth, beauty, and goodness.” Well-chosen illustrations, including reproductions of some of the artist’s works, as well as candid images of the artist by various photographers lend visual resonance to Romero’s commentary.
A shrewd and captivating journey into Warhol’s art, combining psychological insights with evocative prose.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781943876396
Page Count: 256
Publisher: G Editions LLC
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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