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GLORY IN A LINE

Name: GLORY IN A LINE
Author: Phyllis Birnbaum
ISBN: 0-571-21179-8

A LIFE OF FOUJITA--THE ARTIST CAUGHT BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

by Phyllis Birnbaum ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 14, 2006

Readers can make up their own minds with the help of this evenhanded portrait.

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Carefully considered, well-balanced biography of the controversial Japanese artist who created a stir in modernist Paris and was later vilified for his pro-fascist war paintings.

On the one hand, Foujita Tsuguharu (1886–1968) had fabulous success as a painter of cats and nudes in France from the early 1900s until World War II; on the other, he zealously led the group of artists hired by Japan’s war ministry in the late ’30s to sell Japanese aggression into China and beyond. Birnbaum (Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo, 1999) clearly prefers to emphasize the first half of Foujita’s life: The son of a high-ranking military doctor in Tokyo, he learned Western-style painting in art school and, like many of his peers, yearned to escape “from the traditional Japanese terrors of earthquakes, thunder, fire, and fathers.” He immigrated to Paris in 1913, mixing freely with a bohemian crowd that included Bonnard and Modigliani with the help of some exotic, self-sewn Greek costumes and a series of useful French lady friends who didn’t know or didn’t care about his wife back in Japan. (The author admits she often finds the women in Foujita’s life more compelling than her subject.) Second wife Fernande Barrey helped secure his first show, and wealthy customers were quite taken by his unique line (gleaned from the ukiyo-e tradition) and incomparable white paint. Foujita’s eventual return to Japanese ways complicated his reputation. He exhorted Japanese artists to resist Western imitation and be true to their culture, yet was castigated by his compatriots as an insincere opportunist. By the late ’30s, married to the Japanese Kimiyo, he “transformed himself into an earnest representative of the state just as easily as he had changed coffee shops.” Birnbaum offers fascinating testimony by those who knew Foujita, both fans and adversaries, and she sifts through the evidence to depict a conflicted artist proud of Japanese culture and stung by Western racism who ended up mistrusted by all sides.

Readers can make up their own minds with the help of this evenhanded portrait.

Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2006

ISBN: 0-571-21179-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)