An intimate look at one of American art history's unsung heroes.
Culture and arts writer Hoban (Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, 1998) presents an accessible biography of painter Alice Neel (1900–1984).
Like many creative geniuses, Neel's story as an artist began with a rebellious childhood. From an early age, she turned to art as an outlet to cope with her rejection of turn-of-the-century societal sensibilities. Even at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, Neel felt like an outsider, despite the fact that she was repeatedly recognized for her talent. Later on, her aversion to conformity persisted in her choice of mediums. During the height of abstract expressionism, she forged ahead as a realist painter, producing dark and psychologically revealing portraits of a diverse group of people. She found subjects all around her, from the masses on the New York streets to her well-known artist friends (Andy Warhol, Joe Gould) to her own children, and Neel captured a stark, disarming beauty in all of them. Because her work was often brutally personal—for example, the paintings she produced after the death of her first child—Neel's oeuvre is also extraordinarily reflective of her life and alludes to such issues as her struggle with feminine roles, including motherhood, and her involvement with Marxism and the Communist Party. Amid the personal issues that dogged her—mostly trouble with men and money—Neel remained prolific, slowly gaining professional recognition. In 1970, she was commissioned to paint Kate Millett for the cover of Time, and in 1974, her work appeared as a retrospective at the Whitney. Throughout this moving biography, Hoban allows Neel's triumphs and struggles to inform her experience, and the result is an honest narrative of an artist who always strived to document the truth, however difficult. “No matter what happens to you,” she once said, “you still keep on painting.”
An intimate look at one of American art history's unsung heroes.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-60748-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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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