Sprinkled with subtle touches of poetic discourse and the author’s deeply felt passion and admiration for Frank’s work, this...
Dissecting the mysterious Robert Frank (b. 1924).
In his erudite new biography, Smith (The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, 2012, etc.) explains that Frank is the type to quickly walk out the back door at an event to avoid interviews and send critics and fans running. Though this eccentric character may seem like a perfect New York City creation, he started his life in Zurich in the 1920s. It wasn’t until 1947, after living through the atrocities of the war and the inescapable solitude his Jewish religion instilled, that Frank came to the United States. He arrived at the height of the postwar bloom in creative productions of all types. But for a man like Frank, New York was just a temporary appeaser to his overflowing curiosity. He went off to Europe and South America to explore the range of images he could produce with limited resources. “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside,” he once said. “Trying to tell something that’s true. But maybe nothing is really true—except what’s out there, and what’s out there is always different.” Through it all, though, New York remained Frank’s muse. Encountering artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Jonas Mekas, Frank eventually took to the camera to explore the moving image. In parallel, he was also working on his opus, The Americans (1958), which, though viewed today as a foundational work in defining an American identity during the postwar era, was met with significant criticism. Smith compellingly tells the story of one of the most iconic and notoriously aloof artists of the 20th century in a way that is neither dry nor contrived; he helps us to know a seemingly unknowable artist.
Sprinkled with subtle touches of poetic discourse and the author’s deeply felt passion and admiration for Frank’s work, this book is a page-turning emotional delight.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-306-82336-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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