The collection serves as a fine introduction to—and commemoration of—an incisive cultural critic.
Trenchant reflections on life and art from an award-winning critic and historian.
Hughes (1938-2012) is represented in this collection by chapters from 8 of his 13 books, along with 125 pages from his second, unfinished memoir. Outspoken and fiercely opinionated, the author had capacious interests and uncompromising standards. “What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890?” he asked in The Shock of the New (1980). “Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art” could offer insights into a “radically changing culture.” In Nothing If Not Critical (1990), a collection of his reviews for Time magazine, for which he served as chief art critic for more than 30 years, Hughes praises John Singer Sargent (“there is virtue in virtuosity”); acknowledges Whistler’s many faults (he was “an egomaniac, a fop, and a publicity-crazed liar”) but finds his work impressive; extols Pollock’s brilliance; and offers a long piece on the “voracious” publicity-seeker Warhol, who, he believed, pandered to “the age of supply-side aesthetics.” Chapters from Barcelona (1992) and Rome (2011) show Hughes engaging an expansive physical and cultural landscape. In his first memoir, Things I Didn’t Know (2006), he gives a harrowing account of a car accident that he barely survived. For more than five weeks, he was in a “semiconscious delirium,” experiencing “narrative phantasms of extreme clarity and unshakeable, Dalíesque vividness.” Hughes recalls his childhood in Sydney, Australia, where he reveled in the family library without the distraction of “that jabbering moronic babysitter,” the TV. The author’s unfinished chapters include an homage to his friend Robert Rauschenberg, recollections of living on Shelter Island, a satirical report of his tryout for the ABC news show 20/20, and a moving essay on the suicide of his son and his failures as a father.
The collection serves as a fine introduction to—and commemoration of—an incisive cultural critic.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4445-0
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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