by R. Tripp Evans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 2010
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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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...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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