by Richard Feigen ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 23, 2000
Outsiders will learn much about the art world’s fast lane; insiders will smile—or smart—at Feigen’s characterizations of...
An anecdotal, perversely entertaining, but sometimes disjointed memoir by the prominent art dealer and collector.
If Feigen has a thesis, it is a nostalgic one. “Things in the art world are not as they always had been,” he declares. Throughout, he pauses periodically to consider such subjects as Americans’ lack of concern for their own history, race relations (he alludes to the OJ trial), the Vietnam War (he hated it), 1968 Chicago cops, the power of the press, and philistines like Jesse Helms. But these tiny tirades are merely acidic asides in the long, caustic monologue he delivers about the world of art and artists and museums and collectors that he has inhabited for a half-century—and in which he has thrived (he once sold for $3.5 million a painting he had bought for $16,000). Feigen is disgusted by the new commercialism in museums—they are “mutating into pleasure palaces” that insist on “blockbuster” shows at the expense of education; he deplores the “new breed” of museum directors (with “administrative skills”) who know neither art nor taste. Most interesting are his backstage accounts of the various negotiations that he has conducted—including what he terms “the biggest deal I ever blew” (a proposed sale to Iran of a precious Persian manuscript)—and a truly engrossing tale of his ultimately futile efforts to keep together the priceless collection of Gertrude Stein. With patent glee, Feigen hurls slings and arrows at the outrageousness around him, using expressions like “ruthless buccaneer,” “scoundrel,” and “social climbers.” He calls the Kennedy Center “monstrously ugly” and declares (from an encounter in 1961) that Marc Chagall “hadn’t had a new idea since 1917.” Along the way are some charming stories, including one of Miró’s using crayons purloined from a child to draw figures for a fan.
Outsiders will learn much about the art world’s fast lane; insiders will smile—or smart—at Feigen’s characterizations of them. (76 photos)Pub Date: June 23, 2000
ISBN: 0-394-57169-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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