An intimate and insightful chronicle of exploration and revelation.
A renowned architect reflects on his craft.
Together on a round-the-world sea journey, journalist Carlo Piano and his father, Renzo, kept a diary of thoughts and observations as they pursued Renzo’s dream of finding Atlantis. Published as a kind of conversation, their alternating entries cohere into a luminous meditation on beauty, architecture, nature, and creativity. Though Carlo is skeptical, Renzo defends his goal: “I say Atlantis exists, Carlo, and even if it doesn’t, we should still look for it. Because it is a beautiful idea, the ideal destination no matter the journey.” Onboard a ship tasked with updating nautical maps, the Pianos set sail from Genoa, crossing roiling seas and dead calms, stopping at sites where Renzo has designed structures: an airport in Osaka Bay, the California Academy of Sciences, the New York Times offices, the new Whitney Museum, the Shard in London, the expansion of the Morgan Library, the Pompidou Center, Rome’s Auditorium (“a city of music,” Renzo says), and Potsdamer Platz, which Renzo describes as “a bit repetitive, monotonous”—one of several architectural mistakes. Throughout, Carlo dubs his father the Explorer, the Surveyor, the Constructor, the Old Man, and the Measurer, labels that speak to Renzo’s multifaceted interests. “To measure is to gesture towards knowledge, to attempt to understand,” Renzo explains. Besides surveying the land, “I also measure the many angles and points of the sea, too. I measure everything.” Beyond measuring, he notes that he learns about a place “by entering into dialogue with it, listening to it, conversing with it, walking it, exploring its terrain.” Music, art, film, literature, and science, as well as the needs of the community, all shape his work. The two men’s musings are interlaced with memories of their childhoods, professional collaborations, and personal friendships—such as Renzo’s with Italo Calvino, whose sensibility echoes in the volume’s radiant prose.
An intimate and insightful chronicle of exploration and revelation.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-623-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Europa Compass
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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