An overly analytical biography, but one that goes a long way toward upending assumptions about Wood’s work.
A portrait of painter Grant Wood (1891–1942) as a melancholy, closeted man.
In the 1930s, Wood became the standard-bearer of Regionalism, an art movement that rejected European abstraction in favor of homespun imagery. Then as now, Wood’s work—especially the iconic 1930 painting American Gothic—is often claimed to represent old-fashioned American values. But as Evans (Art History/Wheaton Coll.) demonstrates, a swirl of complex messages made its way onto Wood’s canvases. Born in rural Iowa, Wood was raised by a demanding father, whose ethos of manliness complicated his son’s early interest in painting. But the young Wood persevered, eventually settling in Cedar Rapids to work in a studio above a funeral home. The setting was appropriately somber for an isolated artist—his mother and sister were his closest confidantes—who felt forced to suppress not just his homosexuality but anything resembling bohemianism. Evans devotes much of the book to close studies of the symbolism cloaked within Wood’s paintings. His landscapes were coded appreciations of the male body; a female portrait like Victorian Survival takes swipes at conservative values; a home-and-hearth scene like Dinner for Threshers is Wood’s epic reckoning with the ghost of his father. The author’s decryption efforts come at the expense of traditional biographical detail, at times frustratingly so—there’s relatively little on the place of Wood’s work in the larger context of American art, and the commentary on Regionalism is mainly run through the filter of the homophobia of fellow regionalist star Thomas Hart Benton. But Evans also shows how Wood’s obscuring maneuvers extended to his own behavior—e.g., he donned overalls as a working-class affectation and married an older woman for appearances’ sake. Wood became more daring in his late career. His 1937 male nude, Sultry Night, was so provocative that the U.S. Postal Service banned prints of it from being mailed. A frustrated Wood sawed off the nude portion of the painting and burned it, an action that serves as a symbol of the torment Evans amply documents.
An overly analytical biography, but one that goes a long way toward upending assumptions about Wood’s work.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26629-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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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